First, on receipt of Buck Downs’ The Sound of Music (referred to here in this reverie as SOM), the collector reckons with the cover art, Isaac Duchemin’s Tabula Asinaria. Engraved in 1612, Tabula depicts a raucous scene of servants bathing donkeys; donkeys invading the estate to pull down curtains, destroy lutes & horns and desecrate the implements of human exploration (globes, compasses & such); and winged specimens of Equus asinus doing battle with each other over the melee. Gentry stand by, frozen in a painterly tone of mixed terror and admiration. It’s fucking terrific.
In the afterglow of such a prelude, what’s in store within SOM, the collector ponders. Asses doing battle overhead would surely satisfy, but Buck Downs takes the cultural war to the streets of our contemporary dog & pony. Fans of Buck Downs, also the author of the monumental Unintended Empire among many other books, postcards and ephemera, will find the poetry in SOM familiar. Individual poems have featured on postcards, graced small press publications and been issued forth at Buck Downs’ show-stopper readings. The entire last section appeared in Dodie Bellamy & Kevin Killian’s legendary Mirage [Periodical], beloved by StartleResponse.com and many other avant-garde poetry allies. To have the work together at last in one perfect-bound volume is a sweet confection for the reading hour.
StartleResponse.com could discuss at length how the writing in SOM exemplifies the author’s gift for undercutting traditional metaphor, or how its contained chaos is the result of technical precision, or how it explodes rigid conceptions of what belongs in poetry – but let us not entomb the work in a doctoral thesis. Let’s take it to the people, where it thrives.
Some adore Buck Downs’ writing because it is funny, and that’s okay. It is funny in a gut-laugh kind of way but also in a words-are-receptacles-of-cultural-lunacy way. It is difficult to read a Buck Downs poem and not want to share it with someone else who will laugh or give you a knowing look. If you’ve ever sat in a Buck Downs poetry audience beside Rod Smith or anyone else with a deep appreciation for the possibilities of language, you know what StartleResponse.com is saying.
sitting on the dock of th
bullshit. sittin on the bull
shit. alongside the obvious.
to pick up one time. it is
not doable. it shows you
must change your way
of life. not just the font
scheme of it.
Others are fond of the one-liners that resonate off the page and into our oversensitive lives. Buck Downs did memes before there were memes. Perhaps today’s memes seem so stupid because, unlike AI cats, Real Housewives brawls and amateur dance-offs, the full force of intellect and originality underpins Buck Downs’ lines.
I wrote in my diary
but nobody wrote back.
*
what’s good about a good
book is the way it will get you
in trouble.
*
you look reified
just right.
And then there are readers who may identify with SOM’s worship of the mundane, which likely grows sacred for anyone living an American routine. You may have been there: The 7-ELEVEN discontinues the Mountain Dew Brain Freeze Slurpee, and you never forgive The Man for it. Or when you move towns, you miss the iconography of the AmTrak trestle you once walked under every day.
stop at 7-ELEVEN
for slurpee & a pack
of rough riders make me
feel like a piece of jerky.
that doesn’t mean you
shouldn’t have some.
*
that little over
pass where the AmTrak
goes. use the side
walk on my back.
bathing in the mercury
vaporage.
And more of you may have other reasons (the raw humanity, the poignant monologues of speaker self-appraisal, etc.) for reading Buck Downs. Some of StartleResponse.com’s favorite poems reside there in SOM. In a crisis of relentless productivity (fewer federal workers stretched across the same burgeoning workload; nurses obliged to “flex up” to unsafe nurse:patient ratios; Taylor Swift fancying herself a “tortured poet,” etc., etc., etc.), Old Home Day with your favorite poems is a fair defense. StartleResponse.com wagers you could do no better than to phone a friend and recite the closing lines of SOM:
this is buck.
what the fuck
is up.
