Microphones

Donalee Moulton-Barrett was a writer and editor in Halifax.

As you read Microphones by A.R. Kazuk, you can picture the writer at work: deciding just those images that would be appropriate symbols; deciding just what poetic dialogue would throw a little light on the theme; deciding just what margin notes would reinforce the images and the theme (in case an unobservant reader missed either, or both).

It is a picture that should never come to mind. Kazuk tries too hard and the struggle carries over to the poetry. The reader becomes conscious of the creative process, and through this consciousness comes uncomfortableness. What we want is poetry, not process. We don’t want to see the writer at work, only the work itself. In (“II: Glint”), for example, Kazuk writes:

I have left my quarrel on the compost heap
in her backyard. Beetles are moving
my green desires in a salvage operation;
now there is nothing in the world my own.

And to help you along are these margin notes:

A single investiture
of actual
and applying
knowledges of sex

Microphones reads like a rough first draft. What’s missing, of course, are drafts two, three, four, and five. And a good editor.