5th Blog: about Covey

It was a pleasure to hear Bruce Covey read his work in class and at the reading. Poetry really is best read out loud, and by its author. Some of the poems that struck me the most were “14 Kung Fu Climaxes,” and the one about the president’s non-declaration of war.
Through the use of genre, fragmentary narrative, and list making, Covey’s “14 Kung Fu Climaxes” functions as an exploration of language and perspective, as well as being quite humorous. Setting the poem in the well known genre of Kung Fu movies lends the poem an air of playfulness, cashing in on the many melodramatic scenes viewers have become accustomed to in such films. The finality and seriousness of the plot is undermined by no less than fourteen different endings for this poem. The lines all start with the phrase “That’s when” or “And that’s when,” adding to the poem’s fragmentary character. The events all take place within an known context, singular blips within the general context of the genre. There is a general plot movement at work within the poem, fragmented as it may be. In the first stanza both the narrator and his lover die, presumably shot by a common foe. Here, the love interest is spoken of in the third person. By the middle of the poem the narrator is fighting with “you,” or the person to whom the poem is written, which the reader might presume to be the love interest. By the end of the poem, through all the killing and dieing, the narrator is again with his “beautiful lover,” watching it all unfold on television, “beamed into eternity.” By dismantling the narrative and reassembling it in little bits, Covey reexamines the way meaning is created and interpreted.
Form is used in the poem “Declaration” to look at language from a different, more distant, perspective. By breaking down the president’s remarks by syllable, and then sorting the syllable groups alphabetically, Covey subverts the words intended meaning and gives the reader a more general perspective into the themes of the address. I was left with the sensation of seeing a bar graph that shows the points the speech writer was trying to drive home: terror, retaliation and other emotionally charged ideas. This format would be interesting to use in examining any politically charged text to examine general trends and moves made by the author.
In all the poems Covey exhibits a relationship with language that is both playful and thoughtful in its deconstruction. In his poem “Ra Ra” Covey says, “How happy I would be to mow these characters/Cut off the top halves of all these letters.” By mangling the original meaning of the text, and reassembling the pieces in a new manner Covey encourages the reader to create his or her own universe within the general context of the material we are surrounded by in our lives. In Covey’s world, the ever changing nature of our existence becomes an opportunity to play with meaning and take what you will from the endless possibilities of the void. Or, as William Blake said, “Invent your own mythology or be slave to another man’s.”