By MICHELLE BITTING Palisades Poet Laureate ‘The poet makes himself a seer by a long, immense and reasoned derangement of the senses. All forms of love, suffering, and madness’he explores himself, he tries out all the poisons and keeps their quintessences.’ ~ Arthur Rimbaud So sayeth the Paris-based poet in 1871, identifying the poem-maker as a kind of language shaman or shape-shifter, an idea more vital than ever in contemporary poetry. The poetic act of stepping into a persona, of entering the personal experience of an outside or historical figure in order to embody and express a lyrical ‘Other’ feels like a natural response to our current fractured, techno-multiple world. Stephen Motika’s prize-winning collection of poems, ‘Western Practice’ (Alice James Books), is an exemplary illustration of just this sort of ambitious aesthetic in action. And yet, while his means of appropriating lost landscapes and key historical figures is extremely modern, even experimental, the resulting poetry is an elegiac, lyrical homage to recollected earthly beauty and human spirit from bygone epochs, specifically those identified with the West Coast. While the images and narrative cadences often skip, leap and plunge through rapid-fire realms of shifting perspective, Motika’s meditations are thoughtful and deliberate. The language is vigorous, surprising and lush, his vision infused with a high-impact, sense-driven force of experience and revelation demonstrated from the start in his poem ‘Night, In The Oaks’: rain came, a blinding rain. water rushed off roofs, splattered down gutters and into streets. wet feet and pants. I who come from the clear font. With a little bit of imaginative effort and focused, shape-shifting energy, the willing reader gets a bird’s-eye view into rich creative terrain’prominent figures and the burgeoning West Coast cities they populated, from Seattle to San Diego in the 20th century and beyond. Traveling through jazz clubs, art galleries, movie sets and deserts, Motika tracks the artists who illuminated them’Duchamp, Ruscha, Gehry, Baldessari and a whirlwind host of others. The entire middle section of ‘Western Practice’ centers on the highly innovative composer Harry Partch, with whom Motika strongly identifies, his own poetic meditations a kind of mirroring of Partch’s avant-garde sound and syntax: Compelled by Kithara Partch built a great lyre of 72 strings. Orpheus’s lyre had three strings. Timotheus (446-357), who dared to expand the scale on the Kithara by adding four strings to the eight approved by Pythagoras was driven out of Sparta forever. ‘These days, when someone does something different, they ignore him to death.’ Motika’s extended ‘visitation’ on Partch’s life resonates as both invocation and homage. In addition, he frames ‘Western Practice’ with present-day recollections central to his experience growing up on the West Coast. These book-end poems anchor and provide relational context for the historical wanderings of the lives described in the sections between. In this way, the reader is more confidently able to travel between past and present and still feel oriented inside the author’s extensive itinerary. About his creative process, Motika says that much of his work is inspired by ‘open field poetics,’ where ‘the page becomes its own visual plane.’ He says, ‘Images are incredibly important to me, and how to create a series of moments in a landscape or sequence of landscapes.’ Speaking almost like a sculptor or word-painter, Motika elaborates: ‘Once I have something down, then I can tinker and shape into the balance of images/sound and some sense of meanings find themselves in a productive conversation.’ Stephen Motika grew up in Los Angeles. His family spent a lot of time exploring the state, camping up and down the Central Coast, with frequent visits to historical sites. Much of the compelling and diverse texture of ‘Western Practice’ stems from this recalled terrain. From ‘Near Los Osos’: thistle, sanicle,/rewards, post office, bed in church,/ Travel Crespi’s footsteps, dry creeks, salt water, spilled petals chewed, a gnashing sensation, beauty marks and hair clips, vertical sensations/blue crisp/night cast/into still/visor On the matter of topics explored in ‘Western Practice,’ Motika adds: ‘The last poem in the book references my family’s time visiting Montana de Oro State Park. I also hiked in the mountains and explored the desert. A visit to Noah Purifoy’s art site in Joshua Tree a few years ago instigated the writing of ‘City Set,’ which is about the Los Angeles art scene from 1955 to 1977.’My grandmother was especially engaged in the arts community and my uncle studied painting at UCLA in the 1960s. As a child, I knew about the most visible artists, such as David Hockney, Edward Kienholz, and Richard Diebenkorn. In the process of working on ‘City Set,’ I learned about a lot of figures I hadn’t been familiar with.’ As far as early influences, Stephen remembers reading some William Carlos Williams poems when he enrolled for a summer program at The Mirman School. In high school at Crossroads, he was mostly interested in prose, although he enjoyed reading Rimbaud and the romantic poets. At Vassar, he enjoyed reading Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell. Always looking for a more experimental poetics, once he discovered the work of Black Mountain and San Francisco Renaissance poets, he was on his way. These days, in addition to winning the Alice James Book Prize, Motika doubles as program director of the acclaimed Poets House in New York City and editor of Nightboat Books. When asked about current writing projects and favorite poets, Stephen says, ‘ I’m interested in elegy and have been writing poems based on dead writers and artists and obsolete technologies. There are lots of great poets at work. Some of my favorite right now are George Albon, Forrest Gander, Brenda Hillman, Martha Ronk and Brian Teare.’ If Stephen Motika’s ‘Western Practice’ is any indication of what’s in store for us from this fine, ambitious poet, we have much exciting work to look forward to.
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