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Bitches Brew
May 2008
Down Where The Hummingbird Goes To Die
By Justin Hyde
- The Guild of Outsider Writers Press/Tainted Coffee Press,
(http://zygoteinmycoffee.com/taintedcoffeepress/outsiderwritersbookstore.html)
- Jan 2008
- 58 pages,
- $6
- Winner of the 2008 Jack Micheline Award
“men did whatever
they could get away with
when no one was
watching.”
-from “my first dear season”
It’s unfair to call anyone “the next Bukowski” because such comparisons always rob that particular author of their own niche. But fuck it I’m gonna do it and say Justin Hyde is “the next Bukowski.” Or something equally stupid like “Justin Hyde now wears Bukowski’s crown.” Just because I wanted to be the first to do it knowing full well I won’t be the last.
This is specifically unfair to Hyde, because mano a mano he’s taking Hank down in his own ring, and he even flashes his awareness of this for a brief moment only:
“nietzsche tells me
get to know
the common man,
says
if I’m a seeker of the truth
i’ll seek
the common man.
i like you Nietzsche
i say aloud
consider you a friend
but sometimes like bukowski
you talk out of your asshole.”
-from “fuck nietzsche”
What I should say is that if Bukowski was from the mid-west and less full of shit, we would have had Justin Hyde pushing the language forward 40 years ago (and it’s damn lucky for us that he’s just starting now.)
Like Buk, Hyde tells little flash fiction stories with his poems but without Buk’s huge lyrical arcs and occasional plain song. Instead, in the fashion of the times, the poems in Down Where the Hummingbird Goes To Die are much more spare that a the majority of “the king of the small press’” poems, and contain the generosity of spirit of the mid-west folk who know they’re likely never to get a screenplay made about their lives:
“he’s trying
to crawl
into my bed
bawling shamelessly
calling me Kathy and
apologizing
for something.
two years ago
i would have
punched him in the face
and
choked him out
but
having
come to
full terms,
i walk him
to his
mattress
throw on
the cover
and
spot him
a bolt
of my flask.
-from “at the wet shelter in dubuque iowa”
Hank Chinaski might have taken the poor bastard back to his cot but he sure as hell wouldn’t have shared his flask…at least he would never write that he would. There’s a cold honesty in Hyde’s poems that is even more heartbreaking than Buk’s sly hustle. Consider the following passage:
“She never laughs
the full laugh
of a comfortable lover because
she came home early from work
on a lark
June sixth two thousand
and four to find me in our garage
with the door closed
passed out in the driver’s seat of my
running car.
You go on from this because
there is no choice
this is life
a series of unthinkable occurrences and
regatherings;
the thing now that
has become a morbid joke
and a true hurt in her is
that I did not leave a note.”
-from “I Stole My Wife’s Smile”
This scene stands out mightily in the small indie press’ overstocked world of slashed wrists, heroic heroin shots and corpse fucking. Romantics always have their depravity to look forward to, or failing that, ALWAYS leave a big ass manifesto for a suicide note. One pass through Hyde’s poems and it’s difficult to think of him as a Romantic. Here is nihilism in its rawest form in the heartland of America, and while he knows damn well he’s not the only one, he also knows he’s one of the few who knows what it’s called (see “fuck nietzsche.”) This also marks a stark difference between Hyde and Buk…Hyde is not afraid to admit he’s a little smarter than the common man, but not afraid to rub shoulders with him. Bukowski despises the common man while claiming to affect the ignorance of the commoner (Buk’s biographer once found a dictionary sticking out from beneath the “King’s” bed after Sir Charles famously bragged that he never looked anything up…his response: “You found me out kid.”)
Still, it’s going to be hard for Justin Hyde to avoid the comparisons in his career, especially if he can ever get away from his gig as a corrections officer (compare that to a Post Office job) so he can put his talents to work full time like that other guy. With titles like “my first day on a roof with six mexicans” and “after taking a piss at mcdonald’s” (a candidate for the all time greatest poem title) as well as the aforementioned storytelling in his poems he’s clearly and consciously using Buk’s M.O., but unlike the hardest working submitter in history, you never get cheated by Hyde’s small poems on your way to his Big poems.
-Paul Corman-Roberts
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