Review: Two new poetry collections by Mark Young
Daniel Barbiero
October 2022
Your Order Is Now Equipped for Shipping (Sandy Press)
The Advantages of Cable (Luna Bisonte Prods)
Mark Young’s two new collections of poems are like a pair of eyes offering slightly discrepant but ultimately coordinated perspectives on the same object. That object is the often absurd contemporary world of hyper-consumption and socio-political dysfunction, a world of physical clutter and ethical confusion ceaselessly communicated through the ubiquitous channels of electronic communication technologies. Throughout both books, Young wryly navigates his way though this pervasive terms-of-service media environment of ads, apps, audio books, Youtube channels, and cable news, and records his deadpan reactions to what often is the straight-faced madness of life in the current age. When exposing the frequently illogical logic of contemporary life he rarely resorts to supplementary commentary, but rather lets the incongruities he sets out speak for themselves in a matter-of-fact way. And he is even able to find moments of beauty and insight struggling to emerge from the surrounding noise.
In many of these poems, Young finds a kind of Surrealist humour noir in those disruptive moments when the discrepancy between “is” and “ought” takes on the appearance of a vast chasm. This may be a matter of the hypocrisy and self-serving inclinations of political actors and activities. Young’s response is simply to register the difference and note its irony, as for example in “The Will,” from Your Order Is Now Equipped for Shipping:
Is it strange that
an existing evil on
which diplomacy
stands turns a much
greater profit than
causal incarnation?
Such humor is not ex-
pected. He circumvents
it, but doesn’t quite
know how to promote
himself. How dare this
object know what to do?
We don’t know for certain that the second stanza is a response to the first, or just the next thought in a sequence of independent thoughts, but the juxtaposition is provocative and throws up a tension between the two that highlights madness described in the first. In “Variant concerns,” from The Advantages of Cable, Young’s humour noir mocks the paranoid worldview of the state’s national security organs, which put our household appliances under surveillance because of their fear that “rhubarb juicers are prone to out-/rageous acts of terrorism.” Who knew?
Beyond politics, there is the economy. Woven throughout many of the poems in both volumes are skewed and skewering perspectives on the hallmarks of a consumer economy, particularly one built on the unstable double foundation of financialization and marketing. “Karaoke,” from Your Order Is Now Equipped for Shipping, sends up business-speak, while the self-explanatorily titled “Corporate Greed” from the same volume sums it all up with the closing aphorism “the/pursuit of money/ is a spiritual task.” The Advantages of Cable’s “an ankle injury” wittily sets up a slant rhyme between “marketing campaigns” and “invasive/ species dependent on face-to-/ face demonstrations.”
Beyond the more topical poems are poems that include reflections that leave the physical clutter and ethical confusion of contemporary life behind. “(s)light,” from Your Order Is Now Equipped for Shipping, finds the poetry inherent in the way a misunderstood phrase can generate polysemic variations on itself:
I think back on what she
said. There is distortion,
Chinese whispers, so that
I can’t decipher if it was
always stay downwind of
interlopers or always wind
down after riding an ant-
elope was what she meant.
Doesn’t matter. Either
sounds fine in a poem,
& to be able to use them
both together is a bonus.
“A poem ending with a line from Beowulf” from the same volume records the serendipity of poetry breaking through the shell of the banal, as an image of moving house is suddenly interrupted by the speaker’s astonishment at hearing someone quoting a line from Beowulf.
The poems in The Advantages of Cable and Your Order Is Now Equipped for Shipping take a number of different forms—not surprising, considering that both volumes together contain around two hundred individual pieces. There are poems with staggered lines, poems laid out in shapes, prose poetry, poetry featuring interlinear counterpoint. The majority are compact, compressed columns of relatively short, relatively dense lines that depict a mind moving from thought to allusion to speculation to seemingly disinterested observation, in what can be described as a kind of low-key Surrealism stripped of Surrealism’s tendency toward the extravagant. Young’s poems move with the rhythms of spontaneous speech, with its shifts of focus and leaps of semantic faith; logically independent images conflict and coincide in surprising combinations that fuse into hybrid images with metaphorical force, as for example in “Quatorze: juillet” from The Advantages of Cable, in which “The tracking device be-/neath the skin be-/comes an alarm clock.” The metamorphosis suggested here isn’t literal but is a metaphor based on the devices’ shared function of facilitating the exertion of external control—whether by those who surveil or a rigid schedule–over their host/user. Some poems unfold through a chain of obscurely linked actions that read like transcriptions of dreams, as in this excerpt from “The cathedral collapses under the weight of bad karaoke,” also from The Advantages of Cable:
The meter clicks over & I go
into debt. I line up at the
counter & am given gray
robes to wear. Like-minded
people surround me. We all
start bootscooting. Jimmy
Buffett calls the lines, but who’s
that offsider who claps her hands
out of time & peremtorily deter-
mines where the apostrophes go?
In a hyperreal world, sometimes the dreamlike is the most real. And that is the world that Young gives us, in stereo, with these two mutually reinforcing collections—our world, in all its alien familiarity.
Your Order Is Now Equipped for Shipping (Sandy Press) →
The Advantages of Cable (Luna Bisonte Prods) →
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Daniel Barbiero is a double bassist, composer and writer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century and on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021).
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