Of light between houses I control half

Some one else had laid down in my body

Creak away slowly and the cars of morning

—brian mornar

There is something to be said about a poetry that can reflect, and often clarify, a certain event. The power of the expression comes through when that individual event is made abstract across a range of human experience. In the morning light, rising from half-dead sleep, the noise of traffic subtly lulls one back into full consciousness. Brian Mornar achieves this point of accessibility: The mundane all is raised into a transformative moment. Mornar’s ability to make this turn seeps into his entire project as a poet, as he follows a kind of mental quest within language, or as he quotes Kleist, “We have to go on and make the journey around the world to see if it is perhaps open somewhere in the back.”

Brian Mornar came into the University of Buffalo’s Poetics program several years ago with the explicit intention of joining a new community and giving himself an opportunity to grow as a writer through his studies. By this, Mornar looked to engage personally and emotionally with his reading and to surround himself with other writers in the community, including writers outside the university. This approach would have made Robert Creeley proud. Brian writes for the love of the game, for the outside and very tangible (dare I say political) hope that one can have direct influence over, as Creeley would put it, the world that matters.

Repatterning, Mornar’s exquisitely crafted new chapbook from local poet Richard Owens’ Punch Press, is a collection of four long poems that are constructed in a similar fashion to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, which itself is a massive mapping of primary and secondary texts relating to philosophy, architecture, art and poetry. In a more directly poetic exploration in Mornar’s work, it allows first-person singular voice to bleed through into multiple manifestations of voice. For example, poetic lines like the ones above give way to intellectual curiosity:

What is between Benjamin’s notations? Simply, the urge? What brought him to the page in each instance? The idea, the material. The promise of the whole in amassing?

Whatever the case, Mr. Mornar, it seems your work in amassing (repatterning) a whole out of disparate sources (voices) lays out a strategy of active reading, that the texts one engages are enabled to pass through and be transformed into a multiplicity of meaning. This particular approach to poetry provides a useful rubric in poetic composition: The poet, like a hip-hop DJ, should be encouraged to sample language. Quotations embedded in Mornar’s work, while striking a scholarly tone, appear not as interference or distraction to the inherent rhythm, but instead an organically contrived narrative of thinking. The promise of the whole amassing is kept.

* * *

Peter Conners & Brian Mornar read Thursday, January 17 at Rust Belt Books (202 Allen Street) as part of Just Buffalo’s Small Press Poetry Series.