More Than Mere Light by Jason Koo
By Allison Bird Treacy
Just weeks before John Ashbery’s death last fall; I took the holy journey from New York City to Hudson, NY where the ninety-year-old poet made his home. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I was stepping directly into the poetic lineage recounted in Brooklyn Poets founder Jason Koo’s third full-length collection More Than Mere Light (Prelude, 2018). A close examination of the New York School’s genealogy, Koo’s poetry has expanded the forms developed by Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and others during the 1950s and 1960s and expanded it to fit his own experiences as an Asian-American man, a half-century removed.
One remarkable feature of More Than Mere Light is how it is uniquely structured around a few long poems, particularly “No Longer See,” a fifty page epistolary-like piece, and to a reader the form could easily intimidate. Koo’s everyday language, like that of his stylistic predecessors, however, readily welcomes the reader into the poem. Absorption into the text overshadows both the length and the examination of the New York School or trendy books, opening the poem at multiple levels.
The first lines of Koo’s long poem, “No Longer See,” drop each other into the “I do this, I do that” style characteristic of O’Hara’s poems — and with the immediacy common to most of the New York School and the poem helps us navigate with intermittent time stamps. He begins,
Somehow it’s 2:43 PM and ready I’ve frittered away most of my day.
How are you? Banal question for a banal, as usual,
Day. Every day for the past few weeks I’ve been thinking of starting
This letter
Though little is happening in these first lines from a narrative perspective, that is precisely Koo’s point; his style is built upon the banal, on observations of the city he lives in and of daily life. And what poet — what person — doesn’t know deeply the procrastination these lines describe? Koo strikes to the heart of our modern lives by highlighting that wasted time, and as he continues, observes how this poem is a manipulation of his time. He wants to write a letter but also “to write poems, /and writing this letter meant writing prose, which/Would get in the way of those…” Then again, why shouldn’t more of our communication be in poem?
The idea that we can communicate in poem is too rare in our work, despite dedications, yet if we look backward it has a long lineage. Shakespeare, Yeats, and, yes, O’Hara, among many others, call count poems of address as part of their oeuvres. And for Koo, as for his literary predecessors, our daily lives are deserving of such artful observation, while the prose line is worthy of poetry’s linguistic and spatial invention. He plays with this form in “No Longer See,” with its variation on the traditional prose poem, as he writes about reading Jack Gilbert:
In the dark of the apartment, a seductive cool without the annoyance
of mosquitoed toes. The muffled sweet moans
Changed as she changed from what she was not into the more she was.
Amazing sentence. The original enjambs after sweet
Then not. You have to read that sentence again to catch all the nifty nuances
I’ve put in there, as I’ve added my own enjambment
To complicate things, things sweet then not, become a sweet knot.
Koo does not flinch at the pleasure of sound play, pushing it beyond common consonance or assonance and instead spilling homonyms and repetition into his reimagining of Gilbert into the prose of a letter. And, perhaps more amusingly, he puts a puzzle into the poem, and then points it out. Koo says, I dare you to go back and look at that again. Look at how much these common words can do when split and rearranged. The space of the poem, the stanza and the page, are an infinite playground.
To continue reading “No Longer See” is to dig deeper into the entanglement of the arts world — the cursory reading of trendy poets published by Wave Press (wonderful, but here read for the hipster street cred), the way Jackson Pollock’s work causes people to say ‘I could do that,’ a response also occasioned by work like this long poem-letter — but what about the rest of More Than Mere Light? The title, shared with the first poem and taken from Karl Ove Knausgaard, welcomes us into the book:
The day always came with more than mere light, came hugely pawing
through the windows,
Frisking you up, no soft fortress of pillows cobbled around your head could
help you.
The sunlight in silence pouring down, insidiously weighted
With all the expectations of the city, the street cleaners moving through
Unearthing groggy zombies parking in pajamas,
The drilling beginning, men tucked inside the scaffolding on the brownstone
next door
Koo firmly roots his poems in New York City, particularly in Brooklyn, yet the idea that “The day always came with more than mere light” has broader implications. It comes with obligations and exhaustion, no matter how we push back against the, yet also with wonder if we pay attention. Notice, for example, how the annoyance of drilling also comes with the peculiar phrasing “men tucked inside the scaffolding,” so that the reader cannot help but imagine a miniature, urban dollhouse, the tiny figures posed on the ledges and in hidden crevices. This small change of perspective, here a plain verb made strange, transforms the ordinary.
Too often, we embed ourselves in one of two camps: constant boredom or persistent wonder, or in modern parlance, everything is either #fml or #blessed. But it doesn’t have to be one or the other, and we can find more pleasure and more play in that in between space, where there’s breathing room. After all –
Maybe stabbing is what the fire needs, not water,
Maybe stabbing is what the self needs, not water, not mere light, holes to
create some breathing,
As when a child traps some caterpillars in a jar and punctures holes over the
foil sealing its openingAnd next morning fresh caterpillars have bloomed all over mom’s curtains.
When was the last time you looked between the buildings and room to grow, found more than just mere light filtering through? As he records quotidian New York scenes, Jason Koo pauses over those remarkable moments, lets them stand alongside the complaints and consumerism, the competition and social climbing. Here, surprises appear in all their strange glory, like caterpillars on the curtains, perhaps unwelcome and yet wondrous all at once.
