Reposting this old Poetry Project Newsletter review of Peter Culley’s Hammertown. One of my favorite poets, he’s also a favorite reviewer — his review of Clark Coolidge’s Far Out West, for example, has always really done it for me, packing more references into less space than almost anything else, ever (to say nothing of the ongoing catablogging of Culley’s favorite stuff over at Mosses).
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“His playing is beyond what I could say about it.”
—John Coltrane on Paul “Mr. P.C.” Chambers
“Probably intended for dance tunes or with dance tunes in mind.”
—Louis Zukofsky on John Skelton’s “To Mistress Margaret Hussey”
Presented in three sections of six poems each, Peter Culley’s Hammertown is experimental at its core — check the particle-accelerator serial mash of “Snake Eyes” — and, strangely, beautifully, classical on either wing of the triptych (or gatefold LP cover), as the poet deftly mixes modes and methods — a sustained lyricism shot through with riffs epistolary, pastoral, elegiac; leavened with sincere homage; ventilated by epic-ironic gestures. And then there are complete surprises, such as the doses of “tumbling verse” à la Skelton; Culley’s rhymes and snapped lines, written “with dance tunes in mind,” help leash the poems enough to keep their wilder energies from spinning the work off into space while nudging what can be a very dark book towards the light. There is nothing emptily virtuosic in Culley’s polyverse; on the contrary, I repeatedly felt the thrill of the new while plunging into “a mix without edge or limit” and, just as often and importantly, the satisfaction of frequent enough snatches of “an air familiar” to keep from losing too many wits to bear witness.
