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    You Must Remember This: Poems
    You Must Remember This: Poems
    You Must Remember This: Poems
    Ebook101 pages37 minutes

    You Must Remember This: Poems

    By Michael Bazzett

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    About this ebook

    “Hauntingly fable-like and delightfully idiosyncratic.” —ADA LIMÓN

    A woozy logic dominates these poems: a heart can become a buzzing hive of bees, a rooster can trigger a series of bombs, a young man can embrace a city bus as his spirit animal. Yet in this collection—selected by Kevin Prufer as the winner of the 2014 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry—Michael Bazzett slices through his poems with a dangerous sense of humor. “Your humor is deft and cutting / my fingers off one by one.” Once dismembered, Bazzett’s poems can re-member us and piece together the ways in which we once thought we knew ourselves, creating a new, strange sense of self.

    A meditation on who we are, who we’ve been, and what we might become, Bazzett’s writing is like a note written in invisible ink: partially what we see on the page, but also the “many dozen doorways that we don’t walk through each day.” You Must Remember This is a consistently slippery, enrapturing collection of poems.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMilkweed Editions
    Release dateNov 17, 2014
    ISBN9781571319302
    You Must Remember This: Poems
    Author

    Michael Bazzett

    Michael Bazzett is the author of The Echo Chamber, as well as five other collections of poems, including The Interrogation and You Must Remember This, winner of the Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry. He is also the translator of The Popol Vuh. Bazzett is a poet, teacher, and 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellow. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, Guernica, Virginia Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, The Rumpus, and Best New Poets. He lives in Minneapolis.

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    • 5/5
      Full disclosure: Michael Bazzett is my nephew, so naturally I was eager to read this book. YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS is Bazzett's first full collection of poems (although he has previously published a chapbook, THE IMAGINARY CITY, in 2012).For someone of my generation, the book's title is perhaps misleading. I guess I was expecting something more in the "a kiss is just a kiss" vein of poetry. No such luck. These are poems to ponder, to wonder over. I won't lie. There are some pieces here I'm still trying to figure out and may never fully understand. Maybe it's because his influences are so diverse and, for the ordinary reader at least, pretty obscure. European poets Antonio Machado and Tomaz Salamun ("Imperfection") figure in, and maybe a little Borges. Homer's ODYSSEY ("Cyclops" and "Elpenor") are in the mix, as are Saul Bellow's HERZOG, and even a nod to former Sex Pistol Johnny Rotten ("September Picnic"). Dreams figure prominently here, in "After Machado" and "In Vladivostok" for example. And settings range variously from Mexico ("The Horse") to Canada and Siberia. And there is a definite playfulness displayed in poems like "Recollection" in which a nameless narrator puts himself together from his various parts, from his tongue in an "embroidered box on the bedside table" and "pale twinned arms / lie nestled together in a battered cello case," to his pelvis "on a wooden saddle" and "the hairy coil of my privates / rests on the dresser, next to a pile of coins." And there is the "silent" ink central to the fanciful "The Sinclair Gift Emporium."Sex and sexuality also play frequent roles - in "Manhood," "The Crisis," "Aria," "Some Party" and others.A few poems here particularly resonated. "The Dark Thing," a creature stoned and poked with sticks, evoked the "kill the pig" frenzy of LORD OF THE FLIES; and "The Book of _________" maybe Heinlein or even Stephen King. And "Orangutan," in which a daughter's dalliance with an electric ape produces a result reminiscent of James Dickey's "The Sheep Child."I am sure that my brother (the poet's father) will find a favorite here in the final poem, "The Last Time I Saw God," with its nameless narrator rocking along in a night subway car, seated next to God - "That is when I noticed his slight resemblance to my father." For some reason as I read this book I kept remembering the Housman poem, "Terrence, this is stupid stuff." There's probably no correlation, except that I want to say: Michael, this is strange stuff. But then poetry often stumps me, and if obscurity equals talent, then Michael Bazzett is full of it. (Talent, I mean.) Highly recommended.

    Book preview

    You Must Remember This - Michael Bazzett

    I

    In Vladivostok

    The woman in the dream

    said be careful with your cock

    and I suddenly knew

    in the way one knows in dreams

    that my cock had somehow become

    a lever that might detonate

    a string of bombs riddling the city

    in the way blood clots might lace

    a body in its final days.

    When I realized I was holding

    a rooster, I did not exactly

    know what to say. Perhaps

    I smiled. I don’t know.

    There was no mirror

    and I’ve never been able

    to see myself in dreams.

    Cyclops

    The story is such a story we don’t always stop to think

    about what it was like to be there: that cavern floor

    packed with pungent dung, dark as the inner bowels

    of an animal when that slab dropped into place: how

    utterly it sucked to hear the oaf stirring in his stupor

    made uneasy by wine mixing with the bolted flesh

    of good friends dispatched while we watched—

    it was just a flat-out bad deal for everyone involved.

    Polyphemus messed with no one: a law unto himself

    there in the hinterland eating goat cheese by the ton

    and Odysseus brimming full of the sauce of himself

    after out-clevering all Ilium by nestling in the stallion.

    He’d had plenty of time to think there in that hollow

    belly smelling of fear and fresh sawdust holding his

    piss in one endless clench counting droplets of sweat

    rivering cold over his ribs and under his breastplate.

    And now here he is again groping for his sharpened

    pole in pitch dark using one appetite to feed another.

    He lays the point in the drowsing embers and jostles

    it enough that the cave appears in a blood-warm glow.

    You probably know the rest—plunging the blackened

    tip through the eyelid, the crackling hiss as the eyeball

    burst, the geyser that shot from the socket—then huge

    hideous blind rage: it was easy to get inside, he thought,

    the real trick comes in the getting out: words that might

    land differently if you are not clinging to the fetid locks

    under a ram, knees pinning its rib cage, your hips held

    high as it drags you slowly into the chill morning air.

    Maybe then you’d feel the warmth of Polyphemus’s

    wounded breath, washing across three thousand years

    as he crouches above you, stroking the woolly backbone,

    inquiring why this particular one lags so far behind?

    The Field Beyond the Wall

    We walk to the edge of town: there

    just beyond the wall we see clouds

    of crows and ravens, also buzzards

    teetering down to pick apart the flesh

    that peeks from every flapping shirttail.

    See that belly pale as risen dough?

    The dark oaks creak with the dead

    weight that hangs from their limbs—

    ropes taut with bodies barely turning.

    We gather on the wall, idly and in pairs,

    looking out across the charred fields

    and the smoking timbers of a farmhouse.

    By noon, the hum of flies will lull our ears

    into dreaming orchards thick with bees,

    but now in the chill of morning it is mostly

    the scrape and croak of birds just starting

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