Stacey Szymaszek introduces Miles Champion by speaking of poetry as a practice which she associates with altering the pace of things: in most cases, slowing the pace down. But Miles' work, claims Szymaszek, has the effect of making one feel that a kettle is screaming and “boiling over”. Shortly after, Miles starts reading so quickly that I can literally barely understand his words. There is an urgent rush to get the words out of himself: I imagine a kind of childhood game, the desire to repeat and to repeat as quickly as possible certain tongue twisters until their meaning becomes distorted (perhaps renewed?). The sense-quickening that Szymaszek has spoken of becomes literalized in the poet's body, almost comically; but with a peculiar kind of decidedly unpretentious force as well.
Eventually I get the hang of it, of him, of listening: and the words continue to spill out; absurd, acrobatic, tangential: “red, totems, stone, leaflet, comrade, normal, blood vessel, orange juice”. And yet in spite of the apparent “absurdity” of the work, I am convinced that the absurd is only present on the surface-level. There is also a certain “rightness” that I can't quite name; the sense that an absolutely rational language has emerged to speak from chaos. “Colors do not smell when you edit them,” says Champion, “time is a colander with fresh holes”- (at which the entire audience sighs audibly with recognition) - "wet cups leaves blisters/exudation of cumbersome parts/I check faults with reverie/they loosen our heads/the rope names in their celibacy/question space/mute bells”.
Moxley reads next: Szymaszek opens by quoting Moxley as saying in an interview, “experience is not merely what happens to us”. As she reads, I find that experience also seems to be what happens around us, atmospherically, or what happens without us, or what happens to others, or what we deny is happening all the time that it is happening: a multiplicity of presents and pasts in which we are continuously implicated. “We watched the news in disbelief,” writes Moxley, as a speaker in a beautiful California garden, “eucalyptus debris/the surreality of being so thoughtlessly content.” The cherished “private self” of poetry is constantly undermined: both a self-critical and a generous stance. “I edit the pulse of my mind/distraction establishes me”: the outside filters in, asked or unasked, situating both the writer and the writing deeply in the world.
In Szymaszek's introduction, she also speaks of Moxley's work as a space in which “political injustice can never be too removed from us psychically”. This impossibility of a separation from political injustice pervades the work. There is no entirely innocent contentment, outside of the haunting knowledge of our “country's bounty as impoverishment”. Again and again, Moxley's poems return to a call for collective and individual responsibility, even as taking this responsibility often seems nearly impossible. “In relative safety,” writes Moxley “and in search of goods/nauseous with fear for the capacious sky/it feels like our carcasses have been pushed out into the open.” Meanwhile, “poems in journals have forgotten that there's a world”.
I was surprised by the plainness of much of the language in these poems – and the mastery with which such plainness was utilized. Lines almost affably conversational in tone carry the heavy weight of psychic culpability: draw us into a conversation that seems, at first, easy, and later probes perhaps too deeply. “I get more narrative by the year” writes Moxley, “saying things to get them said/feeling no leisure to take old risks”. The need to say things “to get them said” is the strategic language of a writer who refuses to forget that there's a world.
