EMU BLIS, BUMS LIE, BLUE-ISM
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This world of us —
it seems only capable of revealing hints of care
in slant rhymes and odd enjambments.
And I’m wondering why we don’t cry more,
knowing there’s so little we
control.
From Broadstone Books
In this profound volume of experimental poetry, Michael Brosnan exhibits exquisite control as he employs (and invents) tools of verse language (far beyond mere “odd enjambments”) to interrogate – and deconstruct, literally — the word sublime, in all of its senses. “Excellence? Grandeur? Beauty? Inspiring unavoidable awe?” No mere exercise in linguistics, however, his enterprise provides the opportunity to consider no less than the entirety of human existence in the face of “the nagging matter of / the coming Sixth Extinction — hurried along / by superciliousness and / human hunger for what cannot be obtained.” “I want to find less in meaninglessness,” he declares; “I want to know if knowing can save us from ourselves,” and this book is the record of his search for that answer and hope.
Many sublime companions (real and imaginary) are along for the ride — Mozart, Coltrane, Jimmy Page, Moby-Dick, Dr. Philosophy — while erasures of Wordworth poems frame and intersperse the work (an act of distillation that serves as a model for the book as a whole); and the titles of a library’s worth of books whispering from their shelves attests to his extensive reading. Impossible to describe in brief, it must be read to experience the sweep of Brosnan’s vision and venture. As for the payoff: in the end he is after “a small wave of contentment” as expressed in the craft of “Origami” — “Today, I’m seeking new possibilities / in a small illusion with unambiguous lines. // Look, world, look. / Our story is in tatters. // Here’s a ‘dove’ for you to hold. / I give it in peace. Make it fly.” In the closing Wordsworth erasure, and old man rises and hoists up his load, a fitting image for the service Brosnan performs for us in undertaking this poetry and philosophical enquiry.
Praise for EMU BLIS
In his third collection, Michael Brosnan dissects and appraises, as with a surgeon’s scalpel or jeweler’s loupe, the concept of the sublime (“creature of mud and fog”): its guts and wonders, its flaws and majesty. Brosnan’s sport with typography and form depicts the slipperiness of sublimity, and the challenge of discerning it amidst the static of modern existence. A passion project of sweeping scope and crisp wit, this book will engage any reader who’s ever been bewildered or frustrated or amazed by the ineffable grandeur of our beautiful, fractured, complicated world.
— Maggie Dietz, author of Perennial Fall, winner of the Jane Kenyon Award and the Grolier Book Prize
“In this third volume, Michael Brosnan writes “bravely just outside the concentric circles/ of want and worry”.... His language is a searchlight for poetry, constantly a renewal. Travel with these poems as you would a knowledgeable circumnavigator who uses all wits, instincts, histories, indicators, observance, and questions to discover what’s sublime about the human journey.”
— Peter Money, author of American Drone: New and Select Poems
Award Nominee
EMU BLIS, BUMS LIE, BLUE-ISM was named a finalist for the 2023 Wandering Aengus Book Award. Judges comments include:
“A highly innovative and experimental exploration of the relationship of the sublime (mystery, ecstasy, terror) with poetry.”
“Surprising, inventive, and engaging in both form and language.”
"A deep philosophical question in poesia that's enlightening and engaging.”
“The tension created in each line is compelling,”
“The work reveals the on-going human condition reflected against the modern world, technology and social media's stronghold, political division, lack of empathy — all of it.”
EMU BLIS, BUMS LIE, BLUE-ISM is available at:
Bookshop.org
And your local independent bookstore (highly encouraged).
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THIS BOOK started with a simple thought while I was digging into our poetic past and reading various works of Romantic poets — especially William Wordsworth and his steady contemplation of the sublime. What would these poets think about the world today? And where in world so torn would they find the sublime, as they saw it? A corollary, I suppose, is the question of whether we even care about — or even think about — the notion of the sublime in the 21st century.
EMU BLIS, BUMS LIE, BLUE-ISM — all anagrams of the word SUBLIME — represents my exploration of these questions. Being a poet, of course, I decided to do this exploration through poetry — not a collection of individual poems (there are some in this book), but rather through interlinked sections of poetic expression. This form seemed the best way for me to engage the question of sublimity today.
The concept of “the sublime” is one that has been in evolution since classical times. Bring up the notion of the sublime today and we’re generally aiming at questions of beauty and grandeur, of a sense of awe, of art that raises our emotions to a higher plain, of spiritual uplift, of that wonderful and hopeful feeling of the human spirit rising above the quotidian. I like what John Keats said about “the holiness of the heart’s affections” and “the truth of imagination.” I like, too, the way the young Wordsworth always seemed to connect the sublime to morality — as if to live a life focused on truth and beauty, on awe and amazement, is at its core a moral pursuit, and one that can, or should, improve the world for all species.
William Blake, too, understood the power of the sublime. In “Auguries of Innocence,” he writes:
To see a world in a grain of sand,
And heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
That’s not just a poem about the sublime; it’s also a sublime work of art. No?
Of course, Blake saw the dark side of the sublime, as well — that “invisible worm / that flies in the night / through the howling storm.” And Edmund Burke, in his 1757 treatise on the topic, also braids in the notion of sublimity in the terrible. Burke also notes the human limitations in exploring the question. As he puts it, “the condition of our nature binds us to a strict law and very narrow limits.” Given that all we know comes to us through our five senses, and our five senses can only take in a limited range of sound, sight, smell, touch, and taste, our sense of the world is very constricted, indeed.
These threads — of the beautiful and the terrible, of knowledge and mystery — underscore both the hunger to know and the limits of knowing. Still, we seek. That’s the thing.
Where, one might reasonably ask, is the sublime today? Do we find it in nature? In music, art, and literature? In the better action of society? In spiritual pursuits? Do we see its darker iterations in the fracturing of democracies and the constancy of war and the ongoing assault on the natural world? These questions have kept me occupied for the past couple of years. Since this is poetry, I’m not offering up answers, just a sense of what I think matters — what draws us, confounds us, encourages us, defines us. But it would make me happy if you jumped in here, too, to ride this big rickety raft with me down our beautiful, precarious river.
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