The Intent On: Real American Poetry

From the redwood-topped hills of Berkeley, California to the air of New Jersey, oppressive with rain, from the taste of potato skins fragrant with the soil of Idaho to the blazing white Sangre de Christos mountains of New Mexico, the images conjured in The Intent On by Kenneth Irby are as varied and powerful as the American landscape. In the second addition to North Atlantic Books’ series on unheralded yet significant figures in American literature and poetry, The Intent On collects and celebrates the work of Kenneth Irby, with his poems gathered together for the first time in one text. Irby experiments with poetic structure in his work, deliberately and precisely peppering sound with silence.

With America as the backdrop, he cements melodic picturesque with relentless calamity. Irby calls writers such as Robert Duncan, Ed Dorn, and Robert Creeley close colleagues and is associated with the Black Mountain poets as well as the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group. Irby’s voice is clear and complex, as well as geographical and psychological as he maps a phenomenological landscape that is all his own.

From The Intent On:

January 1965, Looking On

Moss in the gratings
of a sewer vent

And past me have gone
a lady cop in a yellow slicker
ticketing in the rain
and those who have come in and out
after books

There is no image the flesh
does not take in, sink, the hook, there is
a weight beyond me all afternoon, into the drizzle
uncertainties of
how to look

A man comes in selling ballpoint pens
“I won’t be back to bother you for a long time, not till April–
I’ll let you have all three for 75¢ –they all write”

And in the dust on the floor of that used-book store?
So seared, the scars he must have had so long
any look back at him
is not even felt?

Moss
on the sewer plates

And on Clement Street
leads straight to the Pacific
men dead on their feet
come–back? home? down hard–
to die. The clod prim slickered copess

And there is no footprint
no print in the moss
the wet, sopped weeks of rain
does not take out of men, bodies
the bodies sopped
staining the filthy concrete

The rancors or texts and elucidations

And the quiet light down on the dust, in the windows, in this store

My God, my hands stuffed in my dirty pockets

– 11 Jan 1965