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Review: Casey Bush, Student of the Hippocampus

Although Casey Bush has been writing poetry for several decades, Student of the Hippocampus, his eighth collection, is my first serious encounter with his work. Casey is cut from the Beat-surrealist cloth that defined much of the west-coast poetry of 70s, giving him a hard-earned foundation on which to build his responses to a flawed American experience. He has the advantage of weighing changes, both cultural and literary, against several decades of participating in American poetry, of which his memoir “Vision/Revison” gives account. He navigates the tawdry, changing landscape of Portland and other American locales with a seasoned knack for seeing the contemporary world, with all its warts, as a place where life can still experience the sublime.  

Having moved to Oregon almost two years ago, I appreciate the Pacific Northwest angst: increased traffic and the claustrophobic march of corporatization. In “Positively Negative,” in which Casey recognizes that “we live in an obscure caliginous world / where God and good are not quite the same.” There is entropy in the collective unconscious, but the possibility for something more positive remains open.

One of my favorite poems is “Out of Town for the Weekend,” in which 9-to-5-ers, having jammed themselves into cubicles all week, promptly bottleneck on the freeways on Friday afternoon in order to escape to nature for weekend therapy. Delayed by a wreck, Casey marvels at the vulgarity and absurdity of the human condition: some drivers,  impatient, veer around the wreckage before the glass is even swept out of the way. Then he notices

the S-shaped vein on my temple takes four or five turns until it dives deeper a river that goosenecks down from the mountains and onto the plains

—a strikingly, Reverdian image (“a juxtaposition of two more or less distant realities”) that ironically correlates the tranquility of nature with the claustrophobic and stressed human psyche (16).

As the collection’s title suggests, playful, elegant rationality is central to the book. The collection is organized into the movements of a chess match—opening, mid-, and end game—inspired by Casey’s chess hobby. As a guiding metaphor for the book and the contemporary landscapes it navigates, it makes for an engaging counterpoint. As a surrealist, I appreciate how and where Casey taps into the spontaneous, irrational, and chance-based into his game-like approach to poesis. It turns out surrealism provides essential components of the complexity and “splendid insincerity” that, according to Nabokov (whom Casey quotes at one of the section breaks), is needed for both successful gameplay and literary creation.

“Always Wear a Black Hat While Driving in the Rain” is one of my favorite examples because it transforms a seemingly innocuous object into a signifier of mysterious, irrational beauty. The poem is simply a list of hats and hat-contexts, which builds, through the litany-like power of catalogue structure, to sublime heights. It begins simply enough:

hat in Detroit hat in Chicago Cleveland hat Rocky Mountain hat

but soon deviates and widens the circle to other contexts, including “early marriage hat,” “hat on top of a hat,” “xmas tree hat with electronic technology,” and culminating with “lecturing hat floating on its back down the red Congo,” a “zoo of a hat where mammals live under a suicide waterfall,” and “a hat black as night in the driving rain” (30-31).

The underlying structure of Casey’s poems are rooted in Apollinaire’s “point sublime,” wherein everyday situations flare up suddenly into irrational but beautiful incongruities. “Recurring Dream” poignantly employs this technique by building a highly complicated lyrical thought/experience in a single sentence, through creative use of left-branching syntax. The poem begins:

I am summoned To atone for condescending backtalk But before I can raise my hand To be beat bloody by the teacher’s ruler My fellow students all rise to their feet And shout out that they are Spartacus Then in an act of united defiance Consume raw garlic And respond to a series of questions Designed to explore heretics Who believe that the desert mirage is actually an oasis Where… (98)

and continues with a list of subordinate clauses explicating the nature of this heretical “oasis.” Eventually, the speaker is pulled back into reality when “the window rattle[s] / As a garbage truck passes down the alley” and “[t]he sound of the hubcap rolling down the street / [s]uddenly freed from the wheel.” The action of the poem is straightforward enough—the speaker is daydreaming in class and is jerked awake by a clamor outside—but the syntax allows the totality of associations to be contained and unified as irreducible experiences, wherein the mind blends images, sensations, and memories in a stream of consciousness that makes its own, irrational, sense.

Transformation is possible only in and of the poetic, and thus as language. Language is changeable, flawed, containing chaos and chance, that make a fragile medium, ultimately uncontrollable by the poet, as Casey explains beautifully in the opening to “Communicable Communication”:

the problem with reading is that it involves thinking and so the true meaning of words may not be apparent to everyone especially given the fact they evolve like several generations of fruit flies trapped in our mouths slippery with nuanced saliva and by the time they reach someone else’s ear they can mutate into a new and recognizable species (11)