A New School of Design - Poems by Thomas Zemsky
Publication Date: October 1, 2020
Paperback, 64 pages
ISBN: 978-1-937968-67-0
Available from Small Press Distribution
[I]t’s what is familiar in dreams
that is full strange,
as any child will tell you,
I too am unbidden
& aspire to digress.
There are poets who describe the world, a great many of them; but far fewer are the poets who create worlds. Tom Zemsky is one of those, and masterfully so. The dedication to his latest collection announces his program: “Metaphor is poetry enough.” Using metaphor as his raw material, he constructs dreamlike poems, “full strange,” that strangeness deriving from “what is familiar”, fragments of the everyday we recognize in new and unexpected places, rather like finding a bit of ancient stonework recycled in a wall along a country lane. And what wonderful digressions he offers, including a kaleidoscope of possible Shakespeare’s (“Shakespeare the sous chef or Shakespeare the snake handler… / Shakespeare able to pull Shakespeare out of a hat”), or imagining Emily Dickinson
as a devotee
of heroin
her kit
kept neatly
on a doily….
“I just try to write / like I have the DT’s”, he declares in “Drinking Song”, “really a concoction / of inexhaustible ingredients / I have no choice in taking….” But while he may claim no choice in the taking, there is ample evidence of his choices in the making of these poems, the assurance in the placement of each word. His wonder at the world indeed appears childlike, as in his response to the discovery that he had left a purchase back at the store:
How like money
To change hands like that.
I thought I was going out
to buy something
for the evening meal
instead of participating in magic.
Zemsky’s poems reveal that we are always and everywhere participating in magic, if only we will recognize it. His closing poem bathes the reader in “That Kind of Moonlight” which inspires all manner of dreaming, from the “coolly hysterical predicament / caught in Kafka’s pen” to the “churned ecstasy” of Jackson Pollack’s paintings – “babies bring out their most improbably syllables / for that kind of moonlight….” Zemsky conjures his most improbable, and most delightful, syllables out of it as well. Let us be glad of his digressions.
Praise for Thomas Zemsky'sA New School of Design:
“[M]y advice is / don’t get rhapsodic about the snow,” Thomas Zemsky enjoins his readers in “By Way of Introduction,” the poem that opens this collection. But it’s hard not to rhapsodize about these poems, with their wit, wordplay, and intriguing doubleness. Zemsky investigates a range of subjects, including the cosmos, his mother’s eyes, amusement parks, terrorists, and January, as well as artists and writers such as Shakespeare, Dickinson, Rousseau, Kerouac, and Pollack. The DNA of these poems is metaphor, from fear that’s “like the weather / in pirate heaven” to “the kind of moonlight” that “lures giraffes into typing class.” These are poems for the ear as well as the mind and heart. To read them is to enter a familiar yet endlessly-surprising universe: Zemsky’s new school of design is indeed “out of reach / & just out of sight, / right here.”
—Libby Falk Jones, author ofAbove the Eastern Treetops, Blue & others
A discredited myth claims the Inuit have x number of words for snow, but one need not, as I did, have grown up in Buffalo, NY, to recognize that the twenty-seven occurrences of the word “snow,” including in each of the first three poems of Tom Zemsky’s mesmerizing collection of poems,A New School of Design, mark a poetics, not of obsession, but possession; not of the desolation of time wherein “Foolish winter/comes to erase/all but where you/ are a tree/filled with sensations”; but of the uneasy consolations of being “one whose pleasure/is without beginning or end,/described, I guess, by the line /vanishing between Mona Lisa’s lips, /noon snow that rises /from the body of illumination.” To be sure, occurrences of the word “moon” here finally outnumber those of snow, helped by the dazzlingly Whitmanic last poem where it appears twenty times in the form of moonlight of the kind with which “Jackson Pollack churned ecstasy”—both as menacing/mincing as “a harmonica full of snowblind gunsels” and as benign/bewitching as “the same dress worn at midnight/by the water & wheat”—but which turns out at (the literal) last (line) to be “but a glimpse of that kind of sunlight.” What kind that is this poet clearly knows and cannot but tell.
—Michael Joyce, author ofLight in Its Common Place, A Hagiography of Heaven and Vicinity, and others
Thomas Zemsky’s A New School of Design bewitches with its unexpected leaps of association, its many sudden, surprising images. In a book with poems that often dispense with organic unity, there is play and process of a mind obsessed by metaphor, a mind interacting with a world often lacking in coherence, but one that builds a new, richer reality. In “Drinking Song” (“I just try to write / like I have the DT’s, / Yellow bats inside gospely yawns, / electric goats holding / their little chalkboards of slobber… /”) you see vividly how Zemsky ‘s method dislocates linearity into the capture of hallucination. His anaphora poems (“Instead”, “Or Shakespeare”, “Résumé”) are a nest of metaphors that through craft crack open seeing. Zemsky is so deft with metaphor and simile you continually exult in fresh comparisons (“…weapon fire of anxious & restless breaths visible in the wintry air…”). And there’s the recurring image of snow that seems to infuse the poems with heat rather than chill them. Zemsky is a master that presents the world in a new, astonishing way.
—Robert Eastwood, author ofSnare, Romer & Locus Loci
Thomas Zemsky was born in Hamilton, Ohio in 1947. He received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Since 1976 he has made his home in Lexington, Kentucky where he worked for many years for the International Book Project. Now retired, his favorite pastimes include listening to jazz on LP records, Latin American and modern literature, and movies according to the auteur theory. He believes that poetry, first and foremost, is metaphor.