I first met Bernard Cohen, a local Ridgewood poet, last year at a reading where I thought my head was going to shoot through the ceiling above the stage. I ran into him again a month ago at another reading, the Punisher series, where he read from his debut poetry collection, Magpie, out now by indie press New Publishing. He didn’t recall having seen me read at all, which was great. I also hoped he didn’t recall my terrible submission to Charm School, his online lit mag.
The best grudges are held against those who don’t even know you exist. We’re too far past that to start that now. Besides, Magpie charmed me with a quiet denial of poetic form and mediation using today’s languages (finance, technology, celebrity), both of which complicate the typical portrait of an American cultural wasteland in contemporary fiction, “bylines in” commentary, and whatever else is happening outside your window.
In Magpie, the wealthy live out unknowing satires (“Montauk”). Others chase after actresses while processing paranoia (“Magpie”). In “For Julia,” we all become pills, “detached from the world, living for the thrill of recognition,” to be consumed to regulate or give ecstatic experience to another. To be useful, to have a palpable effect on another. These poems don’t come from a single speaker, but a survey of everyone who’s around today.
In “Love Poem,” the opener, Cohen writes, “pivot to / video to get to / the heart of it.” Video and photography are constants throughout. Cohen knows the limits of writing in an age where we read more words than ever, though rarely from books. The “you” in “Hululand” takes pictures of clouds and “wouldn’t stop sending me pictures… A / mirror in each hand, repelling the world.” We interact with the world through objects that render our bodies distant.
Connection is still sought. The variable is still the humans in the room. “Do we connect / my Rothschild,” again from “Love Poem,” a tender reuse of conspiracy, the lover as rich and duplicitous, and the love itself spoken in LinkedIn vernacular.
Magpie’s speakers operate in nebulous extremes or apoliticality: “Your Emhoff Republican vs. my / Armani Dollar,” “commuter school / politics,” “rw bum rebels.” In “Magpie,” the book’s longest poem, he writes, “Most of the world is BLIGHTED or doomed to be BLIGHTED.” Politics and the general state of things are to be sneered at. In lieu of postpolitical sidestepping, this inadequacy is acknowledged: “I was politically IMPOTENT,” the poem continues. “Dead weight in my own neighborhood.”
And it will stay that way: “We can’t just do it ourselves, / that’s too like life for me.” Cohen’s poems speak to each other, affirm one another’s essential problems as universal. I used to think that was a good thing, that suffering-as-universal was just a facet of humanity. But with eight billion people around, all our heads together, we’re still breaking from the huddle empty handed.
Later, Cohen asks: “What can I do to capitalize on your dissent?” It turns out all you have to do is record others operating as freaks. They can only walk for so long without stumbling. Magpie, as a book, does just that: we watch dozens stumble. Watch your own steps, too, “As if you / will always be photographed.”
What’s recorded and stored can’t be trusted, though: “You are all deepfakes;” “My // wires are dead. I have a backlog;” “In this viral weather.” Flat language shows the internet’s hold over communication; lines read like texts or mean tweets. We don’t have the time or attention spans in a world that requires us to optimize, and the move-fast-break-things mentality damages others, as seen in Part I of “The Poem.” He writes, “I used you for smoking cessation. / The partygoers scattered, leaving / nothing but microbeads.” We leave our garbage behind and make litter of others. Other poems show connection persisting, like when two people “would whisper timecodes at each other,” one helping the other “see through [themselves] and into the world,” from the titular “Magpie.”
Then again, in a nod to seed oil and protein discourse, Kellogg’s is presented as a contract killer (“For Luke”), so one must optimize, be ever-prepared: “I / need to reconfigure my / schedule, because I never really / got anything out of it. I left / town off what I saw.” Lock in, get “a promotion to / stay on balance,” trade in “unimportant memories for a chance to / hack into it:” to break through into something new, to finally make it, only to wind up where “Hollywood is over / New York broke,” swimming in pop cultural runoff, with titles alluding to American Dad, Stranger Things, and Lorde (“400 Lux” in “Who Does Your Laundry?”).
Line breaks appear stilted. In “More Geeks and Less Gym,” he writes “I // heard about the accident and I’m / sorry.” Or in “For Murph:” “Drawn into his / night class, a new manuscript to be / left open.” Each line break lifts the reader up, only to set them back down exactly where they were. The poems’ structures deny the reader any show of wordplay or perspective shift on the previous line.1 We no longer live in a world where everyone is consummate in talking. The general form of Magpie is the stutter, the mumble, the rambles of people who don’t know how to control their own volume in conversation.
The form also resists the urge toward the compact prose poem that embodies “the illusion of the unfigured,” as Anna Kornbluh describes it in last year’s Immediacy. We still have the drama of traditional form here, but he undercuts the tools of that form, “rejecting the cut as the scaffold of meaning.” Or, as Cohen writes in “Email Time Capsule:” “Many words were spoken but my / informant always uses empty language.”
And yet Magpie still abides by old free verse forms, in the way small towns maintain old churches, because there used to be a world here. As Ben Lerner writes in The Hatred of Poetry, “If I have no interest in poetry or if I feel repelled by actual poems, either I am failing the social or the social is failing me.” Show me something worth more than a poem.
Every day, we mimic poetry in its brevity. In our texts and comments, we go through the motions of writing poems, in the same way taking selfies doesn’t make us photographers. Magpie shows that poetry can still respond to the present, that a literary form can adapt even when it’s no longer a popular mode. Keep speaking in whichever way gets the point across: “The world is such a / place now that there is no / golden rule.”
Buy Bernard Cohen’s Magpie from New Publishing here.
- To better illustrate, look to a more orthodox contemporary poem, the kind you’d find in a prestige publication. Consider “If the Wisdom Holds,” the first poem in David Clewell’s 1994 Now We’re Getting Somewhere. In it, the speaker says, “When people actually die in their sleep, it’s nothing / they ever imagined happening to them.” The first line presents death as “nothing:” permanent carbon black, absolute absence beyond consciousness.
Scanning the next line, the reader sees that the previous sentiment was derived from a then-incomplete thought. Then, those fears are complicated by the next line, which reframes the pit of death as outside of the human imagination, as something of infinite possibility, or at least a bridge one only has to cross when they get there. Terror is stretched out until it’s thin and flimsy. Fear becomes the anxiety of possibility. ↩︎
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