lit

Rabbits compared to poets, an “old guy slipped off his stool,/while reading a sonnet ” and other words carefully stacked side by side and line upon line in local poet Clayton A. Couch’s chapbook Artificial Lure--published in 2005 by Effing Press. The chapbook starts with his poem “Stupid Poet Trick” and the adventure begins with a bite on his metaphorical fishing line.

In the title poem, Couch explores the dissonance of words stacked together: “zombie limp through night streets burning how drunken lost.” Punk rock legends Fugazi pile layers of distortion, feedback and reverb. In much the same way, Clayton cuts the natural harmony of formal lines and creates mysterious beauty. He continues this mining for word pileups in his poem “Consensual Couplets.” The opening line reads: “Mirage = mere age. Shows its responsibility off,” and later “Ask and ye shall,/ or refuse fuse. Fusion, such energy independence.” Reading Couch’s poems is like engaging a jazz enthusiast in conversation; soon the enthusiast has you listening to obscure artists and artistic movements. As these new sensations hit your ear you realize they wouldn’t be your first choice, but the exotic nature of this new experience has you digging deeper into a library of unknown albums. “Splash, reduce, exclaim. A spin in the atom/ rocks the ground; all that empty space vibrates/ to the tune of some middling adjective...” reads the poem “Cause and Affect.” This is unexpected music. This is that hole-in-the-wall club where music pushes boundaries and the boundaries push back until something emerges that is raw sublimity.

Unlike a top 40 pop tune, Artificial Lure does not claim a deliberate musical hook or catchy-verse. In that way it’s more like progressive rock or acid jazz--complicated vertical depth as opposed to linear texture. This chapbook may appeal to poets and writers in much the same way Pollack or Rothko resonate more with artists.