I love these poems for many reasons. When I first read Joan Margarit, I heard a powerfully distinctive voice, a spirit of great freedom and energy, humaneness, mischief, and depth.<\/p>\n
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In these naked, subtle, clear poems, surprise and wisdom are often right next to each other. There is often a doubleness going on in a poem \u2013 lots of pairs of ions, the magnetic positives and negatives which hold matter together. This gives his poems a sense of naturally occurring disorder and order, and a welcome absence of wilful craft. There is an exhilarating sense of the spontaneous, the organic \u2013 of happenstance and chance. And at the end of a good number of his poems I have the desire to scream \u2013 as at a theorem proved, or a victory.<\/p>\n
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Joan Margarit\u2019s work is fierce, and it is partisan \u2013 it is on the side of fresh perception. He\u2019s a fierce protector of his precise truth, like the bees \u2013 like a big bee \u2013 with honey. His abstractions and his daily objects are given to the reader with equal, deft, homemade tenderness and brio.<\/p>\n
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Often, at the beginning, a Joan Margarit poem will locate us. \u2018It was a top-floor flat.\u2019 Many poems start up quietly, from within an ordinary situation. And then, suddenly, we\u2019re in deep, off-beat thought and feeling. And a Joan Margarit poem often has a turn at the end, as well as a reversal \u2013 sometimes a double reversal. Reading him, we are in the world of history, wit, imagination, dream, and memory. At the same time, it is the plain real intransigent world.<\/p>\n
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What is so unusual in Margarit\u2019s work? I think it is the juxtaposition of the everyday syntax with his intimacy and wisdom \u2013 the combination of clarity and accurate subtlety which honours the basic mysteriousness (unknowability) of life.<\/p>\n
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I love Margarit\u2019s frankness \u2013 sexuality a part of life like food, sleep, death, health, illness \u2013 and his unflinchingness. He\u2019s stoical \u2013 and singing. And defenceless \u2013 but for basic human integrity and dignity.<\/p>\n
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Joan Margarit has what I\u2019ve heard some great quarterbacks have \u2013 equal ability to turn in any direction at any moment. I think samurai have that. I think in U.S. football it\u2019s called \u2018broken field\u2019.<\/p>\n
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There is a lot of change of direction within these poems \u2013 and many moments of Satori! The experience of reading him feels the way consciousness itself feels.<\/p>\n
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Each of Margarit\u2019s poems is its own being, like a living creature with its own body-shape and voice, its own breath and heart-beat. His poems live and breathe in their natural habitat. They are elegant and shapely. And sometimes they seem almost overheard, as if they are singing in the voice the mind uses when talking with itself or with its close close other. It is common enough speech, and it is brilliant, too, sensually beautiful (but not too beautiful) and with a genuine, just-conceived feeling. Those of you who know Joan Margarit\u2019s work, welcome to its most recent incarnation!<\/p>\n
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Those who are coming to it for the first time \u2013 it\u2019s good to have your company. Here is our brother, his genius quietly electric on the page.<\/p>\n
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