Neocom(muter) is the newest book of poetry by Paul Corman-Roberts, published by Tainted Coffee Press. (2009) The cover art by Andrew Lander is really the first thing that will grab you about this book: the figure on the front is confronting you, stopping you dead in your tracks. You’re being urged to take pause: Just Stop. Step away from the treadmill, life is happening while we are too busy living, as they say. And to me, that is what Corman-Roberts is talking about here but he takes it a step further. We’re not just “commuters” moving back and forth in the business of living, we are becoming so consumed with the process that we are almost detatching, not fully participating. The new kind of commuter is living to serve the rat race, not participating in the rat race so he may live. It is this difference that Corman-Roberts seems to explore, here and there in his work, but quite directly in this collection.
Cover of (neocom)muter, Andrew Lander
What’s Corman-Roberts doing here? What is he setting you up for, confronting you with?
Everything. He’s packed the world into the trunk of the Corolla, a mix of things- some pretty heavy baggage. It starts off with damage: “charred satellites”, near-misses, the fallout from choices, being products of the past.
“Beach Secrets” was a strange choice for me, in it’s placement as the second poem. It seems like a departure, with it’s ocean smell radiating like radio waves from some epicenter on the shore. The untreated sewage in the face of such a calibrated society- is he reminding us that there are still organic elements, byproducts of living, that have the power to come back at us? There’s something in the organic that often refuses to be denied, from the septic to the decomposing, life remains a part of life for the commuter. Like the figure on the cover, it will confront you on the platform. You can run, travel arrogant on your rails, but you can’t hide from truths like mortality, like stench, like “dried blood”, bitterness, like the pets that make a mess of the morning commute. (continued)
There is pursuit here, they chase, jump onto the Corolla. Even the resistant are often rendered as fake:
a never-ending line
of diverse non-conformists twenty chutes wide
ten diverse non-conformists deep
The words seem unable to escape
The impending invasion even on the
Outskirts of the station
Is Corman-Roberts saying that it’s unavoidable? That even those who purport to try- succumb, in similar ways?
He looks for answers in politics, in human interactions both normal and surreal, in the media circus of JonBenet, in the service of kings, in neighborhood associations, balls of the alpha dog “rottie”, in non-profits, in the worlds of poetry.
In poetry? Who are the poets serving, anyway? Mad Prophets, designees of various Secret Ops- in a poem to David Meltzer, he asks:
Why do so many poets crucify each other?
As this poem progresses, (Rabbinical Rant 168) it becomes one of my favorite Corman-Roberts poems and reminds me of why I am so taken by him as a poet, why I want to give his work such full attention. It really starts for me when he refers to the ‘Eden of their making”.
“hymnals and chants of the interior body”
“The baby girl squirms/She’s breaking his cool/down in front/of the hotties/a man un-babed by his baby”
“You don’t have to ball her/to love her/break it down/like you mean it brother”
“Poet, seduce thyself”
(Neocom)muter is full of stand outs: White Flight In Time Machines, Astronomer. You’ll find yourself in places, feel the accusing eyes on you as well, feel uncomfortable in the confrontation. I am convinced that Corman-Roberts does so from a place of love, an earnest place, he is an explorer of internal terrain after all- even as he writes about the external world.
He is bringing us back to something in these poems, challenging us. What are we doing on the platform, where are we going? What are we trying to accomplish, what are we missing?
More About Paul Corman-Roberts:
His website: Paul Corman- Roberts
“Paul Corman-Roberts is an Oakland, California writer of poetry, fiction and non-fiction about people living their lives outside and between the margins of society’s institutions. He is the author of “Coming World/Gone World” (Howling Dog Press, 2006) and “Neocom(Muter)” (Tainted Coffee Press, 2009.) His short story “The Deathbed Confession of Christopher Walken” was the runner-up in Canada’s most prestigious “outlaw” fiction contest, and will appear in issue #51 of subTerrain Magazine (2009.)”
“Would you like to record the death of Western man?
Take a number and stand in line
Work sets the self-analyzing
Monkey free in this elegy
Poet, seduce thyself and
Know the inner Heaven cylinder
Is the place you will see
Through constructs”
Paul Corman-Roberts is also a contributor at Full of Crow, and you can check out his contributor page here with links.
