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Catching On Reed Bye
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Catching On

Mar 06, 2016

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A sample of CATCHING ON by Reed Bye. CATCHING ON gives the reader permission to open the hidden blue highways of their imagination and the strength to understand their complexities and truths. With his virtuosity of language and prowess to frame an impermanent moment, Reed Bye exposes the hidden use of the apostrophe and the powerful kinetic energy of silence. CATCHING ON is undoubtedly “A joyous occasion.”
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Page 1: Catching On

C a t c h i n g O n R e e d B y e

m o n k e y p u z z l e p r e s s . c o m

p o e t r y - $ 1 5

9 780988 607705

ISBN-13 9780988607705ISBN-10 098860770-0

51500

Ca

tch

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On

Re

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By

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Mo

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Catching On gives the reader permission to open the hidden blue highways of their imagi-nation and the strength to understand their complexities and truths. With his virtuosity of language and prowess to frame an imperma-nent moment, Reed Bye exposes the hidden use of the apostrophe and the powerful kinetic energy of silence. Catching On is undoubtedly “A joyous occasion.”

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M o n k e y P u z z l e P r e s sH a r r i s o n , A r k a n s a s

R e e d B y e

C a t c h i n g O n

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C o p y r i g h t © 2 0 1 3 b y R e e d B y e

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or re-produced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief excerpts. Printed in the United States of America.

Cover Art & DesignAlexis Myre

Book DesignNate Jordon

M o n k e y P u z z l e P r e s s424 N. Spring St.

Harrison, Arkansas 72601m o n k e y p u z z l e p r e s s . c o m

ISBN-10: 0-9886077-0-0ISBN-13: 978-0-9886077-0-5

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F o r D o r o t h y B y e P a r m a l e e

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T a b l e o f C o n t e n t s

As snow begins 1Something like that 2Somebody has lived with somebody (herself) 3Instinct never wavers 4While still young enough you should probably 6A simple dichotomy like cats eyes 7Walking through cornfields 8Look ma, no hands! 9What things where they are matter most? 10Two days later, spring is here 11Separate my travelogue from its ordering agency? 12 The day after you fell off your stool 14OK to crawl in the street 15What did you want to say? 17Before light hits the lilac 18What would be trusted? Who will trust? 20Very much so, with castanets 21

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My love has a ways to go 23Thinking “what have you learned from them” 24This morning’s content comes from Sarasvati 27 When angrily she threw a roll of masking tape into the trash 28The next mallard’s sadness 30Flowered or plain, the difference 32Impure the looking 33And that is why I say it never stops 35Why am I thinking of you reading this 37Let’s not congratulate ourselves 39Sometimes you wonder about 40Language is sick. Ridiculously 43This morning’s blessing 45Flit and flicker, peep and tune 48Mood intervenes 49I placed a tissue on a tombstone 50Nobody knows— 52A sip of tea 53Whose miracle lives inside 55

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P r e f a c e

People use the term “pure-poetry” – usually when they’re talking about something other than poetry, maybe the flight of a goldfinch or the expression on a baby’s face. Here, in Catching On, we have poetry itself that’s virtually “pure poetry.” Note: in the 19C, Poe, Baudelaire, and others supported an extremely lyrical sense of “pure poetry””; unfortunately, their successors have allowed this sense to degenerate into forms of verse that, paradoxically, establish their lyricism by proclaiming it. What a pure (mostly musically-acute) poetry might be relative to music and beauty now has shifted from the standard melodious into juxtapositions of sound and/or sense, more surprise-laden and atonal.

I mean that much produced poetry, including excellent, famous work, seems a blend of pure-poetry in its post-modern sense (i.e., more atonal than standard melodious) and a lot of intellectual superstructure – devices to ensure continuity of thought, within the poem and in poetry history, according to the cultivated

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taste of the moment.Poetry itself seeks to unveil, or at least shine black

light on, some of the secrets covered up by the modesty of common discourse. These revelations, I think, are both developed and overdeveloped by the temporal agreements of the poetry world(s). Some poets sneak away from these agreements (and remain semi-hidden themselves even as the work reveals). Reed Bye is such a poet.

His new book, this one, from Monkey Puzzle Press, goes beyond his previous books – including Some Magic at the Dump and Join the Planets, which are profoundly, sometimes tragically, funny inchings- and footings-along of language and life – in apprehending what happens in poetry of its own accord. Partly, he does this by intentionally omitting the ironic gestures of deixis. Bye wrote the Catching On pieces over a year of utilizing his waking-up time for the purpose.

“There’s a way in midnight, when death comes flipping and a-rolling,” sang the 1920’s religious-blues streetsinger Blind Willie Johnson. And, by dawn, ways to flip, roll, slide out of it.

Bye’s book is full of what he calls light takes, almost

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apologetically. I suggest that his “light” is as much the noun (light) as the adjective (not heavy). Case in point:

S o m e t h i n g l i k e t h a t with knobs on, flowers identified later in combustible cognition, ratios carried ahead on flatbeds Smiling faces going past – the lonely ensemble – To what degree have I attached false attachment to this cornfield? I’m asking you palatial faces of dust in sweat blankets for the time being Crash, the scimitar wanted to find something delicate True, she ran back to her old familiar and felt for the flowers. No holding onto old dilemmas Everyone faces them coming and going

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Bye’s poetry snips precisely, and gloriously carelessly, away at our assumptions of coherence.

I think this poetry book is a life-changer.Let’s say life is a stutterstep of little visions (plus

what we do about them). Let’s say a vision can be an average window shot; let’s say there’s always a little wind of some sort; let’s say you need a snapshot of the moment so it can settle again – Bye’s present poetry might lead the way.

I “preach detail” (a workable, necessary oxymoron) in teaching poetry, but there’s a new highlighting of detail in Bye’s work. Let’s call it details of the wind. It comes in the surprises between one surprise and another, rather than in the calculated reality of, say, “a reddish-brown shoelace from Des Moines.” In “rations/ carried on flatbeds,” the syllables develop the personalities.

Half of him is collaborating with another half of him. I believe this is genuine postmodern poetry, in being nonprogrammatic.

Everything’s a slant opposite of everything else. At least that kind of sense – that it’s all disjunct AND, concurrently, closely related – is a good way of starting

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any minute’s morning.I told Jason MacDonald, over coffee, about Catching

On, and he said that Reed Bye’s poetry seemed to him like looking at clouds. (Note: clouds are not cloudy.).

- J a c k C o l l o m , 2 0 1 2 -

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C a t c h i n g O n

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A s s n o w b e g i n s

the rest of time’s already openThere will be no new eye looking outtonight as love calls, you’re alonecrashing on the snow white deck Majesty walks in deliberate stridesShe almost sails that is the virginsnow of air as she goes simply off course under care of heavensomewhere in the deviant scalebeggars can’t be choosy nor is she entering your mirror now about to paint fresh red the walls

C a t c h i n g O n

1

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S o m e t h i n g l i k e t h a t

with knobs on, flowersidentified later incombustible cognition, ratioscarried ahead on flatbedsSmiling faces going past--The lonely ensemble--To what degree have I established false attachmentto this cornfield? I’m asking youpalatial faces of dustin sweat blankets for the time being Crash, the scimitarwanted to find something delicateTrue, she ran back to her old familiarand felt for the flowers. No holding onto old dilemmas Everyone faces them coming and going

R e e d B y e

2

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S o m e b o d y h a s l i v e d w i t h s o m e b o d y ( h e r s e l f )

for some time and although you see her and think it is impossibleshe has an ordinary existenceday in and day out, for many yearslike yours, it is, you come to see,most possibly the case that that is soand what is more, that you knowso little of the world outside’spatterns in which she, tall, slimlong legs and boots, facegently pursed in fractal thought of passage, movesfrom Special Collections with alidded steel cup, suddenly is such foreign presence itmakes the world too much to think to comprehend, or see as one, or one’s

C a t c h i n g O n

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I n s t i n c t n e v e r w a v e r s

It doesn’t have recall but intimate distance carries power of concentration

It contacts lonesome Joanfor instanceas she is today on the streetWe all can feel thatbird wing on the backWhen time comesyou get so few chances tonote the dates on cornerstones

Back door, live wire Trails lost or taken again, her museum face withthose distinctive purple shadows--Orders of intuition

R e e d B y e

4

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No plan or pertinacityNo wedgebut some limitshining in the morning, pale strawwarmth collecting, now for laterpurple shadows

C a t c h i n g O n

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A b o u t t h e A u t h o r

Reed Bye’s published poetry includes the books Join the Planets: New and Selected Poems, Passing Freaks and Grac-es, Gaspar Still in His Cage, and Some Magic at the Dump. A CD of original songs, Long Way Around, was released in 2005 and a new CD, Only Imagination, is in the works. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies including Nice to See You: Homage to Ted Berrigan, The Angel Hair Anthology, Sleeping on the Wing, and Civil Disobediences: Poetics and Politics in Action. He holds a doctorate in Eng-lish from the University of Colorado and teaches poetry writing workshops and courses in classic and contemporary literary studies and contemplative poetics at Naropa Uni-versity. He is presently working on a prosodic study of the poetry of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.

Page 26: Catching On

C a t c h i n g O n R e e d B y e

m o n k e y p u z z l e p r e s s . c o m

p o e t r y - $ 1 5

9 780988 607705

ISBN-13 9780988607705ISBN-10 098860770-0

51500

Ca

tch

ing

On

Re

ed

By

e

Mo

nk

ey

Pu

zz

le P

re

ss

Catching On gives the reader permission to open the hidden blue highways of their imagi-nation and the strength to understand their complexities and truths. With his virtuosity of language and prowess to frame an imperma-nent moment, Reed Bye exposes the hidden use of the apostrophe and the powerful kinetic energy of silence. Catching On is undoubtedly “A joyous occasion.”