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Poet
Ben Doller has all the answers.
The questions
are a different matter.
Doller's
poetry collection, FAQ:, from Ahsahta Press, features
51 "answers" to unknown questions. Each poem, titled "FAQ:,"
begins with the line "Thank you for your question," but the
question hangs in the air unknown—and sometimes, based
on Doller's answers, unknowable.
"I can't
trust myself all night with this question," Doller writes.
Doller's
answers aren't tidy, either. The poems are more like quests
for answers than answers themselves. They feel fragmented
but intentionally so. It's as if the unnamed questioner asks
for clarity, but in a world of confusion, clear answers are
impossible. They are too much to expect.
But Doller's
poems contain bursts of brilliant clarity that come in the
midst of the searching. Doller doesn't use his poems to catch
clear snapshots of a particular moment; instead, his snapshots
come in phrases, like moments of elucidation: A stunt cyclist
seeks "To bludgeon gravity with speed." A narrator laments,
"Endless imagination is scourge, is bane, bare, self-immolient
and spark, is accepting your invitation to, to take it to
nowhere, notime...."
Clarity
bogs down into confusion, but with Doller the confusion comes
across as artful. "A cliché, forced patiently, violently enough
through tortuous enough a tube may become something solid
again. Maybe a saying," Doller writes. "So I have tried to
impel it through these wires to you, you know that I need
some of you to set the alarm clock, to increasingly sing in
chorus with whatever oldie crows that the day should be beginning
that the day should be beginning…."
Confusion
sometimes breaks further down into chaos, but once there,
Doller can find more clarity. For instance, he writes, "It's
just not my job to make the earth again, to celebrate my astonishment
at the leaf as it all goes wrong leaf by leaf…"
Confusion
doesn't always equate to gloom, though. Doller finds humor,
too. "Performing a word-find in the arrivals area: just one
example of admirable behavior," writes a traveler in one poem.
"I can't recall now why I was in the arrivals area. It's a
secret."
Most
of the poems look like short paragraphs in a helpful little
manual. The two most notable exceptions, the collection's
only named poems, "Daisy" and "Same Problem," stand out because
of their couplet structure.
FAQ:
fits perfectly as the twenty-seventh volume in Ahsahta Press's
"New Series" of innovative poetry collections. As with other
volumes in the series, FAQ: will challenge a reader's
ideas about what is and isn't poetry, both in form and content.
The poems in Doller's collection fulfill a similar function:
The rumination is as important as the answer.
(July
2009)
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