Mark Tardi's most recent collection of poems is called
Airport Music, and it recently found itself on the Small Press Distribution's
Best Seller list.
I asked Mark about the inspiration for the book and here's what he wrote back:
As for why I wrote
the book, as a Polish-American Chicagoan who grew up about a mile away from
Midway Airport and one block away from freight train tracks, the relentless
pulse of movement quite literally hung over our heads. I began to consider how
airports are a kind non-place, neither here nor there, and how this intersects
with a sense of Polish identity. And this sense of being "between"
also connects to Polishness, both historically and presently, I think. So much
of Polish identity relates to the struggle for nationhood historically; and
presently, so many Poles achieve by leaving Poland. Chopin, Gombrowicz, Miłosz,
you can go down the line, but so many important Polish figures were outside of
their homeland.
As an
American living abroad, of course I feel this more acutely in a different
direction. There are obvious ways that my Americanness is visible, but in other
ways, it shifts within different contexts. It can be both a liberating feeling
and a very disorienting one. So I hope those emotions bleed through the book
somehow.
I'm
also attracted to paradox. So an artist like Sean Scully impresses me for
following through a motif his entire life -- to activate stripes -- while
Bontecou goes the other route, intense torque and shifts in various directions.
Roman Opalka might be a touchpoint here because of his obsessive fixation with
numbers, counting, his life's work being to count his days, quite literally.
The numbers are textured paintings, but also voiced, uttered; something
palpable but also floating in the air. Makes me think of that line from Michael
Palmer's "Zanzotto" sequence: "the hum of the possible to
say", something like that. I suppose I think of this idea of
"airport" as constituent parts: both "air" and
"port," impalpable triangulations of space, positions in time and
history enveloped in the endless parade of almosts. And there are no giveaway
silences, which is a kind of music.
Here are some of the
poems from Mark Tardi’s Airport Music:
Tone
for Agata Pietrasik
Impossible,
this swept curve, sleep torn.
Almost
unguessable fractions, one more rehearsal, impossible, purely so, curved in
fog. Though not in any strict sense, a door opens and goes on opening,
impossible, to negotiate the difference between a handshake and a poem. We all know dying in Cleveland is
redundant,
yes, or maybe it’s the weather. To just
walk into a photograph, impossible, sure, but plausible enough. And I’m
grateful. Impossible to marry my
mailbox, impossible the curses this early. An impossible affection for the same.
from Airport music
Let x
equal the amount of broken glass strewn across the sidewalk;
Let y
equal the most hurried, the last
this brute contingency
that any breathing falls, imperfect
half-boarded up
There’s no harm for anyone else
in your mathematics
thin negatives,
slant black
never quiet, only graspless
locked into the cut of a house
Let k
equal a knot of people, expectant
sounding each other out
a drawn bath to deform water
a butcher’s broom
5 out of 4 people have trouble with
fractions.
The entireness of simple touch. All
those
lost landscapes.
Your dead body looks like rain;
Mine, rotted planks for pavement,
standing
water, vinegar, another flu out of
season
Don’t ask how we went, by what sudden
leap
or what unforeseen modulation. This zero
with
so many ciphers.
It was impossible to watch:
To undress and dress again.
The chest a harpsichord.
That the
withheld is the only eloquence left.
Flags and
bunting everywhere.
A built-in
lefthandedness.
Woven wind.
That the dead
are protected.
Another
infinity, a hotel.
It was an
injury to the idea.
A saucepan to
plant some flowers in.
Interior
after
Lee Bontecou
So
why this body again, less
inglorious,
absorbed
in interminable games of patience. Why
the doorbell
once more, the
anticipatory
suspicion, why confess, why
the hammer or
lorry or spaceship?
Why
not mine or someone else’s yellow expanding?
Now you lag,
tug, looking back, inescapable perhaps,
no longer a
mailbox to speak of.
For
the day, or a certain part of it, the rain slides.
Prior
architecture, the perfect colander:
Why not a candle, carpenter’s bench,
little hats and all manner of birds?
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Mark Tardi's Airport Music is available at Amazon. Click here.
To read more about Mark Tardi and see some more of his poems, click here: Writing the Polish Diaspora.
