David Gilmour reviews David Booth

With a title that begs a telling about something mattering, David Booths’ Menippean satire, being prose and poetry, or versa vice and a request for response in the title: Tell Me Please, What’s the Matter [sic] What is the matter? What is matter? What matter? Depends, what matters to you. Playing with language is a sport of poet’s, not always intellectual conundrums, but funny sounds and changeable meanings. As with “matter,” above. The experimental flare of Booth’s collection of prose, with both coherence and syntactic order and also with word, page graphics, and all sorts of Sternean and Joycean ways to take it. The experimental variety of styles and subject matter, are a bricolage of bits and pieces made for a storytelling bricoleur. There is a feeling of a Clearing Warehouse for every prosaic and poetic motif imaginable. It is a cathartic run at times. A reduction from intellectual knowledge into babble, admitting the pull of childish play: “What’s a dun forest in Blake’s ode to an evening star, that “Fair-hair’d angel.” Venus hanging in winter branches after sunset. What’s dun itself. Why not look up dun and not let knowing guide us.” Eventually the floral poetic imagery becomes sonic: “Watercolor, forest, grayscale. dun [sic] forest NORTH for dunforst dunfoerst dun furst done forced dunne forst dunne first dumb luck done fast well done dumb furst duhn ferst dunn forest “ etc. Once given license by concrete poetry grids and every variation of sound and sense on trial for the right key, the poet is flying hands free. “Look Ma, No hands.” The miscellany, the garland, and the anthology of prose and poetry are certainly gilded with Aldine white-space patterned language blocks or spires or spears or arrowheads. The combination of styles within a page of prose, and the aesthetic play with formats and graphic effects are evidence of a deliberate shift to a novel genre. Not an obsessive “Nouveau Roman” but a return of the ancient classical “modern” styles, changing subjects and media, styluses, letter hammers, pots of Shadrack, Meshak and Indigo. This is not always fun to read, not always clear what the matter is, and if the author does want feedback, provokes it, then who is going to tell him from all of us reading his book? A reviewer who does not know the answer to What the Matter Is, or any variation of it, Tell me please, you say. OK. The great variety of styles and play with language is highly entertaining, and even kaleidoscopic at times. This mantra-like quality of dunning the reader (indeed, I could tell the fun you were having, dun fun) is a happy racing movement and carries the eye along swiftly. Say the word enough times, over and over, eventually you don’t know what the word is in meaning. “Chip Shop” was my mantra that became mushy peas before I lost consciousness. I never liked peas. Hated peas, especially the fresh, shucked peas, little crumpled bags of green algae, very squashy and can catch in the throat if you are mortally averse to their texture. We ought to thank David Booth for releasing the stuffy tried and traditional to space trash and giving another artistic reach a chance. It is quite all right to imitate the ancient genres of Menippean and Milesian satire, mixing prose and poetry with a semblance of a plot, a memoir, a picaresque adventure. The concrete poetry is an addition from a later modern date, beginning with Aldus’s experiments with patterns of words and words in shapes, not to forget geometrical page designs. Some ancient Greek poets experimented with geometric poetry: the famous double-axe (labrys) pattern. The equilateral triangle. I cannot remember what the words said, but I did remember the design of words into pyramids, triangles and bats wings. Booth plays intellectual egoist with cramming facts into his writing, which reminded me of Harper’s final page of “Findings.” No rarer facts delivered in non-sequitur juxtapositions of discontinuity. For example: “The first Canadian in space died. Physicists explained microwaves’ imaginary time delay. The mass distribution of the first stars was found to have a greater than anticipated effect on the twenty-one-centimeter signal.” (Harper’s Magazine, September, 2025, p. 54.) There is the same zany combination of words, funny connections, others non-plussing: Two Boys on a Bed with a Guitar Let’s rock. Say what? I don’t know. You said it. Said what? Do you even know what it means? My grandfather says it Why do you say it? Everyone thinks I’m uptight. What will you do? I’ll smash my instrument on the stage. [He rises.] I’ll buy a front-row ticket [He drops to the floor.] I’ll throw my pick at you. [He throws.] From the cover of David Booth’s Tell Me Please, What’s the Matter Poetry & Prose, cover art by Vivienne Legg (Wichita, KS: Blue Cedar Press, 2025). “The beautiful have come e stumbli ng in vari uds and al ght, light l de a line o and barns to . . .” The design is a great part of Booth’s presentation, concrete poetry being pictorial as shape and word-worthy in “syllables” and “sequences.” Vivienne Legg was chosen for her word-tree, language tree, root-word-tree, walking beside a line of Oaks. In perfect tune with the play of the collection. The inventiveness is everywhere and at times demands serious attention. With an ADHD friend I have experienced this racing flow of accounting, explicating, narrating and all in general motor-mouthing. Were the footnotes a nod to Thomas Sternes or just to protect from suspicion? When David Foster Wallace used footnotes heavily in some articles (the Dictionary study) and famously in Infinite Jest, I was not particularly amused at the didactic parody. The playfulness of the poetry and prose so easily contrasts with the flat factness of the footnote facts. Then again, some of those notes were attractive to read through as findings. – David Gilmour (8/27/2025)