It isn’t often you read a collection of poetry that steamrolls you into a puddle of rainbows. Poet-translator Ian Dreiblatt's Forget Thee (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021) does just that, at least, to me. It weaves together (rather effortlessly) the poet’s obsessions—New York City and the ancient world, madness and metaphor, soup and symbols. With echoes of Zukofsky and Rilke, every line is what it is and what it isn’t: a perfect reflection of the zeitgeist.
Written as both a love letter to ancient landscapes and a sly jab at modern life, this collection of poems is told as a series of conversations between an unnamed narrator and various figures of myth and history (Thoth! Cleopatra! Emperor Augustus! Wisdom! and more!). Throughout, the narrator and various characters discuss ancient history, present cities and capitalism among a thousand other topics in a book that is both whimsical and hilarious while also threaded with heartache. Reading it is like being in a college antiquities class on an ice cream high. But waaay more fun.
The language throughout is inventive, hyperbolic, and slangy. Here is an example from a conversation with the prophet Jeremiah in ancient Egypt:
You sound depressed, I say, not really, he tells me, I worked the braids of circumstance as best I could, the air & how to fill it, I lived a life of art & besides someone had to do something, us just living here in the desert, so much past & so little history
Or one with Puabi, "mysterious noblewoman of twenty-seventh-century-bce-mesopotamia" in which they discuss the phenomenon that is coconut water:
what are these...torn shimmering husks that blow through your streets, she asks? I say, Oh we loved a gurgling nut water made from a reconstruction of what grain is, we bought it in these cylinders drank its angelic specificity while a ghost of our heartbreaks was continuously resculpted in the public consciousness, it became the single easiest thing in the world to get
In these poems, the past and the present (gleefully) rub shoulders. New Jersey diners host ancient goddesses who transform from snakes to cans of spaghetti-os, the sun is slung behind a jukebox, the meaning of life bandied about, and America is explained with romanticism, apology and disdain. I particularly admire the narrator’s conversation with Thoth, who gets a little cranky:
I’ve seen you do it, Thoth says, even gave you writing so you’d have another kind of body to escape to, and you hid everything there, your inquiries into love, rules for making particular kinds of soups, everything you know about what glass does to light, where to put hands in the dark, your fears and memories of an earlier landscape…. writing is the gift you didn’t survive
but we achieved so much, I tell him: pinball, the poems of Bernadette Mayer, the music of Lonnie Johnson, frozen pierogi, little rooms that glide between mountains
for a little while, he says, sure, I mean I used to be the freaking moon but you don’t hear me bragging about it
Or take a conversation the narrator has with Hathor, ancient goddess of Egyptian culture, that sums up much of the collection’s earnest gist:
I may love humanity but of course I’d rather be a cow on a riverbank.
yeah, I tell her, we know, our walls peeling with rainbows into air wet with sirens, our criminal breath the last thing beautiful, once you start reading you can never go back and I cannot stress enough how little sense it all makes
Playful and masterful, these dialogues, full of pathos and mockery, bring our modern culture under a “Nimrud lens”—examining with exquisite lyricism and cynicism what indeed has become of us all.
❂
Ian Dreiblatt, forget thee is published by Ugly Duckling Presse, New York, 2021.
❂
MEGHAN STERLING lives and teaches workshops in Portland, Maine with her family. She is Associate Poetry Editor of The Maine Review. Her collection These Few Seeds is out now from Terrapin Books. Read her work at meghansterling.com.