Bruce
Bagnell's highly enjoyable The Self-Evolution Spa starts with a Whitmanesque
ode to Oakland and continues through love, war, a tour of the world, sex, and
advanced old age, through Marx, Dante, Ginsberg, and Lawrence Durrell, through
a savage air terminal and a parking structure that will rob the mind of itself.
The Self-Evolution Spa will grab you long before you know you've been grabbed,
and you will remain grabbed through the last page of this funny, emotionally
moving, and profound book.
— Dale Jensen, author of Amateur Mythology and Yew Nork
I
truly loved this collection. Bruce Bagnell clearly
knows his city like he knows his own heart, and his poems beautifully
demonstrate his love of both with unflinching generosity and grace.
— Tim Grobaty, Author of "I'm Dyin' Here: A
Life in the Paper," daily columnist for the Long Beach Press-Telegram
In this diverse, compelling poetry
collection, Bruce Bagnell observes and reflects a great deal upon an urban
landscape, often following the lead of the Beats in offering up the grit and
grind, the edginess, the rhythm of walking neighborhood streets, the subtle and
more jarring ironies of navigating a working class environment, social issues
and seasons of war and strife. Bagnell creates shifts in mood and flow
seamlessly, with form (a balanced mix of long and short poems) and the
multitude of experiences from childhood to adulthood that encompass a
life(time). He has paid attention, and we readers are gifted with imagery and
language that’s alive, alert, passionate, honest and courageous.
— John Rowe -- President, Bay Area Poets
Coalition
Bruce
Bagnell is a poet of the city, especially Oakland—its many cultures, its food
and music, its gentrification, its homeless, its “crushed ancients”—the Ohlone
People, under our feet. Bagnell is an
astute observer of character. He has an
elegiac feel for history, informed, we learn, by his Ojibwa ancestors. He
speaks in many voices, expressing his passion for life, and the rage burnt into
him as a young soldier in the Vietnam War.
In the tradition of Whitman and Ginsberg, Bagnell mourns what’s been
lost, rages about what’s wrong, sings the joys of lust, love and the natural
world. He sinks a plumb line to the soul
of America. Read him and your soul will
thank you.
— Naomi
Ruth Lowinsky, author
of The Faust Woman Poems and The
Rabbi, the Goddess and Jung An excellent analysis of some of the poetry in the book is to be found at http://www.sisterfrombelow.com/2017/ Naomi Lowinsky's on-going blog. Naomi is an Award-Winning Poet, Author, and Jungian analyst. Her blog is always great reading.
In
The Self-Evolution Spa, Bruce
Bagnell’s haunting new collection of poems. His vivid descriptive language
guides us through the underbelly of America — Oakland, New York, or Ohio — all
decaying. With each astute word, he
shines a light on the places where they
still let you hide. Our eyes linger
on the cardboard boxes huddled beneath the overpass in his asphalt forgotten world.
Whether in Ohio or California he exposes the bitter hard core of America.
And, over it all, the ever present crows and raptors hover or scratch
their way through the rubble.
— Leila
Rae, editor & publisher at Pandemonium Press.
Reading this book, I had the feeling of being in the company of a wise and learned person who observes the political nature of experience and has the good sense to laugh. bruce Bagnell's twisted lines give us a view of our twisted world that cannot be understood straight up. Such incisive poetry is impossible to over-praise.
— Adam David Miller, author of The Sky is a Page, Ticket to Exile, and Fall Rising
A few poems from the book. . . . All work is copyright © Bruce Bagnell
The book is 225 pages, this is a small sample.
Library Card
At
Moe’s books memory stumbles me;
my
alligator smell-brain turns me six again,
Descend
to the lower level
of the
granite Carnegie.
Inside
a nose tickle of paper,
binding
glue, old cloth covers.
There! Spectacled Mrs. Gray at her desk,
the
children’s section to the right.
Sit on
the floor,
look
for a good one hiding on a low shelf.
Pick
anything, flap the pages,
enter
tangled jungles, talking pigs, magic.
Now
Bugs Bunny comic books
mingle
with Dr. Doolittle, Oz and Lewis Carroll.
The
voyage, barely begun, never ending,
when a
Walrus talks to an Oyster.
I stare down the poetry aisle at Moe’s
always
six, inside.
A Lament of a Passage
She
used to hang her memories
on the
long pole in the closet
of her
mind,
accessible
to a quick scan and a yank;
she
could wear them over and over
with
few alterations to accommodate
the tolls
of time upon her body –
Oh! the stories she could
tell!
Until,
late in life, there was a shortage of hangers,
too
few visits to the cleaner
and
she began to fold and stack
what
she barely remembered,
neatly
at first,
in the
cabinets and drawers.
Then
there was the problem of which compartment,
which
room,
until
finally she tried the hallways.
The
clutter surrounded her
until
she could hardly move
with
all those disjointed piles:
childhood
scattered under a layer of grocery shopping
and
the altercation with the clerk,
who
clearly couldn’t add,
and
finally we had to bring in the food to her,
which
she consumed until
the
bathroom was as distant as Antarctica.
Finally
she lay there,
overwhelmed,
and
gave it all up,
her
whole life tossed out.
When
we held her hands we were strangers,
fresh,
new, comforting every time
until
she forgot how to breathe.
First published in the Round, 2014
The Peculiar Circumstance of the Parking
Garage Level Minus 3
I was
more than half ruined by work
on the
downside of an insulin spike,
descending
to Hades via the parking garage elevator
seeking
my car, my temple of reality –
that
graffiti’d wall on garage level minus three,
where
I always park and pause to sniff the dank air full of old pee and exhaust
before
turning to my restorative miracle, the wall.
That
day,
after
the meaningless destruction of other people
and
rearranging of the paper piles on my desk,
I was
where I wanted to be,
where
the light was dim and shadowed.
Everything
still and silent, noir,
except
for the crackle of a wounded fluorescent light blinking
yellow
and white,
dark,
then bright, welcoming me home.
My
footsteps echoed as I approached
that
transmogrified wall that mugged me every time I saw it,
hammering
me with the city’s truth;
odor
of spray paint flavoring the air.
New
art there every day yet its god never present, never seen.
The
wall was a billboard screen on daily refresh –
some
odd flicker rate –
blink
and there were new pictures,
new
commandments –
I swear they were meant for me.
I will
never forget the day I was told to
OBEY
but
then that went away
and
then there was the day I was told to
FUCK
YOU.
Which
was fine.
Then
all those codes I didn’t understand
like
SPQR-80
COME BACK
done
in day-glow orange letters 3-feet high back shaded in blue,
later
over-painted with a cougar eating a dog,
blood
dripping down to the floor where the paint
spread
out in a pool –
a
dozen mastiffs bled dry or an elephant gored for its ivory tusk.
They
must have used a gallon of paint
to
obliterate parking space control lines,
red
leaking into the turn lane,
blood-red
tire-tracked up the exit ramp.
I
loved it, it said so much to me.
This
day as I turned the corner to my wall
in
low-blood-sugar-drag-ass-mode
to
begin with
and
and
and
came
upon IT,
my
daily bible verse,
my
Oracle, my dictionary, my encyclopedia daily renewed,
posted
there in the parking garage,
clearing
my head of a day of I-don’t-give-a-shit-about-you work.
A look
at that wall was better than sniffing tailpipe CO fumes
until
dizzy high – that shit lasts for days –
The
wall was better than a good hit on the old alloy can,
red
with wavy stripes and big bold letters stolen from an old
Corvette
race car,
C-O-K-E
telling
me what it is, what it is, man,
I love
it like OBEY;
ummm C-O-K-E!
Sometimes
I snort it just a little to feel the sting of carbonation all the way up my
nose.
What a
rush,
my
eyeballs roll in their sockets.
Just
like when I turned the corner in the parking garage
and
there was that peculiar circumstance:
The Pictures All Gone From The Wall
and me
down on the sugar curve already, damn.
I felt
like the whole city was taken away in some crazy Zen move,
a
karate kick to my heart,
but
but
there
I was,
me who
has spent his whole life damming up tears and taking it
and I
was RAIN.
God
damn it. God damn it.
First published in Zone3, 2015
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