Buffalo Head Solos, by Tim Seibles, Cleveland State University Poetry Center

In his fourth book of poems, Tim Seibles conducts a searching examination of American culture. Like a doctor diagnosing a patient, he repeatedly pokes his fingers into uncomfortable places asking, “Does that hurt?” And more often than not, it does hurt. But the pain is delivered in language so fresh that the reader develops a masochistic desire for more… and more.

In his preface, “An Open Letter,” Seibles writes, “I have grown sick to death of meeting people who say they don’t like poetry, can’t understand poetry.” Seibles promotes an alternative, “a sublimely reckless poetry,” to feed “the complexity of our loneliness, our spiritual hunger for dynamic meanings, our thirst for genuine human community, for good magic and good sense.” Expressing a Postmodern angst in which he feels stuck in “entrenched muck that is currently up to our necks,” where self-gratification and cultural malaise are killing language, Seibles sees most pop culture as white noise (literally white in some poems) that means and says nothing. “There must be a way to stop this dying,” he concludes, “a way to make a literature that does more: a poetry with the kiss of a shark and the feet of a sparrow, a poetry at intervals beautiful then ruthless, frank but full of quickening delusions.”

Througout the volume, Seibles touches on – no bangs on – big issues like he’s playing timpani in a Wagner opera: sex, war, hate, love, kissing, aging, death, orgies, politics, the meaning of life. In a wildly exotic mix of voices—including a cow, a mosquito, a virus, Tutor the Turtle, even Jimi Hendrix—Seibles employs postmodern mosaic, sub-cultural dialect, and surrealism as in “Will Not Be Televised,” in which the persona awakes with his internal organs on the outside.

My kidneys rolled around on their curved backs
grinning suggestively, thighs akimbo – labia                        
beaming like buttercups.

But he also balances the more bizarre moments with a very human and authentic voice. In “Ago,” the persona describes himself:

When I was still a bacon-headed boy
begging to sizzle along
in the world’s hot skillet.

And in “Anthem,” the persona is trying to find a voice, a name, a song to sing “for this starved country in my chest:”

my voice knocked
sideways, my tongue
buttoned all wrong
like a little boy’s shirt.

Seibles’s similes are acutely fresh and provocatively insightful throughout. His brilliantly fresh imagery, balanced with a straightforward simplicity, shines through in poems like “First Kiss:”

her kiss   hurt like that –
I mean, it was is if she’d mixed
the sweat of an angel
with the taste of a tangerine,

Seibles employs a vocabulary of music and musical instruments; pop culture and politics; sex and race; and, most of all, imagination and inventiveness – all in service to his greater purpose and vision.

In the last poem “Really Breathing,” Seibles attempts to tie everything together in one place, one big rant, screaming as he writes, “It just so happens that I am sick/of being black.” He goes on. In fact, in this six-page poem, he’s sick of everything: middle class, Halliburton, Exxon, corporate America, war, factories, “new stadiums,/beauty shops, big-ass houses,/gun-sucking cops, and always the fat/American cars and people who ask/nothing dangerous.” Before its over, he has Jesus “with his dark/Palestinian eyes flared/like the barrels of a shotgun” chasing Jerry Falwell with a weed-eater “Zzssst – Zzssst – Zzssst on his sorry ass.”

Seibles writes that he wants “to renovate the house of living words” and he “can’t stop thinking that good poems – in a kind of chorus on the loose – could comprise a general invitation to a much needed wakefulness.” The passion, intensity, and freshness of his attempt cannot be denied. Renovation requires both tearing things down and building them back. Seibles does both in this book, offering his readers an opportunity to renew their own passions, to grow more authentically human and humane. Those who hold a similar view of the world will be newly enlightened and enlivened. Those with differing points of view, or different life experience, especially white readers, have an opportunity to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

Mark Anthony