forget thee

 Ian Dreiblatt forget thee | Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021

Basil Bunting wrote: To appreciate present conditions/ collate them with those of antiquity. Indeed, there are a lot of analogues in our world to the ancient: our worship of icons as gods, our worship of artistic as well as military feats, and perhaps most of all in the way we value owning your opponent. 

Ian Dreiblatt, presumably no Internet troll, is adept at a more sensitive task: that of delineating modern/ancient dialectics, most markedly thru a series of dialogues with ancient figures, in an untitled sequence of lyrics which makes up the center of forget thee. We see that these teleported mythical figures wonder about our world with just as much seemingly innocent curiosity as we do about theirs.

          what did you do for

          fun, I ask her, drank

          actual milk with actual

     honey in it in the shade

    by a river, she tells me,

    is it any wonder our

     preoccupations were

with paradise?

let it be said I had

a lot to lose, Cleopatra

tells me, I learned to

talk to brewers and

soldiers, pulled catfish

from the river, I married

my brother like any 

reasonable person drank

the sapphire tears of the

desert. do people still 

come out of their bodies

as birds & fly into the

sun? do they still fuck

on flat stones next to

statues of cats?

At 96 5 x 7 pages, forget thee is a tidy book, easily fitting in one hand. And yet in content it packs a wallop, prophetic and tinged with grieving the future. Dreiblatt writes a dexterous and elegiac prosody that historicises with an unmistakable aplomb, and finds traces of new language and life in the rubble of our collective life.

The first poem dunjaluče is a loosely essayistic tour thru so many contemporary anxieties and angsts, centered in the possibility of continued sociality under these shitty conditions, a trope that recurs later toward the completion of the midsection with a run thru of quotations from writers in the author’s real and imagined community.

Dreiblatt illustrates throughout forget thee how we can come to understand history not as a log of events one falling after another but as structures of feeling, to crib from Raymond Williams, mapping everyday life onto mechanisms of historical progress and power. The structures of feeling which are sounded out here both frame and add affective content to life in the now.

As previously alluded to, the narrator is visited by mythic historical figures, gods and poets in an episodic fashion, with occasional lyric interventions such as the following:

    perjoracracy it’s an insane process

    cacaphonocracy the billboards tuned 

    to full bleed radiocracy the country of

    your heart corporocracy in bodies

    bound by vacant interests you know

    normal boilerplatocracy. leocracy.

    guacamocracy how are things in

    the digital surround now?

    cryptocrats take forever in the bathroom.

    we try to make a book to the exact

dimensions of our complicity

   

Some of these mythic figures have brutally subjugated masses of people, and so they see a lot to admire in our cities. We learn how sympathetic our forms of consumption and enjoyment are to those of ancient Gods and rulers. That the more siloed-in-networks we are, the closer we come to ancient modes of iconography.

In this way, our networked mediascape and its innumerable iconic feels gives us the illusion of omnipotence, amplifies our sense of changing the world when we are only modifying it. Obviously, we all think we’re God when moderating a subreddit.

There’s an episode of the Simpsons where Lisa’s fantasy is to sit in the classroom and put on a VR helmet that jacks her in and lets Ghengis Khan personally address her by name and entice her with the promise “you’ll go where I go, defile who I defile, eat who I eat”.  This is not all that different from asking Cleopatra what she did for fun.  Aspersions are cast against modern civilization by the gods and mythic beings that visit us, and the narrator defends our sundowning empire, listing the music of Lonnie Johnson and the poetry of Bernadette Mayer as products of our civilization.

The final section addresses a nascent common speech still in its infancy, references Rousseau and hearkens back to Occupy Wall Street, and looks forward to some new, unassimilable sense coming into being, “a music of mashed/ articulations”.

As a kind of prophetic text this neat, epic, yet appealingly casual in tone monograph does the hefty work of lifting vision out of the collective unsense of our trafficked signifiers and touchstones, a market becoming the commons.