MOSTLY CLEARING
by Michael Gottlieb
If Michael Gottlieb’s language is familiar, it is because he places his voice in conversation with generations of New York’s poets, pop culture, and commercial branding. Everything from O’Hara-esque exclamations and Ashberian experiments with syntax to Looney Tunes and commercial airliners’ rehearsed landing speech—“all the honeyed demarches/ adoring our table talk”—is filtered through a dynamic and utilitarian optimism. Addressing the ails of our contemporary moment, he frames poetry as “a current coursing through the crowd” and poets themselves as vital engineers of utopian thinking.
At times ironic and sincere, optimism colors every interaction, transaction, and action absorbed into Mostly Clearing’s mockingbird diction. This repetitive impulse privileges idiom and anachronism as means of indexing specific generational affects.
Throughout, Gottlieb’s speaker addresses three generations of poets: the New York School, his own milieu of Language Writers, and the younger generation whose artistic practice is situated by precarity, instability, and disillusionment. The speaker sympathizes with the latter, nostalgic for “all the swooning certainty of youth/ … where once it sprouted in all directions.” In the end, hope is what the speaker bequeaths to younger poets as the raw material for imagining a new utopian art.
Accompanied by an essay on how he wrote Mostly Clearing diffracted through the death of Ashbery, this long poem is both an homage to the lyric and political tradition of young New York (“we were all once/ of fighting age”) and an intervention into a contemporary poetry marked by reactionary pessimism. Gottlieb’s text asserts a future for poetry in an uncertain world, and in doing so, entails a call to arms for the next generation of poets—the stakes of which are “an article of faith/ that words can save us.”
People are saying:
At once epiphanic and procedural, Michael Gottlieb’s Mostly Clearing is “doing less / with more / in the land / of the free / association” – rising to the occasion of play despite everything: “everything must go / if I say so myself/.” Gottlieb’s language is found, torqued, chiseled, and beveled to create a joyous Kodachrome momento mori ode to life and memory which lucidly unfolds in various forms in rich felt thought streaming down the page. Look straight out over the lake of the poem to find—surprise—as many exclamation marks as any heartfelt pop art spliced with wry snapshots such as THE VENERABLE ALFRED E NEUMAN’S BEATIFIC RICTUS. A masterful work: I’m in awe every time I dive back in, and will again and again! - Lee Ann Brown
Towering rebuttals make way to dizzy effrontery in Michael Gottlieb’s Mostly Clearing, that last word delicately balanced as it is halfway between noun and verb. The adverb we get: Mostly he was our uncle, out there somewhere between Gem Spa and the Bunker. Possibly at Ukes, but I think not. That curious border between western Connecticut and the Hudson valley, all exurb and corporate. Not Tulsa like the New York School. Adventureland beckons near Herald Square. - Ron Silliman
About the author:
Michael Gottlieb is the author of twenty books, most recently What We Do: Essays for Poets, I Had Every Intention, Dear All and Memoir and Essay, an account of the early days of the Language school. We Will Never Speak of This Again and The Dust, his poem about 9/11, have been adapted for the stage. Selections from this book were staged at the Poetry Project in 2019. He works in tech and divides his time between NYC and Connecticut.