Stay

Stay—Douglas Messerli’s 12th book of poetry, and his first since his 2012 publication of Dark—represents work the poet, dramatist, and prose writer has written from the millennium until the present, a period of 17 years. During this same period, Messerli has published 11 volumes of his My Year writings, a large book about film, and edited numerous further volumes for his Green Integer press.

The title is both a desire for things to pause for a moment, as in “a stay,” while being also a plea for people to “remain” in his life. Well aware of hurtling headlong into death—the poet turned 70 in the year of the book’s publication—and watching many of his close poet and other friends dying around him, he has attempted to “catch” and “call up” their voices through his writings through their works. For many years now, Messerli, using finely tuned collage methods, has taken small bits and pieces of the works of other writers, piecing them together with his own poetic thoughts and associations in order to subtly “rehear” their voices and to re-image his time with them as a reader and a friend.

“Of course, this is not a literal summoning up of them,” Messerli writes. “The dead can never speak again, nor will the living ever quite speak again what they have in the past.” I’m not trying to summon up their voices, like a looney medium as much as I attempt to comprehend their own writings and voices through my own memories, through my own interpretations. Writing through another person’s work, whether they’re living or dead, is a plea for them, for what I remember of them, to stay on for just a few moments more so that I might “hear” what I might of missed when I last spoke to them or, in the case of the dead, when they were living.”

The numerous voices of these poems—Thérèse Bachand, Howard Fox, Susan Howe, Robert Kelly, David Kinloch, Sarah Law, Michael Lentz, Clarence Major, Bernadette Mayer, Martin Nakell, Marjorie Perloff, Dennis Phillips, Meredith Quartermain, Reina María Rodriguez, Joe Ross, Standard Schaefer, Cole Swensen, Paul Vangelisti, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Can Xue among the living; and Djuna Barnes, David Bromige, Hugo Claus, Inger Christensen, Carolos Drummond de Andrade, Christopher Middleton, Adriano Spatola, Jack Spicer, Arseny Takrovsky, John Wieners, Charles Wine, and Louis Zukofsky among the dead—are not based on any person encounters with Messerli (indeed several of these figures he never met), but are called up in tone by their own writings in order to create a contemporary interchange with their own writings.

Finally, Stay is Messerli’s most clear embracement of his own landscape, in this case California, that he has ever revealed. These are poems that demonstrate Messerli not only at home in his Los Angeles evenings, but at home in the voice he has honed through his long career as a poet.

Douglas Messerli (born May 30, 1947) is an American writer, professor, and publisher based in Los Angeles, California. In 1976, he started Sun & Moon, a magazine of art and literature, which became Sun & Moon press, and later Green Integer press. He has taught at Temple University in Philadelphia, and Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. He received the Award for Poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.