Shawn Sturgeon’s Either/Ur is the first in River City Publishing’s Poetry Series, all volumes of which were selected by Andrew Hudgins. The title of Sturgeon’s volume itself well indicates what we will get: a poet whose proclivities and obsessions feature, first, language, next, history and origins, and, finally, wit–taken almost as a subject itself. In this first book of poems, it seems Sturgeon’s main objective is to be fresh, musical, elusive; and if these qualities are to be valued in poetry the poems should be valued a great deal, offering, as they do, a sensibility and music that seem entirely new.

Old Master Hong, in a nutshell, was never wrong about Fong,
who lay like a lumber beyond the hill all day, there on his back
singing. Old Master Hong said brightly, Move along! Move along!

One would be hard-pressed to identify the precursor of most of the poems, yet Sturgeon’s attention to form, his love of music, his adherence to Stevens’ principle that poetry be "the joy (gaiety) of language" seems to land him squarely in the tradition–or at least in some tradition. Of Stevens himself? cummings?
            As with Stevens and cummings readers may find themselves annoyed at the incessant playfulness, put off by the seeming arbitrariness of the internal rhymes and at the poet’s seeming inability to resist them, just as they may be shocked at the book’s middle section, Fables for Beasts, its apparent appropriation of the coyote as trickster figure. The poet seems to taunt us at times with his elusiveness and his insistence on allowing himself comic/ironic escape routes:

My god, not another revelation
while we stand in the rain, the priest going
on about the uses of sacrifice,

how burnt flesh is a sort of shaking off
the blues–and all the while we’re blowing on
our hands, wondering who’ll carry the wood,

and how we’ll arrange it in a manner
both pleasing and strikingly effective.

Closer readings reveal, however, that this is not exactly the glib irony currently so pervasive in this ironic age. For one, there are the subjects the poet chooses to be ironic about: art, yes, as in the poem excerpted above, but also the human suffering that art evokes. This is not Barth or Barthelme asking us, merely, to question the strategies of art itself. Rather it seems a new way of focusing our attention on the traditional sources of art while at the same time redirecting our eyes (and ears) both to the margins and behind the scenes.

In truth, the Egyptians were stoned under
by those high quarrels of geometry–
each workman making his point by constructing
certain free-standing arguments, that,
while taxing to the common man, created
vast slopes of declining meaning.

One is reminded here of Neruda’s The Heights of Machu Picchu, though perhaps relieved the poet is able to escape the ponderousness and stridency of the purely political, which would no doubt overburden the lines, rob them of their freshness.
           In the book’s proem, "Misreading Our Lives," we have our initial encounter with the poet’s we, his group speaker, his voice of collective experience, subtly introduced:

The story of which we speak is, perhaps,
not even a story, rather it is
a semblance of a story, just a smudged
invitation to help you pass the time…

This poem then shifts to second-person singular, and the opening poem of the book’s first section (the book is divided into three parts) is a first-person speaker, but in the next poem, "Meet the Campers," the we is back, as it is in many of the other poems in the section, until, by the volume’s seventh poem, "Advice from Eskimos," the poet’s emphasis on this POV-of-the-many has risen to the level of a motif:

In the dug-out of winter, we avoid
cold corners, while at the center of snow,
we put our empties out. It’s like that
with us…

What are we to make of this? Beyond the obvious "rhetorical freshness" Richard Howard identifies in the book’s introduction, what does the collection’s insistence on the collective ultimately entail? I would argue that it amounts to a sort of stoic irony that hopes at once to embrace and fend off the coming apocalypse of the culture, the promise of ruin that every culture is heir to, and, interestingly, to examine that phenomenon partly as a function of language itself. This theme is made most clear in the poems of the final section, the majority of which feature the collective speaker adapted now to a people suffering at the hands of the Hittites and Philistines, now to people suffering invasion by the Romans, now to those suffering the hubris of the Babylonians.
           Yet, again, if this sounds like a collection of paeans to the cult of victimhood, think again. The poet escapes that, as he escapes all such rhetorical entanglements, through his faith in the ability of language. Its ability to dance and elude, for instance:

We hear, the Sumerians want their words
           Back now–who’d have imagined they were
Simply on loan?....

Do you see what we are saying–do you
           sense that, still surprised, we have gathered
           beneath these limbs, attempting to turn,
           we can still say, this wind from its around,

and that in doing so we will adopt
such strategies as can be found on
various tablets we have in town?

And this poem demonstrates how the book, whatever else might be said about it, is all of a piece: its mode, its technique, and its subjects form a galaxy of stars swirling about a definite center, a book of poems whose studies of language are themselves demonstrations of its unsuspected possibilities.
           The middle section, Fables for Beasts, may on the surface seem to veer away from these central themes: its twenty poems constitute a series featuring "Coyote" as the primary element, a character appearing to us as a sort of suprahistorical amalgamation of Native American trickster figure, Warner Brothers cartoon character, and postmodern antihero:

Coyote saw the sky and said, I’m going
to pieces, saw the earth between his toes
and said, Now the mud is up to my ass.
But it’s hard feeling epic, so Coyote
took off his cap, laid away the hideous
mask, and rising to the occasion, saw

himself to the sea.

In fact, as the lines above suggest, the series represents more of the same. Although the poems in this section revolve around a single figure rather than the we of the others, and though that single figure is located somewhere outside a specific historical period, the poems emphasize rather that the we of the other poems is one, not only that the we is us in the plural, but that it is each of us individually as well: creatures subject to the whims of history and to the trajectories of cultures. As always, our only means of recovery is through language. Likewise, the poems suggest, language represents our only means of escape. Consider, thus, the poem "In Which He Dreams He Is Columbus":

Coyote likes the funny hat, but lice
he’ll live without. He’s just sitting on his
deck nitting, when the news is called down–Hey!
We got an island here, or a parade
Of big fish. Coyote nibbles a nit,
We could go that way, I guess, if the wind

Moves west. After so much killing, there is
nothing Coyote won’t say–Let the King
sort them out; let the soldados chop-chop.
We’re here to make money; we’re not into
politics. The people are pacified;
a few more die. The rest live on on roof-tops.

Sturgeon no doubt sees himself as artist rather than political activist, yet he insists on an art with passion. The artist in him refuses to defer aesthetics to passions–political or otherwise–which would make, at best, second rate reflections of both. Perhaps the best reflection of his artistry is his ability to maintain perfect pitch. To wit, the "Columbus" Coyote poem above–irony that’s not been drained of passion, that remains committed to art and other worthwhile passions, to giving us something new with which to renew ourselves.