Carefully selected un-careful poems

Local author celebrates release of career-spanning third collection of poetry

by Ryan A. Bunch

published October 1st 2008

Read through Nick Muska's new book, All Cool: Carefully Selected Poems, there's little doubt he's a Midwest poet. Muska's incendiary works carry the torch of the Beat movement, with more than a few beer-slopped dashes of Bukowski's rude and crude insights sharing a joint with a whole history of French literature's renegade underbelly. 

Muska celebrates the recent publishing, through the University of Toledo Urban Affairs Center Press, with a reading on Thursday, October 2, 7:30 p.m. at The Ottawa Tavern, 1817 Adams Street.

All Cool is the poet's third book, following releases in 1979 and 1987. Muska has been the recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship, Arts Commission of Greater Toledo Community Impact and Community Achievement awards, and an Ohio Governor's Award for the Arts. Locally, Muska has scripted, produced, and directed the popular annual celebration of Jack Kerouac's works, "Back to Jack." 

The writer's biography pinpoints him as a "global traveler and inveterate bohemian hipster." If there are any doubts, the career-spanning poems of All Cool back up that claim. 

All Cool serves a biographical purpose. Split into six primary sections (Hunky Tales, Heavy Lifting, Translytics & Versions, All Cool, Tropics: Sunsets, and Tropics: Sunrise, with a few extraneous poems tucked throughout), the book tells us both the poet's life and interests. 

Poems like "Knowing Your Place," teach a bit of how Muska's world view was shaped, raised in Lorain, Ohio ("WELCOME TO LORAIN/Ohio's 11th Largest City/Home of International Festival/(no "the" tells it all)," he declares in the opening lines, before moving through a verbal tour of the city, arriving at the humble closing, "It'll never make the top ten./But, then again/Neither have I." 

Hunky Tales explores Muska's hometown, ancestry, working class roots, and ultimately depicts the struggle Americans face to put our fledgling heritages into the greater context of melting pot American life. This is best portrayed in "The Lyric of Telly Manko," a narrative where the speaker weaves Telly's steel mill tales, in the form of an after-work, over-a-beer conversation, with observations and insights that culminate in the speaker's understanding of culture in blue collar America akin to the molten steel it produces. 

"The Polish dawn glints from the Puerto Rican banana shop/and thick-ankled women in babooshkas/wander with carriages beneath the smoke/One pink Spanish girl talks with Repas, the Slovak barber./Sausage rings wink blindly out of Jacoby's Mart/and Joe Kérékés still tends bar at eighty," Muska writes.  

Poets are blessed and cursed to see the world – including their homes – as outsiders, hence a propensity toward travel. Evidence of Muska's treks scatter throughout All Cool, but are most thoroughly documented in the Tropics sections.

In his ruminations on the ins and outs of the sun, Muska continues All Cool's theme of unapologetic sex and dope, tied into the fantasy of real life insights, but in numbered verses that call to mind Kerouac's hymns a la Mexico City Blues. 

In "Ray's Cab 1:35 a.m." he muses "Drunken lovers/arching drunk iron railings/Lips locked all night/in damp tropic funk/All night violet alcohol fumes/cognac and cocaine/rise up from gay cab back" and in "Sunset IV," Muska offers the simple snapshot, "fried on mesc/blue-dot/O/wOw/O/throw my/gold earring/in after it!"

While amusing, it's not just Muska's honesty in tales of decadence that makes his writing endearing, but rather the way his crude meanderings contribute to the relentless conversation of history's societal underbelly. With more than a few nods to renegade poets and French symbolist icons Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud, among others, Muska seems less interested in starting new conversation than chiming in on centuries old established ones that frame the human affinity for nightlife and all its accomplices in the context of daily life.

Because of its nods and allusions, and because of Muska's interest in French writings and his deep knowledge of the literary genre, All Cool isn't completely inviting to novice readers. The Translytics & Versions portion best serves readers with keen knowledge of the root poems and writings (including Egyptian hieroglyphics) they're spun from. But, the works aren't off-putting.

Even without literary contexts, Muska's tales of late nights, ladies of the night, cars, jails, boys, girls, and general madness to fight for the sake of fighting, even if it's against yourself, create intensely visual, unapologetically vulgar, chuckle-worthy scenarios. 

One harrowing/amusing, charming/seductive example comes in "Automatic Me ~ after Apollinaire's L'Automne," where Muska derives a voice and tale from the early 20th Century surrealist. "Dance of noise like you paid for the cage/And this buff, lantern-lit dance boiling forth/ - it's automatic me/Who snags her peppery, virginal hams/Then slides hands - I paid for it - upon shantung silk," the speaker calls through Muska's amused pen.

The Translytics poems have much to offer, but Muska's voice seems most coherent in his telling of Midwestern labor and life.

Heavy Lifting explores the life of thankless manual labor and the unending arduous drone that surrounds mass production work, and it's cousins (mills, warehouses, railroads, etc.). 

In "Forklift Poem/Winter," Muska crafts musical cadences that illuminate the creativity drown out by repetition in imaginatively descriptive verses.

"When I drive lift/I am saddled to a peeled-paint rhino/who would charge concrete and crumble block/If I did not hold it tightly by the ears." ... "When I drive lift/From my rhino perch I am lord of all I survey:/An iron-dark, echo-empty warehouse/Ben's junkyard next door, its soil gone oil/sun glinting hard from stacks of rear-view mirrors" ... "When I drive lift/I am the last snorting thing left out on the dock/breath and exhaust lost in the snowstorm/blowing under the edge of the overhead doors," Muska writes.

Perhaps though, the most affable addition to the collection is Muska's closer to the 128-page poetic saga, "Author's Retraction," where the writer essentially gives a nod to his wild past, and makes peace that it has indeed passed, with a playful rhyme.

"There was a time I ran the streets/A time when I lived downtown,/A time when I played with the girls and boys,/A time when I ran around," Muska remembers in verse one. "But now I stay at home and lurk/While my friends still swill down beer./I'm not a lover, I'm just a jerk/And things ain't no better I fear." He carries on, resolving in verse three, "Those times when I closed the bars/Weaving to the last dark song/Then groping joints in the parking lot,/Well, my friends, they're gone." And like most of Muska's poems, this one toils simultaneously in fond memories, sadness, and comedy, "I love this time of silence now,/Soon I'll have a mountain path to climb./So forgive me, friends, if you can/This cheap and tawdry rhyme." ... "Don't send me dagger looks or razorblades,/Don't turn your grins to frowns./Those were fine high times I ran the streets with you,/But the streets have run me down."

This collection displays Muska as an adventurous, risk-taking writer with distinct style and voice. While the poems were carefully selected, carefully grouped, the themes thoughtfully laid out, no amount of planning could tame Muska's chaotic anecdotes or thrill for being, nor could it curb his insatiable desire to chew language and reform it into eye-candy-coated vignettes. 

Muska's words and stories are intense, and often intensely personal, even selfish. Time, place, and context seem annoyances, and are often absent. The brevity can translate as confusing, but the power of Muska's words is that they look you in the eye and tell you they don't give a shit if you get them or not. Insightful readers find that the writer's bold attitude, comic wit, and iconoclastic disposition radiate from the blank spaces beneath, between, and around his fragmented tale-telling verses and offer more than we'd ever be willing to read.