A Review of Lazy River by Tamas Panitz – Reuben Dendinger
October 28, 2024
Like a noise artist plying cracked electronics, Tamas Panitz opens up American English and bends its circuits, twisting everyday language into brash, exuberant melodies. Departing from the drums and jangling chords of last year’s Wild Lies, this new volume strives toward the same quiet ecstasy of the avant-garde Americana of John Fahey, Jim O’Rourke, and Bill Frisell. O’Rourke’s Bad Timing could be the perfect score for Lazy River.
For over a century, avant-garde poets sought the revitalization of language, the renewal of life, through the technique of shocking juxtaposition – Lautréamont’s famed “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella,” – striving to escape the sinister laboratories of metaphysical thought, with their rows of animal fetuses preserved in dusty jars of formaldehyde, and to enact the sensual mystery of creation.
The astonishing force and comedy of Panitz’s poetry is derived primarily from this technique of unexpected juxtaposition, and yet his manner of twisting and perverting language cannot accurately be described solely with reference to any prior avant-garde. Indeed, Panitz is a leading figure of the “Nomaterialist” movement, its methods and ideals outlined in the book Vesuvio (New Books 2023), co-authored with Joel Newberger and Losarc Raal. In the crowded history of poetry, one would be forgiven for imagining it was at this point impossible to invent a distinct and unmistakeable new poetic language, but that is precisely what the Nomaterialists have achieved.
The principle difference between Nomaterialism and Surrealism is that, while Nomaterialists certainly channel the unconscious (or the archive, the grand intertext, however we want to conceive of the universal reservoir of imagination), they are not content to sit back and enjoy the show. What they attempt instead is occult intervention: warping, slashing, restitching the fabric of existence. This perhaps all sounds quite heady, but in fact the first thing one notices about Panitz’s poetry is its playfulness. He is perhaps the funniest poet writing today, his instinct for the absurd extending to rhythm, a certain metrical slapstick. But this humor is frequently combined with heartbreaking music, so that, like looking at certain old photographs, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or weep:
Here and there, people
are blocking the street
between two rooms,
where roombas meet. The world
is in constant motion
caught in the green glossolalia
of my pestle.
(I’m a laxative.)
One day the breeze will temper
summer campers
with the accents of an imaginary
demand,
the music of secondary traits,
and inhuman suffering.
The effortless wedding of the familiar with the magical, a refreshing clarity at a time when much surrealist impulse remains beholden to the macabre wet dreams of Georges Bataille or the occult fantasia of Leonora Carrington. Normal parlance, strange memories, sexual innuendo, prophetic declarations, Gothic, science fiction, all our aspirations and illusions, all seamlessly synthesized into a pure language of the heart:
One is too exposed soon, and too alone later. Alone with the elote, you’re missing the part of your brain responsible for not romanticizing psychology or those giant Brazilian tunnels.
With these mysterious interventions, carried off with Panitz’s signature panache and magic ribaldry, the poet seems to confide in us the whole secret of his method which turns out to be the secret of creation itself. But he demands the same from the reader, repeatedly asking questions which invite an intimacy and generosity which we are unable to refuse:
Verse is booming
thanks to incoming liquid.
(Trees.)
But does harpoon trump poontang?
They say I’m being arrested
for aggravated assault
on a bluesy riff. But are there any
wings left?
To be a poet in such times and not give in to despair and morbid indulgence is remarkable in itself. Who else brings together Rimbaud’s deranged irony and Whitman’s prophetic joy, as in the parenthetical asides at the end of certain verse-paragraphs where the poet confesses his secret identity: “(I’m a mint convertible),” “(I’m an energy drink)”, “(I’m a coloring book).” Or the unforgettable declaration: “I’m the blue flan, / the pale tattoo of gooning in line.”
I could keep quoting such lines interminably, or at least until “The final lorgnettes of geese pass across the eye of the bay.” But nothing can suitably convey the exhilaration of reading through one of Panitz’s superb, effervescent books. Read Lazy River, Wild Lies, Mercury in Lemonade – whatever you can get your hands on.