October 1, 2017//the hickory is full of/fruit.” Whereas, the entirety of section VI is dated as written “Brooklyn/Manhattan/Chicago, 2009,” and a poem in section I is titled “November 16-December 1, 2016”. A poem in section VII opens “May 2004-December 2017” and a few pages earlier in the same section another poem offers the observation “And right now I can see. The presented arrangement moves freely back and forth across the years of writing. The sequential ordering of the book into eight sections feels more intuitively generated than chronologically driven. Other than the emphasis upon further developing and understanding her vocation, there is no clear narrative per se.\ The collection presents, as it were, a series of snapshots from out Fishman’s life over the course of a decade and a half centered upon her observing those moments she identifies as poetic, or poetry-related, motivating her continual self-schooling in her chosen artistic practice. The gathered writings record every day observations and events, Fishman’s comings and goings, her readings and conversations-primarily with family, her husband and children make numerous appearances throughout the writing-much of which occurs at home on their farm north of Chicago as well as trips she takes locally and to cities around the country.
There is much to be sifted through, yet in a remarkably generous fashion, the reader is thereby rewarded with invitation into Fishman’s working process. A publisher’s note from Wave Books describes the work as “spanning 16 years of notebooks, teaching notes, and improvisations.” As might be expected, the accumulated result largely reads like notes towards poems and/or extracts from exercises in poetics. Fishman has brought diverse material together and left the writing in relatively raw shape.
Drawn out from an assorted number of notebooks and other writings kept over many years, this is an intriguing, if occasionally odd, wide-ranging textual assemblage comprised of several often-fragmentary poem-series mixed in among journal-like reflections and recordings of day-to-day events. This is not the typical collection of poems. Lisa Fishman’s Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition enacts an engaging statement of personal poetics offering up a kind of secular reliquary.
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