Mathias Svalina, _Wastoid_

 MAY AS WELL devote my 1001st pots to Mr. Svalina as well. I strongly suspect that people will still be reading him a hundred years from now—my Svalina collection (currently nine items) will be housed in the rare book room of a university library, their pages turned by gloved hands under soft lights…that is, if the humanities survive, if universities survive, if libraries survive, if reading survives, none of which I ought to take for granted. Maybe nothing will be left but, as with Sappho, a few priceless, cherished fragments.

Wastoid was published in 2014, but I wondered as I read whether some of the poems were composed during Svalina’s time here in Lincoln, Nebraska, in the middle 00’s. The poems refer to such local landmarks as Wilderness Park and the Sunken Gardens, and the volume’s title pays homage to a notable local band of the era, Wasteoid (with an “e,” n.b.). 

154 prose poems, each titled “Wastoid,” most with an opening sentence about love or “my lover” or “my beloved,” after which just about any topic at all might come up, much as in the dreams of the Dream Delivery Service. It’s as though the Songs of Songs was written by Oulipo.

My lover is so sincere. When he enters a room, fathers unpop their boys’ collars & conceal their comb-overs. Bad art hides from him. Each day is an elaborate eulogy. Everything he does or is deserves an encore. I am an unfinished statue of Atlas, the earth never added to my shoulders.

Hard to explain, and I am not going to try, how poems as random as these end by seeming funny, or poignant, or melancholy, or wise, or all four at once, but so they do.

The final poem in Wastoid ends with the sentence, “O my lover, cunning lover, feeble lover, do not fear, fire cannot burn you.”  The book’s publisher decided to put this sentence, all by itself, on the back of the book in a 17th-century-looking font. Much as I admire the sentence, I imagine people reading it, saying “Awww,” and buying the book only to be non-plussed by the references to GQ calendars, Vin Diesel, and Au Bon Pain. But maybe I underestimate them.

I am retired from teaching, but the book got me fantasizing about a course in which we began with Sappho and the Song of Songs, moved on to Rumi and Mirabai, took in Petrarch, Shakespeare, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, maybe Berryman, then maybe Margaret Millner’s Couplets, then this. 

Would they love it or want to lynch me? 

In a hundred years, they will love it.