Here and There: Two New Books by Richard Milazzo & Kyle Harvey
Some background on this second installment of “Ends and Odds.” Recently the local literary review, for whom I’ve done eight essays over the last few years, has denied four queries in a row for reviews of recent books of poetry. In each case I’ve proposed covering two or three recent publications, on a range of topics, from translating poetry, to English and Irish poets writings about the U.S., to the two poets I’ll talk about in this current installment. Preferring to avoid second-guessing editors, the more recent management of the literary review, though noticeably reducing its poetry coverage, offers no clue to its current reluctance toward my collaboration.
So we, Sean and I, have decided to use this “Ends and Odds” rubric to take notice of recent books of poetry. In the broadest sense, one endeavors to write for the record, though such a notion grows dimmer and problematic in one’s 80th year. What seems most to befit talking about poetry is pointing out, describing a context or a tradition of practice into which a book of poems finds its place. As with music, to be appreciated poetry demands an increasing exposure to more poetry. It benefits from being read within the sound of a radical insistence upon language. One achieves meaning, then, by making poetic speech, in Roland Barthes’ words, “terrible and inhuman,” and most often opposed to the social transactions of common usage.
The two new books of poetry I’d like to talk about are Richard Milazzo’s More Fugitive than Light (Tsukuda Island Press, 2025) and Kyle Harvey’s There Without Being There (BlazeVOX, 2025), both noteworthy examples of independent publishing.
Since the late 70s, Milazzo has been a noted art critic and curator, in addition to his career as a remarkable poet. His latest book bears the subtitle: Poems of Rome, Venice, Paris, 2016-2017. Although Milazzo remains an enduring citizen of New York, this latest offering epitomizes more than 40 years of activity. More Fugitive than Light is a true collaboration with New York artist Daniel Rothbart, with Milazzo’s essay on Rothbart at the start of the book, followed by Rothbart’s discussion of Milazzo. Then paired, on facing pages, with Milazzo’s 59 poems is the same number of Rothbart’s paper collages. The poems travel the world along with the collages or, should one say, they are prime testimony of a poet whose vocation remains that of a traveler, as he approaches the zenith of his career.
Most of the poems are signed at the end, with the city, hotel or café in which they were written, often, as well, with a dedication to an artist, another poet or friends with whom the poet was visiting in the actual place. Specificity, what one of Milazzo’s masters, Ezra Pound, termed ‘exactitude,’ is one of the basic characteristics of Milazzo’s sensibility. From Manhattan, to Santa Monica, to the Blue Ridge Mountains, to Jacksonville, Florida, with France and Italy in-between, the feeling of place infuses the each poem and its vision, as the poet reveals his voice, “crying out indiscriminately in pain and ecstasy” (“The Facts of Poetry”). The more the poet travels, the more, as he declares (“As If in a Dream”), he keeps convincing himself:
it was the best we could do —,
even losing our way, only to find it again,
if only for a brief moment,
in the ever-deepening shadows surrounding us.
Throughout the collection, as one can see from the above citation, Milazzo remains the master of the quatrain, whether in a short poem of three or four stanzas or in longer pieces of ten or more quatrain stanzas. His mastery of melody allows the poet to imbue his reflections on time and space with a measured grace that at times seems to belie the personal restlessness at the core of More Fugitive than Light. The easy skill with which Milazzo impels the sadness of time passing, taking us to unfamiliar, sometimes daunting places, may be seen in the first and sixth and final quatrain of the New York poem, “I Shined My Boots”:
I shined my boots before visiting you
for the first time in the cemetery,
as if you might notice them and the two crimson poinsettias
I positioned between the plastic flowers —
• • •
Silently we walked away,
stepped into the car and drove off.
Neither of us said anything, as I stared down
at my recently shined boots.
One last thought about Richard Milazzo’s work. Reading the poems in More Fugitive than Light, written in hotels in Santa Monica, Rome, Paris, Venice and Modena, I return to the need for a book of Richard’s comprised solely of poems written in hotels around the world. I’m not sure of the scope of such a project but I’m sure it would be an eye-opening and significant publishing venture.
As the title suggests, Kyle Harvey’s There Without Being There also involves travel and location but from a much younger writer — this is Harvey’s second book-length publication — whose ultimate concern is charting a territory, essentially unknown and ever-more-Western. We pick up where Harvey left off with his first book-length work, Cosmographies (2022). In the first third off the book, Harvey sets out with “Western Suites cont.,” as he closed his adventures in the previous Cosmographies.
Opening with “Western Suite for Being There Without Being There,” a fulsome statement of intent, the title itself becomes a nod to the presence of that other masterful Western traveler, Jack Spicer, a prime interlocuter in Harvey’s first book. This opening “suite” — musical analogies inescapable — leads us to this melodic resolution in the four concluding lines:
a necromancy of
anticipation
there
without being
there
Throughout one is aware of an extraordinary energy, pointed and diffuse as the landscape, put disarmingly in the poet’s words: “a language which begins in silence/and ends with a mouthful of wings. . .” A language which keeps urging the argument further West, on the trail of Spicer’s contention: Where we have never been is real.
The second of the subsequent three sections of the book, “Clairvoyance,” is a longer poem that reinforces the clarity with which Harvey proceeds. So exemplary is the clarity of “Clairvoyance” that one can only point, indicate and abandon explanation:
Nothing more
is a word
misused
it’s not easy
to be connected
accompanied
by doubt
The sure-footedness of the music brings the reader inside, defining the motion intrinsic to one’s being along for the ride. In “Clairvoyance,” Harvey introduces another traveler and maverick in the tradition, George Oppen. In 1912 Ezra Pound had set the mark high as a young poet, demanding “a language to think in,” very much the goal Harvey has set for himself in his first two books. Oppen took his mentor Pound at his word and became ever more scrupulous in locating his own thought prior to forging a poetic language, the finest example of which, in my view, may be found in his 1968 long poem, “Of Being Numerous”:
Obsessed, bewildered
By the shipwreck
Of the singular
We have chosen the meaning
Of being numerous.
Here’s Harvey again in “Clairvoyance,” embodying and advancing Oppen’s fundamental notion of “a limitless, limiting clarity”:
the matter
so small a work
such possibility
a new liberty
of difficulty
I can only apologize to
the truth
hangs clearly
from silence
And onward goes Harvey’s book-length work – hardly the more facile ‘collection’ – reminding that the entire endeavor is a singular project, all the parts answering for themselves. Oppen’s classic riffs may be heard as one heads further into the territory: “we see ourselves/in many ways/and in many ways/we are mistaken.” As always, the poet remains beholden, enamored of the light. Not so much “the” truth, but a truth helping one “inside the light,” where “permanence/softens/pieces of itself.” The poet ends “Clairvoyance” convinced that the whole venture is in essence a way of “rolling the dice.” What impels our desire to be here or there, one’s entire commitment to a thoughtful language, may finally come down to, in the poet’s words,
unanswered light
in a time of
uncertainty
your way in
The final section of Harvey’s book is preceded by a quote from the novelist Wright Morris, whose explorations of the West (most notably for me, his Field of Vision) were an inspiration to several generations of writers: “In the dry places, men begin to dream. Where the rivers run sand, there is something in man that begins to flow.” The landscape’s otherness is apparent from the start of the poem, at once obvious and illusive:
I imagine
myself
as other than
myself
mistaken
separated
from reality
by something
I did not mean
After so many years in Los Angeles, I’ve come to see that Gertrude Stein wasn’t entirely right when she said of Oakland, California that “there’s no there there.” What she overlooked was the silence, the white space inherent in the West – what Kyle Harvey names: “incalculable/power/this vast/terrible silence.” It’s a place of stories, tall tales, phantoms, reminiscences and certainly regret. Or put more succinctly by the poet: “the possibility/of knowing/and a longing/to know.” Like the battered white horse that appears in the second section of “Desert Wool”:
stopped short
in the middle of
a word
well lead
out of speech
the poem follows each new, westward experience, and often nothing for which the poet is prepared, as Harvey notes, “beyond/being/prepared.”
In much the same way that the reader isn’t prepared for the curious syncopation of section four, with its jagged rhythm and rhyme into the heart of the country: “spoon/carpet/bongo flotilla/South Dakota/Uber/maneuver/late/bloomer/caviar consumer/wave/particle/duality/dog/American/wet/biscuit/utopia/dual/power/
lotion/poet/all these/Miracle Whip/realisms/and more.” And the, the section’s brilliantly resolving sound:
too little
too late
turns over
without
a sound
I’m carried away
without
when
even
the whistling
stops
In the concluding section, the poem’s expansiveness and attendant mystery reassert themselves in the traveler ‘s remark, “Three day/dusty ride… leaning/into a dream.” Because they (?) are alone, there remains a constant which, for the poet, is “the absolute strangeness” of time. There are no answers, only an unsolvable enigma in the most telling of landscapes, paraphrasing the poet’s declaration, “yet in all this/no operation/of senses.” This actual, almost clinical observation leads inevitably to the trip’s ending – having finally (for now) arrived there and not there. Or, in fact, “there without being there”:
no waking
from the dream
nothing
less
nothing
more
nothing but
an urge
to keep riding west