REVIEWS
R.D. Armstrong has a carefully studied, unencumbered position, for him a pencil stays handy for writing very
fast, and that’s what his poem is all about. A very fast trip up and down the coast, in the midst of which occurs the
9/11 attack.
He eschews
punctuation and strophic form, but capitalizes each line for classic formality. His poem races steadily on from the observed
to the remembered or the imagined in a coherent reality governed by the drive. When he stops or slows down, the poem does
so, too (making you think of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, which famously stopped for years after the raft was destroyed,
until Huck made a new one).
Great poem. Reviewed by Christopher Mulrooney
"A major work: funny and achingly sad, and erudite about poetry, life,
and America vis-a-vis the world. I greatly admire the expansive energy yet the compression and rightness in the language.
It's truly wonderful. "
Maggie Jaffe (Cedar Hill Press)
Roadkill reads like Armstrong took one impossibly long, deep breath
and then screamed the whole poem out non-stop into one of those new transliterating gadgets that automatically turns speech
(screams) into words. I kind of read it the way it sounds it was written -- non-stop. Had to have a couple of beers
and a nap when I got finished.
It’s a high-energy description of traveling from Long
Beach up the coast to San Francisco, Oregon and then Washington, and, having lived ten years in L.A., and made the trip any
number of times myself, Roadkill was uncomfortably real for me. Uncomfortably real too because one of the constant
themes in the poem is 9-11 and what it has done to the American psyche:
There is an endless loop of smoke towers
The arcing jet fire collapse mushroom cloud
In reverse dirty dust cloud exhaling
death
Tickertape parade of sorrow that old sinking
Feeling that comes with any bad news....
I’ll never be the same
Ever
For the next twenty four hours
Whenever I close my eyes the image of
Tower number two collapsing is what I
see....
Ghosts haunting my eyes-wide-open world....
(pp.24-25)
It’s like he’s saying, before 9-11 comes through to him, Man, look
at this country, all this urban sprawl, this traffic, hurry, bustle, rush, money, and then suddenly it’s all one
immense beginning of the end.
But off he continues on his mad dash north, up to Seattle, then
back down again to San Francisco, 9-11 never quite leaving him, thinking thoughts like the world may hold the U.S. to blame
for its international policies, but what does that have to do with him? He turns on KPFA and listens “to the opinions
of Afghanis/About the pending war in their country/...most agree that /It wasn’t the fault of the Afghan people/That
the US was attacked.../I agreed with this until the interviewer/Suggested that this was why the/Americans are held in such
high/Contempt around the world because/We are always trying to blow/buy off/Our enemies--there you go again/Confusing the
us with US....” (p.46)
It’s not Raindog who’s done anything wrong, but suddenly
he becomes the U.S., and he might get a bomb dropped on him just because he’s an American.
He visits poet-friends like A.D. Winans in San Francisco, at times
almost forgets the menace of war hanging over his and everyone else’s head as he merges with the road and the landscape.
California still is California and the sea still the magic sea, and as he gets closer to home, even the ugly is beautiful
because it’s his, his familiar world:
Home at last I can
almost taste the
Air around the harbor that rancid
blend
Of diesel Sulphur fish and crude oil
All these images are punched into my
head and ratcheted
down tightly
around my soul and there they remain
(p.60)
A very important poem, this, that brings the Beat and Post-Beat (I’m thinking of A.D. Winans
and Charles Potts) power of saying-it-the-way-it-is artistry into the contemporary world without making it sound like anything
worked at, artificial, feigned.
It’s straight
from the gut writing that will remain a monument to the way it was in the ole USA in 2002 and who knows how long thereafter.
Reviewed by Hugh Fox
