Glass Enclosure
Fulfilling the tenacious imagination through all its methods and obsessions, this brilliant new collection by a poet who is also a critic of jazz form and free-verse prosody speaks to the very core of all lyric concerns. Charles O. Hartman’s poems are cool and dizzying, a dark, witty fusion of jazz sensibility and computer-generated texts. With innovative grace, Glass Enclosure confronts our very systems of understanding, the languages that enclose us even as they reveal the world.
Honeydew
As the poem paces down Main Street
on its way to the sparkling harbor
it knows to notice tints on the pigeons' backs
but "tends to forget" the man heaped on the stoop.
The better the poem knows its business
the smaller its business needs to be.
Its shoes are tied, its jacket buttoned up;
its pockets are sewn shut. The man wonders
if the poem has any money, but the poem
has no money, is proud of not having any money,
of having only the sun to make gold of the sidewalk
and glamour the water in the harbor awaiting it.
A hole the size let's say of a honeydew
passes completely through its chest.