I read Kerry Kurdziel’s “I Accidentally Read Al Pacino as A.I. Pacino” and I fell in love with the void all over again.
In college, my friends and I, often under a puzzlement of pot, would test the limits of our peripheral vision. One friend would sit facing a wall of melting, 60’s, art nouveau-inspired acid posters, while another would say, “Can you still see me?” as he stepped farther and further away into another’s inwardness. The rest of us would watch in bemused silence. We did this so often that I’d wonder whether it was ritual, obsession, or safety measure driving us deeper into this gamified space of unknowing. Here, no person or idea of persons could be too obscured to capture our attention entirely. We did this so often that I wondered why we did it at all.
Such a void as this, or one sans intoxication, is where one might accidentally read Al Pacino as A.I. Pacino, and “Sometimes, it’s just another light.” Kerry Kurdziel’s poem reminds us why cataloging remnants left in our turning from one void to the next is so important. It brings us closer to “the face behind the stocking” or grief “busy and warm” in our hands, picking a blouse up off the floor.
Kurdziel captures the mind’s subliminal work. As Wallace Stevens writes, “Things as they are // Are changed upon the blue guitar.” All this static creates tension atop the stretched signal of a life. In the poem’s case, it is a tension created by ever tuning a dial of moments turned image. Our ears perk up, listening for a change in the station.
I was watching the painter and multi-instrumentalist John Lurie recently in his self-titled HBO series stripe white streaks standing in for blossom petals across the limbs of an impossible floating tree. As I watched, an eager fly fought for my attention, caught between meaning and what gives life its meaning. Reading Kurdziel’s work is like this, stepping into the persistence of a daydream.
In Kurdziel’s poem, our sight lingers “between a door hinge” and “dangling from the mouths of dogs” or “at the grocery store.” We’re permitted to revisit what we know of the world, what the world knows of us, and how poetry exists not just as a distillate experience, but sometimes as a kaleidoscopic funnel and an endless number of homages to our relationship with love and loss. Kurdziel’s turn of image disposes of nothing; there are no easy goodbyes.
Kerry Kurdziel is a poet currently living in the Greater Boston area. Her work has appeared in The Columbia Journal, Muzzle Magazine, and Euphony Journal. Kerry writes about the strangeness of modern life, interiority, and memory. Kerry is an incoming MFA candidate in poetry at Sarah Lawrence College.
Anthony Procopio Ross is a poet born in Kansas City, Mo. where he now teaches writing to college students and writes copy for a local agency. He has proposed and conducted multiple grant projects to create and uplift art in the communities he serves. Most recently, he ran Literary Lens: a zine-making endeavor supported by ArtsKC, showcasing KC’s local poetry scenes through the creation and curation of shareable art objects. His work has been published in the Laurel Review, McNeese Review, and Inflectionist Review, among others. He serves as a co-editor for Bear Review.
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