Pulling the Rug Out: A Review of Partidge Boswell’s Not Yet a Jedi
The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly - you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you. -Eckhart Tolle
Sometimes I want to be a kid again, and sometimes a rockstar. As a society we are inundated with stimulus from the world around us. Over time we create opinions, and then test these opinions. Those that filter as “true” become beliefs, those that filter as “not true” are discarded as invalid. This process is repeated across our life span and leads to automated thoughts and subsequent actions, or what philosophers call identity.
At a time when society seems rife with inflexibility, Partridge Boswell’s collection, Not Yet A Jedi, asks its reader to suspend belief and live a poem.
Boswell a Vermont native, started the Bookstock Festival of Words in Woodstock, VT. This years festival runs from June 23-25, 2023.
From the front cover’s image, a nod to “Pop A Wheelie,” the reader vaults into the possibility of being ten and free. The language of said poem creates the lift.
From oil-dank bowels of a nightmare garage you ride
beknighted, Saturday morning’s acolyte, sleep-dazed
But aright, straight for the ramp you built last night
In the driveway in homage to the great adrenaline-hazed
Evel Knievel-achetype for every dangerboy and bone-
Headed troglodyte bent on a bright schematic vying to break
more bones than the Guinness World Record flying prone
over cars buses lions fountains sharks canyons rattlesnakes—
before the neighborhood wakes. Topping the slope you rev
Your banana bike and pedal hard on the approach past
A hushed gang of squirrels and robins holding their breath
Half-hoping this levitation will and won’t be your last….
Boswell doesn’t leave us at adolescence but offers a wide-ranging mix of moments. A son, a father, a teacher, an astronaut, a beggar, all packed with imagery and the musicality of someone who knows how to compose a line of sounds. Sounds that move the reader outside of ego and into possibility.
Ode to an Afterthought
…the how and what about.
For a handout asterisk to the everyday miracle of driving around town
Windows rolled down in mild disbelief a suicide therapist
crawling inside a client’s empty cocoon to find a small yellow butterfly
flitting in the abyss of a September afternoon embalmed in what
must surely be the last eighty degree day before
the who and why and what the fuck
everything heads south bleeding mercury retreating rebel soldiers thirsting
for a front porch tune marching daily from errand to appointment
diffused in the patina of a million inconsequential dying into another endless
gestation another frost’s first refusal
naked stubble of field corn reborn
the two seconds it took to assess her situation.
the last-ditch universe and no one else.
On hunters’ faces beginning to unveil their prehistoric camouflage……
Boswell, a primary vocalist for Los Lorcas (where you can hear several of these poems sung), admits a lifelong appreciation for the symbiosis of music and poetry. He has been writing and lecturing on the fluctuation of this connection in different cultures, for some time. A believer that poetry is an oral art, his poems bring to life moments where joy and pain live simultaneously. This is evident in the ending of “Strike”:
Loop of canned Muzak…But which Orpheus? The one before
or after he finds the minor key? Or after he’s torn apart?
I strike another match and light a candle. They’re hungry
so we tuck in around the table, drawn by the surging urge
Icarus felt as he soared toward the light that conjured us,
our capes and masks draped over the back of our chairs.
Here we are, this is us. He tender peppery leaves of rocket,
croutons crispy yet soft. I know but don’t say what power
I wouldn’t want: to see into their futures. Our hands are open
and empty; our plan—a scrap of light we keep in our pocket.
Which superpower? Here’s a hint: there’s only one.
After our conversation about the collection, Partridge sent me this note,
“A poet doesn’t simply want a reader to read—to enter and engage with or experience a poem; a poet wants a reader or listener to live their poem. You’re right, it runs deeper than nostalgia…not quite duende or saudade exactly either, but a feeling of “you had to be there” that’s so profound, a poet will risk everything to vanish vicarious boundaries including words themselves, to take you there so you can be there together, not merely as witness but as shared essence. There’s a word for it in some language, I’ll let you know if I find it.”
Partridge Boswell risks everything for us to live a moment together through his recent collection, “Not Yet A Jedi.”
Katch Campbell is a connector. With a master’s degree in Science and an MFA in poetry, she creates metaphors for her patients and others about the world around us. Her work is an inquiry on the atrocities we commit consciously and unconsciously against each other and the universe. Katch serves as Vice President and is a permanent faculty member at the River Pretty Writing Retreat, a bi-annual workshop in the Ozarks. She has co-led immersive poetry trips to Slovenia and Italy and used to edit for ZoMag.com.