Galley Letter/Press Copy - Roof Books, Mostly Clearing

If Michael Gottlieb’s language is familiar, it’s because he places his voice in conversation with generations of New York’s poets, pop culture, and commercial branding. His cultural references, from Ashbery and O’Hara to Loony Toons’ one-liners and commercial airliners’ rehearsed landing speech (“all the honeyed demarches/ adorning our table talk”), convey a tongue-in-cheek optimism. Addressing the violences of our contemporary moment, he frames poetry as “a current coursing through the crowd” and poets themselves as engineers of utopian thinking.

Alternatingly ironic and sincere, this optimism colors every fragment of familiar language appropriated into Mostly Clearing’s mockingbird diction. Gottlieb uses idiom and anachronism to invoke specific generational concerns. Throughout, the speaker addresses three generations of poets: The New York School, his own network of Language Poets, and a younger generation whose artistic practice is situated by precarity, instability, and disillusionment. He sympathizes with the latter, nostalgic for “all the swooning certainty of youth/ ... where once it sprouted in all directions.” In the end, Mostly Clearing offers hope to younger poets as the raw material for imagining a new utopian art.

Accompanied by an essay meditating on the New York School’s aesthetic of mid-century optimism in light of the death of John Ashbery, Mostly Clearing is both an homage to the poetic and political traditions of young New York (“we were all once/ of fighting age”) and an intervention into a contemporary poetry world marked by reactionary pessimism. Gottlieb’s text asserts a future for poetry in an uncertain time, and in doing so, entails a call to arms for the next generation of poets—the stakes of which are “an article of faith/ that words can save us.”