Some Deer Left the Yard Moving Day

Poetry. To: 'quincify.' To: 'decolonize.' Andy's Peterson's some deer is dedicated to 'Naropa, ' the university he attended for two years. There, he drew rancid, ebullient comics and amazed us all--his 'blood company'--with stand-up, improvised accounts and physical examples of a contemporary hybrid poetics. As Oscar Wilde said, 'There is no such thing as spontaneity.' I always understood this to mean that the person who improvises the best [Andy Peterson] is also the person who has enough time inside them that, when prompted, it [time] can come out. By 'time, ' I mean that unique combination of dream-soaked inner life and scholarship that--in Peterson's work--is the capacity to move between a 'lit dusk, ' 'its rituals, ' and the 'cheerful madness' that a life in community brings. The experiment is to stay alive. In the words of the author himself via Creeley [quoted] [voltage]: 'Poets don't invent the world (they live it).' They: 'Forget to ask but remember to release via kisses.' And so on. I can't decide. Is this book a 'waterfall' or is it a 'volcano'? Or is it, as the Buddhist saying goes: 'Both-both.' Both things at once.--Bhanu Kapil