The latest poetry collection from multi-genre writer, performer, and artist Richard Loranger should be read aloud whenever possible. It is fit for the acoustics of any space: an outdoor park, a busy street corner, commercial flights, bars, art galleries. In one moment, the work jets out lines of willful cacophony: “a beaming lump of ectoplasm sings / the praises of a newborn ring of gunk,” while at other times, it seems this Mammal is not afraid of coming off as a little old-fashioned, or even arcane, employing a sing-song affect with plodding rhymes, as in one rather sardonically titled, “Re: Love Poem,” which is a short piece: “If it is lush / I have a crush / on you; // if it’s banal / a femme fatale / is due; // and if it flatters, / it’s self-flattery; // but if it’s true / there is no you / or me.” The author deploys a kind of societal critique that is at once holistic, transgressive, and utterly exploratory … while chronicling their own personal list of indulgences, fantasies, prayers, and parables along the way. Furthermore, Loranger’s encyclopedia of experimentation spans a great number of different styles of poem. The book is a fruitful ongoing collision of various stanza shapes and tones of voice, from instruction manual to sonnet, diary to riddle, flash fiction to personal correspondence. The curious, striped, multi-limbed figure on the cover seems to beckon us towards a new hedonistic awakening, an avatar of poetic freedom … a supernatural mascot with eyes for nipples.
Boldly and casually at the same time, Mammal can swing from the more accessible “walking around New York” -style poem, for example, to a more dense, almost byzantine orchestra of syllables, which certainly may not make much sense to a lot of us beyond its music … but it should still come as a pleasure to any creature’s ear. Multiple styles often work in concert: flares of sensation like jewels in the otherwise prosaic telling of a walk. Rivulets of image and sound shatter this familiar pedestrian nature, as in the longer poem “Bootism,” becoming a song of the body almost Whitmanic:
I’ll stride this flesh through brick and glass,
through concrete and the door
to reach the park and soak in green.
Isn’t that what this skin craves
through every goddamned pore—the breach of air,
the momentary clack, the stench of chlorophyll and mud.
Physicality finds linkage to imagery and sound through the written word. This poem is Loranger’s most readily chock-full of proper nouns, namedropping Kerouac, Thoreau, Tolkein, Grand Army Plaza, some streets in Brooklyn, Earth. These are among the only proper nouns deployed in the book, we also find Brueghel, China, Times Square, PayPal, The Carpenters. The author is not above the everyday mock-kitsch of product names and the insidious technological artifice that marks our most recent epoch. The eternal truths however remains the same: “As long as we think we’re our bodies / we’re fucked,” Loranger writes. We can surround ourselves with all the augmentations and post-modern trappings we want, we still face the same corporeal and, by extension, spiritual quandaries. Using the airborne bathroom on a plane for instance, it’s just “one of several acts of exchange with the world,” and something there ought to be a poem about.
Among the less easily quotable poems in the book there first appears a visual poem without preface or title: “let us not forget.” The phrase is in a different font from the rest of the collection, the words space out from each other as it repeats, doubling and repeating unevenly on each horizontal line, shifting like bricks laid for a wall, each word gaining a diagonal impact in multiple, it can be read from top left to bottom right in a number of other directions as well. Flanking that on the recto side we find a reproduction of the work of none other than Leonardo da Vinci: plan and bird’s-eye view of a centrally-planned church (MS 2307, fol. 5v), which serves as the point of departure for Loranger’s 20-page instructional prose poem sequence, “Poems for a Centralized Church,” a section from the middle of that sequence:
Poem L
In preparation for Poems M through Q, I will enter the church
alone with two hundred musical instruments, sound equip-
ment, and various visual art materials to my specifications
at the time, with which I will play until I am quite satisfied.
I will be the audience, and the poems will be whatever I want
it to be.
This comical determination of the narrator shows the author’s refreshing honesty and candor. They know this work is not for everyone. They write firstly so they can have something to read themselves, but it’s more than just everyday narcissism … it is a craft and curiosity, perhaps reminiscent of any number of post-modern multimedia, multi-genre art methods too … Fluxus certainly comes to mind, a certain intellectual prankster-ism, while at the same time it is the expression of a certain sacrament: engagement. There is no apathy here. There may be an indifference, a kind of zen-like indifference, to get past the ego. “Breaching,” going beyond or through, the poem as permeable object, “there is no I/you/etc,” is a recurring theme in Mammal. And indeed, if we didn’t know any better, we might think the book is written by more than one person … in fact, Loranger’s point seems to be that any/all book(s) always are. The self, individuality, is a kind of crumbling church that shouldn’t necessarily be demolished, but should certainly be re-vivified with new living material.
A poetry collection like Mammal is a stalwart alternative. There is a mind and eye-boggling typed-out reproduction of a poem originally handwritten on a “mobius strip” consisting of sixteen sheets of loose-leaf paper, the entire text running about 13.5 feet, Loranger’s description: “Each typed line represents each handwritten line word for word. As a mobius strip, it has no beginning (or end,) so it may be read starting at any point.” It’s a devout adherence to the author’s particular fancy; Loranger is following their bliss. It is as if Mammal proposes an entirely new ecosystem or economy of poetic experience. One might readily identify two natural polarities of course: writing and reading. If one could imagine hallucinated re-vamping of fragments of poems from The New Yorker, stitched together and newly electrified to make a kind of rainbow-Frankenstein, that’s Mammal. What gets subverted is that all-to-familiar economy of sentimental delivery by the poet, which is always in the interest of forging the poet’s personal brand, and usually determined via the crucible of what has already happened, its risk mitigation, the status quo, certain “accessible” (to repeat the term) traditions. If people have already bought it, they will buy it again. Who’s buying Loranger poetry? They don’t know or care. It may not be for everyone, but it is essential, for its going further, a beacon signaling from the future. Some people use the word avant-garde.
A book is the perfect vehicle for showcasing a certain crafting of a written world, while also Mammal assembles evidence of the author’s practice in other artistic mediums, the extension of the horizon of poetic engagement into realms of performance art, sculpture, theater, installation, or even philosophy and theory. The author reminds us there are things a book maybe can’t do, however for poetry, there is no getting away from the book entirely; indeed, for poetry and/or “the poem” to remain a meaningful current event (a definition of what any poem by any living poem should aspire to) ingrained formal boundaries need to be transgressed. The joyful expression of the lifestyle of the poet finds better expression in this daring exploratory indigo style, where personhood almost disappears; as opposed to the eminently conservative, transparent, predictable style so common among other poets … sentimental conformity as moral duty. Somewhere along the way, recently all creativity become “content” just like “voice” became subservient to “brand,” but not here. Loranger’s writing gets even broader, searching for a new ontology of what it means to be human, as one body a part of many others that together form a larger one. Writer, reader … it still takes two, as the saying goes. Truly, Mammal is a poetry collection that panders to no one, and it doesn’t vainly attempt to snatch grandiloquence or fantasy from the jaws of the mundane; it actually suggests a method of life and art where such phenomena, such magic, are an everyday thing, there is no mundane, once you learn to see.
Mammal, by Richard Loranger. New York, New York: Roof Books, October 2023. 128 pages. $20.00, paper.
Ben Tripp is a writer and performer from Vermont based in Queens, NYC. His writing can be found via Brooklyn Rail, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Guernica, Full-Stop Quarterly, and Gauss PDF. He was a finalist for the National Poetry Series in 2021 and received a City Artists’ Corps grant that same year. He blogs and archives work at benjamintripp.wordpress.com.
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