A Vestibule of Ornery Thought
On Marty Cain's "The Prelude"
The Prelude by Marty Cain. Action Books, 2023
haven’t in a multitude of earthly spins been so awashed in wetted word. all words’ worth (pun, bitches!); nay, stay with me. for having traversed the subgarden i limp again topsoil, unhinged and living: a fox blazing lasers from its deadeyes—a bear blowing brown flame—a whalehole spouting liquid green—a preteen.1
for Marty Cain unmakes and remakes Wordsworth’s The Prelude in his own image, in the image of the biological, the never-to-be-completed, the everyday read out in violent spasms. in Cain’s subgarden (“a complex system of tunnels that have run through the sedimented rock layers for generations”) is unearthed the preoccupations of the Poet, the formation of becoming of a Mind and an Eye shoved into the same spaces, the spaces of Before and After. the preoccupations of the Book, and the Poet in the formless form of the Book: “[& eye will be a father]”
the book as a ruin. these echoed ruins, as in Wordsworth’s “Hart-Leap Well,” the buck springing from the shambles of the decrepit pleasure garden (Cain: “and we follow prints to a thicket / where the animatronic deer / built a living space / [. . .] / their television blaring / their paisley couch where they sit / and drink coffee and watch Bambi and cry”), the ruins what came before, and now. what is the pursued? The Prelude. the book ruined, decomposed, grown upon. tunneled through, tunneled under, around, above. wormholed. the book beneath the book. the Poet buried in the garden. the composition of the subgarden. the book as grave, the poem as epitaph. what is past is the destination. “The Child is father of the Man,” says Wordsworth. says Cain, “you have to kill / the garden / to get there.” to what was preteen. to what was future. The Prelude that birthed The Prelude that birthed The Prelude that birthed . . .
it is true that this “review” doesn’t make a lot of sense, unless it does (and if does, good for you!), a something and a nothing kind of sense, which is another way of saying that after reading Marty Cain’s The Prelude through in one sitting i mumbled “fuck me” and stared out the window for 20 minutes, all links and holes, poured into and poured out, flailing in Cain’s thickety lived-in fecundity of Twister Tea and drinks in inflatable pools and fatherhood and the purpled interiors of horses. reverberating, vibrating, transformating, sensating, a permanent crisis of echoing energy: this book is some visionary shit.