Unlocking puzzles
Most people appreciate a good puzzle or two, don’t they? Equally, most poetry readers appreciate a degree of clarity, so that they can have some grasp of what the poems are ‘about’.
In its unnumbered 35 pages of poetry, this small pamphlet, without a synopsis to direct the reader, is rather enigmatic. Does auto producer consist of one poem, or is it in fact a series of untitled poems which can be read either as a sequence or not? It gradually dawns on the reader that it is in fact one long-ish poem. Punctuation is absent throughout, and, with two exceptions (other than ‘I’), so are capital letters, and those features augment the sense of the text’s unity.
The poem conveys the ups-and-downs of a loving, but finished, relationship, between a self-pitying ‘I’ (sometimes rendered as ‘i’) and a ‘you’. The pair are unnamed and non-gender-specified. The pamphlet’s size works to the poem’s advantage, by presenting it in small chunks, with short lines and enough white space on the page to reflect the stop/start, complex emotions wrought by the relationship’s end:
sometimes i want to be near
you for us to be the same
to close that
distance quickly
and touch you
staying natural always
other times
not to have to cross your path
or see you from any window
of any room
that’s all
Most puzzling, maybe, is what bearing the title has on the poem. One might take ‘auto’ as meaning ‘self’, which would be apt given how much overt ‘I’ there is in the poem, but what of ‘producer’? Is it hinting that the ego of the ‘I’ persona is becoming self-perpetuating?
Some enjoyable surreal flourishes provide memorable images among the memories of the relationship: ‘plasticine comes up through the ground / comes up through the table / through the potato as butter / having two meanings at least’.
The poem’s format also means that the patient reader can follow the relationship back to its beginning: ‘the moment / your tongue traced my lips / you were always there / making a / pattern / just for me’.