Jamie Iredell - I inhabited the inside of a mouth, the space between ass cheeks

"Like any classic tragedy, Jamie Iredell’s Prose. Poems. A Novel. is broken up into three acts, in which the troubled hero recounts his life before he moved to Nevada, his life after he moved to Nevada, and his life after that, when he moved to Atlanta. Composed as a series of vignettes, pivotal moments in a troubled man’s peripatetic life, the narrative flits within the gray area between poetry and prose and, while it dispenses with linearity, finally coheres into a portrait of Larry, a fallen high school football star who never quite overcomes his self-destructive habits to live a life full of lasting intimacy and love.
Larry visits cabins, fields, bars, and strip joints peopled by “be-pistoled,” “be-suited,” “bespectacled” ne’er-do-wells fueled by crystal meth, amphetamines, ketamine, mescaline, cigarettes, psilocybin, Chianti, whisky, PBR, Vodka, Jack Beam, Strega, Oxycontin, Crazy Horse, weed, and cocaine with “actual cocaine crushed up into it.” Besides his own downward-spiraling actions, Larry is also troubled by a bear, rattlesnakes, and all kinds of creepy crawlies:
Herds of mosquitoes grazed the alleyways—mosquito-sized vampires—and heaved hordes of citizens above skyscrapers, then dropped the husks of their bodies to Peachtree Street. The hulls of destroyed brick rows lurked underground, and above, fiberglass rocketed into the rain. Hardwood floors lined my apartment, and cockroaches scrawled notes across my chest. With the humidity, I inhabited the inside of a mouth, the space between ass cheeks.
“There was nothing in the way of metaphor about me,” Larry tells us. Fortunately, this isn’t true—his observations are often drenched in carefully crafted metaphor. A lake is a mirror, blood vessels are lightning strikes, tuna cans are shining stars, clouds are saucers, and Larry himself is a “desert rat with a signature.” His similes are even more evident: “Leafless cottonwoods flew past us like enormous hands”; “Cara was like that: skinny as carousel pony poles…”; “The next morning the sun scooped my eyeballs as if they were mounds of ice cream.”
What I enjoyed most about Iredell’s narrative are his lyrical, almost Annie Dillard-like observations of nature, the elements, the landscape. But where Dillard’s evocations are solemn reveries sodden with all kinds of lushness, with prose akin to—[namecheck any American transcendentalist here]—Iredell’s descriptions are prickly, brittle, harboring all kinds of menace and malevolence:
The fog lilts in like a cat—perhaps a bear—as it stalks the coast and harbor, pounces artichoke fields, sinks its claws into the browned hillsides, and the fog’s teeth settles in bones like a cold stalk of broccoli, like the earth in which it grows, sunless black, the recesses of space, above the moon, past the atmosphere, far beyond this Pacific cloud cover, and below water the sharks missile-cruise the forested kelp for seals, for the succulent fat beneath their skin, and between the shark jaws, in place of teeth, flex rusty bear traps, and if the sharks could, and you could maneuver it, they would let you gnaw yourself free and swim a strawberry trail to shore for the lettuce ripening in the valley, and the strawberries reddening in the hills, because fog is also good for this.
Evidently, Iredell has learned his lessons well from Faulkner and Steinbeck, but his sentences are also informed by Kerouac’s cavorting cadences. But these influences are heard and not seen—you don’t think about them as you imagine the narrator’s bloodshot eyes scanning his surroundings. Iredell’s voice is his own.
While Larry doesn’t really change much—or change into much of anything—he is self-reflective and does have at least one moment of honest self-realization: “It’s only now that I can look back and say what kind of idiot I’ve become.” And while fights abound in Prose. Poems. A Novel. it is Iredell’s ability to wrestle beauty out of squalor and depravity that one watches most keenly. Though Iredell’s debut collection may be read as a cautionary tale about drug addiction and alcoholism, it is, paradoxically, also an adventure story through the empty roads of boredom. His chosen form, brief vignettes full of striking imagery, is the perfect vehicle for his sad, hopeless vision: the world can be understood only in glimpses, seen through a glass (bottle), darkly."- John Madera


"Title explains form in Jamie Iredell’s Prose. Poems. A novel. It’s a bold choice, and one that seems to suggest a sort of literary gamesmanship, a salvo in the form-versus-content battle, delivered in favor of the former. That the book opens with a epigraph from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, followed shortly by the author describing himself as “[a] whiskered goon at a notepad” should indicate otherwise. Through a series of brief, interconnected prose poems, Iredell tells the story of the first few decades of a young man’s life. The setting moves from California to Nevada to Georgia, encompassing relationships and friendships, births and deaths, remote cabins and dive bars. Each section stands on its own (the book’s three parts initially appeared as chapbooks), though there’s a clear progression as the narrator makes his way from childhood through a series of advanced degrees and personal relationships.
While the title suggests fiction, there’s a certain ambiguity to these pages — the “I” of Prose. Poems. has a similar biography to the author, and there’s one moment in which the narrator shows already-written pages to one of the characters, years after the events recounted have taken place. It lends a certain tension to the experience of reading — the title, after all, isn’t Prose. Poems. A memoir., but at the same time, these pages have a casual authenticity to them. Whether it’s his own life or one wholly imagined, Iredell’s skill at life distillation is impressive.
What shouldn’t be lost among mentions of the craft and subtle structuring on display is that Iredell’s book is a deeply pleasurable read. Each prose poem is self-contained, a story told in a way to conjure some combination of nostalgia, regret, or elation. Early in the book, Iredell volleys out this sentence: “We guzzled Zimas at a condo in Salinas.” It’s weirdly perfect, both in its rhythms and in its ability to evoke a particular moment in time and space. Like the music of Les Savy Fav or Golden Triangle, it’s art made by people who can argue theory all day but understand the value of bliss and release. And at the end of the night, Prose. Poems. A novel. stakes out its own unique space — finding that blissful overlap between beatific prose craftsmanship and a post-Cometbus generation of punk rock memoirists." - Tobias Carroll


"As the title might suggest, somewhere between poetry and prose sits Prose. Poems. a novel, by Jamie Iredell. On its surface, a collection of first-person flash pieces that highlight seemingly random moments in the life of “Larry,” a veiled-named high school football star turned middle-aged suburban comfort lifer. His life is hardly remarkable. But the way in which Iredell describes it, is.
With each vignette, the loose narrative arc comments upon a consistent sense of foreboding, which perhaps goes hand-in-hand with the prose poem form (is there ever a hopeful flash fiction piece?). The story is never linear, though never jarring. It’s a mistake to search for linear anchors in the text, as the setting and even the characters are fluid. There is a sense of story that meshes with the reader rather than dictates to him.
The strength of the novel lies in Iredell’s ability to acutely describe characters and settings, with a poetic sensibility that is often simultaneous stark and complete. First a setting:
“Then the sun tripped over the mountains like a clumsy fat guy. Ants followed one another over the rocks. We sucked up deep, cool breaths. For a minute they seemed like our last. But, go figure, they weren’t”.
And then our characters:
“These women wanted you to touch them. They’d been objects so long, only human fingers reminded them that they had skin”; “…a woman with more piercings than skin. It was like fucking the inside of a gumball machine”.
Prose. Poems: a novel is a slacker story, but a slacker motivated to understand not just his context (where slackers tend to top out; Douglas Coupland’s Generation X) but himself within the context (Dan Rhodes’s Gold). And much like the latter comparison, Iredell’s story benefits from its entrenchment in a captivating setting, one that both houses the characters and illuminates them." - Caleb J Ross

"The poetry of the prose is romantic and indulgent and perfectly ugly. I don’t know how he does it exactly, but Jamie never overwrites, while reserve and subtlety don’t appear to be his concern. And the anxiety of Denis Johnson’s influence doesn’t deter him at all. In so many ways – the topics, the prose, the form, etc. – there is so much Johnson in this book, but it lives confidently and compellingly apart. The scenes are claustrophobic and dire but I’m feeling a comfort and familiarity inside of them. Reading this book is enjoyable. Reading this book is like listening to an emo song that doesn’t suck really loud on your headphones (like Cap’n Jazz or the first Promise Ring album); it indulges whims and the poetry of adolescence without ever being cloying or cliched or losing its own voice. - John Dermot Woods

"Jamie Iredell’s first full book of poems, Prose. Poems. a novel., dares its reader to consider the book as a simple drug-and-alcohol-fueled rampage while moving towards manhood:
I always imagined that Jon wanted to feel the inside of the back of my skull with his knuckles. I swallowed another beer in two swallows. It’s only now that I can look back and say what kind of an idiot I’ve become.
Although drinking and taking drugs form an inextricable thread through the poems, the narrative thrust of the poems as a group—the “novel” part of the title—take the poems beyond this basic theme. These poems are not punk retreads of the remnants of the Beat movement; rather, Iredell carves out a unique space in his writings that gives rise to a singular voice of defiance.
The title of the collection serves as a bold declaration of war on the boundaries of genre. Iredell is not flouting the rules of genre, though. Instead, Iredell weaves his three titular genres together into a form that is all its own, containing elements of each. The poems are either prose poems or flash fictions, existing in this shared and contested ground between two genres. This shared ground is utilized for two ends: to create a singular instance of the poem as well as to move the poems as a group along a narrative path. In this shared and melded space, each genre is suggested and feels almost identifiable, but attempts to determine the specific nature of the book at any given point remain difficult. This elusiveness does not create distance between the reader and the text. Rather, it causes concerns of form to recede and become unimportant. What is most important is the poem and the exact moment being described on the page. What is most important is the story and how all the poems fit, in some way, together to form a whole. They are both the most important, logic be damned.
The poems are an exploration of location. Iredell’s alter-ego narrator wanders through all strata of his surrounding society in the same way that Benjamin catalogued Paris or Ece Ayhan treated Istanbul. The narrator here, though, is not walking through his location; he is always driving. The car becomes a main character inhabiting nearly every poem:
We’d driven to the top of the ridge, where the casinos were stars in the desert night. The smell of Greece permeated the truck cab’s air, something like old, unwashed blankets, and my friend, a Ph.D., who was from Greece.
Iredell’s main character does not inhabit condensed, walkable cities. He inhabits expansive American cities and the rural wildernesses in between. The car both embodies and creates the narrator’s relationship to his location. One cannot help but think of Creeley, “drive, he sd, for / christ’s sake, look / out where yr going”, and at the same time think of Kerouac’s On the Road. To be on the road, to drive, is a vital American experience.
The narrator moves across the nation, from west to east, against the flow of manifest destiny. The narrator’s quest against the grain of American history is also a move from the rural and outlaw to the civilized. We meet the narrator as a drunk and an outlaw:
The cops said, “Step out of the car.”
and as he and the story progress and move eastward, he also undergoes a process of growing and maturation:
I spin this out—this paragraph—from this desk, while Sally’s tiny feet, in their miniature sneakers, with the little swooshes, hike away this morning on her trek to the station. . . . Before Sally returns this evening, when I have finished this paragraph and said to myself, good job, I will bumble storeward for chicken and veggies and begin cooking them for her, my pretty doctor. And I’ll hope, like I do everyday, that she will in fact come home.
This is a bildungsroman that charts for itself a specifically American territory, that looks more to the American lifestyle than to the roots of the term in the German Enlightenment. The most obvious divergence from the bildungsroman tradition is the impetus for the change or journey: both of the narrator’s moves are prompted by admission to university studies, but it’s clear that, for him, studies are secondary to simply living and exploring. Writing does not come to the fore until the conclusion of the maturation process—in other words, not until the end of the collection. The narrator, instead of moving purposefully towards maturation, is, rather, drifting through America. The move from Nevada to Atlanta is not announced with fanfare or even any indication of a reason:
When I moved from Nevada: Moses and Fredo stacked boxes of books in the U-haul, cussing at the sage-filled lot adjacent the building…When I said goodbye they turned partway and shrugged.
This drifting might make one think of ennui. But although there is a relationship between the spirit of Iredell’s poems and the spirit of Rimbaud’s poems, the precise designation of ennui is not quite correct. A more appropriate term would be one that is entirely American and encompasses what it means to be American at the turn of the millennium. A more appropriate term would be disengaged:
Once, down above the junk, this feeling like I was part of something . . . There have been one or two times since when I felt almost the same way. That bar—the Summit Saloon, way out in the dark on Fourth Street—closed. Afterwards they put up condos. That’s the way it always is.
The surroundings are treated with an air of detachment and lack of connection or distinct caring. Friends, alcohol, and locations are all described and interacted with but fade in and out without leaving a mark on the narrator. He is not upset that the Summit Saloon closes. That’s just the way it is. He is not upset that he has only felt a part of something a few times in his life. That’s just the way it is. The poems are not an attempt to create meaning, which would just be a lie. They are recognitions of the reality of the narrator’s life and situation. And the reality of being American is movement and change. We are transitory, we routinely move from city to city and state to state; and our locations are transitory, as the Summit Saloon becomes condos, which later might become a school or a strip mall. To be American is to inherit nothing and create everything as we move along.
Iredell’s work skirts many boundaries and traditions: poetry, prose, and the European traditions of the bildungsroman and ennui. But it avoids each of these, if ever so slightly, and marches out on its own. The poems are not coming from a tradition because no tradition is the American tradition. The poems might recall traditions, but Iredell is not using these trappings to tell his story. Instead, he is telling his own singular story, creating his own specific tradition and genre as his story unfolds through this series of poems. A singular, American story. A singular, American poem." - Andrew Wessels