Jon Riccio on Don Reese’s “Collected Works”

Dear Don,

I’m spending time with your work after an ice storm left me without power for twenty-three hours. I almost showed up to a Zoom interview in two layers of jackets, but electricity, much like your poem’s “ad hoc installations” decided to “festoon the available” of my den. Speaking of education, congratulations on twenty-six years of teaching high school English. I owe my early reading trajectory to Jill Jilek and Howard Hintze: sophomore, junior, and senior syllabi, respectively. Has anyone ever had so alliterative a transcript?

My poetry vocabulary is richer thanks to your use of cordiform. At first, I thought it was related to geology since rocks are central to your poem. I’ve used strata in more cover letters than I can count. As in, “Creative writing workshops are valuable strata in the geode of a potentially decades-long career.” Talk about igneous ESP—ballast knew we’d make a good pair of dialoguers. I learned that cordiform means “in the shape of a heart.” The clefts in your work (“or the sand covers the cleft,” and “a stone remains a stone / a heart retains its cleft”) take us in symmetry-querying directions. How many times is symmetry mentioned when we talk about poetry? My two cents—and who knows if someone has already theorized this—symmetry has aural foundations too. Like the relationship between a rock and its rippling of a pond, I love how your symmetry happens via syllabics + letter-level echo effect:

                                      finder          feathers 

                                      pinions        puts them

                                      ad hoc         in cork

                                     cordiform    glow orange

Also, I appreciate these interplays:

Ln 1 feathers
Ln 4 “blends in” (camouflage, like certain birds’ coats)

Ln 23 “who fills pockets with shells and moss,” (hard / soft contrast)

Ln 27 “or momentary stops” (the reader as arrangement connoisseur)
Ln 28 “or sporadic glances”

Ln 33 “finds you and recovers you” (these can mean the same thing, or
if we go the avian route, after
they molt, birds’ feathers
regrow, re-cover 
their body;
if we think of poems
as feathers, we can reexamine
your title, “Collected Works.” 
Ergo, plumage.)  
This is an awesome break between the middle and third lines—

whose little glass boxes
can be  struck
by the sunlight

Struck, working with “glass boxes” and the earlier rocks, leaves us in anticipation of a display case shattering until sunlight veers the verb in the direction of soaking. 

Googling Do rocks contain oxygen? I’m told, “In most rocks, oxygen makes up about 92 percent by volume; all cations taken together (silicon and metals) make up but 8 percent by volume. Consequently, the number of oxygen ions is of the utmost importance for the volume relations in rocks.” Spacing is your poem’s respiratory system, indentation your way of curating the bellows. Thank you for introducing me to a new approach that draws, “with intricacies,” a made breath. Someday, I’ll syllabize you.

Let’s discuss more poetry, soon. 

Sincerely,

Jon