What I've been hearing from literary types is a lot of whining. Literary authors published by small presses piss and moan about being underpublished (and we know who they are), victims of some vast corporate conspiracy set on destroying the minds of consumerist capitalist victims. Over the years a goodly number of writers have used the pages of American Book Review to sound off against the corporatization and commodification of American letters. We hear how the New York publishing houses have abandoned literature because, hey, why not?—because Americans have been duped and spoon-fed mass-market goop for so long that they prefer the goop. We hear the moan that literature is on its deathbed, twitching and pissing in its adult diapers. Charles Frazier gets an eight million dollar advance on his new book, Thirteen Moons, and the “literary” writers collectively scream in oppressed agony. Stephen King gets a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Award committee, and the moan becomes a porcine squeal, academic piglets chasing their tails in terror, some folks too sad to even care or comment. A professor at a university at which I used to teach anxiously awaits the publication of the next Hunger Games book and the other professors declare the End-times of literature.

What I say? Who cares, that's what. Who gives a rat's ass, is what. Let the Potter Professors sit alongside their children and Hunger Games themselves into oblivion for all it affects me. If New York publishing houses get together and enforce a “No Literature on Our Presses” embargo, if Stephen King gets the Nobel Prize, if a loopy professor lets someone write a masters thesis on Danielle Steele, it's not going to change the work a great writer writes. There are just too many examples of our great writers being ignored, “underpublished,” even unpublished (Walt Whitman self-publishing Leaves of Grass, Thoreau self-publishing Walden and selling a dozen copies, Dickinson's dresser-drawer stash, Melville's commercial failure, and on and on and on) to think that Capitalism Gone Wild is going to stop our best minds from writing and  producing great literature. Gilbert Sorrentino, Toby Olson, and Stephen Dixon have spent most of their careers publishing on small presses, and it hasn't stopped them from writing, nor has it stopped intelligent people from noticing their work. The difficult thing these days is locating that great literature. That, of course, is what The Industrial Worker Book Review is for.

This said, I introduce Steve Davenport's first book, the splendid collection of poetry, Uncontainable Noise. The shit:not-shit ratio of the books I receive in the mail is about 500-1, and it was not without my accustomed suspicion, even dread, that I cracked open Davenport's Uncontainable Noise, published on some little press in Ohio—Pavement Saw Press—that I'd never heard of. The book's title is typically a “poet” title, not as pretentious or oblique as most, but clumsy in the mouth and unlikely to be remembered even ten minutes after reading the book. Small nowhere press, weak title: shit-detector on high alert status.

But that's not what's inside the book. I chaired the Poetry Committee of the National Book Critics Circle two of the past five years, and I've read hundreds, perhaps more than two thousand books of poetry in those years, and Steve Davenport's Uncontainable Noise is one of the best three or four books of poetry I've come across during that time. Uncontainable Noise is a great book.

Some things Davenport doesn't write about:

—household plants

—paintings he's seen in European museums

—homosexual love affairs

—politics (Republicans bad, corporations bad, white people bad, etc.)

—furniture

—foreign dishes we've never heard of and don't want to eat

—grandparents' digits

—clouds like (insert lame metaphor), sunlight like (insert lame metaphor), moonscapes like (insert lame metaphor)

—Europe

—flowers (with or without lame metaphor)

—dark skinned people like (insert really lame and condescending while trying to appear compassionate metaphor)

What Davenport writes about is a world poets neglect, a world in which people don't spend their summers abroad or at writers colonies, a world in which pain isn't alleviated by fine wine and a Guggenheim, but by a bottle of whiskey and a night with your head hanging between your knees and a revolver in your hand. Uncontainable Noise, unlike most books of poetry, isn't a collection of whatever the poet has happened to write during a given time: it's a book that is a whole unto itself. It reads a like a 60-page sestina, lines and phrases recurring in the poems throughout the book in what is most likely a deliberate pattern I haven't set on down to decode. Each poem punches, bareknuckled and purposeful. Steve Davenport writes like Charles Bukowski might have written if he'd had more talent or been able to hold his liquor better. All Davenport's poems are so very good I'm just going to (without the publisher's permission) give you a sonnet randomly chosen:

My Untranslatable Signature Bomb Sonnet

That first fuck you was hard to take. Then the second

like the flat head of a hammer bruising the wood

around a punched nail. Nothing negotiable.

Later, now, in the knuckling face of your anger,

the phrases you light and toss back like Molotovs,

shards peppering the air, I bottle resentment.

Tonight, with six fingers of bourbon blossoming

in my hothouse skull, I'll pull up the kill floor, leave

the marriage box through a trapdoor. I'll chase the noise

of my blood into the trees of repose, yawp word

and body, howl hundred-line rooftop bomb sonnets,

a yodel my untranslatable signature.

The bruises I'll wear like stories until they fade

and become baggage, old badges of my damage. (6)

The blurb-jobs on the back cover are by the established poets Alice Fulton and Bob Hicok, and they read like blurb-jobs always do on the back covers of books of poetry—like prose poems in which they blurber is trying to show how well he or she can give blurb. Poetry blurb-jobs are nearly interchangeable, and to read them gives no sense of the books of poetry for which they're testifying.

You want a sense of the book? Here's a blurb-job for you:

Steve Davenport's Uncontainable Noise is a book I'd recommend for the National Book Critics Circle Award if I were still on the Board, and it's also a book I'd have given to my gas-station-attendant father. It's a book poets will either be jealous of or admire, and it's a book any barfly worth his sourmash will enjoy and hopefully pass out reading.

My copy, FYI, is stained by a melted glass of Jim Beam I couldn't finish, though I tried valiantly to do so. I read it in my garage so my cigarette smoke wouldn't choke my family to death. I think Davenport would approve.

Play some Hank Williams, crack a bottle of Jack or Jim, read Mr. Davenport, and read poetry the way it's supposed to be read—during a night of the longknives, eyes drooped and lip curled.

Literature isn't dead. Steve Davenport and Pavement Saw Press—among many writers and presses—prove this. The American Book Review, for example, has a circulation of 8000, and if half of its readers bought half of the books we review, many small presses would actually turn a profit. Hey, whiney insecure desperate please-review-my-book-or-else-I'll-be-dead-forever-please-oh-please-writers: je t'accuse. Stop whining and buy some goddamn books instead of waiting for your free review copies or buying used books online. One of the reasons literature is having a hard time is because its readers—you—are cheapskates. Instead of buying a Big Mac, buy a fucking book.

I hope I'm the first person to have reviewed the work of Steve Davenport, because this is a poet we'll be reading into the future. I want to be the smart sonbitch who first in print noted how wonderful Davenport's work is and is likely to remain. When I review for the papers, it's usually in disgust. But with Davenport, even if I'm a sloppy second, I feel privileged.

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