Intro for Michael S. Hennessey (EOAGH Reading Series, 6/17)

I greet Michael S. Hennessey today as a fellow octopus of poetry at the beginning of a long career. The amount that Hennessey accomplishes, and the number of people who work he supports, become even more impressive when you realize that he got here to the reading today with one impaired tentacle, limb, or foot. The body matters, Hennessey’s poetry reminds us, in the strange simultaneous way it’s co-present with different kinds of media immersion, static, identification, and alienation. This is what language does, and this is what experience does. If Lew Welch were channeling one of Ted Berrigan’s poems, it might sound like one of Hennessey’s original lyrics which dive right into the space between the circuits that structure our consciousness. As in Bernstein’s essay on Berrigan writing against the body, Hennessey’s interest is in the complex biographicity in a gesture such as “I’m only pronouns, & I’m all of them, & I didn’t ask for this / you did,” in what might be called the “appropriation of a life by writing.” Meanwhile, he has also noted an interest in “habitability” as an experience of reading. So the self or the biography when it appears, conjured by the act of writing, in Hennessey’s recent work takes the form of self-deprecating interruptions or commentary in parentheses, or it takes the form of the pronoun "we." I enjoy not just the density of his poems but also his thoughtfulness about continually changing the project and coming up with new approaches for each poem. This is a writer who knows how to write narratives and has chosen to do otherwise, and he’s on IM talking to you about personal stuff at a speed with which most people can barely keep up. More power to him. Please welcome Michael S. Hennessey.