Intro for Filip Marinovich, 3/20 at Zinc Bar

   
When I think of Filip Marinovich’s poetry, I think of the word “energy.” Marinovich uses language in a way that has a kind of wild, excited, urgent flow, part garrulousness part enthusiasm part adrenalin rush. His penchant for confrontessional bursts of direct address, which includes the lovingly embarrassing effect of apostrophe, stands out among his contemporaries and lends his writing a momentum and immediacy rarely seen today. This is also what I think of as shaggy poetry: there’s also a willingness to be playful and messy and seriously silly: “people will hug in the street Elizabethanly” or “for the porpoises of this poem sunning there on the rocks.” Then at other times the playfulness can turn on a dime into darker, more surreal ruminations, often stated as refrain “peripheral vision greenery wolverines gnaw at me  / and vomit me up /  a new man / with powers to heal.” Channeling aspects of Ginsberg, Kenneth Koch, Williams, Bob Holman, and other charismatic forebears, this poet transfigures them into a sound all his own, into a kind of impossible generosity. The exigent urge to see himself as boundariless, filtering everything from voices to images through his poem-body, like a cosmic amoeba, coexists in a moving dialectic with more frustrated autobiographical moments of blockage or process: “I must pause and nap / My Wolfman paws tearing apart the notebook” as we are sometimes given an equally generous inner glimpse of the attempt to write as if written through, a peek under the hood into the Martians at work. Oh Marinovich’s poems, which I love and which I hope he keeps coming for many years and many apostrophes, I am continually disarmed and split down the middle by you. Please welcome Filip Marinovich.