Review of Mark Spitzer, Age of the Demon Tools. Ahadada Books, 2007. 60pp. ISBN 976-0-9808873-1-0.

Kane X. Faucher

Mark Spitzer has been an advocate of a rather esoteric spirituality, having achieved that sublime state of finding his inner catfisherman. Fish, and more particularly those of the bottom feeder variety, have been a mainstay theme in most of Spitzer’s offerings, but to rely solely on this distinction would be limiting and giving short shrift to the cavalcade of other thematic nuances Spitzer spots his work with.
In his newest poetry collection, following his last volume (The Pigs Drink From Infinity), we find Spitzer both at the height of his brazen invective and the depths of humourous self-deprecation. Flurries of neologisms and portmanteaus greet the reader on every page, attaining a kind of special economy of words that truly delight and discomfit. These madcap inventions are essentially eddying shoals that ride the infernal crest of Spitzer’s unapologetic narrative as he fumbles his way through life in Kirksville and beyond. Spitzer is both stoic and comedian, and occasionally a mad wordplay pundit. But it is not just the harlequin moments that resonate in Spitzer’s bizarre tour de force, but as well the dips and deviations into that sonorous poetic voice and the earnest politically astute commentator that seems to believe in a kind of Jeffersonian-style democracy that has yet to truly be made manifest. In this way, he is both ponderous poetic voice and sociopolitical soothsayer, frocked as a kind of post-beat logomancer whose poetic “splatterns” never fail to resonate with the sharpness of their delivery.
With its many “hazeled lakes”, “me-pods”, “lurky leviathans”, and hailed nutmeats, Spitzer bends his phrases over his knee by the logic of more scatometrico, issuing a polemical discharge that is beyond the commonplace flatulence of pundits on either side of that butt-cheek ideological divide.
I had spent time with Spitzer and his wife in their swampy habitat in Toad Suck, Arkansas last autumn. Upon their wasp-banded motorboat along the river with chicken liver bait on the end of a viciously medieval-looking treble hook, and me hardly a fisherman having never before seen gar up close or eaten marinated shark-steak kebob, it was evident that they were living on a cultural isthmus jutting solely from a county run on Baptistry. There were spiders the size of some men’s nightmares in a place that was largely an artistically defunct humidifier, where bars had to be named “supper clubs” where booze is sold only to those who purchase annual memberships. These are the living conditions where Spitzer’s poetry must swell and shoulder forth - on those Ozarkian foothill ascents nearby where, according to some rumours, literary icon Andrei Codrescu is said to have a home secretly ruling the hills like some misplaced Romanian prince. Spitzer, in life and in poetry, has the temperament of a gun-toting Ginsberg, or at the very least a poetically debonair angler. It is something readers of Spitzer have seen alluded to in many of his last offerings such as Chum, Bottom Feeder, The Pigs Drink from Infinity, and Riding the Unit.
The political call-to-action is much more pronounced in this volume, and it is with invective, bile and warning that Spitzer declares that the age of the demon tools is quickly upon us, taking aim at thinly disguised politicos that care more about senseless wars and ignoring environmental degradation. Spitzer’s anchor in his double-barreled poetic critique comes to the fore by arraying the many ugly baubles together of modern woe into a bracelet of catastrophe, and his proof comes on the page where it all seems to return: the increasing levels of fatally toxic levels of chemicals in our rivers and lakes where fish populations dwindle. At heart, Spitzer appears to be an eco-conscious spokesperson, and poetry is his conduit, his forceful critique of attack against indifference in an age where demon tools are becoming sadly de rigueur.