By Conor Hultman
Cletus Crow has published a grand slam sophomore book of poems. Phallic Symbols (Pig Roast Publishing, 2024) has absorbed the disciplined formalism of the debut, like sunshine into a stone. Out of that formalism Crow has kept the bare beauty of the senryu, but allowed the verse to unselfconsciously expand into a free verse, occasionally prose poetry, that retains structural integrity and power. Rarely is a word out of place or tossed off. Very often does a poem glow with an unassailable wholeness, made up of atomically graceful single lines. “this is how / vampires / kill themselves”
These poems don’t disappoint on the title’s come-on, but most often they’re about erotic disappointment. Festooned with phalluses and dotted with anuses, the poet accomplishes that Freudian alchemy of symbolism that draws a pornographic flag of genitalia intersecting, drains all the prurience out of it, transforming sex and its paraphernalia into potent totems of impotence and disappointment. “My penis is a sewage pipe.”
The suffering displayed here is almost always racked across a relational valence. Failed romance, unrequited love, flirting with friends, family history; the self being created across the collection is a group collaboration, a tapestry of every way people can make pain together out of wanting and not getting. “My therapist says / I should clone myself / so I can kill myself / without dying.”
Crow is funny without trying, which is the best way anyone can be funny. Almost every page in Phallic Symbols could make you laugh or cry, could be used as a Rorschach-blot-test-cum-poem. A short one to prove it to you:
Outrageous Nowadays
Man offered to buy my old gym socks for $30
Can you imagine?
$20 more and we can go see a movie
A whole world created at one glance, like a gay American Hanshan carving poems into a mountain with his penis. There’s a raucous, generous humor there, but it’s living uneasily with a great and knowing sadness. Part of the secret at work is religion, which flits among the poems about pop culture and fantasy. Christianity, a rich tradition of desire and loss and promise, is referenced with a reverence special to good art. “I make meth / with some man named Jesus / who is not God.”
The sequencing of the poems in Phallic Symbols is part of what makes the whole work. It starts with “Hike with Erectile Dysfunction,” where the exterior natural world and the interior world of sexual imagination fuse into a stark naked, frozen noninteractive image. It ends with “Hope,” a beautiful ode as tautology, including desperation and transference in ten simple lines, that function as a reinforcement of all the preceding emotive confusion and as a suggestive imperative line away, an exhortation to the reader to hope, even if the hope is futile and hurts. Between these two bookends are poems about whale penises, the penises of statues, God’s penis, girl penises, Godzilla’s penis, insect penises, penises after vasectomy, mannequin penises, cyborg penises, penis pictures, penis drawings, porn penises, grandfather’s penis, and the Washington Monument (which is, of course, a penis). Rather than brute obsession, Crow takes this material an expands it, goes off on variations of content and concept as frequently as technique. Phallic Symbols is like Apollinaire’s Alcools, or Mahler’s Third Symphony, in that it takes a theme and recreates it at every stroke, fully maps out its potentialities and drops the pen immediately when the next line would be repetition. Love is the most fertile battlefield for such artistic wars, as the above mentioned. “Then comes a night with your penis in / the love of your life.”
Cletus Crow nods subtly to influence when it’s due, Graham Irvin and B. R. Yeager notably. But these poems are all the author’s own. Crow is aware of being a singular voice, alludes to outsider status with grace, as with the poem “Literary Society”: “There are too many words I don’t know. / The poets are coming to kill me.” Phallic Symbols could very well be next season’s fashion, and after that a perennial classic. If you are trying to copy a more intelligent and hilarious style than your own, look no further. But don’t tell them I sent you.
Also, my copy came with a condom with a poem on the wrapper, but it would have to be some seriously fucked up sex for me to use it:
BDSM
a whip hands above
handcuffs on the doorknob
you hate me correctly
at specific times
Conor Hultman lives in New York, New York.