Post-Beauty and Almost American Surrealism:
A Review of Damon Hubbs’ Venus at the Arms Fair
By Sean G. Meggeson
Je connais le désepoir dans ses grand lignes.
[I know despair in its broad outlines.]
-André Breton, ‘The Verb to Be’
Damon Hubbs’ Venus at the Arms Fair (Alien Buddha Press, 2024) is a dazzling collection of poems, showcasing imaginative mobility that consistently elicited from me a gawking response at the flagrant potency of Hubbs’ illuminations. Hubbs employs a poetic gaze saturated in what I will frame as mashup of late 20th Century American, post-punk, nostalgic Surrealism with distinct traits of late Romanesque ennui hopped up on a narcotically intense jouissance of loss. My associations call it James Tate dressed as Breton writing Catullus while doing poppers with Black Francis as Pete Townshend’s ‘Empty Glass’ plays at the bar.
From ‘Hunters and Jumpers’:
Then the call to post. And we can see
the clouds move close and the flies
and Hans says there’s too many Janes in poetry.
And I couldn’t agree more.
I’m sniffing for roses
in a grandstand where angels
have dirty faces
and luck isn’t a heritable trait.
From ‘Tennis Socks’:
It was the year we gave up rooftops for boat decks.
You had fallen for Auden
and that man with golden talents
O what was his name—Thom, John
sucking cocks in your tennis socks
from Good Harbor to York Beach,
you thought you were the woman
who invented love
but love couldn’t save me, or you
so we drank at the 525
like Hamlet’s gravedigger-clowns,
unaware of our own errors
As I read through the collection, Hubbs’ relentless facility with metaphor and simile asked me to think about his overreaching themes of eros, memory, and loss—and to situate them generically. Not that such classification is needed to appreciate these poems, but rather, it is a testament to Hubbs that the poems ask the reader to think beyond the poems themselves and see how they might be placed within poetic movements. As the title to the collection indicates, there is clearly an interweaving of genres at work in Hubbs’ sensibility: dada, Surrealism, modernism, and a quality of jaded romanticism á la neoteric Roman poets like Catullus. I think the latter comes most to the fore in this collection. These poems hurt. They hurt in the face of pleasure spent, love lost and beauty deteriorated. All within a backdrop of the psychic reality of an aimlessly haunted, post-beauty existence.
From ‘Wild Card’:
It’s been a complicated year.
It’s been a story in names
in which all the death notices have typos.
Why the Latinas in Lawrence stopped shaving their armpits
is anyone’s guess
now, like Beckett
we have no talent
for happiness…
From ‘Delirium Astronauts’:
we are stark blue nudes hot Saturns masters of revels
commanding the ship til the sky spits the nipple
til hysteria where did you go, my darling—
my atoms belong to you
Even though he comes close, Hubbs is too much of an old fashioned Coleridgean romantic to fully achieve something that might be called American Surrealism. This ‘failure’ is productive for it engages the reader both intra- and extra-textually as the poems unfold. What’s happening in any given poem is up for consideration: dada, Surrealism, modernism? What forms and what doesn’t makes for fascinating reading from poem to poem. For example, while Hubbs’ use of metaphor is dreamlike, jolting and decentering like a dadaist, his poems are more often filled with such a lyrically pervasive sense of time and place lost that the reader tends to be centered somewhere, either within Hubbs’ poetic loci or within their own sense of place and fucked up memory. The reading experience somehow feels like dada, but it’s kinda not. Like ‘The Birthday Party’ sounds like punk, but it’s not.
From ‘A Wall of Noise at Vassar, ’89’:
We eat psychocandy and gaze at our shoes
long before you disappear to study British Romanticism
everyone incendiary with Frank O’Hara, us too
like a snake wrapped around an axe in Côte Basque
we put arms beyond use, fuse damage and joy
a wall of noise at Vassar in ’89 makes our teardrops explode
we’re lost children on the move
we’re lost children head-on in love.
Aside from Hubbs’ fondness for 80’s alt music references (which I love, myself being of the generation that came before y), Hubbs’ poems are consumed with a range of objects of desire not unlike so much of the Surrealist oeuvre. However, unlike, for instance, Breton’s preoccupation with what he once called orgasmic, ‘convulsive’ beauty that separates the object of desire from the desiring (figuratively autistic) subject, Hubbs’ poems are preoccupied with a self-with-other, interpersonal phenomenology. Preoccupied with how lovers imperfectly come together and inevitably fragment. Shit just doesn’t last, even the memories of all that good shit. Even if this kind of interpersonal fatalistic phenomenology is ultimately one of loss and pain, there is for the reader an authentic experiencing of it in each of the poems of this collection. Makes one feel less crap, maybe even respected in their pain. To his credit, Hubbs stays with the pain, and the reader in turn respects him for it. What’s offered is a Catullan sic transit gloria mundi atmosphere (cf. Joy Division’s ‘Atmosphere’).
From ‘The Year I Fell in Love with a Dimes Square Girl’:
the Dimes Square girls are at it again
reading Lunch Poems 2 over lunches amuse-bouche,
the sky like a mango flavored Juul, Manhattan at noon
is a wet brain and when I finally heal from the trauma
of a happy childhood I find every pussy at the corner of Canal
and Orchard to be a Beaux-Arts shrine
to acronyms and floating signifiers.
From ‘Arts & Labor, Marconi Beach’:
…we speak of the oracular weather
and why Wallace Stevens has fallen out of favor,
the jism of late capitalism never far from our lips
hand me the towel, darling
the sun hangs like a lactating clock,
the sale of the commodity is not the beginning…
Not as a criticism of Hubbs’ poetics, but as a curious counter-point, I ask myself if these poems are sometimes and somehow too dazzling. Too coherent (even in their most incoherent, fragmented moments, if that makes sense). It’s a silly question, of course. It’s all a matter of taste—just like how Stevens has fallen out of favor is a matter of taste. During a time in my own reading and writing when my taste is leaning more and more to the fragmented, I credit Hubbs’ attempt at American Surrealism for asking me to come back to a transitive, a more or less generically centered, articulation of pain and loss.
Sure, it’s a jouissance of loss that’s older than ancient Rome and the Pixies, but nevertheless, I believe, it’s a theme necessitated by a contemporary ethics of poetry to serve as a debaser to so much of what is in favor these days. Don’t know about you, but for me, does a reader good.
From ‘Robert & Elizabeth’s Dinner Party—Truro, MA‘:
The ministry of war
veterans sent coffee cake. They have the severe formalism
of a jigsaw puzzle and a taste for making lists.
Conversation is a knight’s tour
of taxonomic cruelty
of millionaire eccentrics and Frigidaire wives;
they suck off every square on the board
without landing on the same cock twice—
oh rigolade, oh consommé
We have our own Big Other
our obsession with market culture
overwash and obeyed.
VENUS AT THE ARMS FAIR
BY DAMON HUBBS
ALIEN BUDDHA PRESS
97 PAGES, $11.25
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Sean G. Meggeson lives in Toronto, Canada, where he works as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. He has written and lectured on such topics as Lacan & James Joyce, neurodiversity, and interspecies intersubjectivity. His chapbook, Cosmic Crasher and Other Poems has been published by Buttonhook Press, 2024. Meggeson was the winner of the 2024 League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Award. Poems forthcoming in antiphony press, and #Ranger Magazine.
Cover image generated on Magic Studio
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