Description
The Death Metal Pastorals turns over the rolling green hills of the idyllic American landscape, excavates their violences, and attenuates the powers that live atop them. In Ryan Patrick Smith’s pastoral, “nothing works here but blood & radio$$ and from page one, we know we’re entering a landscape at once more ominous and more vigilant than anything conjured by Spencer, Drayton, or Marlowe.
Smith’s poems upend the topography of the pastoral setting, peering through a “burning crop of disease” to ask, “Where am I in the field that I give my will over to you?” Through a range of personas, from death metal swains to The Terminator‘s Sarah Connor to Mister Rogers to a smartphone camera at a Black Lives Matter protest, Smith casts a piercing eye to the destructive structures of consumption, gendered violence, and white supremacy. As we enter this highly charged pastoral terrain, far from the bucolic or picturesque, we’re asked to inhabit these structures and then to work to live beyond them.
DEATHMETALPASTORAL
the last swain
The stockyards are burning. The news breaks
black-lunged, choir, radar.
In jeans of robin's egg I dressed myself today.
In grass-rub & honey-dirt doe-freckling my dream calves.
I woke up on a sofa in the garage of my employer's land.
I fanned my palms across my loamy beard.
Before I woke I could see myself coming like sunrise,
before I turned
to TV & the yards were burning & I saw
the whirlwind, network of blackbirds & buzzards /
ravenous hawks.
Now my hair now hide now nipples now loin now stomach
& the many organs
now heart & lungs now blood & milk
are all burned away
into the charred black tire rolling the screen & sky.
Ruminant beauty, thinking flame,
Keep going.
Into flight.
Into the meat of you I love.
Listen to Ryan Patrick Smith read poems from THE DEATH METAL PASTORALS // Watch the captioned video on the BLP YouTube Channel
