Field Work: Notes, Songs, Poems 1997-2010

Poetry. In San Francisco, Austin and Buffalo a chiel's among ye taking notes. David Hadbawnik like James Boswell has a knack for capturing all the things we wish we had said, as well as the street talk which shows up our culture as indescribably banal and fertile. On his way to developing a unique poetic, Hadbawnik kept writing it down; these twelve years of flaneuring perform a voyage of their own, a powerful and mysterious walk towards unknowing--Kevin Killian. The notebooks of Kafka and the late meditations of Wittgenstein echo deep inside David Hadbawnik's marvelous FIELD WORK, whose investigations collect into something like a scrolling wunderkammer of anecdotal revelation. Or into a tour-de-force ostranenie of the quotidian, one might say... Which is to say, and more plainly, I suppose, that in these quasi-aphoristic sallies, daily moments are never quite what they first seem, always infolding much more than what we all almost always assume them to hold. So Hadbawnik looks carefully and insistently. And he does so again and again. And the mundane unfolds its mysteries. 'One minute in the life of the world is going by. Paint it as it is, ' said Cézanne. That is the writer's ethic here, and the result is nothing less than a strange, serial, and many-chambered gift. We haven't had a truly great 'poet's daybook' for quite some time, one that enacts a poetics. Here you are--Kent Johnson.