Timestamp: The Daily Practice of Poetry
Poetry
Canisy Press, 2026
$23.00, 119 pages ISBN: 9781732595644
The clock/tells you, and doesn’t,//how long you’ve got.
-from “Clock Face”
At a recent AWP conference panel, “Slow Down: Patience and Poetry,” poet and scholar Linda Gregerson described her deepening relationship with poetry through her own daily ritual: reciting Milton’s Paradise Lost aloud each morning while bicycling.
As readers of poetry, our attention is rewarded as comprehension unfolds layer by layer. Poetry supports attentiveness which, in relation to the quotidian, grants a reverence supporting our sense of wonder in our day-to-day lives. Then there floats in—breezily and with a touch of flippancy—the “first thought, best thought” approach of the Beats in the 1950s. Later, Peter Elbow’s freewriting techniques also prioritized the unburdening of original voice over more rigorous craft to generate new content and fresh imagery.
It’s these two different tempos or modes that provoke the opinion that poetry develops in opposing speeds from the consciousness of the poet, yet I have always found the two function well in concert, benefiting from a non-dual relationship in the writing process. One can reflect and then write in earnest.
In enters Timestamp with its harried shopper at the local Whole Foods, the dopamine brain scan, political subterfuge, the sound bite in a post-truth era, a writer just killing time online checking the tides and weather…
With David Breskin’s latest collection, we observe the march of verses written in short order across several months tracked by literal timestamp, day after day, poem by poem filtering through the kaleidoscopic influences and surreality of contemporary American culture. Timestamp is a testament to strong voice and well-crafted lyricism mixed with a brisk and critical tone that endears itself to the reader as it leans toward the farcical and engages in fun wordplay.
Breskin, who initially found acclaim as a journalist for publications the likes of Rolling Stone and GQ, easily navigates an atmosphere of tickertape in Timestamp, as he modulates across a profound range of subjects with a freedom fostered by the strange realities and circumstances of modern life.
Poems twin and diverge, often highlighting contrasts between the routine and ordinary while rattling between societal-level commentary, at times considering cosmic proportions. In “Private Dinosaurs,” Breskin pairs the prehistoric era with modern distraction, conflating the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs with the private asteroid of a cell phone handily decimating our attention spans.
The alluring temporal juxtapositions act as a fulcrum, propping open space and atmosphere while Breskin dives in, speaking across multiple themes with an edginess of social criticism.
There is the resonance of “Sunday Fundraisers, 11 August 2024” with its metaphor of a vacuum cleaner addressing the inherent exhaustion of the American political cycle. In “Biopsy,” the brevity of human life comes into focus as we enter the poem through Bob Marley staring down at his big toe. The poem then flows into a visceral reflection on mortality and the impersonal nature of the medical industry.
Breskin’s virtuosic range and the fantastic stream of contemporary influences in Timestamp—along with the bric-a-brac absurdities—converge with the ever-present timestamp at the foot of each poem. The timestamps act to not only structurally encapsulate the content of each poem but tick and pressurize the pacing of the collection.
Timestamp encourages personal reflection with Breskin at times pointedly interrogating the reader. In “Try Not,” Breskin transmits images through puns and wordplay before ironically lamenting:
Try not to think about thinking too much.
The rabbit holes, the time wasted. Just try.
So when I read those lines then glanced down to see the time noted at the foot of the page, I felt my own experience, and the moments I had just “spent” doubly reflected, even in relation to the history of Breskin as he physically wrote the poem. It’s a cycling effect, a layering, not unlike Gregerson on her bicycle, that is part of the reordering (and rewarding) experience of poetry.
Stop with the negativity, the burned
toast, expired shelf-life, flat fizzy water.
Write three new things on your To Do list you’ve
already done so you can cross them out.
—from “Instructions for Today”
Whether it be noticing the offbeat moments in day-to-day life, the farce of the political, the media that thrives on consuming its theatrics, and the circumstances—the compassion of documenting the daily struggles and humorous nuances of the rat race—Breskin offers readers of Timestamp a singular exploration and inquiry of that very attention: both whittled away at and honed in response, with a dash of wit thrown in despite it all.
Kathleen Bednarek is a writer living in Pennsylvania. She holds an MFA from Wilkes University.