Comin’ ’Round: (Selected Writings) by James Sherry – reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp


In the “Boot Camp” section of his poem, “Nukeman,” from Our Nuclear Age, James Sherry writes, “Poetry stands in the margin contemplating the edge, / Drawing violence from memory and culture.” The writing here channels war and conflict and the fits and starts of civilization and discord, tactics and torture. But the statement is also an insight into his work, a crystallization of intent. Moreover, the suite of poems ends:

Common sense alone will not tell you how to strategize 
And the journalists cannot describe it.

As Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his 1821 essay, “A Defense of Poetry,” “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Sherry writes passionately about world politics and culture, sometimes as a clarion call of warning.  Comin’ ’Round is a selection of his writings from over half a century, from his Whitman-like 1973 collection, Lazy Sonnets, to 2022’s Selfie: Poetry, Social Change & Ecological Connection. The book’s title comes from a kind of parody of a traditional folk song, “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.” It’s in his 1976 collection, Part Songs. Sherry writes:

She’ll be comin’ ’round the mountain when the shell sometimes is empty.
She’ll be comin’ sometimes and the shell is an evasion,
when she comes around the mountain
to put in an appearance;
and this is the introduction we’re all trying to come ’round to.

The shell? “And we’ll all have chicken and dumplings in a context / of the human shell....” We are the shells. While the verse is childlike and nonsensical in its way, there’s a dark foreboding. “She’ll be drivin’ six white and well-bred young mares,” indeed. She’ll/shell.

The earliest poems are playful and reminiscent of Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, which memorably begins:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

Sherry echoes this in these sonnets. Take “Statics,” which begins:

I focus horizontally, the plane
I’m inclined to rely on. But there’s
more than one position between getting
into bed and getting out. Lying down’s
necessary for sick ones, good luck
for tired ones, pleasure for sluggards,
the normal state of the intellect,
the vocation of prostitutes, employment 
for the poet, the salvation of Rip
van Winkle...

This is amusing and hopeful, but note his description of the poet’s employment! In “Utopia” he writes “I yawn alone, a no-man of politics, / society’s idle wheel, and loaf along.” But as time goes on Sherry becomes increasingly involved in the progress (or dismantling) of civilization, where the world is headed and his, the poet’s, role in shining a light; he becomes increasingly pessimistic over time.  His vision becomes more alarming. In Our Nuclear Heritage, composed from 1986-1990, his concerns take on global holocaust. 

The poem, “Accidentals,” comes with an epigraph from William Burroughs: “Talk about the power of the atom. All hate all fear all death all sex is in the word.” In poetic essays from this collection, “Plain and Fencing Rhetoric,” “Free Radicals” (“I leave, remove, / split off one electron, / oust, auto da fé, goner. / I think this is the apocalypse.”), “Live Action Language” (epigraph from American Enterprise Institute), “Excess Subtleties” (epigraph from Bob Hope), as well as “Accidentals,” “Nukeman,”  and others, Sherry paints a bleak, almost paranoid picture. Later, in 2018’s The Oligarch, which begins with an arch letter “To the excellent Elon Musk” (talk about irony!), he reconsiders Machiavelli, while discussing the Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Brexit, Trump’s 2016 election win, again presenting a depressing warning, miserable, even disheartening.        

But James Sherry’s writing is versatile stylistically throughout his work. The 1981 poem “In Case,” from the collection In Case, is a long stream-of-consciousness block of prose poetry, the stanzas – or blocks – all linked with an ampersand – & – the final fourteen stanzas (chunks of free-associative prose) all beginning with the phrase “In any case,” which already signals the tangents his thinking seems to go on (“In any case encased in a cloud of non-case, non-case general, compulsive by criminal, this nation of them remains my alibi....”). The twenty-one poems from 1982’s Converses, meanwhile, are all contrapuntal two-column poems, a kind of assertion and response, not so much talking to each other but more often like talking over each other. “TELLER” is a short example:

One cage to another .  Alien

      signs .  Jaws

      hi .  Ten

the line .  Casablanca

      “ .  Night and Fog

Another, “LOVE SONG No. N,” reads:

He want .  n

She want .  o

      it .       p

  it it it it .  (s)he

Figure this one out for yourself!  But to point to just one piece, “Snowball Earth Creates Innovative Poetry,” from the OOPS! (2000-2013) section, a long essay with thoughts ranging on writing, culture, the environment (“In one respect, however, humanity distinguishes itself as a single species by threatening to significantly alter the climate of the entire planet and thereby cause the extinction of many if not most of earth’s species.”); this piece incorporates several variations on form, from essay to verse to actual drawing to a stage play, “Appendix B: Scenes from Fallen Arches: A Mystery Play in Eden,” in which Adam gives names to animals (sheep, skunk, giraffe...). In other words, he’s all over the place here, riffing on form and content though single-mindedly painting a dire picture.

2019’s The Rapture is another play – with characters including CEO and Jesus, government officials (Minister, Mayor), a Russian Oligarch and  a handful of Zombies. It continues to underscore the global threats we face from the rapacious oligarchs, the money-men and climate-deniers.

Revealingly, in “A Fish in the Lobby of 93 Wall Street,” also from OOPS!, Sherry tells us, “Working in the financial district for twenty-five years one gets to thinking about alternatives. My first effort at environmental taxonomy layered one idea on another mimicking time.”

In “Tagmosis/Prosody (Connecting Parataxis),” also from OOPS!, which opens with an epigraph from Stephen Jay Gould, Sherry tells us, “Discrete structural units of poetry are known as prosody. The process of fusion of prosodic units is known as writing.” This offers more insight into Sherry’s long career as a poet and environmental thinker, the tendency of his overall oeuvre. 

Comin’ ’Round is a satisfying, comprehensive overview of the career of an innovative canary in a coalmine. James Sherry’s warnings are especially prescient considering recent political and social developments.