Interloper: Poems

In the United States, where much of the daily discourse appears to be reduced to matters of dollars and cents, poets are interlopers who traffic where they don’t belong. Such is the case with L. S. Klatt. For him, words are musical and versatile, more about play than utility, and he therefore seeks to dislocate language, to freelance and maneuver, to alter common sense on the way to new sense. The poems in
Interloper
unsettle frontiers between disparate worlds so that the imagination is given room to roam: pears become guitars, racks of ribs are presented as steamboats, and helicopters transmute into diesel seraphs. The poetry aspires acrobatically in the manner of prayers and pilots, but adventure throughout the book is viewed as precarious, and the will to conquest leads to apocalypse and ruin. The interloper wanders through crime scenes and crash sites as he glosses the landscape - at home and not at home with the America of yesterday and tomorrow. In symbols that scat and ricochet, the interloper scores a new song, one that composes - and decomposes - on the page. It includes lines composed on open space. There are days when you are lost when the quarter notes cannot find you & you wish to take a buffalo down with an arrow. You play in the fiddleheads - the hell with Pacific you’re eager for Plains - everything on the surface but hardly have you settled when it’s time for Little Big Horn, blisters around your mouth, blown clefs. Such is the paleface. He strikes out for frontier then notation.