"I call myself a conceptual anarchist," says Cambridge poet Peter Payack, nearly spilling his coffee in enthusiasm as he fishes through the trinkets, collages, press clippings, poems, and publications stuffed in his knapsack. There's an advertisement for his "star poems" (haiku spelled out in electric lights attached to the wings of a pilot friend's Cessna 150 and emblazoned across the night sky over Boston). There are poems he's published in a dizzying array of magazines, from Paris Review to Rolling Stone to fringe science-fiction 'zines. There's his Boston Globe essay on running the Boston Marathon, a feat he's accomplished for eight of the past nine years despite suffering from multiple sclerosis. "I'm sort of eclectic," he grins -- a sweeping understatement.

Finally, he finds what he was looking for. The silver object he places on the café table at Harvard Square's Algiers resembles a classic "railroad" pocket watch. But inside, where the dial should be, is an infinitesimal replica of the circle of megaliths at Stonehenge. The little "heel stone," he demonstrates, can be pointed due north, to "predict" eclipses and changes of season. "We've sold about 20,000 of these at the Salisbury Museum at Stonehenge, in England," he explains. "This is what I mean by `conceptual anarchy.' I try to break down real facts and ideas, and put them into new forms, new faces, and new techniques."

I'm amazed by the cleverness of the "Stonehenge Watch," the outrageous intelligence of its humor; it's a poem you can hold in the palm of your hand, a three-dimensional Zen conundrum, the ultimate neo-dada gadget. It's also a mini-metaphor for Payack's lifelong eccentric mission of trying to "lift poetry off the page" and insinuate it playfully into daily life -- the same exuberant, subversive, slightly coy intellectual challenge that leaps from every line of the poems in his new Blanket Knowledge.

Payack, 47, is best known locally as the founder, in 1976, of Boston's "Phone-a-Poem" hotline. He is also a highly visible community activist, a medical miracle who flatly defies his illness, a proud dad who coaches his sons' Pop Warner football team and helped start a girls' softball league in Cambridge. All this is raw material for the charm and topical humor of his poems -- which are sometimes misread, he laments, as "light verse." In fact, their approachable, "everyman" diction is camouflage for truly serious content nourished by a rich vein of sources: his philosophy major's appreciation of Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, and Nietzsche; his '60s student radical's flirtation with anarchist writers like Bakunin, Kropotkin, and Emma Goldman; his ongoing fascination with Zen. To open Blanket Knowledge is to embark on a philosophical wild ride designed to shake loose all your assumptions and open your eyes to new ways of seeing the world.

Whether he writes in prose-like blocks or deft two-line flourishes, Payack's innovation of form is that he borrows the rhetorical techniques of philosophy to "argue" points that can't be rationalized -- creating a kind of self-reflexive, pseudo-dialectic that leads nowhere and everywhere at once. He seems to hear an ethereal music in the rhythm of thought itself, the dance of logic as it rattles around the human brain.

Some poems are parodies within parodies, like the two-line gem "Excessive Expressive" (a play on a classic paradox that's baffled philosophers since Aristotle's day):

I was going to write a one-line poem
but now I've gone too far.

 

Whatever their specific rhetorical pose, all of Payack's poems are concerned with the same fundamental questions, the same celebration of the human spirit, the irony that all our endless thinking leads back to the blissful illogic of emotion. He is a poet of both compassion and mischief, who sees in satire, humor, or the "flash" of the Zen koan a way of teaching by subversion. Whether on or off the page, he says, "I'm trying to put poetry where people are. It's all the same continuum. A writer has to create his own reality."

I'm tempted to compare him to the installation artist Christo, who's made the world his canvas by hanging curtains across a Colorado canyon and wrapping Paris's Pont Neuf and Berlin's Reichstagsgebäude. But I suspect Payack would resist the analogy. After all, he's made his feelings known in the following dishy two-liner:

Christo

All wrapped up
in himself.