Looking into The Last VisPo Anthology

When invited to participate in a series of reactions to The Last VisPo Anthology: Visual Poetry 1998-2008 edited by Craig Hill and Nico Vassilakis last year, I found myself facing many dilemmas about how I myself define the limits of poetry, of visual art and language art. I realized that, for me, to experience visual poetry as poetry still required the element of readability, an ability to see into and through language. So, while everyone else responded to the anthology, I just journalled various notes and reflections to myself about a few of the particular images that struck me as I went through the anthology. To read the series of reactions to the book by other poets, please see The Volta's The Evening Will Come issue 32 from August 2013 (with responses by Rosaire Appel, Kristin Prevallet, Katie Yates, Sharon Mesmer, Deborah Poe, Kate Greenstreet, Amaranth Borsuk, Crystal Curry, Mary Burger, Melanie Noel, Colleen Lookingbill, Janice Lee, Donna Stonecipher and Jessica Smith). As for what follows, these were a few of my thoughts and reactions, in journal form, for whatever dialogue they might invite--or merely to share in a process of reading/looking that this book evoked:

Page 23: Jim Andrews, from "NIO"
(FYI the photos I am responding to are not the one below but of the image contained in the VisPo Anthology. Image below is of the homepage for the online "NIO" project).

Asemic writing meets fractal imaging. The letter(s) break apart, feather and disperse neon-cobalt blue over black backdrop. A second image, below, more black than blue, like a

http://vispo.com/nio/index.htm to see Andrews' NIO prjct

close up edge of the first, a detail, where now the lettrism of it is more visible. These are not to be read, cannot be, but the viewer looks into them as if through to a time of primeval all-speak onetongue. They evoke and penetrate, delicate and fierce. Something to touch? To aspire to? In both of them, a kind of breathing, winding. Yet, I must ask myself, what is the making behind this? A computer program? A fractal? An algorithm? This is the mathematical mystery of science that is poetic in that its nature is unearthing what becomes us. Far from composition in the lyric poetry sense of a time when verse accompanied lyre or metrical patterns memorized thoughtfeelings--and yet this is still a composed form which sings--flutelike, dusklike nightengale calling us into a metaphysical mystery-space, question of emerging or fading into light. The physical body, letter, fades and presses forth from the black plane, the abyss, always there, interminable mortality wishing to swallow language/us/logic whole. Image 2 is the echo, the reverberation visualized at the left of the form, both emerging and fading out while from above a set of lines enter like rays, light into being/belief, as if we could place our hand below it, become illuminated by this blue light of language. 

Page 24: Oded Ezer, "The Message"

Oded Ezer, photo by Idan Gil

Alphabetic symbols or is this Hebrew rising from the page-like landscape over which, as from a mountain, we gaze, falling back into it? The upright letters bend towards each other in occasional pairs like figures speaking. The letter-words appear to be entering the visual plane (page) from right to left--also like Hebrew, Arabic or Japanese. The letters are peeling up off the page, one by one, casting pale grey shadows behind them. Letter-bodies the light catches on, solid a s a being, born now into the world--written, read, spoken, rising: And here, the message arrives: Unreadable. Forceful. Inevitable.



Page 34: Satu Kaikkonen, "Paper Flowers"

Sculptural space: typelettered pages on thick-grained paper, cut, formed to petals, to rounding-opening outward from the abyss at its center (apex). Can one read you, dear flower? Your dark yawning maw less pestil than portal, escape hatch--threat of deep space and silence. Cycling out from there, wider and wider, the curves of pages turn. Close-up image enclosing viewers. I perceive "John" but then other, closer thus larger words I see are mirror-image printed backwards, to be--or not--decoded. A snippet of island? sav? us? Fractalesque bouquet sentences, inorganic flora. Species, genres, as of yet unnamed but stretching, reaching, yawning with its wide-open, desperate maw, for name, speech. So much here depends on the photo. The skillful play of pale grey light and deeper shadow, making me think this could almost be the arial view of some massive concrete-language construction. Radial. Layered. Escher-esque cascades of curving stairwells which rise and fall, rotate, swallow and consume vocabularies.

Page 35: Fernando Aguiar, "Calligraphy"

Thin scotch-tape ribbon helix of alphabet delicately bridges fringertip and thumb--from one hand to another, speech-connection. Blue sky universe above this speech-rope suspended bridge of vocables twisting towards and away from language. A whisper. A shout. A series of gestures--is it breezy and windy where the A, O, I, Es turn and catch and thump against L and M and R? Something is rolling off the tongue. Who is speaker? Who listens? Here is linguistic flight, breathed-out, breathed-in lettrism. Asemic poetry evokes the fragility of speech, of connection, of comprehension. Langue on the brink of making and unmaking. Dance. (See Aguiar's blog HERE)



Page 57: Spencer Selby, "Jahbend-3"

Acrylic? Oil? I spot / deciper "gh  night /  ate pi a tin (?)  / out  /  its in oil  /  fes / th / sen e/ her / ctc." where a "here" could be "here" or "there", even "where", and "ctc" could be "etc" could be "ate", just as "patio" evokes for me the French "partir". On the canvas-surface, an abstract expressionist-style painting rooted in the primal colors (red, blue and yellow) with white and black balancing out, cutting over or through like water or line. Yellow is mostly applied in dried pigment form, or has been scraped hard as if over rough stone or grit. Did yellow come after, cascading in from the right edge--smears of mustard, of flora? The reds are horizontal dashes with softened edges falling down the rocky surface. Behind both a kind of rugged-rock surface, waves and protrusions of color, shape and shadow have come to absorb the printed language, picking at it, seeping the black ink away. Eroding / erosion of language. A kind of painterly landscape erases language. The image wins, eye over I in creation. This composition succeeds in its evocative-ness. The longer I stare at it, the more I focus on the milky white which spills through the bottom half of the canvas like part of a letterish body looped over or laying languidly across the surface. The words, too, are like

Jahbend-3, from Spencer Selby's BLOG

bodies falling down this painting--dispersing/emerging over the paint-surfaces perhaps like a poorly-reprinted overhead projector page of faded typeface laid atop the painting before the two superimposed images are photographed to make what's seen here, now. 
          Again, what moves is away from semantic meaning, not yet relegated to a series of independent letters yet not a sentence with grammar and syntax. Not an enigma or puzzle to decode, as all the pieces are simply not provided. The surface asks, instead, for me to look, observe: "in oil / sense"? The "..." to (or not) be filled in by the viewer. As Donato Mancini writes on page 65 of the essay section of the Anthology: "To read as if to observe. To watch the poem move over the surface, skitter, skate, slide, slip away." Here, yes, we have entered "into visual linguism" where "color (is) evocative surface, depth." (65, Donato Mancini) where, as Mancini continues, writing is being reinterpreted or defined by the editors and practitioners of this anthology as "mark-making, the capacity of one substance to affect the surface of another." (66, Mancini). Here, the substances of paint ink, canvas, paper, photo, reproduction, viewer, reader are entirely altered by that of the others. Do we read? Watch? What is the difference between the work here defined as poetry and that defined as painting, for example, that of Jasper Johns? Would Johns have called himself a visual poet? Yes, I bend, Spencer Selby, and marvelling at your fabulous image wonder at the significance of definining and limiting genres and practices of reading/viewing--my own and yours as well. 

Overall Book questions: 
a closure to my ramblings, or an opener awaiting dialogue...

In the end, as I read the essays and looked at the images enclosed within the covers of The Last Vispo Anthology, I found myself asking myself such questions as: What here, if anything, is to be articulated into sound? Re-pieced into legible/readable word/fragment/sentence/text?  Does language, grasped at, become a commodity that cannot be reached, where something to seize on (connection, communication, music of being, linguisticall-evoked image) illudes? Has language become liquid spilling away? What is my own relationship to reading, viewing, sound and image? To making and the "real" the pursuit of the "real"?

Being a visual poet, I also thought, based on the definitions provided by the images collected in this book, evokes new questions for the "writer", questions once relegated to the category of visual artist, such as: what medium do you work in? What sorts of tools do you use to make your compositions? Do you work in oil, acrylic, collage, color or black and white, on paper or canvas or computer imaging programs? Do you use Photoshop, In-Design, a lightroom, or...? Do you have a background in graphic design, sculpture, photography? What is your relationship to the materiality of your work? 

To respond perhaps to some of these questions I was left with, I would have liked, as part of this book, small notes by the authors regarding technique and process on or next to the image pages. Such notes could perhaps even include reasons for defining the work as visual poetry. As such, the comments on medium/technique and on definition might marry practices which one finds in poetry anthologies and those far more like what one sees in Art History books or art anthologies. A desire for such intellectual-critical framework to allow me to feel more deeply involved in the dialogue around the making of visual and typographical poetry is not new.  (And by intellectual-critical framework I mean more than essays, which I was pleased to see were included in The Last Vispo Anthology and which I did find a strong notable point to this anthology, despite their being set off from the images themselves in essay-sections. Also, most of the essays were not by the included authors/artists). But on the not-newness of this wish for a more inclusive critical-intellectual framework within an anthology of visual poetry, I admit I have desired to see this in other such anthologies. One can take for example two parallel books in French-- the recent collection "Calligrammes & compagnie, etcetera: Des futuristes à nos jours: une exposition de papeier" (éditions Al Dante, 2010: click HERE to order/read more on the book) with a preface by Jean-François Bory and postface by Isabelle Maunet-Salliet. Like The Last Vispo Anthology, this Al Dante collection only included the images and the authors of the images on the

pages with images themselves, making for a fabulous flipbook-especially given its smaller size. Al Dante did add an appendix but this provided only minimal information which focused on the origin (place and publication) of each image/author. The other such book that I have spent time with of late is Typoésie by Jérôme Peignot (imprimerie nationale éditions 1993, reprinted in 2005--see an article on this book by Sébastien Hayez HERE and a 1997 interview with the author, Jérôme Peignot HERE). Typoésie does a far better job (though is out of date and focused on a more limited scope of visual poetry than Hill and Vassilakis' book). This book includes small paragraph pre-presentations or parallels for each set of typoetry included, some from the original appearances of the anthologized works. It also includes a group of pages by single authors or visual-art-writing groups as oposed to one sole image like we see in Calligrammes et compagnie and The Last Vispo Anthology. The anthology Typoésie as a whole does not, however, extend beyond typographical explorations into the paint, sculptural, photographic and other mediums explored in The Last Vispo Anthology. As such, I await the next Vispo edition, hoping perhaps for such additions or even addendums at the end to allow reader-viewer-critics like myself to engage more personally with each of the included pieces and their creators as I struggle to come to terms with who I am as a reader-viewer of such work, but also as an author-creator of poetry, perhaps visual, but perhaps not so much in the end.

Pages 98-99 of Typoésie, photo by Sébastien Hayez, used with his permission, I invite you to see his article on this book including a series of photos  http://www.designers-books.com/typoesie-jerome-peignot-1993/

PASSIONATE POLITICAL COLLABORATION: A review of Jennifer Karmin's '4000 words 4000 Dead & Revolutionary Optimisim...'

It was one of those emails from one of those fantastically creative friends that just came along on the right day to get a response--a word. A single word. One to be added to so many others. Then addressed, arranged, painted with, reflected on. A word as mark, as tombstone, as flag, as spark of life. Jennifer Karmin's invitation to check out her show and then send her 1-10 words, as she explains below, to hand out to pedestrians, paint, install in her art commemorative project, was one of those things I just participated in, off-handedly, to see what syllables came to mind as I looked at her art project online and thought on her topic.

As Jennifer KARMIN explains the origins of her new chapbook:
"In April 2008, I began collecting 4000 words as a memorial to the 4000 dead American soldier who had been killed in Iraq.  Submissions came from friends, students, writers, activists, soldiers, and those who read about the project online.  I asked each person to send me 1-10 words, gave parts of the poem away to pedestrians during public performances across the country, and painted the words using the American flag as a writing utensil in two installations."

Now those lists have again taken new form, been redialogued, in a chapbook free to read online in  4000 Words 4000 Dead & Revolutionary Optimism / An American Elegy: 2006-2012 at:  http://www.jillmagi.net/sites/default/files/Jennifer%20Karmin%204000%20Words%204000%20Dead%20chapbook_0.pdf


IN this kind of political My Life-esque booklet the lists come and go, numbered, between and around and amid long textual blocks of sometimes words and sometimes whole lines in the first 9.5 pages (if one looks at pdf page 4 as pages 1-2 of a booklet). This  chapbook echos the theme of memory, recollection in word collection, and nostalgia found in Lyn Hejinian's now-iconic collage autobiography My Life. For 4000 Words... opens here, in lower case as if already in the middle of its thought or speech: 
                                      "sad and memory children april quicken burning" 
                                                                                              (Pdf p4, left side, which I call p1)
The accumulation of sound that follows is, on some pages, deafening. A cacophany. A yelling to be heard. 'PEACE' cries one, 'lost youth hope now destruction' murmurs another. But then, halfway through page 10 (pdf p8, right side) there is a horizontal gap, a kind of margin, break, breath. This is followed by the very direct and also moving:

 Here the word gives way to the O at once opening of the mouth, the call to be heard, the call to make heard, the surprise -- O!--and the sigh --O-- as well as the numeric deletion, the zeroing, the erasing, the bodies lined and lined and lined generically over fields in battles--the Os in rows making lines, visible lines, as of meaning, of a story, or a graveyard, or a regiment, a company, a set of troops lined up to head out, to head onto the next page.


There, too, the pages that follow are more dialogic--in a titled poem "Revolutionary Optmism" which opens with questions which are asked of America on page 11 and 13 where the lines go back and forth and are printed in a bold typeface while, on the facing pages (p12 and 14) a set of tercets and couplets wend their way like a river down the page, thinking aloud, in a frail, old-fashioned typeset that recall memos and telegrams. These floating tercets and couplets are all in very different voices--potentially of a torturer ('loosen/this guy/up for us'), an idealist ('tears are wiped away and replaced with peace') as well as politicians, or even a member of clergy at the end, etc. These particular pages recall what Jennifer said about the origins of this project--as she explained: "4000 Words 4000 Dead is a companion piece to Revolutionary Optimism, a response to Abu Ghraib based on confessions from Iraqi prisoners, sympathy cards, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead.  Both texts were published together as a chapbook by Sona Books for Veterans Day 2012 and released online for Memorial Day 2013.  More info here."

But following these 4 dialogic pages, the 00000s return, and on the online pdf the pages recall tombstones or perhaps oddly the image from the old, colorized biblical tales of Mosses with the 3 tablets who, in that film version I recall seeing every Easter waiting for my parents to awake, drops 2 so we all end up with the 10 commandments and not 15. Here, too, there is a little bit of stumbling from some outside source--the photo of the page gives them this aspect of being about to close up, crumble, shake. There is a tremulo as the Os pass from pp 15-16 to where they again trail back into the mix of prose block and word lists on the top of p 17 (Pdf p12, left hand side). Here the O gives way to the incantation of O-m. At once 'Om' of meditation, of joining all to one, but also almost a very American Oh my exclamation or even a partial echo of the many poets who have cried out in their poems "non omnis moriar" (I will not wholly die) where this OM is part of the whole, the entirety of each of us, sewn together in sound-site on these little pages. 

Jennifer then spills from the abstract O-M into the very concrete all-caps HEART which she follows by the organ's more abstract, sentimental forms: HEARTBROKEN HEARTFUL on the same line and one begins to get worried about the sentimental boat one might be falling into, too saccharin, the wholehearted bleeding-heartness of this, and then the text catches itself and adds two more soundplays off of this base beating organ: HEARTLESS HEARTY. Here, Jennifer has moved the reader at once to a counter-emotion (the heartless instead of heartful) but then better yet is the tactile, the weighted, the body and almost perky happy "hearty", with the hefty undertone of voice and body that clearly shift this and embarks the text on a kind of set of counter-listings. 

From this point to the end of the book, Jennifer Karmin continues to deepen the varied explorations on the page that she has set up between the named dialogic poetry pages, the prose blocks, the numeric lists and the OOOOs in rows until the text begins to take on a percussive feeling, repetition, variation, juxtaposition, shift of sound, image, tone, voice, piling and piling and piling atop one another like... perhpas those bodies, those wars, those pasts, those lost reasons, those justifications? The list certainly goes on. Hers? It comes to a halt about 80% down the final page:

Here on the Pdf p15, right side Jennifer Karmin's 4000 words comes to a close on the word "artemesia" but that also drifts, like an ambrosia, into the air, not dotted or held in place by any punctuation, still gaining a list-momentum, it invites the reader to turn back, add on, keep hearing the sounds and reflections. :

And oddly, as she follows the final page of the text with her explainer notes, lists of venues from the shows and performances and also lists--as I will do here--those who, like me, contributed 1-10 words to her, their names, my own, feels also like it is part of the 4000 dead, connected to them in some sort of pre and post-language sounding space. It felt like a homage to creation as much as to loss and war and rebuilding, reading and looking at this chapbook. I hope that you, dear readers, friends, family, strangers, travellers, will also find this chap and project as exciting and worthy of sounding out, sighting, reflecting on, admiring as I have. Thank you, Jennifer Karmin, for making a few syllables into resonant sound.

 
Jennifer Karmin's list of 
Contributors to 4000 Words 4000 Dead include: Jeff Abell, Emily Abendroth, Harold Abramowitz, Amanda Ackerman, Carrie Olivia Adams, Kelli Russell Agodon, Manan Ahmed, Malaika King Albrecht, Charles Alexander, Will Alexander, mIEKAL aND, Andrew Axel, Carol Willette Bachofner, Ed Baker, Jenni Baker, Anny Ballardini, David Baratier, Barbara Barg, Thomas Barton, Michael Basinski, Robert Bearak, John Bennett, Linda Benninghoff, Cara Benson, Charles Bernstein, Anselm Berrigan, Cameron Bishop, Joe Bly, Jan Boudart, Jessica Bozek, Lee Ann Brown, Laynie Browne, Kate Burrows, Amina Cain, Steve Cain, Teresa Carmody, Christophe Casamassima, Mars Caulton, Han-hua Chang, Maxine Chernoff, David Chirot, Matthew Clifford, Rachel Coburn, Robert Elzy Cogswell, Esteban Colon, Alanda Coon, Stephen Cope, Colleen Coyne, H. V. Cramond, Justin Crontieri, Barbara Crooker, Kathy Cummings, Sima Cunningham, Steve Dalachinsky, Catherine Daly, Tina Darragh, Heather Davis, Joseph DeLappe, Tom DeRoma, Michelle Detorie, Jennifer K. Dick, Joanie DiMartino, Claire Donato, Carol Dorf, Samuel Dorf, John Dowling, Julie Downey, Colleen Doyle, Kath Duffy, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Kate Durbin, Patrick Durgin, Ellen Elder, Susan Eleuterio, Laura Elrick, David Emanuel, Joy Emanuel, Laura Esckelson, Yvonne Estrada, Erik Fabian, Annie Finch, Jennifer Firestone, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Audrey Fitting, Tiffany Florestal, Richard Fox, Libby Frank, Audrey Friedman, Nick Fryer, Gloria Frym, William Fuller, Sasha Geffen, Paddy Gillard-Bentley, Dan Glass, Lara Glenum, Dan Godston, Russ Golata, Elliot Gold, Laura Goldstein, David Gonzales, Philip Good, Arielle Greenberg, Kate Greenstreet, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Gwen Gunn, Therese Halscheid, Duriel Harris, Roberto Harrison, Carla Harryman, Lisa Haufschild, R. Joyce Heon, Larkin Higgins, Elizabeth Hildreth, Jen Hofer, William Honey, J’Sun Howard, Luisa Igloria, Brenda Iijima, Siara Jacobs, Lisa Janssen, Valerie Jean, Judith Johnson, Kent Johnson, Pierre Joris, Bhanu Kapil, Mary Kasimor, John Keene, Pratibha Kelapure, Kit Kennedy, Ali Khan, Helen Kiernan, Matthew Klane, Jacob Knabb, Shareen Knight, Virginia Konchan, Kathy Kubik, Donna Kuhn, Katie Kurtz, Kathleen Larkin, David Lazar, Elizabeth Lazdins, Andre LeMoine, Richard Ledford, J. A. Lee, Janice Lee, Genine Lentine, Ruth Lepson, Andrew Levy, Stephen Lewandowski, Deet Lewis, Robin Rice Lichti, Toni Asante Lightfoot, Malin Lindelow, Jennifer Lizak, Dana Teen Lomax, Carmen Lopez, Bonnie MacAllister, Bill MacKay, Jill Magi, Charlotte Mandel, Douglas Manson, Elizabeth Marino, Mario, Beth Martinelli, Michelle Mashon, Ginny Masullo, Bernadette Mayer, E. J. McAdams, Joyelle McSweeney, Gwyn McVay, Philip Meersman, Daniel Mejia, Miranda Mellis, Mark Melnicove, Nicky Melville, Philip Metres, Erika Mikkalo, Niki Miller, Caroline Morrell, Judd Morrissey, Robin Morrissey, Gregg Murray, Tim Musser, Beverly Nelson, Celeste Neuhaus, Mary Ni, Lynda Perry, Michael Peters, Allan Peterson, Andrew Peterson, Cindy Phiffer, Cecilia Pinto, Vanessa Place, Janna Plant, Deborah Poe, Kristin Prevallet, Paula Rabinowitz, Francis Raven, Monica Raymond, Marthe Reed, Timothy Rey, Margaret Ricketts, Rosalie Riegle, Andrew Rippeon, Christopher Rizzo, Jenny Roberts, Kenyatta Rogers, Anne Marie Rooney, Sarah Rosenthal, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Linda Russo, Becky Sakellariou, Lisa Samuels, Thomas Savage, Davis Schneiderman, Carrie Santulli Schudda, Susan Schultz, Steve Scott, Jeremy Seligson, Dennis Serdel, Anne Shaw, Lindsay Shields, Shu Shubat, Earl Silibar, John Simon, Laura Sims, Beth Snyder, Juliana Spahr, Cassie Sparkman, Donna Spector, Karin Spitfire, Christopher Stackhouse, Chuck Stebelton, Jordan Stempleman, Rachel Storm, Hillary Strobel, Renée Szostek, Stacy Szymaszek, Estelle Tang, Shaunanne Tangney, Gene Tanta, Michelle Taransky, Mark Tardi, Marvin Tate, Catherine Taylor, Michael Thomas, Tony Trigilio, Eric Unger, Nico Vassilakis, Marian Veverka, Matias Viegener, Erin Virgil, Anna Vitale, Gale Walden, Sue Walker, Julene Weave, Josh Weckesser, Natasha White, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, S.L. Wisenberg, Anne Woodworth, Clotilde Wright, Samantha Yams, Andrew Zawacki

Again, see for free the online PDF of this boo 4000 Words 4000 Dead & Revolutionary Optimism / An American Elegy: 2006-2012 at:  https://sites.google.com/site/jillmagi/Home/sona-books

Of Binaries and Avant gardes... Boston Review we thank you!

"Why do we have these labels that no one wants to wear?"--Samuel Amadon 

I admire the Boston Review's set of responses and reactions to Majorie Perloff's article Poetry on the Brink: Reinventing the Lyric which also appeared in the Prague-based review VLAK, issue 3, published in 2012, as Poetry on the Edge: Reconceptualizing Lyric (pp189-199). I also based much of my recent Tears in the Fence column in issue 56 "Of Tradition and Experiment" on Perloff's text as well--I suppose it was/is my contribution to the "Symposium" on binaries.

But here I want to react to a select few of the many other poets who are weighing in on this article--Of the texts which appear on this symposium site, there are a few which just make me EXCITED to be a writer and reader, and who seem to really be asking themselves, and thus me/you/others the "important" questions. Among those are Evie Shockley's "Loaded Terms", the smartly writen (what lovely language) "The Purposeful Lyric Life" by Sandra Lim, as well as Dan Beachy-Quick's invaluable reflective text on "The 'I' of Lyric" which starts in  "a terrain of instability—a lyric instability—in which such seeming oppositions overlap."

But three I would like to chat about a bit more in depth are below:

LYTTON SMITH:
One of the symposium articles I admired is the pearl that is Lytton Smith's "Pages and Soundscapes" at http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.6/poetry_binary_thinking_lytton_smith.php Here, Smith explores the limits of the sound/page binary as he states "All too often we treat poems as either written or spoken". Two of my favorite quotes from his text are below--I hope will make you all want to go read his text in its entirety online. Here, Smith reminds us of the inability to disentangle in poetry sound from sense, what is seen on the page from what is heard when we read or imagine it read aloud:

"Let go of the written / spoken binary and we find a spectrum analogous to Zukofsky’s “lower limit speech / upper limit music”: at one end, the material of printed words, set in place; at the other end, the possibility of unanticipated improvisation, of audition."--Lytton Smith

"...the poem has both physical materiality and soundscape, that we’re worse off if we can’t let these interact."--Lytton Smith

STEPHEN BURT:
A second essay I found myself laughing aloud at while reading his first paragraph's list of crazy binaries because he so rightly points out some of the silliness of all the massive number of binaries being debated in this supposed era of the post-binary is Stephen Burt's "Ways to the new" which is at: http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.6/poetry_binary_thinking_stephen_burt.php Here, Burt begins "So many binaries circulate in and around contemporary poems that I find myself running out of ibuprofen as I pursue the most useful." However, the binary he does settle on a decide to address is the concept of  "neo-modernism". :

" A neo-modernist poet makes art that tests the limits of “art,” requiring us to ask what counts as a poem, what counts as good, what we assume about art more generally, and whether we ought to reject our prior assumptions."--Stephen Burt (I include this because his definition is compact and smart and makes me also think about its validity--a definitin that is also an invitation to respond)

But in the end Burt will address those authors that fall into this category, trying to remind them that neo-modernism and looking for new newness is not in fact the only way to make edgy exciting new poems. I think this then is really a rejection of a formal nature, and of many of the poets I am personally excited about, and yet I do want to get on board with one thing that Burt reminds us all about: "Ecologists say that excitement, novelty, diversity, tend to occur at edges, but they do not always mean where water meets land; sometimes they mean where forest meets prairie or tundra, where mountains arise, even where cities end. We have all sorts of edges, all sorts of boundaries and opportunities, within the enormous territory of what poetry is,..."--Stephen Burt

SAMUEL AMADON
Some lovely historical reflections on the many debates about binariness appear in Samuel Amadon's "Hybrid Poets Exist" at: http://www.bostonreview.net/BR37.6/poetry_binary_thinking_samuel_amadon.php in which Amadon writes:

"...I see American poetry as a history of conflicts that have given shape to the poetry produced by the opposing sides."--Samuel Amadon

Amadon does point out the great danger we are facing, though, when he writes: "Binaries are inevitably going to be part of a discussion of an art form that is so often subject to conflict. But when those conflicts settle into long-standing camps, binary thinking becomes unproductive."--Samuel Amadon

But I do wonder if we are all even clear on the issue of what the real polemic is--is it really, as Amadon states, "—lyric-narrative / experimental-avant-garde—"? Because this looks to me like a binary between a red apple and a video of the apple--which he seems to point out quite smartly in the penultimate paragraph of his posted essay. The nature of the two sides are not for me antonymic, are not clear opposites--for me, as for Amadon I believe as well, many "experimental" and "avant-garde" poems are narrative and lyric in their own ways, just as many lyric and narrative poems can also be experimental--that is how we end up with book jackets which read "experimental memoir" or find ourselves talking about books like Memnoir by Joan Retallack, etc. So the issue is still one of how to locate the two items we keep wanting to place on Justice's scales to weigh against each other seeking hopefully a little balance and not superiority of one over the other. As Amadon suggests, better yet-- give up on trying to locate exactly what it is we are trying to pit against each other a do a little mixing as authors and readers--as Amadon concludes: "What to do? Crossover.":

"But I think that the crossover between these influences is a far more volatile experience: a conflict on the page that can lead our next poems in—thankfully—unexpected directions."--Samuel Amadon

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS--my own two cents?
Pretty much all of the texts on the site are well worth reading--even a few that merely enrage me with their own celebration of closing-off and rejecting a large mass of what I personally love to read (for if I do not read and know and listen to those whose voices oppose my own, what kind of person am I who asks those people to read and know and listen to the work I admire and which they feel opposes them?) So, I suggest reading all of these texts not only for their ideas, but also just to see the great variety of writing styles on a question such as this.

Isn't the fact that such a diversity in critical discourse exists--and that this diversity does not enrage and is readable to readers and writers of all kinds of poetry--a sign that the diverse poetries of poetry should also be "allowed" or "accorded" the same readership and respect? Because, for me, I find the main binary in poetry comes from a sense of readerships which are either closed to certain formal inventiveness or to a certain exploration of the "legitimized" traditions--as in, our risk is that we are not reading what is perceived as coming from what is perceived as another side, and that we then also do not know, dialogue about or respect at times the work of the wide variety of authors out there. 

The binary, however, is an illusion. For whoever resides today on the "powerful" readership side, oft called "mainstream", is in a position which is constantly shifting too. The line of the between is always in motion and is defined by the perception of the one reading, writing, publishing, etc. After all, the authors and poets I know are not asking themselves permission to write--they keep doing it because writing is like breathing for them, it is a prerequisite for living. And if nothing else this entire debate reminds us of one fabulous thing--POETRY IS MOST CERTAINLY NOT DEAD.

The final issue of ACTION POETIQUE, n° 207-210

Getting the massive 4-numbers in one final number of Action Poétique (1950-2012) is like watching the white whale being sunk, the gigantesque adventure of French criticism and poetry is being dis-activated (de-actioned, like decommissioned). (FYI: this photo is of the avant-dernier number as I have not found one of the new, final issue online yet) 

I only finally subscribed (instead of picking up a copy now and again) this last year and am saddened to see this review go. It brought me so many texts over the years--on Mallarmé, on American poets being read and translated into French, on Anne-Marie Albiach when I was working on my PhD on her work, that fun pink pink issue on Dada a few years back, and so much much much more. It is thanks to Action Poétique that I stumbled across certain French poet-critics for the first time (Pascal Petit, Liliane Giraudon, Jean-Pierre Balpe, Mitsou Ronat, Isabelle Garron, Frédéric Léal, Franck Venaille and others who have works in this final issue) and felt engaged and informed by what such French poet-critics were thinking over the years. This is a sad, sad day. 

As Hervé Martin cited on his blog announcing this issue as the penultimate arrived: "Pascal Boulanger a écrit en 1998  Une Action Poétique de 1950 à aujourd'hui, disponible chez Flammarion." For anyone who wants to hold onto the great legacy of Action Poétique, get a copy of issue 207-210 as it also contains a DvD of all the preceding issues (and their table of contents lists). It is thus an archive gift and a mournful wave farewell.

And also--for anyone in Paris who is wanting to get in a last hurrah with the editors and authors of the review, Michèle Ignazi bookstore is hosting a reading event with Henry Deluy and the editors of Action Poétique the 14th of May: 

 

A l'occasion de la parution de

l'ultime numéro de la revue

Action Poétique

1950-2012

 

rencontre avec

 

Henri Deluy

et l'équipe de la rédaction

 

le lundi 14 mai 2012

à partir de 19 heures

 

Henri Deluy présentera également ses derniers livres

L'heure dite

(Flammarion)

Poètes néerlandais de la modernité

(Le temps des cerises)

Manger la mer

Soupes et bouillabaisses à travers le monde

(Al Dante)

 

AT:  

Librairie Michèle Ignazi

17, rue de Jouy

75004 Paris

01 42 71 17 00

 

40's project mini-review 8: Bhanu Kapil's Schizophrene

I have unexpectedly become a fan of Bhanu Kapil's books these last years. One enters each through revisitation. Her texts are like places--you arrive as a foreigner, hesitant, seeing the unusual, the unexpected, but you continue to explore and reread lines and paragraphs and pages until you fall in love and feel at home in the world she has made for you.

Kapil's works have an immediate poetic draw where one encounters dazziling lines like in SCHIZOPHRENE (Nightboat books, 2011) "It's already late. A black world coming down from the heavens. Black with stars."(p9) A few pages get read over and over again, and then you are hooked. There is something hard to explain about how her works connect--they feel at once dense and loose, not unlike how her own personal blog functions--http://jackkerouacispunjabi.blogspot.fr/.

At work is collage, lines--and spaces between those lines--as she writes: "When it's rotted to the bone, the paper is covered with metallic fur, which is not paper. 'It was a contemporary voice that had the same power as a foundational voice.' No. It's a first line, then a second, the fragments overlapping with a visceral sound, where the pages stick. I unstick them to see. To read." (p58, Schizophrene)

We, too, as readers, unstick these pages, see and read, feel the visceral, the unexpected violence in parts, the beauty in others. We are jerked back and forth between them, and the surprise awakens some process in us--involvement, engagement.

What I found particularly interesting--and I have yet to decide whether I liked or disliked this tranparency--was that with this short work, Schizophrene, there is also a curious transparency of process--beginning with "Passive Notes" which introduces this book, speaking transparently about what the author had wanted (to write an epic) and how what is here came about through failure and rebeginnings (tossing out the notes--which later becomes line one of the text itself, "I threw the book into the dark garden."(p1))--and closing with her "acknowledgements and quick notes" which again reveals process by revealing encounters both artistic and educational (things learned, from whom) which helped this book come to be: "From cross-cultural psychiatry, I learned that light touch, regularly and impersonally repeated, in the exchange of devotional objects, was as healing, for non-white subjects (schizophrenics) as anti-psychotic medication. In making a book that barely said anything, I hoped to offer: this quality of touch." (p71).

For anyone interested in montage, collage, books of place, of journey, of language, books which are looking at the foreigner and a sense of home or estrangement--this is for you. It is delicate and fierce, and though small, is large in its scope and is magnified by its own need to be read and read again. Schizophrene, like Kapil's body of work, is a correspondance with its readers, opening in them to new spaces of langauge.

BOOKS received BOOKS admired: 40s project mini reviews 4,5,6 & 7: Matthew Cooperman's STILL, Vincent Zompa's MOONRAKER plus The White Review issue 4 and Mobile issues 1 and 2

I've had the beautiful pleasure of receving some amazing books of late: including THE WHITE REVIEW issue 4, the French art and literature review put out in Bensaçon by Montagne Froide called MOBILE album / international (issues 1 and 2!), the newest and very exciting book by Matthew Cooperman, STILL (counterpath press), and one of the waylaid but finally drifted-in-off-of-the-bookmaker's-table Dusie Kollectiv 5 chaps--Moonraker by Vincent Zompa.

For anyone who like me is coming late to the realization that The White Review is out there publishing a gorgeous lit mag but which is also an object, this is the time to get a copy. In issue 4, the marbled paper of Venitian fame lines the inner cover which has an outer sheath poster with a stunning image which has been smartly wrapped round the review--the outer poster painting image is by Landon Metz. There is also a poster insert by Gabrielle Beveridge. What I think I am trying to convey by mentioning this is that this art and lit review drops hints of itself all over its reader's life--"aesthetics matter", "making and the object link to the wor(l)d", "come on in, don't just slip me onto a shelf" it cries out. Once opened, the array of writings from creative work to critical reaction and reflection have been as attentively selected as the art work which led me in the door. 

Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself! Order at copy at http://www.thewhitereview.org/ Issue number four includes: Deborah Levy, Brian Dillon, Hannah Gregory, Ben Parker, David Lebor, Tom Chivers, Nia Davies, Jesse Ball, Nick van Woert, Orlando Reade, Michael Horovitz, Juergen Teller, Benjamin Eastham, Ray O'Meara, Andy Brown, Sarah Howe, Rye Dag Holmboe, Matt Lomas, Paul Hoover, James Brookes, Julie Brook, Robert Assaye, Ahdaf Soueif, Jacques Testard, Evan Harris, Landon Metz, Gabriele Beveridge. To subscribe, see: http://www.thewhitereview.org/subscribe/

The French & English art-lit review MOBILE album/international is no less lovely in ways, though it has a more classic art review look--slicker paper for the first 2/3rds and the clean edges to border all of the images contained within. The two issues I was so kindly given by the editors, including Michel Collet who will be part of the Lex-ICON conference here in Mulhouse in June, are on themes: 1) "in between" and 2) "on translation". The third issue I have heard may soon enter our universe--and it sounds like an exciting collection. 

Issue two announces that "Mobile is a French-American bilingual magazine, where a part of creation meets a part of reflection." on the Presses du réel site: http://www.lespressesdureel.com/EN/ouvrage.php?id=2319&menu= which details this particular issue. Some of my personal favorites from issue two include the wonderfully zany inspire-me to be wild images of the Franz Ehrard Walther retrospective "Werken 1958-1968" (pp118-121) including images not unlike this b&w sample of his I located online. There is something elastic in his world, both covered over and extending to contact. I am all for the play, and the connection. And I like the geometry of the fabric's movements as captured in thes photos. Another fave? The double-page color photo, Ludovic Zeller (pp56-57) entitled simply "Landes (France)" as part of the Olivier Leroi interview Zorro Noir / Zorro Blanc which follows it. Many other exciting works to read and look at in this gorgeous Mobile of images and texts.

As for Matthew Cooperman's Still: Of the Earth as the Ark which Does Not Move, I adored Gillian Conolly's assessment of it on the Counterpath Press blog. http://counterpathpress.org/still where she writes "“It’s as if, [....] in our still lives, in the still shots of cultural, historical and individual atomized memory, Matthew Cooperman is holding a Geiger counter, a microphone, a mixing bowl and a spatula, defying his own lines, [...]" Isn't it brilliant to think of an author defying his own lines? But more than that, on the black backgrounded, white-typo pages with lines by authors such as Hart Crane, Hesiod or Harriet Tubman (anyone seeing an H theme in there?) I admired the way the text seemed to be struggling to remind us of its own familiarity while Cooperman had blackened out / dropped certain letters, even words in certain quotes. What is there, where are the gaps leading, are these crumbs in a trailed following? Still. If we move, might we set another vowel loose, lose it? Or must we move, quickly stack everything onto the ark "which does not move" as his title says, in hopes of storing it. Or, are these parts of the phrases which have jostled loose from that storage ark, to come back? This is a book that invites thought. I have not even begun knowing how to take in the poems. For now, they are taking me in, and I am too within the experience to yet "review" or comment on it. Aside, of course, saying--you should read it too!

Finally, the lovely handmade chap, Moonraker, by Vincent Zomba. The electronic version is at:  http://www.dusie.org/ZOMPA%20Moonraker.pdf so you, too, can enjoy the poems. But my copy of the print/handmade book version has this great RED on the cover where the yellow image appears on the online version. I like my red one, somehow making me think of cartoon exclamations. The texts? Wild rethinking of how one can explore a single noun take place in this little collection, for example: "skin". Not the literal simple outer covering of us, but something of connected-disconnectives on a larger level, as in the 3rd version of the "title poem" (all but 1 poem in the chap are titled :MOONRAKER". In this version, the poem begins:  

        And then the skin phone rang

                and then the skin phone coaxed

                   to me or through me

       Of wafting of solitude of sorrow

                of saying

       I pick up a stick and turn

       it into a telephone 

                                      [...]

The poem here begins with an almost hardness, a slick movement, an unusual combo of skin and phone, but then there is the O of "Of" which comes and repeats as if in echo to the gentle "coaxed" as if its response, the of, of, of with the wavy rhythm of "wafting" "solitude" "sorrow" are like little wavelets of sound lapping up against the reader's ear before the reader reaches "of saying". What is being said? A passage. A becoming and disintegrating. There are the elements of everyday life that pepper these poems (as in nouns of place, flowers, trees, household objects, things), and the almost-familiar, (as in the delightfully unexpected: "the mules who bite the earth/and chew all night around me" or the normal slippers that suddenly find themselves making an odd noise, as in ""I brought you the buzzing slippers") and then there is something odd (as in "Stepped out of the wall / but couldn't stop yourself"), or more than that, something uncanny and threatening (as in "blue sanitarium flames" or "one child brazenly eating our leg"). And what lies between? The expression, or the possibility of it--of saying, writing "in our language of knots" as he says a few pages later. This possibility of expression, of reaching out of the mind, the mire of dream, to act in the tangible world, and thus, as Zompa ends another poem, it is not just that "I am positioned on a wind. I position a wind".

Well, those are my 2bits on the lovely books I have so graciously received of late. THANK YOU everyone. And more soon. Just in case anyone is interested--as you may have noticed, I have been adoring the discovery of so many fun visual text works as part of the Lex-ICON project http://lex-icon21.blogspot.fr/ --(the image at the left is from Andrew Topel's Book of Spells. Keep an eye on Lex-ICON for another of his text-images Friday March 30th when that gets published) and I hope everyone will keep checking that out during our 60 days 60 posts pre-conference extravaganza project. It has been a LOT of fun to be the poster for the last 10 days but after the next 2 the bar is passed off to Claire McKeown! I look forward to seeing the next batch of submissions as they light up my screen. 

Until then, tis off to PARIS again for--YEP--IVY WRITERS PARIS with Dusie Press publisher and author Susana Gardner, Sean Cole of NPR radio fame but who will be in Paris for the first time ever reading his new poetry, and to accompany them is Gilles Wienzaepflen, whose recent collection of poems from le clou dans le fer is one of the most delicate treasures I had the pleasure of encountering last fall. It will be a splendid night à Paris, so hopefully I will see some of you there? For more, see the newly revamped IVY blog at http://ivywritersparis.blogspot.fr/ Feel free also to join our FB group and respond to our FB event invite for Tues the 3rd of April's reading!

Books Received for 40s project mini reviews 2 & 3

"Wordlick" by Joe Ross (Green Integer N°184: http://www.greeninteger.com/book-digital.cfm?-Joe_Ross_wordlick-&BookID=292)

This new mini-book by Joe Ross published by Green Integer starts with the bang it carries all the way through--a mouth-puzzling soundscape is alive here, from the very start with the first poem's:

"The margin beginning in white helf fold wreck
Visionthinging again ramwording again
Sentences into being tensemaking strange" (p11)

This, Joe Ross' 13th book (is that his lucky or unlucky number? I might say lucky reading this--) is quite linguistically troubling in wonderful, constantly unexpected ways. It does give one a bit of a headache as the mind tries to jostle and jangle with these, as the logical brain tries to force some standard soundsense back onto a writing resisiting such things. But there are these breaths of clarity for the mind in the way these poems touch a tangible world--with an image from a walk, a mention of a place or animal or sky. But this is not the Paris Ross lives in that he explored in his previous book, instead here is a landscape of imagination, filled with the "Crapeating linetoss at sinkerbaited truckhop rodeo" found on page 29 or the "Mossheaded hitting lowfur tuliprise sunset / Slowstraining the unionjack in corporate sponsored naming debt" on page 38.

This is not one place at one time, seen in clarity, but like the nouns, verbs and adjectives rubbing elbows and clicking knees together, it is a mishmash of placetimesepochscountries that makes this book fabulously evocative and like some childhood dreambook, makes the reader imagine in unexplored ways. Yes, as he writes on page 29, this reader is in fact quite "Wowed again by the circusstripe catwalk jest" that is WORDLICK, a poetry book which has come to remind us that poetry is always here because we need inventiveness.

WORDLICK is the "Necessary invention filling lackcapacity gap" of which Ross writes on p 11. A fun book to carry round and listen to and glance in then relook at the world with these sounds, Ross' exciting language, pinging round inside our heads. THANKS JOE!

"The Institution At Her Twilight" by Caroline Crumpacker.

The lovely arrivals in my mailbox of little unexpected books from the Dusie Kollectiv 5 from 2011 has practically stopped. But here is one I am so thrilled to have received--for Crumpacker's poems reawaken in me the pleasure of feeling language move and question. These poems filled with the dailiness of living and reflecting on the past and present are poems with longish lines where gaps come in to interrupt certain lines and make me (the reader) and the author (I presume at least) look at what is taking place in that white--as in poem one:

"The night is 23 years and in that time I feel destroyed but unchanged."

I love the force of this line--and how the gap after "feel" allows me a moment to feel, a moment to see feeling in the space it occupies not as language but as another sense, one that is unlocated in the instant of speaking. The fraction of time also interrogates the distance travelled over 23 years. And then, when the word "destroyed" comes, emerges, is the other side of this white bridge, the gap echoes visually the destruction, the de-construction of the contructed life. Things are not changed--nothing was built, or the building returned again to dust.

Certainly, here I am stretching in many directions and the poems here have a lightness that contrasts which what I am saying, too, a momentum that keeps me reading on so I do not overthink and overfeel one instant in the poem but am carried onward by rythms which are at once natural but also attentive to a kind of hummming that comforts one when one is hurting. A humming that tries to be in tune with an ache and thus alleviate some of the agony of that ache.

These are poems which are trying to assess things--silence, nostalgia, loss, conflict, love, nature, the moment or moments we are in even now as we read or go off to do something else. I enjoy how Crumpacker's work is constantly naming and making conscious not only me but the poems themselves of their reflective process--so that reflection becomes both linguistic and image(imagined). These are poems where, as she writes "sentiment appears luxuriantly articulate." Again, THANK YOU!

To read Caroline Crumpacker's chapbook online, visit the Dusie Kollectiv 5 website: http://www.dusie.org/issue12.html and click on Crumpacker. Or else go directly to her pdf via:
http://www.dusie.org/Crumpacker%20-%20The%20Institution%20at%20her%20Twilight%20-%20Spreads.pdf

Of course, what you are missing is the wonderful cover on the version I received--a nice architectural drawing which echos the layers of the poems themselves--construction, deconstruction, the concrete and the abstract.

40s mini review 1: VIRAL SUITE by Mari-Lou Rowley

Viral Suite by Mari-Lou Rowley, Anvil Press, Vancouver, 2004

100 pages of cerebral-corporeal poetry are divided here into 5 subsections entitled Boreal Surreal, HomeoPathoLogic, Elucidata, InArticulations and Infiltration/ Transformation. Already in these titles the playful and articulate use of language and Rowley’s attention to capitalization are apparent. Each subsection includes a series of poems which explore in singular formal experiments the intricate interweavings of nature, body, scientific study/naming, life and the proximity of death.

The question of knowing becomes embodied and articulated in naming, delineating, knowledge and sensual contact and coupling with the other or the natural landscape in this book. For example, in Sex in Space Time—part of the Elucidata series where each moderately short lined free verse poem explores or elucidates a principle of physics or biology after which the author comments on the actual scientific property in an explanatory endnote—Einstein’s general theory of relativity is explored/critiqued in a universe of physical couplings. Rowley asks the reader to:

Consider the curve of space

the swell of a breast, the concave

bowl of belly pooling droplets of sweat.

It’s as simple as this, Einstein said

think of gravity as geometry, not

a force to be reckoned with.

A body freely falling […] (p47)

In the end, Rowley concludes:

Sex, gravity, quantum theory

are merely the play of

matter and energy, radiating

waves of photons dancing here and there

..........the pull and swell of bodies

.........in motion. (p48)

As elsewhere, the poem ends in a place where change is still taking place, things are happening, in part because of the rhythmic tidal swell of her language. Most often in this collection things are happening to bodies. Sometimes the body is awaiting its own demise or ravishment, as in these final lines from Cantharsis in the HomeoPathoLogic section: “Spread-eagled on the mossy floor/under a phalanx of trees/she waits” (p 25). Here the “she” is either waiting for the beetle powder she has presumably ingested to cause “pericarditis /death” (p 25) or for the powder’s side-effects, “frenzy, rage,” and her “inflamed genitals” (p24), to lure the man with the “budding pecs, the taunting cupola/ of crotch” (p24) to come couple with her.

In this deftly written book, Rowley’s sensual poems are at times less overtly sexualized and yet the poems are constantly imbibed with the intimacy of physicality in their precision of detail, their tantalizing word choices. As another Canadian poet, Lisa Pasold, would put it, these poems have amazing mouth feel. Reading, especially aloud, we taste Rowley’s delectable and at times complex Latinate vocabulary and these poems seduce us, lure us dangerously close to love or to an awareness that will transform us forever. Consumed in reading, we risk our own consumption by the world which surrounds us and which Rowley’s poems remind us is eternally awaiting to reabsorb us into its elements. For example, in “III” an untitled right and left-justified dense prose poem from the first section of the book Boreal Surreal, Rowley describes the intense attraction to a set of berries in the wild which are “not recommended for eating” as we learn at the end of the poem. Yet, like the poem itself, the narrative “She” “puts them into her mouth and begins to chew.” (p13) The berries are at once appealing and repulsive, absorbing thought—the warning in their bitterness, perhaps an old instinctive alarm signal, is ignored as the “she” of the poem tastes them. But the confrontation with an evident predator causes the surprisingly life-saving reaction of spitting out the berries. As Rowley describes this tasting of the forbidden fruit:

They form a dryish pulp, inhibiting mastication. The fruit absorbs her concentration. She doesn’t hear the other footsteps, contrived, stalking. The bitter fruity odour hypnotic. She feels a low growl emerging from deep below her larynx. Primal guttural vibrations of dorsoventral membrane. She turns to the sound of dead branches snapping. Spews out the bitter pulp. Its dark blood drips from her mouth. (p 13)

Here, one death is averted, and yet another will take place, witnessed by the speaker who will discover/ uncover the body. The “she” who is being saved from the consumption of the poisonous berries by an encounter with a (presumable) bear finds 3 weeks later “his body” “consumed by the forest” (p13). Yet the transformations, life to death, predator to prey, are not so easily delineable in this poem: the “she” transforms from potentially being a person consuming a poisonous plant which can thus consume her by killing her off to being (perhaps) a growling bear who “rears up, fearless” (as Rowley writes a little farther along). Thus the “she” may be in fact an animal confronting another predator—perhaps another bear—as a human is rarely described as “rearing up” so the question of where danger lies and who is in danger are increasingly complexified by these metamorphoses.

The book itself ends with what can be read as a place where global or even universal destruction is underway—or where, alternatively, phoenix-like this destruction will link to a rebirth. The final poem Casual Mythology IV states:

Hey big boy down here we’re

waiting for the long one, bombast, outroar.

Shafts of ion spray in the face.

Cummon. Throw it.

If you’re so pop-god high-energy luminous

let’s see some major cloud-to-ground strokes,

let’s feel those electrons jump,

those discharge papers burn

Zeus-baby,

burn! (p98)

Again, the reader cannot miss the sexily witty sensual(ized) language use, suggesting ejaculation in the “shafts of ion spray in the face” or the taunting but inviting-the-lover closer calls of “big boy” “Zeus baby” “Cummon” “Throw it” and use of “let’s see” and “let’s feel”. There is a dual big bang underway, and Rowley makes us laugh at the fun and funny obviousness of that combo. In fact, the final section of the book is chock full of playful language acknowledging its own popular cultural word spins on old-time Romantic notions of mythological gods, as “pop-god high-energy luminous” or “”Zeus baby” demonstrate.

What is fantastic in this last poem is that it takes Rowley’s ethical and aesthetic explorations of the individual universe, the self as held and contained in a body subject to its own always proximate mortality and frailty potentially on the verge of being returned to an elemental pre/post being state in the molecular and physical universe to a plane where that larger molecular, elemental universe is also subject to its own re-big bang—able to be discharged, recharged, split apart like an atom. Or else we can just read this as a call for lightening, the speaker yelling up to Zeus to send on down one of his big ionizing bolts (which again have the potential to char broil the individual mortal). So perhaps the earth, perhaps the speaker, perhaps the book and poem and thus “discharge papers” will burn here if Zeus responds to the speaker’s taunting. All this awaits to be seen, post or pre book—and therefore the reader again is reading, living caught in “this minute, each moment / a closure / a closed /loop.” (p85) as Rowley states in Nietzsche’s Lullaby where that closed loop is “resilient in / returning” (p85).

I, too, enter into or become that loop, returning to reread the poems of Viral Suite where I explore the interactions and curves and circlings of Rowley’s language, delecting in its sensual-intellectual gymnastics.

Viral Suite by Mari-Lou Rowley, Anvil Press, Vancouver, 2004 ISBN I-895636-58-2 ($16 Canadian or $12 US dollars on their website http://www.anvilpress.com/Books/viral-suite)