PAGE HILL STARZINGER--MY WRITING PROCESS--BLOG TOUR

Thanks to Martin Woodside for inviting me to participate in this blog tour.  His own response is available here.

 

what am I working on?

My first full-length book of poetry, Vestigial, was just published by Barrow Street Press—it was selected by Lynn Emmanuel for their 2013 contest. So I’m working away from that book, to something new. I want to evolve, hoping that if I’m lucky enough to have a second book, it will embody a different reason for being. The poems in Vestigial are splayed and opened, eroded, reduced to the bone, restless. I’ve just started to write in a compact regularized format of long, across-the-page lines, and I’m trying to speak a bit more directly instead of only through juxtaposition. But they still feel like my poems: fractured in places, interwoven in others, a mix of personal and cultural that is elliptical and layered.

how does my work differ from others of its genre?

Someone else may be better at answering this. I don’t think about genre. Maybe that’s because I’m not in academia. I just write, and I try to keep my head down so that I focus and keep going. If I stop—it’s so difficult to start again. I was glad that on the vacation I took a couple of weeks ago I could write every day all day long. That’s ideal for me.

why do I write what I do?

It’s instinctual and automatic and necessary. I write a lot about nature, which is odd living in two cities, New York and Minneapolis. But living on an edge, say like Manhattan, on the ocean, there is an intensity to everything including the number of birds. So in many ways I feel more connected to nature. Two red tailed hawks live in Washington Square Park and we follow them on a video cam; I’ve gotten to know three sets of their children. Rosie, the mother, is a passionate hunter, I wouldn’t want to be a mouse in her territory. She seems a bit of a tomboy, but maybe I’m projecting. Bobby is a gentleman, and loves to bring her a sprig of greens or a flower, sit on the top of the NYU flagpole, especially as the sun sets and he’s washed in gold, copper and silver.

If I didn’t write I would be terribly unhappy. In fact I stopped for 20 years and since I started again I’ve been happier at work, and in my personal life. I think that if you don’t do what you are meant to do you will encounter regret, and a lot of misplaced frustration and anger. I turn to this quote by Louis Auchincloss to remind me to get on with it:

“A man can spend his whole existence never learning the simple lesson

that he has only one life and that if he fails to do what he wants with it,

nobody else really cares.”

how does your writing process work?

I have a full-time job, copy director at the beauty company Aveda, so it’s hard to find time during week days. That said, I spent six months getting up at 5 am. Now, I write all weekend long. If I stop for longer than a week, it’s terribly difficult to begin again. It’s even hard after a week. I think it would be a good idea for me to look at the poem I’m working on every day, say, every evening, and that would keep me more connected. I’m glad you asked this question, now I have a new way to stay with it!

I clip every day, whatever catches my eye I save, underline, investigate further online. I store these in vanilla folders and date them. They hand together in themes. They spark ideas as well as visits to galleries and museums which feed into general themes or initiate subjects. Sometimes I catch myself thinking the clipping won’t be of interest—but if I edit too much I find the folders then aren’t that surprising. It’s really following my instincts and trusting that there is something there.

I’m interested in substrates and shallows and coves that lie under or behind. I probably would like spelunking if I didn't’ feel claustrophobic. Oxford English Dictionary makes the histories, many obsolete, immediate—unfolding each word on the page back in time through their conflicting and dovetailing evolutions. Their new Thesaurus traces the meanings back. I like focusing small, on one word; within, flies out a macrocosm of life.

I often start by writing the first sentence with pen on paper. I like gel fountain pens from Staples right now. They flow smoothly and they have a black matte rubber shaft. Very comfortable. Nothing fancy.

____

Page Hill Starzinger lives in downtown Manhattan, and has worked for 30 years in New York as Copy Director at Vogue and Estee Lauder and is currently Creative Director for Copy at Aveda.  Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Literary Imagination, Volt, and many others. Her poem, “Series #22 (white),” was chosen by Tomaz Salamun for a broadside created by The Center for Book Arts, NYC, in 2008. Her chapbook, Un-Shelter, selected by Mary Jo Bang as winner of the Noemi Contest, was published in 2009. Her first book, Vestigial, came out in August 2013 as winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Prize.

MARY SZYBIST--"Incarnadine"--Reviewed by MARGENTO

Initially published here

Mary Szybist--Incarnadine--Mysticism by Means of Poetic Experimentation, the Worldly, and the Other

The recurrent motif impressively and proteanly reprised and refashioned by Mary Szybist in Incarnadine is the one of the Annunciation.  And one of the most unique “Annunciation” scenes is staged as “from the grass beneath them,” which not so much means that the ‘announcement’ is made by the grass, but that, unlikely as it may sound, the voice in the poem is the voice of the grass.  The grass beneath “them” who?—and them doing what?  What seems to be sure is that it is the grass beneath a possible (‘deconstructed’?) scene of the annunciation, or more precisely, under a “girl” with her “knees pressed into us”—us?, us the blades of grass—while an ineffable “it” hovers above and descends in a both powerful and flighty manner, barely “skimming the tips” of the grass but still cool form the clouds and making the air “itchy.”  Whether “it” be the spirit descending, orgasm and/or impregnation (by a man, since the fact that “the shadow her chin made/ never touched but reached just past/ the crushed mint” may speak of a rather ‘unholy’ position), or the baby being conceived, this is still not the annunciation, but the ‘consummation’ of what has been announced, the act itself.

“[We] held ourselves tight/ when it skimmed just the tips of our blades” says the unusual plural speaker, “it” being the wind of the spirit. And “holding tight” may be read there as pulling ranks, a possible emphasis on a symbolic community reinforced by the Whitmanesque motif with its both erotic and funeral connotations; plus the reference to the bard’s poetics of the earthly as the same as/ultimately fused with the beyond.  But Szybist’s is a community of poems rather than one of characters or personae, with mainly a variety—or, better, variations—of form, style, and angles on a certain theme in diverse contexts.  Charles Altieri in his blurb, after speaking of the nothing out of which presence comes and the “self’s reality,” confesses to feeling “at times that I am witnessing a rebirth of the lyric.”  What a wonderful compliment, but what the famous critic does not mention is that the context in which he witnesses the lyric’s rebirth is every now and then a substantially experimental one.  And indeed, Szybist has this rare capacity of professing a fervent lyricism along with (and in the most felicitous cases, when the recipe is not more obvious than the meal itself, precisely by means of) an impressive range of styles, forms, and approaches.

These things are actually shrewdly and sort of programmatically enmeshed together in the opening poem, “The Troubadours Etc.,” the title of which can be of course read as an expression of post-postmodern ennui, but also literally, the troubadours and the rest of other such… poets and poetries fusing the deeply lyrical/confessional/sentimental with form, experiment, and song or declamation.  The very first line actually encourages this latter reading rather than the former, as it tries to cast irony away —albeit temporarily and merely in a funny way: “Just for this evening, let’s not mock them./ Not their curtsies or cross-garters…”

And then the poem lithely veers to the landscape and, under the guise of journey notations digresses from ecological and farm animal treatment concerns to the clouds of blue and the messenger pigeons,

Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them,
the violet underneath of clouds.
Every idea I have is nostalgia.  Look up:
there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled—
darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound…

images that ultimately lead (in actually quite a traditional troubadour fashion, although of course in a different diction and form) to the speaker’s innermost feelings and deepest ‘anima’, still seen as shared with the other(s)—“And when we stop we’ll follow—what?/ Our hearts?” (author’s emphasis)

Szybist elegantly circumscribes in this poem the three main themes of the book: (experimenting with) poetic tradition, the (eco and/or city)scape, and the paradoxes of (encountering/approaching/describing/translating) the other.  For the latter, the overture comes at the end of “The Troubadours Etc.”—“…won’t you put me before you/ until I’m far enough away you can/ believe in me?// Then try and come closer—”

And the key metaphor for all these three themes is, as already stated above, the Annunciation, but an “incarnadine” one, that is, strongly colored by fiery emotions, and celebrated in the flesh only.  Yet in the flesh not in the sense of utter denial of the transcendent, but as the mainly if not the only way to have access to, or rather, as in the recurrently dislocated biblical scene, to receive the transcendent.

In one of the best poems (and also one of the most accomplished in terms of expressing the main concerns) in the collection, “Hail,” Szybist alternates couplets (in a book of great variety, the most frequent stanzaic pattern, maybe due to its psalmic connotations and elegiac resonance) with stand-alone lines, just as the speaker herself seems to shift from the voice of Gabriel to the one of the tapestry weaver depicting the scene to that of ‘the’ poet—“I sleep to the sound// of your name, I say there is no Mary/ except the word Mary, no trace…” is strongly allusive of Stevens’s “there is no life except in the word of it”—and finally to that of the poem as such.  The latter, containing, just like the introductory poem, masterful and relevant enjambments, testifies to its own completion and contradictory nature at the same time, perpetual and temporal/temporary, constant and in motion, a “momentary stay” finally engulfed again if not by confusion then by silence, even if meant to render an enduring image and voice: “…Mary, I am still/ for you, I am still a numbness for you.”

But Szybist’s poetry is actually never still.  “How (Not) To Speak of God” is a concrete poem in which the lines are arranged as the spokes radiating from a void hub, a solar symbol maybe that is frequent in so many cultures.  The first word in all of these lines and therefore the closest to the center is “who” (twice in the modified form, “whose”) an emphasis maybe on the personal God of the annunciation and Christianity in general, but also a smart way of embedding ambivalence in the poem—just as the title, these lines can be read both as assertive descriptions as well as questions.  But beyond such negotiations of meaning, there is a genuine fervor that really irradiates through both the diction and the design—“who should be extolled with our sugar tongues/ […]/ who saw the world incarnadined, the current flowing/ whose face is electrified by its own light…”

The author of such concrete poetry who also included a poem arranged as a syntactic tree diagram, erasure poems, found poems, poems composed of intertwined citations, ekphrases (not only of paintings but of family snapshots as well), later on in the book also authors a sonnet, “Annunciation: Eve to Ave,” whose stanzaic configuration and the rhyming scheme observed in the first quatrain are Petrarchan, but which, once reaching its volta, goes beautifully crazy, as a Mary subtly merged with Eve machineguns her amazement at the mystery of the holy experience to a hip-hop beat, playful, impudent, not forgetful of the power games informing not only (a woman’s) life but soteriology as well:

“And when I learnt that he was not a man—
bullwhip, horsewhip, unzip, I could have crawled
through thorn and bee, the thick of hive, rosehip,
courtship, lordship, gossip and lavender.”

On the facing page, in a totally different tone, a speaker (a possible far relative of Martha the sister of another Mary in the Gospels) overhears the annunciation from her kitchen; the angel is now a director shooting the scene for a movie since—“Mary, step back from the camera”—is what the speaker overhears while washing some pears in the sink.  The poetically ineffable is masterfully juxtaposed with a both subtle and overwhelming mystical experience, urbanized nature, contemporary family life, and their inevitable mediation by media.  But above all, this is the unforgettable music of the inclusive, lay and sacred chants poetry can now freely intone in the verse of the world’s most gifted young poets, mystical in the starkest bodily way, inexhaustibly experimental since relentlessly open to the other:

There were faint sounds
like walnuts being dropped by crows onto the street,
almost a brush
of windchime from the porch—

Windows around me evgerywhere half-open—

My skin alive with the pitch.

                                                            —MARGENTO

[Mary Szybist. Incarnadine. Minneapolis, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2013]

MARTIN WOODSIDE--MY WRITING PROCESS

Many thanks to MARGENTO for inviting me to this amazing tour blog, and you can see his response here!

1) What am I working on?  
I'm currently working on a series of poems about masculinity, tentatively entitled "Institute of Masculine Studies."  The series includes poems about fictional characters such as Dirty Harry, Magnum P.I. and historical figures, like the iconic thinkers described in Laertius's "Lives of the Philosophers."

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?  
Who else writes poetry about Magnum PI?  I'm even working on an appreciative mustache--so this is "method writing."

3) Why do I write what I do? 
Because it makes sense to me, and it's fun.  I once wrote a short poetic series on Frank Sinatra, and it was really liberating.  It allowed me to get into character, while at the same time getting my hands on something that felt real and true.  At the end of the day, these poems get a laugh, but they also offer a sustained meditation not only on American masculinity but my own complicated relationship with it.

4) How does your writing process work?  
Erratically.  I'm an academic as well as a creative writer, and sometimes these vocations nourish one other; at other times, they just get in each other's way.  Basically, the passing days offer a lot of brief windows that I try to make the most of.  I also have to watch a lot of old Clint Eastwood movies; in that way, you can say I'm quite process-oriented.

Martin Woodside

POET IN NEW YORK--GELLU NAUM--"ATHANOR"

Gellu Naum (1915 -- 2001) is one of the greatest European poets of 20th century.  He

started as an orthodox Surrealist, together with André Breton and Victor Brauner in the Paris of the 1930s, where he pursued a PhD in philosophy from the Sorbonne. After returning to Romania in the early 1940s, he embarked on a solitary and prolific career, riskily immune to the political agenda of the Communist regime. He reshaped surrealism by means of a mode-of-existence poetics that absorbed (often jocosely) erudite eastern and western references along with popular culture and the quotidian, thus managing to fuse a wide range of styles and dictions into a unique discourse, shamanistic and ironical at the same time. His verse contains varied infinities while staying mysteriously homogenous and enlightened by the pursuit of the same unmistaken path.

MARGENTO--My Writing Process--Blog Tour

Thanks to poet Amanda Earl for inviting me to do this.  She writes about her own writing process here.

1) What am I working on?

MARGENTO: I am working on a poem already (re)written by other poets.  More explicitly, I am currently working on a topological poem mapping certain places by means of poems by poets who (in conventional terms) have never been to those particular places.  I rediscover America and describe it by means of poems from writers (that is, travelers) who never reached it or never suspected even existed.  In mathematical terms, I define a mapping from various ‘foreign’ corpora of poetry to my own ‘familiar’ spaces.  The ‘foreign’ will thus not only become ‘familiar’, it will actually prove itself to be the only possible way to experience, operate with, and translate the latter.  The topographical by means of the topological.  Coauthored with other poets (that is, translators).  There is no self but the other, which is for ourselves to discover through the others.  My Bucharest a Babel of bible bootleggers and babbling poets.

Apparently independently from that, but not really, I continue my work on the project titled the “graph poem” (graph as in network of nodes and edges) now at a more specifically academic level, together with Professor Diana Inkpen and a few of her graduate students in Computer Science at uOttawa doing research on and developing computational poetry machine learning and generation applications.

Also, I am curating the Poetries & Communities Project here, and working with people on a couple of continents on the third MARGENTO album. 

Last but not least, the premiere of amazing composer and singer Bogdan Bradu's rock opera I wrote the libretto for--Masca Lumii--is due later this year.

2) How does my work differ from others of its genre?

M: It differs by the fact that it is openly and programmatically the same as the others.  And not (only) in the sense of Kenneth Goldsmith’s uncreative writing.  The problem is not being different or identical (no poem is the same with itself [just as nothing is the same with itself, since everything is a poem], and therefore, a poem that integrates poems as such is different from anything else anyway), the problem is how much and how representatively a poetry can absorb, integrate, and process (from) others.  Poetry nowadays must be an n-dimensional verse space, as its form and composition inevitably involve the links and commonalities it discovers, explores, and develops between ongoing poetries.  Its writing is a form of reading, and reading it is getting involved in its process of composition.  The map of the graph poem is the meaning of our world’s poetries, and that meaning is the generation of the graph poem. 

3) Why do I write what I do?

M: Are you kidding me?  Okay, well, maybe in certain respects, as Swift once put it, “for, what though his head be empty, provided his common-place book be full.”

4) How does your writing process work?

M: Whenever I get started I realize (I start hearing) a lot has already been going on and all I have to do is join the jam session and try and not embarrass the others.  The better I fit in—especially when doing my solos—the better I get to know them while making myself heard: that’s my way of being ‘original’, as a full time traveling translator.  And when I think I’m done, I discover (I start seeing) how things have already started to branch out across a wondrous new community of familiar voices: that’s my kind of ‘conformity’, sharing after-hours the form in which the others translate my own communal work.

Next week's blog tour participants are:

Felix Nicolau is the author of four collections of poetry, two novels, and five books of literary and communication theory: Homo Imprudens, 2006; Anticanonice (Anticanonicals), 2009; Codul lui Eminescu (Eminescu’s Code), 2010; and Estetica inumană: de la Postmodernism la Facebook (The Inhuman Aesthetics: from Postmodernism to Facebook), 2013; Fluturele-curcan: specii ameninţătoare (The Turkey-Butterfly: Dangerous Species), 2013. He is on the editorial boards of Poesis International, The Muse--an International Journal of Poetry, and Metaliteratura.

Martin Woodside is a writer, translator, and a founding member of Calypso Editions. He’s published five books for children, a chapbook of poetry, Stationary Landscapes and an anthology of Romanian poetry in translation, Of Gentle Wolves. Along with MARGENTO (Chris Tanasescu), he edited and translated a collection of Romanian poet Gellu Naum’s work entitled Athanor and Other Pohems. Martin spent 2009-10 on a Fulbright in Romania, studying contemporary Romanian poetry. Currently, he lives with his family in Philadelphia and is a doctoral candidate in Childhood Studies at Rutgers-Camden.

Raluca Tanasescu is a PhD student in Translation Studies at University of Ottawa and the translator of 11 volumes (fiction and non-fiction), as well as of many poetry selections. She is currently working on her doctoral research project titled Songs of Globalization: Trans/Inter-Cultural Patterns in North-American Poetry Translated into French and Romanian. 

GELLU NAUM LAUNCHES SOON IN NYC & PHILLY--translated & performed by MARGENTO & WOODSIDE

ADAM DICKINSON--THE POLYMERS--reviewed by MARGENTO

 

initially published on the MARGENTO website @ uOttawa HERE

Adam Dickinson--The Polymers--or the Poetry-Chemistry Continuum

Reading Adam Dickinson’s new book is quite a challenge.  The title sounds like a chemistry treatise, there is no contents at the beginning, and the interiors abound in chemical diagrams, symbols and illustrations, notes and lists, indexes and methods, etc.

Okay, says the intrigued reader, let’s start at the start—the first poem.  The disparate images seem to come from a refracted seascape filtered through a series of what could be a number of carefully hidden (sometimes ironical) literary allusions—“Hail from inside/ the albatross” (Baudelaire and/or Coleridge), “coral beds/ waving at the beaked whale’s/ mistakes” (Shakespeare and possibly Melville), “Hello from the zipped-up/ leatherback/ who shat bits of rope for a month” (Zeno’s tortoise paradox sarcastically combined with Sextus Empiricus’ snake-rope argument?)—and a progress from the inner-subjective—or what could be conventionally called lyric (“the inside of the albatross”)—to the exterior world of consumerist and popular culture.

The short sinewy lines have most of them two strong stresses across a variable number of syllables, an accentual pattern that may represent the symbol “H” for the hydrogen molecule the poem represents on the polyester diagram the whole section draws, also present in the title—“Hail”—as well as at the beginning of every sentence in the poem, all starting with “Hello.”  One also comes across “Halloween Hulk” but other than that, “h,” especially as the [ h ] or [ ɦ ] sound-denoting letter, is almost absent.  Lost again?

From the argument/epigraph—printed on a semi-transparent-paper so that the two paragraphs can be read and seen through at the same time on both pages, although never as truly contiguous, since they are in fact printed each of them on a different side (and therefore somehow working as a Moebius strip)—we find out that plastic is “an organizing principle (a poetics)” for the “macromolecular arrangement of people and waste in geopolitical space,” and are thus presented with the metaphor of “social polymers,” patterns of our culture and politics.

And in a good Language and/or conceptualist tradition, such patterns are to be dug out of and explored through the language.  One learns, therefore, from the “Materials and Methods” section at the end of the book, that “Hail” is a “partial list” of “disintegrated greetings.”  Still, Dickinson not only disintegrates common formulations (is that really all he does there?) but also deconstructs literary/cultural commonplaces, in this case the opening traditional salutation/apostrophe of the classic epic—the Greek “Sing, O goddess” or, say, the Anglo-Saxon “Hwaet.”

Each of the poems in the section (and similarly in the following sections) correspond to a molecule on the polyester diagram (“Hail” for instance being the hydrogen one at the top of the central hexagon), but not in a predictable order—as the second poem for instance, is the last but one towards the right end of the chain of molecules, another hydrogen developed as “Halter Top (Translating Translating a Polyester).”  But the order of the poem-molecules is far from being the only element that renders the whole enterprise multifaceted and comically confusing.  The bracketed part of the title is, of course, a poetics in nuce of the book in its entirety, therefore speaking of a (molecular) sequence of chemical-cultural diagrams translated into letter (lettrist?) symbolism and then into poems.

Still, from the ‘explanatory’ section at the end of the book (in itself a funny, captivating poem) one finds out that the lines of the poem are actually all anagrams of the letters making up the name of the substance at stake—“polyethylene terephthalate”—hence, a, e, h, l, n, o, p, r, t, y.  The outcomes are fascinating, as the ‘game’ ranges from Mother-Goose-like sing-song lines and tongue twisters, “Let the python plot the thorn/ Let the hornet paper the tree” to surrealist ecopoetic riffs, “Nylon antelope threaten the Tylenol people,” to a baffling (al)chemical, geopolitical, and digital-age restaging of the tree-of-knowledge scene:

Her teeth apply to the planetary apathy.
They are polar, they are throttle,
the error apparent
to the hyperreal
apple

with, among other things, a dart thrown at the multinational computer company in the last line.   The composition principle and the resulting baroque-surreal imagery work here (and not only here) towards, of course, a parody of Christian Bök’s Eunoia (in its turn a parody in so many respects), but while the latter’s main allegiance may be with Oulipo, Dickinson is adept at the magic philosophy of Pataphysics, which he fuses in his own fashion with biosemiotics, new media, and industrial chemistry or—when for instance reading another author’s text and counting the letters with most occurrences, then treating them as chemical symbols and drawing the corresponding substance diagrams—not pataphysical but “patachemical” lettrism and cabalism.

Actually, in a recent essay on Kenneth Goldsmith (J. Mark Smith, ed., Time in Time. Short Poems, Long Poems, and the Rhetoric of North-American Avant-Gardism, 1963–2008, McGill-Queen’s U Press, 2013), he describes Goldsmith as “a kind of environmental scientist” that through his writing/recording techniques “illuminate[s] the membranes and structures through which information from and about the environment” (135, my emphasis) is processed.

It seems to me that if in the statement above we read the “structures” as polymers, we actually have a remarkably accurate assessment of Dickinson’s own poetics.  Moreover, if to that we add the proposition in the same essay to consider “the link between poetry that imagines itself as science (pataphysics) and science that imagines itself as poetry (biosemiotics)” (ibidem), we most likely obtain the most genuine key to the multiple layers of meaning in Polymers.  As a matter of fact, the typical pataphysical facetiousness and sarcastic humor are present in the very presentation on the back cover where we are announced this is “an extraordinary science project performed at the nexus of chemistry and poetry” (added emphasis).  This “science project” really combines poetry imagining itself as science and science imagining itself as poetry, since the “protocols” followed in writing the first poem (“Hang-ups”) in the “Polyethylene” section are: “Hiding behind humor can be dangerous applause in the hands of an addict.”

Maybe indeed, what “hides behind the humor” is a radical warning regarding the pitfalls of conformity in all walks of life, science and ecocriticism included (for not accounting for subjectivity, and the implicit scientific realism, respectively).  The only risk is for the reader who is even more skeptical than that to see in Dickinson’s pataphysical copious playfulness just the ‘joke(s)’ and, ultimately, an art-for-art’s-sake kind of accomplishment, since the criticism of everything can be seen from the other side (of the Moebius strip) as the critique of nothing.

But the poet does not flinch, and the stakes go higher and higher as he dauntlessly keeps adding new dictions, new puns, new facets, and, what is probably his strongest trump, ever shifting angles.  In one of the strongest pieces in the collection, “Chemgrass,” a fast-forwarded cartoon-style sex scene crossbreeds domestic “doing it” with home decor and surrealist vegetal-animal-parts and clothing and (heretically rendered) theology (and of course media and sports and politics) and what not in a deafening language blender (with a blown up diction) that will not (be) stop(ped) until the all-gulping poetic chemical grass (or “pot”?) is fully brewed:

… We shag all the flies
in the ripped-up scouting reports
from the dead-ball era.  Sunburns calisthenic
elbows and knees, exorcising exercise
with the double-stolen gnosis
of Clement of Alexandria, who declared
that for wedding performed on shag carpet,
the benediction remains in the dirt…

And so the sarabande goes on, reaching and then leaving behind fractal lines (oops, I almost said modular… ars poeticas)—“I field birdseed”—as the posthuman poetic catalyst consistently eschews any single-minded political critique: the “carpetbagging sentimentalists” commandeer the spot on the forehead needed for… faking.  It is not the ‘message’ or the attitude (of an “us” gradually obliterated anyway), but the configurations and maps of “geopolitical spaces” of waste(d) language.

Dickinson’s is therefore a fierce challenge, whereby, in spite of the apparent playfulness and exuberance, verse is actually confronted with (scientifically speaking) certain draconically stinted prospects.  Our age’s poetry thus becomes a huge mimesis and an ‘against-nature’ automaton at the same time, the most democratically inclusive manipulation orchestrated in ineffective elitist ways, an n-dimensional joke, vulgar without being popular, arcane without being revelatory.

But only a poet with an incredible vitality can make that compulsively apparent, one that, in a recent interview, has (paradoxically?) stated, that poetry is more relevant than ever.

                                                                                                             —MARGENTO


[Adam Dickinson. The Polymers. Toronto, ON: Anansi, 2013]