Column074 — January/February 2006
Visit to a Blog
Volume 38, Numbers 1-2, January/February 2006
Scense Reviews. Derek White. http://sleepingfish.net/Scense.htm.
Lyrical Eddies: poems after the music of marilyn crispell.
Jefferson Hansen. 65 pp; 2005; Pa;
Anomaly Press, c/o Lorraine Graham,
1401 North Street NW #601,
Washington, D.C. 20005. $23.
TELLTHISMUCH
Carlos Luis and Wendy Sorin.
20 pp; 2005; Pa;
The Runaway Spoon Press,
Box 495597, Port Charlotte FL 33949. $20 ppd.
.
Talk about laziness and outrageous ethics, this column is going to be mostly a quotation of someone else’s review–and of a book my press published! My rationale is that the review is a first-rate example of how to write an intelligent review (which has nothing to do with whether it’s positive or negative), and that the book reviewed (an entirely meta- commercial one) is one nobody else is likely to review but which mightily deserves to be reviewed. Without further ado, here is the review, Derek White’s “The Combinatories of Advertising,” which I got off the Internet from White’s excellent website:
“I was delighted to receive a new chapbook the other day, a (full-color) collaboration between Carlos Luis & Wendy Sorin entitled TELLTHISMUCH (The Runaway Spoon Press). Being that I have previously collaborated with both of them, I was personally interested to see how their collaboration would turn out, especially as what I admire about both of them is their sense of visual design and physical symbolism, and I was interested to see what sort of fish they would catch when their tackle boxes were combined.
“Immediately we are presented with the question, ‘What happens when ad makers take over all the popular myths and poetry? From here, language dissolves to a maze of synaptic association, physically linked and circled, giving the outward appearance of a Tom Phillips piece. But whereas Phillips steals new associations from old texts, Sorin and Luis fabricate their associations, though often from sampled or used materials–iconic pictures, found texts, headlines, symbols and other collagic ephemera–which they bounce off each other like charged pachinko balls in a dreaming brain. Rather than deconstructing, they are constructing, and combining in a wild game of chance.
“The meaning behind the resulting juggernaut is about as apparent as the underlying themes in advertising which they address, in that the jungle of symbolism triggers connections in your brain which you might not ever be aware of. Case in point, (in a piece in which) we are given veritable eye candy with the repeated disclaimer, ‘maltreat, his own eyes.’
“This combination or nodal styling is not new to Sorin (see some of the samples from our collaboration, P.S. At Least We Died Trying), but when combined with luis’ compounding lexicon–half borrowed from ancient hierglyphics and half-borrowed from the depths of ASCII assembly code symbols that don’t normally make the rounds in conventional ‘texts,’ they form something entirely different and compelling.
“I’m not sure what (one) image towards the middle of the chapbook is intended to be, but to me it looks like the exposed guts of a distributor cap, which is solidified by the repeated rearrangement of the letters P-L-U-G; as well as the recurring STAT red warning label, which not only conjures static, or statistic, but STET, the copywriters code for ‘let stand’ (in reference to an omitted or corrected word). The viscerally electric, yet eerily biological, image of a distributor cap is perfect for picturing how the synaptic ‘language’ itself works. The distributor cap in a motor is what makes the connections, shooting current out to the individual spark plugs which in turn fire their respective pistons, bridging the gap from ethereal, and invisible electrical energy, to physical mechanical energy. Not that you need to know this to drive a car.
“These are not things you are subconsciously aware of. So what is TELLTHISMUCH? It is a subversive advertisement for the loco-motion of language itself, the crazed propagation of dissociated ideas into the interstitial fabric of our gray matter to fuse and drip back together into new and novel language formations. And did I mention that it accomplishes this while still being light-hearted and funny?”
What makes this review a good one are (1) the precise description of the book’s contents– and, at Derek’s website, full-color reproductions of three of the works in it; (2) the wide range of connections Derek finds, and plausibly demonstrates the validity of; (3) his willingness to bounce his language into passages like “the sort of fish they would catch when their tackle boxes were combined” and “the loco-motion of language itself, the crazed propagation of dissociated ideas into the interstitial fabric of our gray matter”; and (4) its subject matter. Okay, no doubt I count that last a virtue because in this case the subject matter is something I was involved with. I have a better reason: reviews of value tell us about matter we would not likely find out about if not for them, they don’t tell us about Shakespeare and the current poetry celebrities like Vendler and Bloom’s writings. This is obvious such a review. Now, to cap my laziness, I’m going to finish this column by quoting a poem from Jefferson Hansen’s latest collection, Lyrical Eddies: poems after the music of marilyn crispell. Its title is “Rain”:
drumming on asphalt washing helicopter seeds into gutter & sewer green leaves vacillate like a gambler's mind & we sparrows huddle in hedges wait out the rain to flit again in clouds of our own making
The Issa sensibility this poem displays is prominent in Hansen’s collection, but his quirky mentality is capable of all kinds of registers, as in this from “How Not To Anaesthetize Desire”: “the duck crossed the road because of a category error/ the goose followed for the hell of it.” Hansen is another ridiculously too-little-known poet I wish I could do more for than these few lines. Try him, sometime.