Column 117 — May/June 2013
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The Latest from the Otherstream
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Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 5/6 May/June 2013
Addenda. Márton Koppány. 2012; 56 pp. Pa;
Otoliths,8 Kennedy St., Rockhampton QLD 4700, Australia. $24.95. http://the-otolith.blogspot.com http://www,lulu.com/spotlight/l_m_young
www.talismanmag.net
Richard Kostelanetz’s Fict/ions and This Sentence
(Blue and Yellow Dog, 2010)
www.talismanmag.net/finkkostelanetz.html
Back-cover blurbs are usually useless, but Sheila Murphy recently did one for Marton Koppany’s Addenda, that I consider good enough to quote here.
“Conceptual art can be bountiful, spare, even beautiful. With an economy of presentation, Márton Koppány’s work uniquely captures, invents, and refashions installations on the page from unexpected sources. His works run the gamut of humor, politics, and philosophy. Each piece offers a genuine gift of perception. With signature purity, works such as ‘Asemic Volcano,’ showcase the potency of word-free realities.”
At this point, let me break in to say that in “Asemic Volcano” a red question mark is rising from a red volcano that looks like a pedestal–two objects only against a wide violet background–“word-free realities,” to be sure–utterly word-free, which puts them utterly beyond reason’s best explanatory means . . . except for the question mark elegantly labeling the volcano the final enigma at its most minimalistically reduced state that Nature is. Reason may not be able to escape Nature’s eternal ambiquity, but neither can Nature ever free itself of conceptualization’s attempts to harness it. Along the same lines, I might add, is “Utterance,” which consists of just an empty comic-strip word-balloon in a small grey rectangle inhabiting a very large all-white rectangle.
Then there’s “Emptiness,” which is a white page with “ness” in cursive taking up a small portion of it followed by any arrow going to the right. “Vibrant with lui-meme realization,” for sure, as Murphy has it. “‘One Moment in Three Sections’ (or ‘Study’),” she goes on to say, ‘depicts a tiny triumph’” : that of a stick figure keeping a single moment’s “hurrah” (expressed by extended limbs rather words) in force for three frames of a little comic strip.
Murphy ends her blurb with an exuberant but, in my view, accurate reference to Koppany’s “Old Question,” and “Addendum.” In preparing us for ‘Still Life No. 2,’ these, she says, are “a final reminder of the inherent interconnectedness among all things. The recombinant majesty of Koppány’s genius raises the bar for what is possible in the infinitely expanding universe of visual poetry.”
“Old Question” depicts a huge period wearing the kind of hat most American men wore 60 or 70 years ago. A hand is coming out of the period that clutches the top of a question mark, using it as a cane. “Addendum” depicts two question-mark-tops juggling colored balls (or periods). The two, and others in the book, do indeed, set up “Still Life No. 2,” which may well be the most complex minimalist work in this long-ongoing series of Koppany’s, involving Nature, punctuation, colors, even arithmetic (so slated for an appearance one day in my Scientific American blog if I can afford the fee I’m sure he’ll charge me) and too much else for me to say more about it here.
As I was working out some close readings of Marton’s work for one of my Poeticks.com entries, I was reminded of my friend Richard Kostelanetz’s recently calling me better (ahem) than anyone at close-reading innovative poetry after a visit to one of my Scientific American blog entries. I replied at the Internet discussion that Richard had made his remark in that if I was, it was only because almost no one else was doing close-readings of innovative poetry. At that point others brought up names of quite a few who were, and were doing it well–although still not a huge number of them by any means. Among those mentioned was someone I wasn’t aware of, Thomas Fink.
I got into a pleasant Internet conversation with him, learning of his having done a review of a book of Richard’s for Talisman, an excellent literary magazine that’s been around for quite a while, with now an online version anyone can refer to. Because it gave me a good excuse to plug a work of Richard’s to pay him back for the compliment, but–even more important–to allow me to bring attention to a good critic of otherstream work, and to the value of close-reading, I thought I’d quote what Fink wrote.
“Blue and Yellow Dog Press has published two books in one by Richard Kostelanetz,” Thomas’s review begins. “Each starts on a different side and is upside down from the other.” In one of them, Fict/ions, words are shown infraverbally divided by slashes into two or three inner words–“boo/me/rang,” for example. About this one’s narrative, Thomas says, “The sound of the flying object cutting through air is a ‘ringing’ (not subtle) denigration of the first-person narrator, perhaps because s/he is foolish to use such a dangerous implement. Also in a reversal of the startling transformation of ‘manslaughter’ to ‘Mans/laughter’ through a delayed slash, surprise is engendered by Kostelanetz’s decision to place the first slash one letter earlier (“boo”) than one would expect. I generally hear ‘boom’ in ‘boomerang’ but not ‘boo.’”
I tend to like most those of Richard’s fissional poems (as I call poems like his fict/ions) in which a change of punctuation is even more dramatic as in “Char/is/ma,” to which Thomas brings our attention a little later. “Similarly, the tangible result of a mother’s tragic (tragi/comic, I would say) burning in ‘Char/is/ma,’ he says, “is not evidence of the charisma that she might otherwise possess. The sonic disjunction echoes the thematic one. The juxtaposition of the single word and the three smaller ones indicates a displacement from a unified ‘hot’ or ‘glowing’ psychological quality to the disintegrative effect of actual heat.”
I would especially commend Thomas not only for his close-reading but for the many times he quotes Richard’s material–his “I/nun/dating.” and “Be/aches,” for instance. Or “Does not an encyclopedia of the world inhabit this sentence?” which is from the other book of Richard’s double-book, This Sentence, pointing out how effectively the word, “encyclopedia” in the sentence provokes a reader “to create a fragment of that encyclopedia.” To put it banally, lo, the power of words–if a poet disturbs a reader’s expectation enough to make him truly reflect on them.
Here are three more of Richard’s sentences to finish pinning down what he’s doing, and because they’re fun:
This sentence is syntactically correct. . . .
This sentence correct syntactically also is. . . .
This sentence not correct is syntactically.
And then there’s possibly my favorite: “Clumsily is this sentence organized unfortunately.” Thomas make several choice remarks on these and others of the “The Sentences,” but I’ve no room left to include them here.
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