Something Solid, unlike Apparition Poems, is a book which knows its place. The God-forsaken quality of the poems strung in numbers is replaced by a sense of consolidation with the core values which render poetry useful for most literary landscapes— incidents and situations chosen for interrogation, involving the poet in memory, sensuality, and the formality of the traditional sonnet (and newfangled double sonnet, twenty-eight lines); a downward curve, as it were, into these topos, rather than an upward curve into serious philosophical discourse. What would make the book more than a curiosity (or, perhaps, anti-curiosity) to such discourse, is a Barthes-ian acknowledgement of a basic literary principle which philosophy finds distasteful, but which nonetheless has and will always dictate individual literary economies— we tend to read and re-read what we find pleasurable to read and re-read. The pleasure principle inhering in texts and textuality may dictate that Something Solid, despite its not being angled in a strictly original way, will be read and re-read with more pleasure and avidity than Apparition Poems, which most, including discursive types, may choose to respect from a distance. The version of poetic memory explored here has as its ensign an engagement with two periods in time, one place specific— the Nineties, and Aughts Philadelphia. Built into the book’s willfully conventional dynamic, is the imposition, on these periods, of an aura of romantic chaos, of the possibility of the poet’s consciousness, in medias res in the appointed zeitgeists, conflating internal with external vicissitudes, so that the book resonates as both completely personal and ripe for universalization. The poet stands within the text and its dramas, a self-conscious synecdoche.
Where sensuality is taken in the text is to a locale configured to purify and transcendentalize its manifestation into an emergence of imaginative, dramatic reality. Bodies are not seen as real but hyperreal; the carnal acts as a portal into its own effacement, into the larger existence of Eros as an idea and ideal to mystify the objective, express the effacement also of objectivity into immediacy, drama, and the aesthetic establishing its own, rightful claim on aestheticized language, in as ideal form as the text will allow. Imagination in the text establishes its own body— possibilities glimpsed, starting from sense. Undulant, an early standout from the text, performs this task— layering sensual and imaginative data, the tactile over and under the imaginative, so as to solidify, both pleasure in the text for capable readers, immersion in time-zone or zeitgeist awareness, and formal innovation for what peregrinations can be compressed into fourteen lines. This ambitious task subsists past the manner of Keats and Wordsworth, in their respective sonnets, into a Neo-Romanticism of all these conflated elements, coalescing in simultaneity. Not philosophy, but not simple either. Frequencies begins from more sophisticated ground— the meta-aesthetic— one artist addressing another. Then, the poet’s imagination somersaults into an assaying of the imagination of the Other. That the meta-aesthetic manifests alongside a raw revelation of carnality makes Frequencies ring out or emanate, with a Manneristic, perhaps, sense of exaggeration, on double, triple, and quadruple levels.
The text’s extensive immersion in visual art, through the prominent placement in the text of Mary Evelyn Harju, Abby Heller-Burnham, and Jenny Kanzler, tilts the text towards a perpetual sense of ekphrasis, as an owned level. This level achieves a status of semi-dominance, developed along semi-dominant lines. The semi-dominance of a travelogue sensibility, from Philadelphia to New Hampshire to Montreal, is also developed in tandem. The grounded quality of the text, against Apparition Poems, answers perversion with exuberance, a haunted house with an eternal salon, down to a series of Creatrix muses who imbue the text, as has been said, with ekphrastic intention. This coloring or imbuing culminates in Starlight I and II, a miniaturized dialectic that takes (as Equations does not, exactly) the mysticism of romance and intoxication and confers judgement or an answer on the pursual of such, amid darker material. The objective is thus established as one aegis for the subjective to sit under, in a text which takes its stripes both from the cognitive and post-cognitive.
The sonnet, as a poetic form, is traditionally an enemy of philosophy. Brevity and compression of data are both adversarial to the development of discourse and discursive contexts. Why the sonnet here was chosen and set into dynamic motion was to undo preconceptions regarding what the sonnet’s possibilities are, in practice, if hinged to an imaginative premise. For the book, the poet invented a form— what he calls a
double sonnet— one sonnet atop another, as a twenty-eight line poem, rather than a fourteen line poem. Precisely half the poems in
Something Solid are double sonnets. The expectation horizon of twenty-eight lines is, or can be construed to be, radically dissimilar to the original mere fourteen. In twenty-eight lines, the little song, angled against intellectual expansiveness, takes on a new stripe as a vessel or vehicle more pliant, more nimble, more about widening parameters so that memory, sensuality, and drama, have a stage to perform, do their tricks on, both adequately lit and adequately built to support their weight. Yet, the precision of the form— twenty-eight lines— renders some compression necessary, so that the traditional sonnet geist of willing confinement, enforced brevity, and the phenomenological tension which ensues, for both poet and reader, still imposes that poetry remains poetry.
For Something Solid to transcend the merely tautological— poetry being poetry, long-established tropes within poetry digging in their respective heels to reestablish their subsistence— the combination of elements which inhere in the text must gather themselves together and travel, as if thrown with substantial velocity, to a unique gestalt locale. The locale, as a congeries of all its component parts, is crystallized, in miniaturized form, in Undulant and in more representatively newfangled form in Frequencies— the charm, sense of transgression or danger thwarted or neutralized, and frisson built into a life, unconventional amidst all the conventionality, consecrated against bourgeois pursuits. The poet is not domesticated. Rather, in his travels, the pursuit is for the richness of flight, and the phenomenology of flight, travel, as an end in itself. The poet, as an arrow flying through spaces at any moment enchanted or damned, is in love with the very principle of dynamism perpetuating itself. What gravitas is expressed, what objectivity is reached for, has to do with an understanding reached, through the composition of the book, what human life can offer to this form of consciousness, which craves a mien of the unsettled. Here’s how motion or dynamism is achieved, here’s how pieces may fall around it. The rogue poet is no one new, to be sure. This rogue poet is not attempting to be new. What he wants is a new kind of textual voyage, for himself, to mirror and ricochet against, and thus enhance, his fleshly voyages.
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