THE LANGUAGE OF LOVE IN THE LIGHTHOUSE
Christopher Fritton, "My Fingernails are Fresnel Lenses"
sunnyoutside, Buffalo, N.Y. 2008
ISBN: 978-1-934513-06-4
Limited Edition 250 copies.
Hand-set, printed, and bound.
Reviewed by Kemeny Babineau
Christopher Fritton’s poetry is a Fresnel lens, a focusing of body and mind in language. When I read Fritton’s poetry I emit light. I think the words the poet wrote when he lost light emitting words. When I cast my light upon Fritton’s poem the black ink absorbs the light and the blank space around the letters returns it as a reflection of what I reflect upon,and in reflection move on, shining.
“My Fingernails are Fresnel Lenses” is based on scientific fact, so what seems to be a metaphor or surreal observation is not. Fritton’s poetry is clear and focused, a sustained building of images into metaphor. Poetry is light; language is a Fresnel lens, or is it the other way around: see? This is the kind of confusion Fritton avoids by not making those metaphors, the making of the metaphor is up to the reader. What Fritton does do with his pellucid verse is provide as coherent an argument as I’ve seen that the creative process is generated from within, in essence. Curiously, this invites the metaphor of the lighthouse but it isn’t a metaphor as we are lighthouses, creators of light, and like lighthouses we have the pre-requisite Fresnel lens to focus our array.
Fritton’s poem is a testament to the prolific distance art can travel when it travels light. It is also a love poem, and a wonderful one at that, you’ll love it.
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PORCUPINE LOOKS BACK
White Porcupine, Phil Hall, BookThug 2007. 20$
Reviewed by Kemeny Babineau
White Porcupine pushes language to the edges of being, or the edges of being into language. Frilled with word quills the poet pricks the self and pierces the flesh of an other. This is a verbal assault on the past, and on language, a writing of a wronging. The reader is snowed under early on, thrown into the storm of the text in medias res, but the poet leaves enough lifelines for the reader to get out from under the avalanche.
My father and I are driving at night into a great white porcupine that would be just
deep weather if we went any slower
because we hate each other – but really we love the porcupine more
low-beams tapping for a map – as the white porcupine buries (Hall, 18)
Formally, White Porcupine is a haibun, or a variation on such. The journey Hall takes, which is emblematically expressed in the image of the snow’s white porcupine, is an artist’s journey of self-discovery. The poet, who is turning 50, is very present in this work, but in a less consciously self-conscious way, or as Malcolm Lowry wrote “not all who look would be narcissus.” This is a text that plays very much with appositions; there is rage and malaise, vulnerability and play. The defining image of the poem, which is an optical illusion (i.e. an image embedded in alternate versions of itself), comes at you on the white page in black lines as an inversion of itself. What’s turning here is the inside out, or the outside in, where a backward glance sees forward from the past. Perspective is the eye of the I at the storms center, filled with weather and whether, sociology and psychology; and like all good poetry it takes place at the interface, the membrane between the outer universe and the inner one. The books opening quote from Theodor Adorno: “incomprehensibility is confession.” prepares the reader for the bewilderment that follows, but there is a great deal of order to the book as well. Structurally, it spins off of a six-line seed poem.
older than my heroes got
sold a whittled role for touch
fold within green fold my doubt
not suicidal / not joyous much
bought in to finagle my own way out (oot)
ovoid rampage / muzzled hoot
Each line of this revelatory and enigmatic poem serves as a subtitle for the six sections of the work. Untitled, this poem appears first, pre-sequence, and acts as a framing device, making the content of the subsequent poems a disquisition of the original poem. There is an outing, inning by ining.
Over all this is an impressive series of poems that reaches back to the voice of Trouble Sleeping (Brick Books), but what makes White Porcupine a stronger work is the flexibility of the publisher. Incorporating Hall’s penchant for found objects into the book is a profound statement on the superiority of the small press and the small print run. Not that Trouble Sleeping isn’t a gorgeous book, but that White Porcupine is interesting as a book, but really, I can’t say more than that –without spoiling the effect.
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For more information go to the BookThug link in links menu.
Reviews of LRB authors
-Minus 45: Some Days in Winter.
John Barlow. Published by
Laurel Reed Books, 2006.
Is everyone a skeptic these days? Are we even skeptical of skeptics: as
though they were sceptic? Believe it or not. I was asked: “is this
literature, though?” A meaningful pause, followed by a thoughtful though.
John Barlow has long been a skeptic, and thoughtfully so, even hopefully, at
times, and going on, since the 14th century at least.
Now it’s in Toronto, winter there on a bicycle is like “-Minus 45”
anywhere else. Winter writer. The artist at work is saying, experience is
art, living in it. Maybe always is at a start. Or this is the beginning and
the end of the Romantics, who can never end, of course, having started.
Thus. These poems and scattered drawings, photos and odd collages are the
vertiginous moments of art, where a happening happens, by and large. Again.
True to life Barlow cycles on. Willfully unwillful, and unwoefully so.
“-Minus 45” is aware of history, and its bargain with the future, but
refuses to bend to any such brands of despair. Knowingly, these poems
chortle on; but not headlessly or heedless. If you’re looking for the cause,
look around. What have we done?
And what have we here, but the politically aware and responsible. Barlow
bucks all notion of tradition, but delivers it none-the-less. Here is the
protestant (as in protest) and the bohemian, the uncompromising artist of
anti-art. The philosopher and the fool, and both of them saying: “I believe in
free will even beyond time” (-Minus 45.)
This text acts largely as a journal, a tracking of days, observations,
but it is also an undoer of meaning. This. Is another thing. “Chaos is
highly regarded in my ultimate mind (-Minus 45”). But Barlow is concrete,
and in his beliefs. Living in downtown Toronto, immersed in various literary
scenes, and supportive of, while baulking, the whole social gambit about.
Oddly. These poems are confessional, obfuscating and revelatory. You cant
read them without growing to know the mind and the man who created them, or
knot , as a whole, deconstruction reconstructs. This is the project. You
should get it. Real. Soon.
Elijah Wahn, Smooth Town.
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Films and Poems, John Barlow: LYRICALMYRICAL, 2006.
Reviewed by Kemeny Babineau
This is a wonder fully fun book. Films and Poems presents some of the most lyrical writing of John Barlow. This is a spare and reserved selection from one of Toronto's most prolific writers of the underground. What Barlow does with this handful of poems is showcase his talent for continuously circling the square, for arriving without getting there, being in and out of time. To me the long distance journey these poems seem to track are the soul flights a shaman may take. To read these poems is to witness the double handed melding of dimensions. I say double handed here for more than the obvious reason, it is also a nod to method. Barlow has long been a proponent of automatic writing, typewriter style. But not automatic writing without immersion, after all, and then some, it is the experience that counts. What Barlow achieves, is the modernist stance of the contemporary artist "sitting self consciously clothed only in a shifting veil of method." And isnt this what we've long known, and un? That art is the movement of soul, and that motion is one towards the other, another. Or, as Barlow puts it in the Foreword to "Films and Poems: "Poetry would have dealt with all these things centuries ago, and probably already had." But this was then, and that is lost. Films and Poems gathers up the broken methods of western literature and harkens back to a time before the cracks began. These poems are like a flash into pre-history snapping forward into the future's present tense. Always moving, these poems refuse the embalmer's craft. What Barlow's work is about is preserving that, these, moments of life but doing it so perfectly outside of perfection that the subject is never subdued but allowed to exist in its natural habitat, unfenced, unhindered, but considered, thought of , as is, and un.
You attempt to breathe
in this atmosphere.
Thinly.
Is it the chronological subdivisions,
the talk of schools, styles,
the analysis of themes,
the final
dressing of the corpse
in carriable form
that makes
immortality?
With these poems Barlow achieves, despite his works delayaled nature, the broad ellipse of time. And this is done thru technique. By its very nature automatic writing relies on ellipsis (how else for the words to find their way?) or it discovers such as this is how the mind works when operating in an elliptical universe. So these poems are crafted and crafty, but technique never gets in the way of origins or inspiration. The poet takes pains to illustrate this by preserving the odd typo and misspelling, and new words, from the original draft. Essentially, what typos and alternate spellings do is release sense into otherness while coining new words for a new experience. Although these poems often thumb the nose of linear thought they also employ the advantages of the lyric narrative as in "Death of a Bicycle." Quiet simply these poems are the culmination of a lifetime being written, and written over. In Films and Poems Barlow finds the right measure and balances the automatic with the reconsidered. Congratulations to the publisher Lyricalmyrical for creating such a vivid corner in the round of round about now, this is welled un.
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bravenet.com