|
|
|
|
|
|
| | | | | | | | |  |
| arte e letteratura: Ric Carafagna reviews Andrew Lundwall's Pubblicato il Venerdì, 05 marzo 2004 da |  |
Andrew Lundwall’s Eye Pharmacy serves up good medicine for the poetic soul. Its visual/verbal concoctions heal us from the maladies of looking at life as just a collection of rote referentials: those old expected semiotic constructs which are handed down to us and we accept as some type of semantic gospel without questioning the potential for further expanding our vision through the imagination. Lundwall seems to have taken the credo of William Carlos Williams: “no ideas but in things”, and run with it through an ever-changing landscape, leaving us disjunctively surrealistic word murals for us to admire in his wake.
Upon opening the work, one is struck by the ‘deliberate’ layout of its design: A single block of text surrounded by ample white space. Its initial effect is strikingly stark, but when one focuses upon the text, one gets the impression of each page as being a framed portrait hanging upon the illuminated white wall of an art gallery. Indeed, each page is an intricate portrait, some blatantly representational in their nature, some abstract and dense enough to send the mind searching through its deep unmined recesses in hope of anchoring itself to
some objective correlative.
Eye Pharmacy reminds us in both appearance and content of George Oppen’s Discrete Series. It is indeed an objectivist tome as is evident in how it reveals to us the ‘stuff’ of life :
cathedrals with multitudes
of lights with moth-eaten
street sidewalk sleeping sweeper
Yet the ‘objectivist’ presence is disrupted, sometimes stealthily, sometimes unequivocally with interjections ranging from the aleatoric to the surreal:
there is a tremble
of toe nation fly-
swatter ring settled
in the dust dust
walking away from
the scene of discovery
I pick up a sewer-lid
and make whole
what has vanished
Raspy jazzy rhythms and alliteration gussy up the text and bring a lilting flair to its forward momentum, reminding one of Pound’s allusions to the musical qualities necessary in the construction of poetry:
a cocaine buzz back is a tree
trembles slightly the shells
kicksin’ around all o’er ground
remember that steam really
knocked havoc on every single
door remember stomping boots
and buckets of autumn on the shower
Certain images and phrases appear and reappear ,cloaking their resident verse in a mysterious ghosted narrative which seems to move through the work like a subtle unseen otherness. This carries with it its own weight of questioning which inhabits the mind, and with each recurrence brings a new reference with which the reader must stop and get his bearings before attempting to put back the pieces of the puzzle - a puzzle which is in a constant state of morphological uncertainty. At other times the text relays a chaotically spastic search for meaning, turned upside down and seeming to eviscerate its own bodily content. The semantic indifference which lives in these words relates an experience which both the eye and mind can relish.
As well as Oppen and the Objectivists, there seems to be a Steinesque-L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School spectral presence haunting these portraits. This appears evident in the - can I call it - ‘title-poem’ of the work:
an eye-pharmacy is a hunt
an eye-pharmacy is a loopt grain
an eye-pharmacy is something gone
or here an eye-pharmacy him
or her an eye-pharmacy cradle
on candle an eye-pharmacy parades
and it is an eye-pharmacy ant-hill
through town blue congested infancy
The syntactic irregularities and lack of punctuation allow the reader myriad possibilities with which to and break down and ‘translate’ the meaning, sometimes from discrete clausal representations, other times to just one
morpheme, alienatied amid a sea of surrounding text. This technique keeps the reader on edge, not letting her lull off into a placidly unconscious textual apprehension. We must be aware that at any moment the text can initiate a new trajectory which we must follow while not losing sight of the path that the ‘meaning’ has formally forged:
fingers attach themselves
right there it was when I will
throw up a caved-out yellow
pouts of seven oscillations ?
can gamma rays crowd
furious nations ? anxiety in
the 1st in elevator yeah yeah
yeah yeah me perhaps
I’ve found a sewer-lid and
re-trace myself back and
buckets of toe nation fly-
swatter ring settled in
wasp nest past a sliver leaf
The questions “?” in this portrait serve to highlight the textual complexities inherent in the poems construction and its ‘intended’ message. At times Lundwall leaves us to fabricate our own referential ‘message’, keeping us hanging on every word; its myriad potential with its ability to continue or thwart what our mind expects ‘is’, or ‘should‘ be.
The work ends in a decidedly enigmatic fashion; we have images reappearing from earlier portraits:
a sewer-lid . . .
a silver leaf blooded . . .
and the author questioning himself as to:
. . . when I wanted to
decide however and
retrace myself back . . .
but it is in the final two lines of this last portrait which leave us a mystery to unravel:
is something gone
or were they ever
A questioning to all that has gone before. Indeed, a questioning of his/our apprehension of . . . not just a sewer-lid, or a silver leaf blooded, or ‘words’, but the ‘idea’ of reality itself, understood by the mind and encompassed by the ‘eye’.
Read other reviews by Ric Carfagna
http://www.poeticinhalation.com/riccarfagna_author.html
Read Eye Pharmacy:
http://www.xpressed.org/
Visit Andrew Lundwall's Author page on Poetic Inhalation:
http://www.poeticinhalation.com/andrew.html
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Non fai ancora parte della comunità di Fieralingue? Registrati subito, CLICCA QUI!
|
|
|
|
