Propagation
by Laura Elrick
Kenning Editions, Dec 2012
106 pages / $14.95  Buy from Amazon or SPD

The poems in Propagation might seem quiet at first, or early on in the book, consisting mostly of simple phrases restated again and again with different line breaks, subtle emphasis shifting in language we might otherwise overlook, and while that might be true in some cases, don’t be fooled: these poems are loud shouts and angry jokes, raucous and just as ready to hit you as to be read. And this is a good thing during a manufactured crisis in poetry having to do with affect and identity and stuff you already know about if you’re all conversant with what’s going on in the poetry teacup right now.

What’s great is that all that stuff is beside the point. Delivered in a deadpan lateral slide that manages to recall both Gertrude Stein and Larry Eigner, Propagation is a defiant book, ready to just provide you with language you’ve taken for granted and let you figure it out. Again, this is a very, very good thing. Propagation doesn’t so much present with you with poetry to appreciate or interpret as it presents you with words and phrases cut mostly like chunks off vernacular language and just offered, take it or leave it, life for example the following excerpt from an untitled poem:

So what’s above is both devoid of content and overdriven with it: devoid because we as readers don’t “get anywhere” beyond a stutter of I, you, this, and thanks, and overdriven because the more insistent the excerpt gets at connecting “you” and “thanks” the more sinister it seems, as if the thanks might be forced or insincere or desperate or all three. Many of the poems here work like this: what seems wan gets pounded home with great force until something as ephemeral as a thank you lands in a constantly shifting territory between and I and a you that don’t need to be named or described because it’s not them that matter it’s the gesture trapped in the stammer.

And as deft as Elrick is with empty generalities, she’s just as good with the kind of local and particular that you might be looking for in a “normal” poem, as in the following excerpt:

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Brief
by Alexandra Chasin
Jaded Ibis Press, 2012
Paperback: 180 pages / $15  Buy from Jaded Ibis
App Novel / $4.99  Buy from iTunes Store
 

Just as the pre-digital ancients looked for answers in the stars, coffee grounds, or Sunday astrology columns, today’s mystics look to computer-generated spam, glitch-art, and captchas. With its cold modernist rationalism, literature appears to be a doomed secular medium between these two pseudo-spiritual realms, with books on track to be its tomb.

Neither monkey nor machine, how can The Word survive when challenged by the cybernetic? Alexandra Chasin’s novel/eBook/iPad app Brief is one New Media experiment in literary life-support. Fusing a shizo-analytic modernist screed ala Deleuze and Guattari and Phillip Roth with endless graphic combinations possible via simple computer programming, the work ends-up a high-Modernist mess worthy of gallery exhibition—which might be fine, if such a venue weren’t the protagonist’s target of ire.

In the iPad app version programmed by Scott Peterson, over 34,000,000 images randomly combine and drop into the text. Most of the image-to-text-pairings are misses, doing little to assist the narrative—a 180-page courtroom defense by an art vandal named Inqui (gender indeterminate). Arguing a plea of temporary insanity, Inqui tells the story of their formation from pre-natal to brief stint at art criminal.

It was the Nuclear-Era cultural inundation of violence that drove T.V. Casualty Inqui to scrawl “KILL LIES ALL” on Picasso’s Guernica, an act copy-catting of Tony Shifrazi, who turned the publicity from the act into a career as an art-dealer. The narrative is not so deterministic as to say that an unjust world caused Inqui to commit their crime, but Picasso’s famous authorial deference to the Nazis is implied. Who vandalized Guernica? You did.

Like an infinite game of semiotic Battleship, the arbitrary placement of randomly-generated images has a few inevitable hits, but does little to assist the pros. One hopes for some visual puns to match Inqui’s frequent wordplay, instead the combinations are mostly ugly and uninteresting. An image of Barney Rubble lugging a stone-age television set appears twice, with two separate pictures of nothing generated within the tube. On several other pages, tiny indistinguishable little snippets are dropped-in like Exacto-sliced scrap. On another page an anachronistic frat boy vomits.

Is this a joke on the iPad owner? Maybe for today’s irony-inundated cultural consumer, intentioned art is too heavy-handed? Perhaps this dull app is itself a type of vandalism of the text? If so, not enough—despite having lost control of their agency Inqui firmly controls the text, and their droning is never obscured.

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My Bright Abyss: Mediation of a Modern Believer
by Christian Wiman
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2013
192 pages / $24  Buy from Amazon

“Silence is the language of faith” we read in Christian Wiman’s newest book of prose, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. This seems counter-intuitive (or perhaps even hyperbolic) coming from a poet, especially a poet of faith, but he explains, “action—be it church or charity, politics or poetry—is the translation. As with any translation, action is a mere echo of its original, inevitably faded and distorted, especially as it moves farther from its source.”

Christian Wiman is the current editor of Poetry magazine (though he announced his resignation in January), the author of several books of poems, including the recent and widely acclaimed Every Riven Thing and a new translation of Osip Mandelstam’s poems called Stolen Air, and another book of prose, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. Wiman is also one of the most important voices today on the confluence of art, especially poetry, and faith. In fact, the two are so ambiguously implicated, so crucially intimate, he rarely writes or discusses one without the other.

In the preface of this stunning new book of prose, Wiman explains he wrote it for those “frustrated with the language and forms of contemporary American religion, [but who] nevertheless feel that burn of being that drives us out of ourselves, that insistent, persistent gravity of the ghost called God.” I think we will find, then, his intended audience is vastly comprised and includes many of us, for the synaptic tangle of spirituality in America is still, to use Wiman’s word, burning. It seems wherever I go I encounter those dissatisfied with the way we talk, not only about art, its role in our entertainment-consuming culture, but spirituality too; as what it means to believe becomes more and more nebulous, our language becomes more and more reductive. Americans are frustrated with the way language has been abused, consumed, violated.

It seems we are at a loss for words.

Maybe it’s that the interiority of our lives seems so abstracted from the language used to describe it. But then, isn’t that why we’ve always turned to poetry? The anxiety of limitation, this constant—however subtle—desire for transcendence, is as present in art as it is in faith, we learn from Wiman. The first essay in My Bright Abyss, the title essay, opens with an unfinished poem:

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