Comments on: The Body

By: Eugene Scherba

Eugene Scherba — Tue, 21 Jan 2003 02:30:00 +0000

COLLAGE FINALLY WINS
(a Dadaist cut-up inspired by Jeff Encke)

poetry is in the throes:

two new poetry presses
heave on top of her apparatus

like a now-absent lover
in our post-whole world

the parasitic footnote turns on
the invisible textual body

marginalia
infect the text

ampers&

scholarly explorations of desire:
the form of the matter is clearly what matters

the subterranean text is full of dead:
La Can of Campbell's Kelly

Pre-Socratic pattern-making machine—
an innovative way to write a memoir

Collage finally wins
a surface for decipherment and pleasure

The body answers Charles Bernstein's call:

MACHINE MACHETE MACHO MASOCHISM
MA ME MO MA MA

Desultory:
DA DE DO DA DA

By: Terrence Fowler

Terrence Fowler — Wed, 08 Jan 2003 20:06:00 +0000

In defense of Ms. Boully’s originality, I would like to note that the Burning Deck title to which the review refers is not at all a footnote to an absent text; rather, it is a footnote to the work’s title, something done previously 30 years ago by Dale Porter.

By: Jeff Encke

Jeff Encke — Sat, 04 Jan 2003 19:40:00 +0000

An Old Surrealist Game

plasticity Bakhtin claimed
poetry today in nowheresville

multi-generic experimentalism
a crisis of genre anxiety

readerly expectations
fit an established categorical

two poetry presses
kicked with prose

Verse and now Slope
indeed, an essay

in the John D'Agata
"lyric essay" vein

Carson's personal
explorations of desire

a striking resemblance
both inter-nesting footnotes

Jenny Boully's notes
fragments from philosophic

an old surrealist game
of "if" statements

moderator forever the mind
a pattern-making machine

far-flung reading Pre-Socratic
Lacan Campbell Kelly

fragments fly in chimes
engenders all sorts

system recycles components
The Bicycle Thief morphs

more desirable than the original
collage wins out

drippy with theory
construct infect

shape-shifting figures
backstage and off-camera

the oft-repressed din
a minus tide

author templates herself
for comic effect

the missing biography
her own miniature text

haunted dream within dream
innovative to be sure

the lover's body
an echo chamber of afterthoughts

defies availability
silent right margin

heaved on top of her apparatus
to refer elsewhere

two freckles on the golden hair
our attention on marginalia

clever troping in a loop
the parasitic footnote

exuberance
puerile and self-adoring

a perfect fog
the desultory whoop-de-do

By: Leonard Kress

Leonard Kress — Sat, 04 Jan 2003 13:37:00 +0000

Christine,

I do very much appreciate your review of this book. I also realize that these are relatively brief reviews–but I would have appreciated the tiniest example from the book here. It was only after I went in search of Boully’s work on other websites that your review made the sense that it did. I also want to praise your restraint and your attempt to avoid outright denigration but also your attempt to make some important statements about poetry today. Thanks.

Leonard Kress
lkress@owens.edu

By: Bruce McPherson

Bruce McPherson — Sat, 04 Jan 2003 03:32:00 +0000

Interesting review on many levels. Since you’re tackling the issue of genre dissolution, would you consider taking a look at a book by a Mexican poet, novelist and dramatist which we’ve just released in English translation. It seems to have defied almost all attempts at review so far, and I think it’s partly because it’s as much poem as prose narrative. The title is “Creature of a Day,” the author is Juan Tovar, and some information about it is available at our website http://www.mcphersonco.com. Thanks, Bruce McPherson (editor and publisher)