Description Poetry.
TRACE ELEMENTS is a trio of serial poems--Double Vision, Four in One, and Transient Graphs--that make up the second movement of a work called Analog Dreams, written over the past decade.
If the tone of these poems is dark, and it is, as befits our place and time, there are nonetheless glints of light throughout.
What must be stressed is that these traces of hope derive from unabashed verbal invention.
The mental geography these poems traverse is that of an improvisor at full song.
Imagine channeling actual bliss.
As if the last best hope for a viable future were a thorough re-imagining of life in the present.
Double Vision features sixty-four paired couplets in iambic pentameter.
As the epigraph from Jacques Lacan asserts: the function of Language is not to inform, but to evoke.
What is evoked here is the liberatory potential of a relentlessly negative critique.
In the gap that defines each pair of abstractions there's a mis-registration of visions.
History stockpiles these emanations / Whose half-lives measure successive events.
Binaries caught in these liminal spaces are split into shards of other logics--including that which syncretizes the aesthetic and the political.
Iambics, of course, are for satire; hence, they're a provocation.
Four in One is a four-part partita in sixty-four quatrains.
Its epigraph, from Jackson Mac Low, invokes death, winter, and so on--a dry if knowing reminder of spring's eventual return.
The breaking of binaries in Double Vision gives way to a utopian premise that uses every trick in its rhetorical playbook to evade a dystopic conclusion.
Whose days consist entirely of mornings / On the spooky shoals of consciousness details a life without thought of redemption but with undaunted hope for a habitable future, beyond the epistemic grief of past practices.
Having established a setting and a discourse, the trio concludes with Transient Graphs, forty-eight brief prose poems which chart the re.
| Asserts | The function of |
|---|
