To enter the realm of writing one must take one’s
self to divorce court. I’m sorry it has to be this way. The re-education of my
working eye winks. To enter the realm of writing is to suffer losses. Run off
other sufferers, run off. I wanted to but could not say run off. I need someone
to pet me until I fall into a lava tank engine love. The construction worker
concept is just an unused drill by the side of the road. The well-lit crane
sways in my direction. The trial of the snail is set to begin. Take your time. The
trial of the elephant is told to us by the parakeet mind. (“Maya Deren Lives
Forever / in the Speedboat at Night”)
Ever
since discovering her work via Ugly Duckling Presse’s 6x6 [see my review of such here], I’ve been eager for more work by
Brooklyn poet, editor and archivist Anna Gurton-Wachter. I’ve now been rewarded
for my patience, thanks to Essay Press producing her chapbook (both as a free
pdf online and limited-edition print edition) The Abundance Chamber Works Alone (2017) as #92 in their “Groundloop
Series,” a series that seeks “to bring together authors exploring diverse
subjects through loud, innovative architectures.” Set in three
sequence-sections of prose poems—“Maya Deren Lives Forever / in the Speedboat
at Night,” “A Development Proposal / for the Center of the Earth” and “Instances
of the Corpse / Flower Pose, a Study Group”—she opens the small collection with
an introduction/prose poem titled “PREFACE,” that reads:
There are competing visions of the swamp. Females
deposit their eggs in a parasitic territory for gratification alone. The intruder
salivates. An act is magnified by formal study. End scene. Later, back at the
lab, the summer spirit remains unknown. Parasites surround the forest. What we
call a self-created memory worthy of the father and worthy of the mother and
worthy of the mountain of golden guts. What we call, “lurking in the water,” or
“stable speech acts.” The world is sufficiently killable as the squatters can
attest. The abandoned critters are so modest and struggle to become a symbol
for the cosmos, seeping through the soil deep inside the earth.
I want to know how to feel when I wash ashore. What
to communicate first. You might find yourself the viewer, the violent concept,
alive to the spill of sight as it tries to expire. The viewer is meant to
experience a faint memory comprised of all possible readings. To feel like the
act of reading has accomplished a tunnel display of denied tenderness. You might
find yourself inside this lonely boycott state, active inside a motionless pit.
I’m
absolutely blown away by the music of her lines, and a rush that sweeps the
reader off their feet and into further, unexpected spaces. There is something
fascinating in how Gurton-Wachter’s poems exist as abstract essays, constructed
as expansive lyric catch-alls, structured to be able to include anything and
everything, even while providing a linearity and purpose through each
individual sequence. Her work is absolutely stunning, and she is easily one of
my favourite American poets without a full-length poetry collection; I can’t
imagine such a thing is far off.
No comments:
Post a Comment