To address Matt Henriksen’s poetry, we start with a passage from Whitman’s preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass:
… from the eyesight proceeds another eyesight and from the hearing proceeds another hearing and from the voice proceeds another voice eternally curious of the harmony of things with man.
I cannot think of a better definition of poetry’s visionary impulse. The poet employs his or her senses in the service of a perception that is not of the order of this world. It is a mode of perception that points to another world right here in our everyday homelessness. The key to the visionary impulse is in our mutual sympathy: if the poet is curious about “the harmony of things with man,” then we too can be curious. The aim of the visionary impulse is to explore the endless ravishments and ravagings — harmony’s dualities — of the unacknowledged worlds within our world.
Debrah Morkun’s new book enacts commingling (“here is my torn dress made of semen”); is a non-monetary fiduciary — an ethical holding between the Ida Nadi (lunar Nadi, site of comfort, nurturing, said to control mental processes and to be the site of the “feminine” aspects of personality, represented by the color white (“the forest was open”)) and the Pingala Nadi (solar Nadi, stimulating, said to control vital somatic processes and oversee masculine aspects of personality, represented by the color red (“a virile member of the eternally repeated word”)).
When the occasion arises, or for a particular occasion, or perhaps once in a while, or in the case of Carol Watts’s Occasionals, poems written from September 2006 until September 2007, or not poems but a poem in rigorously regular “cuts,” sixty-eight altogether, divided into four equal segments: “autumncuts,” “wintercuts,” “springcuts,” and “summercuts.”
Juan Gelman is an Argentine poet, born in 1930. Although he began writing and publishing at an early age, he seems to have received major recognition only rather late in life. In 1997 he won the Argentine National Poetry Prize, followed by several other prestigious awards, culminating with what’s considered the highest Spanish language literary award, the Cervantes Prize, in 2007.
T. Urayoán Noel performs at Illinois State, February 2011. University Galleries. Photo by Brian D. Collier.
The author of several books of poetry and translation, Urayoán Noel brings a satirical voice and a contemporary urban consciousness to the traditional notion that the poet will entertain and enlighten. The results, in his hands, are a well-done weird. Inevitably, they’re also compelling, and then a penny drops, and they provoke.
Seen from one perspective, his 2010 collection Hi-Density Politics (Buffalo: BlazeVOX) represents a shift from Noel’s earlier work. Its greater emphasis on process and constraint yields a new experience on the formal level, particularly where Noel has used new technologies to produce his teeming metropolis on the page. Yet Hi-Density Politics offers all the more when considered as an extension of his previous books, published in 2005 and 2008.
