Andrew Brenza : Rank, by Kristine Snodgrass

Rank, Kristine Snodgrass
JackLeg Press, 2021

 

 

 

 

As rich in meaning and suggestion as the numerous definitions of its title, Rank, by Kristine Snodgrass, is multitude and mess and gamut at its finest. Through a selection of Merriam-Webster’s definitions of rank, I offer scrapings of understanding, shadows of experience, and a call for further exploration of this extraordinary work.

Rank n. :   an orderly arrangement. Rank is a series of 94 glitch poems interspersed with six prose poems or six sections of a prose poem. While the latter is open to interpretation, the play of text and image offers relief to the eye and heart through the juxtaposition of alternative modes of understanding.  

Rank adj. : luxuriantly or excessively vigorous in growth. Glitch overcomes the glitched and the base images are obliterated in the vibrant distortions of line, shape and color. I infer that the base images must provide some structure for the glitched images, like a lattice, but I can’t be certain because as I look for them, I can only find their fragments, if I can find them at all. Rather, like the base images themselves, I am lost in what is being done to them. The experience of this is a beautiful maelstrom of emotion evoked by the wild vividness of the glitched images, the energy of line and the surprise of inhumanly generated shape. The glitch, in its luxuriant excessiveness, is all.

Rank adj : PUTRID, FESTERING. The obliteration of the base images, the seemingly chaotic outcomes of the glitched pieces, one one level, suggest decay, suggest entropic dissolution of identity, understanding and comprehension. But this decay is not what is rank. Rather, it is the human will to order the universe in human terms, that is, to understand it primarily through logic, a logic that has been used to create brutal inequalities (ranks) and to justify cruelty and oppression, which becomes rank, which losses its vitality in the mysterious and boundless energy of the inhuman glitch.

Rank adj. archaic : LUSTFUL, RUTTISH. Further, the primacy of the glitch forces the eye to an elemental understanding: color as color, line as line, etc. This is a sensual experience, the body’s knowing vs. the intellect’s. Base being emerges out of the digital destruction of the base images. I am closer to myself, feeling a fuller sway of my incomprehensible personhood, and am alive in the saturation of my desires, as a result.   

Rank n. : relative standing or position. Because I am afforded understanding of myself in relation to this book. Because the relation of this book to my understanding allows me to emerge as a feeling and thinking being. Because there is nothing without relation. Because our mutual and individual existences depend on relationships in a literal sense. 

In this way, Rank is an essential work for our times. It dismisses convention, foregoes logic, and destroys edification, but not toward nihilistic ends. Rather, Snodgrass offers us a generative shattering, one that opens the possibilities of humanity and the humane through inhuman means.  In short, it upends the human means by which we have created a fundamentally inhuman and inhumane world. It is marvelous!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Andrew Brenza’s recent chapbooks include Geometric Mantra (above/ground press), Poems in C (Viktlösheten Press), and Waterlight (Simulacrum Press). He is also the author of five collections of visual poetry, Automatic Souls (Timglaset), Gossamer Lid (Trembling Pillow Press), Alphabeticon & Other Poems (RedFoxPress), Album, in Concrete (Alien Buddha Press), and Spool (Unsolicited Press). His newest book, Smear, was released by BlazeVOX Books in March 2021.