rob mclennan : Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, by Chen Chen

Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency, Chen Chen
BOA Editions, 2023

 

 

 

 

The second collection from New England-based poet and editor Chen Chen, following When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (Rochester NY: BOA Editions, 2017), is Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency (BOA Editions, 2023). Chen Chen is one of those poets I’d long been hearing about from numerous others, all of whom have said that his work is required reading; and this collection certainly more than lives up to expectation. As well, Chen Chen knows how to come up with delightfully-memorable titles—some further examples beyond his book titles include the poems “& then a student stands up, says, Are you serious?,” “I am reminded via email to resubmit my preferences for the schedule” and the loaded-formality of “I Invite My Parents to a Dinner Party”—while offering a first person descriptive lyric narrative able to turn any thought or subject inside-out or backwards. There is a fierce intelligence and open heart on display here, and such a heft to this collection of deeply intimate, engaged and engaging poems. As he offers as part of the sequence “a small book of questions: chapter i,” writing:

How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?

I walk home calmly.

I kiss him.

          I kiss him.
          I forget to tell him about the truck.

Set in four sections, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency is a book of philosophies, intimate moments, free-floating anxieties and descriptive passages; it is a book about belonging and family, and of what we are allowed to choose. “Your emergency contact has called / to quit.” he writes, to open “The School of Australia,” “Your back-up plan has backed / away. Your boyfriend has joined a boy band / named All Your Former Boyfriends // & Sarah McLachlan.” And still, there is such a confidence and ease to his lyric, one that shifts between prose poem and line breaks, every phrase and every word in its own and absolutely perfect place. At turns playful and mournful, his is an investigation of intimate and deeply felt moments, including around his mother, his partner, academia, homophobia and racism, and how it is he chooses to respond, and hold himself accountable to his own actions. “i am busy considering / how to personify / is to make a person out of feelings // & not necessarily to make / more personable                    again,” he writes, as part of the second section of “four short essays personifying a future in which white / supremacy has ended.” He writes of trauma but one that never overwhelms his awareness of what is beautiful. As the sequence “a small book of questions: chapter iv” includes:

What do you know about dismemberment?

I write a poem about my mother’s meat cleaver, which she uses to chop everything. I write a poem about my mother chopping watermelon. I write a poem about my mother crushing cockroaches with a shoe, a slipper, a roll of newspaper. I write a poem about my mother crying. A short poem about her arguing with my father. a longer poem about her wanting to boil him alive. A poem about her watching Titanic & hating the sad ending & saying, I’m sick of sad endings. A poem in which she is sick &, for a while, the doctors can’t figure out why. I write a poem in which she has been dead for years. Five poems in which she doesn’t die, she can’t, will never. I start a poem in which she has a very long conversation with my boyfriend, then calls me to say, I just had a very long conversation with your boyfriend, it & he were great! I just can’t figure out what would come next.

There is such an ease, even while wrapped up in an urgency; even while writing the small details between himself and his mother, or with his partner, including around his partner’s mother’s illness and death. The poems are heartfelt, meditative and move intuitively, it feels, from one moment directly into the next, as the poem “Summer,” the second poem in the first section, opens:

I have a canoe that gives me therapy my insurance won’t cover.

The man I love calls from Colorado, unaware of my canoe.

It offers a better kind of cognitive behavioral, in very turquoise water.

The man says his mother is dying & I say I know but nothing is clear.

I pay the canoe with my best Christopher Walken impression.

It becomes clear that Colorado is where all calls are from, how did I not know.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). He’s been spending the past six-plus months working on a book-length essay on reviewing, literature and community, “Lecture for an Empty Room,” sections of which have been slowly appearing via his remarkable substack. He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com

Marty Cain : After FuturePanic / Before Amish

from Report from the Trivedi Society Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

 

 

If future is panic and capital is crisis, and if Amish wrote FuturePanic, and if poetry is circuits, and if Amish links effect pedals in a circus of wire, and if his SimCity map has spectral plumbing, and plumbing extends to the fleshy blue cords in my face then my mouth is STANDPIPE & my nose is LATRINE and I’m smelling Amish’s poems which carry the delectable scent of used cars filled with fresh soil sprouting tulips AND HIT THE DISTORTION I met Amish in a Fayetteville gallery built upon Bourdieuian infrastructure or an “anti-economy economy” which sounds like SimCity getting hit with a meteor AND HIT THE CHORUS an intermittent wave of red frowning faces as wages decrease and now do you know where you are yes I’m of course in Amish’s sans serif lines hanging out on those lovely fucking indents like a luxuriant condo balcony crumbling into the sea, HIT THE MOTHERFUCKING WAH.

 

 

 

Marty Cain is the author of three books of poetry and hybrid writing, most recently The Prelude (Action Books, 2023). Individual works appear in Best American Experimental Writing, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of Mississippi and a PhD from Cornell, where he is currently a postdoctoral fellow. He lives in Ithaca, NY with his spouse and daughter.

Vidhu Aggarwal : Brenda

from Report from the Iijima Society, Vol. 1 No. 1

 

 

 

 

Ode to the Jetstream and her malaise due to climate change

It is indicative of ecological collapse on a global scale—all affecting all.

The eyes are knowing eyes and eyes of storms—the void in the center of a storm. Dislocated eyes. Oculus’ that see reality and are deluded also.

 

THE GOLDEN EMBRYO

“The seven half-embryos portion out the semen of the world at Vishnu’s command.”
                     —  The Rig Veda (1.164.36), translated by Wendy Doniger

Shiniest of voids, ringing with fields.
A unitary vigor, tarrying for eons. 

Pluck the tension, and particles ding-dong and disappear.

Some clump and explode,
rainbow into uterine layers, diaphanous

and thickening—tabs

of bursting
cartographies.

Plasma membranes, oceanic feeling circulating
through straying habitats.

Life forms mutate, accumulating cultures. Some survive
the high waters, the freezes,

 

 

the anus of inverse allotments, abutting domains
of empire:

(. . . Araby shags Katharina, Prabu shanks birth,
Aaron ghosts haughty, Huck drags folks,
Bill tells stories, Julius sucks ore,
Vassily bots hard, Larry cracks jokes,
Darren bathes guns in power and glory. . .)

Lords of riches,
releasing remote intricate gizmos, repellents,
and horndog fantasies
into the loosening and baying expanses.

Who will embrace all

those odd, incidental creatures
ad infinitum,

as they are going, gone? One bug,
diamond-headed, inky,
with a cinched oblong body, pinched
at each end, with the slightest filament for a tail, and round,
sheer wings.

Lords of dissolution,
you will not be consoled: for being so torn

for missing always
the teeming void, the book of beginnings,

where you decaying at every instant. At every instant,
anything goes: woozy pupae cluster upon splintering genealogies,

 

 

 

spitting out eccentric yantras with jazzy segments and alarming
high-pitched whines. Whatever’s

left of that initial,

irradiated substrate

is on high alert, flashing skirts of squalor,

converting over—in and out of—time

into daughters.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Vidhu Aggarwal’s poetry and multimedia practices engage with world-building, video, and graphic media. Their poetry book, The Trouble with Humpadori (2016), imagines a cosmic mythological space for marginalized transnational subjects. Avatara, a chapbook from Portable @Yo-Yo Labs Press, is situated in a post-apocalyptic gaming world where A.I.s play at being gods. They have published in the Poetry, Boston Review, Black Warrior Review, Aster(ix) Journal, and Leonardo, among other journals. In Daughter Isotope (OS 2021), they engage in a “cloud poetics,” as a way of thinking about personal, collective, and digital archives as a collaborative process with comic artists, dancers, and video artists.

 

 

Teo Eve: Notes from the Field: Vispo - Past & Present

 

Vispo 一 visual poetry and concrete poetry (subtle differences, I would argue, but largely interchangeable) 一 is a fertile form amongst the indie publishing crowd, but, like most examples of ‘experimental’ poetics, tends to get overlooked by mainstream poetry publishing houses and magazines (insofar as a poetic ‘mainstream’ actually exists).

While vispo might be seen as a relatively new art form, taking advantage of print and digital culture (and certainly digital visual poetry can be seen as a new-ish sub-genre of vispo), its origins stretch arguably back to the invention of writing itself. Many readers will likely be familiar with George Herbert’s concrete or shape poem ‘Easter Wings’, and some will know that this poem’s shape imitated that of a poem by the ancient Greek writer Simmias of Rhodes. Before this, Egyptian hieroglyphs were written in a complicated system of synergy between images and text, and the majority of individual hieroglyphs can be considered mini artworks in their own right. Before the decipherment of hieroglyphs by Champollion and co., scholars had a lot of fun attempting to decipher what hieroglyphs might mean based on the objects they represented alone, leading to mystical and wildly erroneous results. And while these attempts to ‘read’ hieroglyphs under the false assumption they were pure pictographs may have been ahistoric (possibly influenced by these reconstructions, contemporary writer Philip Terry proposed an intentional ahistoric mis-reading of ‘ice age poetry’ in The Lascaux Notebooks, conjuring minimalist stories from prehistoric geometric signs), there is an argument to be made that all hieroglyphic writing was visual poetry: certainly, all hieroglyphic writing was visual. Earlier still, the very formation of letters themselves could be interpreted as vispo in the purest form: abstract signs, inviting interlopers to read in meanings.

If our writing system seems to have long since abandoned the unbreakable bond between image and syntax so characteristic of hieroglyphic literature, writers in the intervening centuries have maintained an interest in the synergy between text and image. Medieval monks painstakingly illustrated and illuminated manuscripts, William Blake printed his own poems accompanied by detailed artworks that interact with his text in interesting ways, and entire calligraphic traditions flourished in South East Asia and the Middle East. The European vispo revival was probably spearheaded by Guillaume Apollinaire’s Calligrammes, which brought a strong typographic element into the text. If Apollinaire was a writer inspired by visual arts, Modernist painters of the 20s onwards went the other way, combining, to borrow a title of a work by Magritte, ‘Les Mots Et Les Images’. This synthesis of text and image inspired and continues to inspire Postmodernist and contemporary artists: the work of pop artists Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein come to mind, as do the canvases of Jean-Michel Basquiat; while Charlotte Johannesson frequently incorporates words into her sometimes-digital, sometimes-weaved, artwork. Nowadays, it is difficult to go into a highstreet art gallery and not see a painting that incorporates letters in some way.

Can artworks that are primarily visual, yet incorporate words, be truly called visual poetry? If not, is this because they are largely confined to galleries? 21st-century digital and print culture seems to be challenging these assumptions: cheaper mass-printing has liberated the page from strictly rigid typographies of the printing press and pre-digital age, and now many artists have taken to publishing abstract artworks, often without reference to words or letters at all, in books. These ‘visual poems’, presumably called so primarily because they are designed for the codex rather than the gallery (though perhaps they can be ‘read’ in much the same way as abstract lyric verse can be, looking for resonances and patterns rather than interpreting a figurative scene) are markedly different from the calligrammic concrete or shape poems by Herbert and Apollinaire. (A further sub-category, asemic poetry, uses letter-like shapes to explore the physical act of writing, scoring movement à-la Jackson Pollock while exploring what words can’t express.) Despite a growing school of visual poets using digital, photographic, and hand-drawn methodologies to inform their practice, there remains a strong calligramic tradition amongst the wider vispo community, marrying text and image to make meaning and making figurative shapes out of letters (see SJ Fowler’s charmingly asemic Calligramms).

Overlooked as they may be in the mainstream literary word, there are too many practicing vispoets to even hope to begin to form a representative list here. A good introduction to contemporary writers would be Timglaset’s Amanda Earl-edited Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry, a full-colour 260-page tome containing art and essays by 36 women based in 21 different countries. See also Penteract Press’ 2022 The Book of Penteract, which 一 as well as being a beautiful product 一 includes a dazzling mix of digitally-produced visual poetry (Laura Kerr’s abstract geometries; Vilde B. Torset’s asemic calligraphy; Tom Jenks’ colourfully spiraling ‘visual translations’ of Dante; Merlina Acevedo’s collage work; and Clara Daneri’s glyphic ‘Corvid-19’ sonnet, Frankenstein palimpsest, and line-by-line emoji retelling of The Tale of Peter Rabbit 一 and that’s just scratching the surface). Indeed, alongside Trickhouse Press, Steel Incisors (edited by prolific vispoet James Knight), Beir Bua Press and Streetcake Magazine (co-run by Nikki Dudley, an experimental visual poet), Penteract Press is one of the UK’s leading champions of vispo, publishing a large range of books that celebrate the interactivity of image and text.

Amongst Penteract’s publications is The Kazimir Effect by Christian Bök, who was recently nominated for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry. Comprising of minimalist haiku named after British Paints’ shades of white, which accompany abstract Malevich-ian paintings whose palettes employ the shades of white named in their respective poems, The Kazimir Effect is a beautiful marriage of form and content. Marian Christie’s recently published Triangles combines (to quote the blurb I provided for it) ‘a compelling array of experiments, mathematical theory and vispo’, and in doing so ‘proves the beauty of mathematics. In blending the visual and lyrical with the numerical, Christie finds art in science, science in art’ ーlook out especially for the tasteful emoji triad of ‘Love Triangle’.

My own Penteract release, the quasi-vispo, quasi-lyrical, quasi-letterist The Ox House, is a ‘love letter to the letters of the alphabet’, and combines the visual and written arts. Each of its poems, many of which are themselves visual, or at least incorporate visual aspects in their typography, are accompanied by full-page illustrations of capital letter forms, inspired by and in homage to medieval manuscripts’ illuminated letters. Its spiritual sequel, I Imagine an Image (forthcoming from Penteract Press in 2024) will push The Ox House’s experiments further, exploring how graphological layout affects readings of poetry while incorporating poems that necessitate the physical turning of the page in order to be read. Anthony Etherin, who runs Penteract alongside Clara Daneri, applies formal constraints to his visual poetry, as in ‘Lunar Phases Sestina’ (Slate Petals (and Other Wordscapes), Penteract Press 2021), which imitates the prosody and pattern of a sestina silently using ー you guessed it ー glyphs representing the moon’s various phases.

I have said in my opening paragraph that vispo ‘tends to get overlooked’ in the poetic mainstream, but there is of course one major exception. Rupi Kaur, the Canadian poet loved and derided for her minimalist, maxim-esque made-for-social-media poetry, frequently marries her text with a visual element. Though these are not calligrammic concrete poems (their images are not formed by images), nor are they ‘pure’ visual poems (figurative images accompany sensical text, rather than forming abstract shapes) and the images rarely interact with the text (though there are exceptions), there is no doubt that the poems’ illustrated accompaniments play a large part of Kaur’s appeal. Kaur’s collections are undoubtedly amongst the best-selling poetry books of all time, and her myriad imitators reproduce the poet’s simple but affecting line drawings as much as they do her stark verse. Considering Kaur continues to publish many of her pieces on Instagram, an image-sharing platform, before they make their way into a book, this makes sense. What is more likely to capture someone’s attention on a busy social media feed: fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, or five sparse lines accompanied by a picture?

If vispo fell out of public consciousness due to limitations on printing necessitated by the printing press, new digital forms of reading and book production have opened the door to a new golden age of vispo. This article has barely scratched the surface of either the history of visual poetry or contemporary practitioners, and there is currently no definitive guide to vispo past or present (hint hint to all the publishers out there). I haven’t even mentioned Astra Papachristodoulou’s multi-dimensional sculpture poems, or Briony Hughes’ visually and sculpturally-informed ecopoetry, nor have I begun to explore the wealth of interactive GIF poetry and computer game poetry made possible through programming, social media and the blockchain. (Speaking of Papachristodoulou and Hughes: if artwork that incorporates letters are only considered vispo when they’re published in books and not displayed in galleries, Astra and  Briony are complicating this dynamic again; their group exhibition of sculptural poetry, Textual Porosity 一 which also features the work of Caroline Harris 一 will run from the 30th of May to the 11th of June in Winning Gallery, near Hampton Court.)

It is possible that due to the accessibility of resources and platforms (it’s much, much easier to create typographically interesting poems on, say, Canva than it is a typewriter or even Microsoft Word), more visual poetry is being made and published today than had been in the sum total of pre-21st century history. And even if this proves to be a hyperbolic claim, one thing is indisputable: vispo is alive and kicking. Even if mainstream publications and critics ignore it.

 

 

 

 

 

Teo Eve is a poet and writer based in London. Teo’s debut poetry collection, The Ox House, was published by Penteract Press in 2022. A love letter to the letters of the alphabet, it combines visual and literary arts to celebrate the possibilities of language encoded in abstract signs. Its spiritual successor, I Imagine an Image, is forthcoming from Penteract Press in 2024. Teo’s debut book of autofiction, On Shaving, Or, The Taxonomy of Clouds, was released by Beir Bua Press in 2023, and incorporates methodologies from visual poetry into its prose.

 

Photo credit: Charlotte Ottevaere