Karla Kelsey

Review: Books of Text and Image
For readers interested in contemporary poetry of text and image, Apollinaire’s calligrams offer a point of departure par excellance. In his own words (and we cannot help but agree after engaging with such works as “Coup d’éventail” or “L’Oiseau et le bouquet”) “the relations between the juxtaposed figures” of one of his poems “are as expressive as the words that compose it. And this at least, I think, is a new invention.” The calligrams stand out not only as new inventions foregrounding the role of relation, but as emblems of a turning point—so essential to the poetics of today—in the way we have come to consider language and image. As Johanna Drucker fully explores in The Visible Word, visual poetry of the early twentieth century experiments with typography in a way that, just as Ferdinand de Saussure was showing in the field of linguistics at the same time, deconstructs the word-as-sign, divorcing the signifier from the signified to reveal that the word itself is a visual thing that can be considered and manipulated on its own. John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse’s collaboration, Seismosis, and Shin Yu Pai’s Sightings, books recently published by 1913 Press through the Rozanova Prize, an annual contest that publishes collaborative and/or visual books, are works that, each in its own fashion, extend this tradition of visual poetry born of the breaking of signs into the twenty-first century. Read more in Octopus Magazine # 10.

Essay: Celebrating Charlotte Smith
This celebration of the Romantic poet, Charlotte Smith’s long poem “Beachy Head” is also an investigation of, into, and through the particular faculty of the mind known as “the fancy.” Discussion of this faculty flourished during the Romantic period of poetic and philosophic writing and is often contrasted with the more popular and, in terms of the literary tradition, aesthetically preferred mode of the mind, the imagination. Although the fancy, as a critical term, has fallen from aesthetic discourse, vibrant traces of it remain in critical works such as Lyn Hejinian’s “Happily” and Charles Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption.” Both of these works celebrate the lineage of the fancy in the non-mimetic, flickering mode of mind and language evident in contemporary avant-garde writing. Read more in Octopus Magazine # 9

On Stacy Doris’s Knot
Via both form and content, Stacy Doris’s Knot undertakes the task of writing all that occurs in a single moment, in a single flash. “Entrance,” the first poem and introductory note, aptly describes the complexity of this project: “This book’s actual shape is a meander that articulates its construct by showing all of its vantages at once, including the movement which creates them.” The dual function of this piece as first poem and introductory note reveals the practice of the book: the moment-flash of Knot is not simply one act of perception. Rather, the book kaleidoscopically evolves from the perspectives and sensations that simultaneously comprise each moment. As “Entrance” operates as introduction and poem, enactment and explanation, the project as a whole spans a single moment of a life and all moments of a life. It encompasses individuality and multiplicity, the interior and the exterior, the poetic and the meta-poetic. Read more in Slope

On Sandra Miller’s Oriflamme
The concept of zaum (za=beyond or trans, um= mind, sense, rationality), coined by Kruchenykh and theorized by both himself and Khlebnikov, embodies these Futurists’ dream of a new universal language founded on the fundamental units of sound embedded in each word. The vision of this universal language is one of sound sequences free of historical and social idioms and constituting a series of universal truths communicated by a direct cry that surpasses all cultural constructs. Along with breaking words into sound units, zaum’s tactics include breaking up traditional grammatical structures, invention via neologism, and associative movement based on sound and illogical combinations of words. Although oriflamme. is not simply a transrational text translated over to the twenty-first century, these tactics prevail throughout Miller’s book and provide useful tools for entering this most unique text, allowing us to see the work’s heritage and appreciate the crucial ways in which oriflamme. departs from zaum’s ahistorical dream. . . .
Read more in the Denver Quarterly

Essay: “Attention in the Garden: Beauty as an Act of Mind”
For Ancient Greek Philosophers beauty was found to reside in objects as they are in and of themselves, regardless of human perception. Plato’s beautiful objects participate in the nonsensuous form of Beauty, shining out instances of proportion, harmony, and unity. Aristotle finds in beautiful objects order, symmetry, and definiteness. A rose, as object, is beautiful. However, in considering aesthetic value, we needn’t look to roses and objects, the beauty of which, at this point in time, seems to be a social convention of taste rather than a truth embodied in each thing. Instead, in the quest for beauty we can turn to the mind and body’s interaction with the rose, with the event of encountering the first bud in the still-chilled garden come spring. In so turning I will focus here on the action of the mind in the mode of aesthetic perception, looking for the way in which we perform beautiful thinking. Here I use the notion of aesthetics not as a critical framework of judgment, deciding whether x or y poem, painting, rose garden or natural vista is “beautiful,” but as a mode of perceptual experience, a mode of inquiring into the world, thought and language producing a beautiful arc of the mind.
Read more in the Five Fingers Review