Amanda Earl

I'm a terrible person to review poetry. STILL. Despite the fact that I do it all the time. I refuse to allow my own writings to be classified as "poetry" - thusly 'condemning' my own more formally experimental writings to even deeper obscurity b/c if there's one thing poets have an interest in it's POETRY - & not in writing that disavows poetry.

SO, here I am again. Reviewing poetry. Reviewing, in particular, a bk that hasn't been previously reviewed. My GoodReads friend, Eddie Watkins, is an excellent reviewer of poetry. As I've written before, Eddie says something about 'entering into the poetry'; I don't usually 'enter into it', I glance off it. Sometimes I relate to it b/c I find an entry point, sometimes I'm inspired by it enuf to write something interesting that seems somehow parallel (perhaps this is very Amy Catanzano of me).

In Earl's description of this she writes:

"Ursula wanders city streets and back alleys while having visions of Saint Ursula, the patron saint of lost girls, said to have been massacred along with 11,000 virgins en route to her wedding ceremony to a young Pagan prince. AHP has designed and published a limited and colourful pocket size chapbook in 26 copies."

& I'm honored to have copy 19 of 26. What perplexes me, though (& it's an age-old question), is how much is the reader expected to 'get' (ie: feel or think) of the "Ursula wanders city streets and back alleys while having visions of Saint Ursula" part of that description? B/c I wdn't've 'gotten' that, necessarily, w/o having read it online. Perhaps it's not that important. After all, it seems that it's the feeling that counts - the feeling of HAVING A VISION OF SOME KIND. & that feeling comes across, sortof. Or maybe it's just poetry being poetry. Wch isn't such a bad thing, I reckon.

In Franz Kamin's "Crumbs of the Pie" performance, the protagonist visits a neglected artist & is handed a small bk that's called "Crumbs of the Pie" on his way out (after too short a visit). The protagonist doesn't want it - he thinks it's 'just' poetry. Franz dreamed this performance. Then the protagonist looks in the bk & sees that it contains drawings of crumbs & that these crumbs are ALIVE & it's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. He doesn't need any other bks after this.

This bk is about the same size as the one in "Crumbs of the Pie".

"look at your face
you can still feel the burn
these are lines spirits have touched
visions of heaven
fingertips that you find worthy
your hair is white
if you're lucky you're a ghost"… (lisätietoja)

With the silent saga of Voyagers I and II well beyond radio reach, one could wonder what an intelligent extraterrestrial species would make of the on-board greeting from earth with its compendious cacophony of earth-based sounds. A well-intentioned dog's breakfast of auditory curiousities? A sound-collage of a species desperate to communicate? A melange of unintelligible squeaks and garbling that would be grievously mistaken as a declaration of war? Amanda Earl departs on an intrepid journey away from her devoted Ottawa regionalism apparently redressing what the onboard greeting on Voyager 2 forgot. The delicately visceral quality of this long sequence poem opens upon what would first register for a cosmic visitor: a pulsating energy flickering in a remote pocket of the universe. From here, Earl twists and imbricates themes of language and light into a kind of golden poetic braid. Earl finesses each line so that it is less broken than tapered and frayed. From light and the ocular delights, Earl moves along her corporeal register into the domain of liquidity, resolving these themes in darkness and silence. The body as diluvian entity frees the subject from the noun-fixity of gravid concepts, giving over Being to that aleatory movement of the verb:for those whom the first is waterwhat they know they know from swimming & from rainthis is how to learn to continuethis is how to find quench driplips of downpour of throat & teaches touchthe sounds offalling heavy in the body a flood.At times, this poem reads as an isolated radio whisper, crackling and staccato in its utterances, while at other times it reads as a litany of an undiscovered body. Its questing voice and earnest exploration makes the poem a curiously welcome complement to Jason Camlot's The Debaucher. The sustainability of Earl's poetic greeting is seemingly almost meant to be sung, making Welcome to Earth: poem for Alien(s) an alternative psalm for a choir of a space-alien future-fantastic.… (lisätietoja)