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Cold Dogs by Zan de Parry

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  In “Cruel Extensions,” an early poem in Cold Dogs , the scene is of “enter[ing] the shop of an absent grocer to steal” then getting trapped inside. The speaker never even tries to start stealing, though, they just find that the door closes in on them. They try to break the door, the window breaks “onto” their “face,” and the grocer appears, trying to catch the speaker as the speaker tries to climb out:   And pulls me down to kick me in the head I’m no prisoner to walking I walked into the cage of walking willingly I’ve touched every ad, become brilliantly traceable Ate food wrapped in bright words as if the food itself could speak Yesterday I got shot with footprints in my face The king pulled me down And kicked me in the head with power At first I was upset Because it seemed to reflect the essence Of what keeps happening  But I don’t want to write like that I want to live a long, good, hard, young life   This poem has a more overt “message” than most others—or, it...
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Stroke by Stroke by Henri Michaux

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I came across  Stroke by Stroke  in the wake of reading The Wilds of Poetry , an anthology assembled by David Hinton, a poet and translator of Chinese poetry. In the introduction, he calls attention to writing’s pictographic origin, which ideograms maintained but alphabetic languages abandoned.  Whereas pictographic language “manifest[s] a direct connection to the empirical world,” alphabetic abstraction connects letters to speech sounds, resulting in “words that have an arbitrary relationship to the things they name.” This explains a whole cosmology for Hinton, whereby “consciousness as open and integral to natural process [as in Taoism] was replaced by an immaterial soul ontologically separate from and outside of material reality.” Instead of consciousness being the same as everything else, it is the Ego’s, a detached and reflexive entity that is not the same as the things it thinks about. Alphabetic writing, which “arbitrarily relat[es]” to the things it names, ac...
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I entered without words by Jody Gladding

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I entered without words  is comprised of “landscape-oriented” poems, in which drops of one or two words are spread across the page. The poems have a very singular look that’s neither “concrete” (the shapes are still determined by syntax, inviting you to start at the top left of the page and read left to right) nor “Projective” (that’s too determined by the “breath” of a subject). There are some similarities to ideograms, but ideograms are not alphabetic and are a kind of  “brushstroke.”   Some of the words are printed in bold type. Gladding states that these are entry points into the field of each poem. So, for example, one might read “in my sickness the sky kept spinning” in the following poem, but the idea is to also range across the poem and read other possibilities: When I go over this poem, I also read a statement of being “amazed at how all that could be firmament kept spinning.” All that is firmament is actually spinning, at the atomic level. You also need to ...
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