Saturday, February 19, 2011

Juggling Space - Alice Blue # 13

Finishing out alice blue # ( 13 ), a highline assortment of writing. I started with the author listed last then worked my way forward, so I was treated immediately to a Russell Jaffe poem. This opened the issue smashingly:




...And flowers were those things that pulled you out, but

now damp and folded and piled like dams in the morning where it’s

bluish and everything’s one color but not the same amount angry, they

are zones.



I did find myself getting upset at the sameness by which the predominant form unifies most every writing. It's obvious in it's very streamlinedness that great attention has been paid to presentation/pagination, font, spacial design/layout, and how this array of physical aspects affects a prose poetry audience.


The dissection of a whole, consistent or parallel trajectory, then, becomes fundamental to the reading of alice. In reading a volume ( albeit in the wrong direction ), one must recognize that it's the intention of alice to be read only for its letter; one is forced to disregard the look and feel of the thing for its taste, simply, because that superficial edifice attempts, tacitly, to have you have it, is too nice, too easy, too worked on. The presentation is a nice seduction device, a groomed goatee. By character of its very slickness, without avenue to deliberate its illusion.


Each writer, however, is given only the space of two or three pieces to de-homogenize. If, and this is my very only beef with alice, one is to go rooting into hermeneutics ( of a volume's mere physicality ), I want more of the writing that ought amaze, reward the reader. Perform the trick, get the doggie treat.


I may have had a dream last night wherein I thought the writers over at alice blue have a grand 'ol time writing what they write. I think the place, though in this instance, overtends a concern for how a thing is said over what's saying.


Spend some time, take a read at ( in reverse order ) Russell Jaffe, Nate Slawson, Trey Jordan Harris, Jenn Marie Nunes, Ruth Williams.