Daniel Barbiero reviews Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross' collaborative Shooky Session 1 John Ashbery, As We Know 5 December 2022, Jason’s office (2026)

Daniel Barbiero was good enough to provide the first reviews of Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross' collaborative Shooky Session 1 John Ashbery, As We Know 5 December 2022, Jason’s office (2026) via Arteidolia. Thanks so much! You can see the full review here, or below:

There’s a model of intertextuality that holds that every text has its double; in back of every text is another text, largely hidden but partly visible through the cracks in the first text, which in turn came into being as a response to the text secreted behind it. In many instances this second text goes unacknowledged, whether through absent-mindedness, anxious repression, or misdirection. Not so with Jason Camlot and Stuart Ross’s new chapbook Shooky Session 1: John Ashbery, As We Know 5 December 2022, Jason’s Concordia Office, a collectively authored poetic sequence whose authors cheerfully acknowledge the text to which their own text responds.

To write their sequence, Camlot and Ross first chose a book from the library at the Montreal university where Camlot teaches, and then settled in at his office to write. The book they chose was John Ashbery’s As We Know. Next, they alternated between reading and writing: one would read aloud from the book to the other, who’d write while listening, and then they’d switch roles. What and how much to take from As We Know to incorporate into his own poem was up to the writer to decide.

Camlot and Ross selected a book by Ashbery as their point of departure on the strength of Ashbery’s style and the inscrutability of his meaning. Ashbery is a poet of indirection, rapidly changing topics, plain diction, and labyrinthine syntax; negotiating his particular brand of ambiguity by ear is liable to open up a broad field of meaning full of possibilities that can inspire a range of imaginative responses. And the collection’s longest poem, “Litany,” itself is structured as an interplay of two texts. It’s written in facing columns that mimic the counterpoint of two independent voices heard at once, which makes it a fitting forerunner of Camlot and Ross’s own variety of verbal counterpoint.

The chapbook is divided into two parts. Part I consists of a single, quasi-narrative poem, while Part II is made up of discrete sections that can be read as independent poems. (Each part presumably was written by one or the other of the two poets.)

Part I’s discontinuous through-line recalls something of Ashbery’s own constant jumbling and rearranging of subjects, but without his systematic evasion of reference. While the forward motion of the long poem is propelled by a sequence of events that make sense on a local level but refuse totalization into a cohesive account, the things and actions they include often come plainly into view, albeit in contexts that are themselves enigmatic. For example,

We blush before elaborately broken entablatures
of bird-dropped simultaneities,
while smoke lingers,
looms above some simple ornaments
symbolic of beginnings,
of lonesomenesses,
of roundnesses, and of slants,
of thinnesses and generalities,
privatenesses and all things,
of preludes, and of farness,
of wonderfulness and asphalt.

The setting is a smoke-enfolded, presumably classical architectural ruin, which apparently causes embarrassment to the speaker. (But why? We don’t know.). The building’s ornaments are “simple,” but once their meaning is unpacked they turn out to stand for a mounting inventory of airy abstractions that then comes thudding to an incongruous and sudden end on a hard, paved surface. We’re jolted from the realm of the Ideal to something very close to the literally concrete.

This quick-cut shift in register, which pulls the rug out from under the tentative footfalls of common sense, is supplemented by elaborate metaphors and similes whose meanings are the product of their very incongruity:

Artifice is a twist
gaping at a citadelic tree,
a thing lumbering into
the invisible garment huddling
in a bus shelter on the icy
edge of the globe, a kind of
togetherness that injures illusion.

[…] All we know is
existence is waiting for a cab, like a
woman with a baby carriage filled with
fever-stricken mechanisms
I shall never see

The poetry in Part II tends more toward the lyrical and reflective, as in this self-contained section:

Some very pretty views are ascertained.
At dusk, amidst fitful cedars,
an iota of remorse
reverberates against the nightingales.

So, I wander through each dirty street,
as fools rush into my interstices,
and as my holes dream impetuously,
Solemnly, of rich adhesions.

O Sun, I want to enjoy
your work, your shining,
and setting, and rising,
and turning everything around.

There’s a play of ambiguity here that keeps the tone evocative but undecidable. The light is dim and there’s a passing moment of regret, but there’s a suggestion of hope as well: the sun the poet wants to enjoy may just as easily be rising as setting, since “dusk” can describe either dawn or sundown, and nightingales can be heard at both times.

Sometimes Ashbery’s voice seems to come through on its own, as in this passage from Part II:

Did you ever stop to think
about that other blackened memory,
and whether it was omitted
from the agenda deliberately

or out of innocent oversight,
or perhaps because it was pre-ordained
to be omitted from the
minutes, and so had

also to be omitted from
the agenda, even though
that other blackened memory
was included, for whatever reason.

And that these memories bear little resemblance
to anything but blackened star-shaped flowers?

The subject here—the “blackened memory”–is elusive and defined only in terms of another memory that presumably came up earlier in a conversation we’re only coming to in medias res. What it is we don’t know, and how or why it would be on anyone’s agenda (and anyway, what kind of an agenda would include a blackened memory as a discussion item?) also is a mystery. And meanwhile the syntax takes several serpentine turns as the question, rhetorical or in earnest, unspools. It’s the kind of thing we’d expect to find in Ashbery.

To be sure, in reading Shooky Session 1 it might make for an amusing game to try to draw a direct line between Ashbery’s poetry and Camlot and Ross’s by looking for coincidences of imagery or diction. For example, Part I’s

You can find knowledge like that
flowin’ round the flowers.
In this poem, flowers
stand in for something else.
Flowers are code names
for wishes of different kinds.

may have jumped off from the titular image of Ashbery’s “Flowering Death,” while the “interstices” from Part II may be an echo of “the interstices of my desirings” from Ashbery’s right-hand voice in “Litany.” But such an exercise would be beside the point. In the end, Camlot and Ross’s intertextual relationship to As We Know doesn’t rest on simple appropriation or direct commentary, but rather on the less predictable, and more inventive, ground of inspiration. What they’ve written stands on its own, and provides pleasures of its own besides.

Daniel Barbiero reviews Dale Tracy's Gnomics (2024) at Arteidolia

Daniel Barbiero was good enough to provide the first review for Dale Tracy's Gnomics (2024) over at Arteidolia. Thanks so much! You can read the original post here.

“Gnomics” is the name that poet Dale Tracy has given to the twenty-four short poems that make up the content of her new chapbook of that title.

A gnomic utterance is a short, condensed statement of a universal principle or observation, often couched in enigmatic or figurative language that gives it the appearance of profundity. Think, for example, of the aphorisms that earned Heraclitus the nickname “the obscure”: “a hidden harmony is better than an obvious one”; “the nature of things likes to hide”; “changing, it remains the same.” These are pithy statements that purport to speak of universal truths, but do so mysteriously enough that even after twenty-five hundred years there’s no agreement on what Heraclitus really meant.

Tracy’s gnomics don’t share Heraclitus’ willful obscurity, nor do they claim to present universal truths. For Tracy, “a poem is a model for doing rather than an explanation of something” – a way of learning about the world rather than pronouncing on it. Hence her gnomics present her in the process of thinking through the world and doing so in as condensed a manner as possible. They are, in effect, discrete objects in which a thought is totalized in a tightly-bound linguistic enclosure.

Take, for example, “Ars Poetica,” the collection’s opening poem:

You must eat your midnight and roses
or there’ll be no pounder of spices.

This single sentence poem mimics a conditional statement of the “without X there can be no Y” type, recast as a chain of associations. How these associations come into contact with each other is an enigma for the reader to interpret. “Eat” and “spices” may be connected through the implicit but absent intermediary term of “food” (spices make the food we eat palatable); “midnight” and “roses” associate with each other as cliched tropes of sentimental poetry. Are we to “eat” them figuratively, make them and their bland like disappear, in order for real poetry, its more challenging or substantive tropes akin to the spices that give food its pungency and which must be pounded out by the poet, to emerge in their place? Possibly, and a possibility latent in the title. “Ars Poetica” may be totalized syntactically – rendered a complete thought in which each association has its proper place in a sequence of associations – by its logical structure, but its meaning is not. It’s poetry, and not to be exhausted in a single reading. Its meaning resides in the ambiguity of its images rather than in its logical form.

The tension between logical form and poetic content is something Tracy plays with throughout Gnomics. “Logic 3,” one of five poems title “Logic” which play with syllogistic forms for poetic effect, reads:

What can be created can be destroyed.
Knowledge can be created.
Some knowledge nourishes dirt.

The first two sentences give us the premises, which don’t lead to the conclusion we’d expect, which should be “Knowledge can be destroyed.” But this is a poem rather than a syllogism proper, so we have to derive the conclusion analogically rather than logically. Organic matter nourishes the soil as it decomposes (is “destroyed”); transferred by analogy from organic matter to knowledge, the image of decomposition represents the more general idea of destruction which we now can see applies to knowledge, though apparently not to all knowledge.

Modeling the progress of a thought in language – seeing it through from its beginnings in a string of words in search of a meaning to its totalization in a completed unit of signification – is one of the aims of these poems. Tracy has described them as “open[ing] up a line of thought” through which “the thinking emerges from the poem as a process.” As we’ve seen in “Logic 3” that process can consist of drawing conclusions by analogy; we can see another kind of thought process in “Pocket Sky”:

A jagged tree is a key to the sky,
which turns around it slowly.

The thought modeled here mimics the apparent turning motion of the sky: it spirals outward from a central kernel consisting of a single image – a tree whose ramified branches resemble the teeth and notches along the blade of a key, as it protrudes upward in a clearing – and expands into a complex metaphor that reverses our expectations through an incongruity in the way it’s elaborated. A key is something that works by turning within a space, but here it’s the space surrounding the (metaphorical) key that turns; this reversal of the conventional order of things heightens our awareness of the way the metaphor is constructed – we follow the path the thought takes as it rounds a curve we didn’t see coming. If the tree is a key the sky is the cylinder containing it; what’s more, the tree provides a key to our noticing the sky by virtue of its vertical orientation directing our gaze upward. The image of the tree has the added effect of setting up an implicit pun with the title of Tracy’s collection: it “rhymes” with the image of the gnomon, the vertical rod ancient geometers used to measure the length of shadows.

The extended metaphor in “Pocket Sky” works by combining the two more-or-less distant elements of the tree and the key. They combine partly on the basis of a symmetry of physical resemblance and partly on the basis of the similar sound profiles of “tree” and “key”: both are monosyllabic words beginning abruptly with hard consonants and ending with the same long vowel sound. It is a method of forming associations that recalls Surrealist poetics.

We can see this again in the riddle-like “Fallacy”:

A mind like saloon doors:
all spur, no horse ride.

We can imagine a mind being like saloon doors – loosely hinged and swinging open and shut with every random stranger passing through – but the linkage from that opening simile to the implicit image of a horse being prodded with a spur but refusing to move requires an alogical, imaginative leap that on the surface produces a mixed metaphor. But it’s a leap clearly meant to elaborate the simile in a different figurative register since, like the stubborn horse resisting a prod, such a porous mind would most likely be one that doesn’t move itself to think, despite getting a push. Rather than a mixed metaphor, we have a complex and wryly humorous surreal metaphor-by-association. It really isn’t surprising, then, to see Tracy, in an interview last year, describing her way of thinking as having a “surreal bent.” With Gnomics, she makes that thinking the meaning, rather than just the means, of the poetry.

Gnomics is Tracy’s second book with above/ground press, following 2020’s The Mystery of Ornament. The Ottawa-based press, which is curated by publisher rob mclennan, specializes in elegantly presented poetry chapbooks like Gnomics. It has published more than 1325 titles so far and celebrates its thirty-first anniversary this month.