Anyone still occasionally finding themselves mourning the demise of
Object Permanence, should redirect their subscriptions to Nate
Dorward`s The Gig immediately. It contains some excellent
poems, with the same kind of consistency as OP#1-#5, including important
work by John Wilkinson (four poems), Lisa Jarnot, Peter Riley (from
the second Book of his Excavations), Trevor Joyce and
others. Reviews, and a remarkable essay by John Wilkinson, not so
much on John Wieners or Charles Bernstein, tho` it reads poems by
them both, as a quite thoroughly conscientious exploration of his own
reservations and qualms about a psychoanalytically informed literary
criticism, suggesting that such a project is prey to all sorts of
errors and seems to me to stop just short of saying that a p.i.
l.c. is impossible, or radically unlikely. The last few pages, I`ve
decided, tell you more about John Wilkinson`s own work than anything
else I`ve read.
Most gripping for me at the moment is the stand-off between Peter
Riley`s work in The Gig, and the Wilkinson poems that kick it all
off. They are both as grippingly readable as each other.
Riley asking, "How do we have it all, after it is gone?",
engaged in a seamless gathering up of citations from literary and
non-literary traditions, as if to reconstitute THE metonymic system
to which they all refer. And so is all about reference. And
Wilkinson, in essay and most explicitly in the third poem in,
subordinating "reference" to "connectivity" - which probably wouldn`t
be "connectivity" at all in Peter Riley`s terms, but a series of
orphaned synecdoches. I wonder if, and worry that,
John Wilkinson`s links are meant to be guaranteed by the
psychoanalytic theory worried at in his essay, a theory whose
psychic determinism sets ITSELF up as THE metonymic system
to which noone can HELP but refer.
Trying to make some swift sense here. Fragmente`s most recent issue
was a fascinating survey of the interfaces between psychoanalysis
and poetics, well worth getting too, but I`d be lying if I said that
anything in there gave me as much food for thought as the first issue
of The Gig.
Details of how to get a copy are writ out for you below. You won`t
regret.
all best
robin
>From UK a single copy is seven Canadian dollars inc. postage, three
ish subscription is eighteen Canada dollars, cheques
to be made payable to Nate Dorward, whose address is
109 Hounslow Ave.
Willowdale,
ON M2N 2B1,
Canada.
Queries to: [log in to unmask]
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