Composition's Logics: A Review of Nicole Mauro's The Contortions (Dusie Press, 2009)
After putting down Nicole Mauro's new book of poetry entitled The Contortions, I am reminded of something filmmaker Stan Brakhage once wrote: "Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception." Mauro's book is "an adventure of perception." This collection is a hybrid of genres, the words contorting into spaces and juxtapositions that challenge the reader to pursue her own perceptions and definitions of the possibilities of language, a journey well worth the experience.
The book of poems is divided into five distinct parts: Kilter, The Contortions, Jackdaws Love My Big Sphinx of Quartz, Dispatch, and The Ending of Days. The first part is composed of a single poem, the opening piece inviting the reader to walk through a word wilderness, "_ologizing, and _ophosizing / the babble out / randy / cavitations, or a snore…" However, the most intriguing part to this reader is "The Contortions," in which Mauro's poems respond to Rorschach-inspired images (Mauro herself created the inkblots with the exception of one created by Pat Mauro). The poems like the images send the reader wondering. And, like Rorschach's images themselves, the possibilities are numerous. As I look at the images, I imagine that I see a nose, a head, or a fountain, but as I read Mauro's text, the possibilities proliferate. I begin to feel it is I who is "digging other / whoms": ". . . I saw, in Rorschach, / facials, that promiscuous / light would lay / itself / next to anything / spatial.: And, this is just what Mauro does. She creates "anything / spatial", filling the pages with word play, from her "to to" which recurs in several poems (to (to) the point where I stop attending to other forms of play before finishing the poem) to Freudian associations. Yet she deftly avoids the obvious - in images that could clearly be a penis in Poem IV, for example, she begins with the image of a struggling sun, only later exploring the corporal "opening of holes."
In Part III, "Jackdaws Love My Big Sphinx of Quartz," (the title itself quoted by Rimbaud suggests the type of play that is to come), Mauro creates sixteen pangrams. Aside from adhering to the rules of the pangram where each letter of the alphabet is used, the titles of the poems themselves are in alphabetical order with the exception of the last poem. The word play continues throughout this section, and the reader simply has to let go of preconceived notions of grammatical and syntactical expectations and enjoy the experience. The last poem of this section explains it best: "I want to touch to a terrible extent, to the very / exclusion of thought / places / the electromagnetic / outdoors / can't pigment / that are yours."
Part IV, a collaboration with Marci Nelligan, is entitled "Dispatch" and consists of 18 separate pieces. As denoted by the title, this section incorporates a transmission of messages between two people, extracting words and phrases from one piece and incorporating them into the next. Whether or not the poets are working together on each piece or are responding to one another in this poetic conversation is uncertain, but the feeling that a dialogue is being created has been achieved. As in previous sections, I search through the language and look for the connections that weave in and out of various lines. Some poems more easily convey the crossover: where section one ends, "Defined as middle hollow vessels lose all heart," the next begins, "Hollow vessels lose all heart, our lip / has failed…" Other times, the lines extracted are embedded deep within one poem and then found at the beginning of the succeeding one. And in the midst of this collaborative line play are the words themselves. The language is again manipulated, contorted into various phrases that leave the reader to sit with the text, linger over the words, not so much in search of a narrative, but to languish in the words themselves. Language such as "Hindsight, yes / daffodils held like / the tongue might ellipses" rests beautifully on the page.
The final section "The Ending of Days" extracts headings from The National Enquirer, specifically referencing soap operas and their simplistic plotlines. Mauro begins with the found text, an over-simplification of language, and creates something unique. For example, in reference to Port Charles she writes, "Page 76 of the script says it's inevitable, much like the line enclosing the circle, making curve of the angle. . . Dangle, participle, dangle." The summaries the poet constructs move the reader away from the mundane language that can bombard her on a daily basis. That which becomes such a central focus in popular culture is reinvented, and in doing so, Mauro challenges the reader to move past this generally accepted norm and into language's infinite possibilities.
I would like to end this review with a quote from a poet that Mauro begins with early in her book - Emily Dickinson. "If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way"? The Contortions is one of those poetic experiences where the reader can find something new at each (re)reading of the text, her mind opened to new and inviting possibilities. From ink blots to Freudian associations, from pop culture references to collaboration, Mauro's poetry attempts to recreate and challenge the reader's perceptions of the possibilities of language, to (to) physically get into her head, to (to) contort, to (to) manipulate.
And, in doing so, she succeeds.
Ekleksographia:
Wave 4.1.c
August, 2010
Review
Chantel Langlinais
Chantel Langlinais's teaches at Texas Christian University. Her work has appeared in damselfly press, The Southwestern Review, The Louisiana Review, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Journal, and the Louisiana English Journal. She directs Texas Creative Under: Ground Breaking, collaborations among writers, musicians, dancers, and photographers in the TCU community. Her one–act play, The Exhibit will be featured at the Archway Gallery in Houston next year.