CHRISTOPHER STACKHOUSE. Slip. Corollary Press. 2005. $6

ENRIQUE FIERRO. Natural Selection. Translated by Miguel Gonzalez Gerth. Host Publications. 2005. $15

reviewed by TYRONE WILLIAMS

Slip is Christopher Stackhouse’s first solo collection of poetry (he collaborated with writer John Keene on a 2006 book of art and poetry entitled Semiosis) and it has all the signs of promise and uncertainty one might expect in a debut. The most successful pieces here are the short ruminations on the relationship between the physical inscription of the artist and that of the writer, a blurred borderline aptly captured in the title poem and the opening work, “Mark.” However, the best of these pieces may be “Intensive” and “Untitled for John Cage,” both of which articulate the significance of aesthetic and cultural differences at minute and macroscopic scales. Thus, in “Intensive,” “Both/and or even acceleration, wrecklessness/ though brightness shifts, through brightness shifts”—a “w” and “r” open up a linguistic wormhole into larger scales (social, political, etc.) of pertinence. And in the Jon Cage homage, an “absent” quotation mark puts into ironic tension, or perhaps, plays with ironic tension since this singular difference in a poem constructed out of quotations opens unto these words (imagine the initial quotation marks absent): “I enjoy seeing a mark that hasn’t been/ fiddled with…” Less successful—because more obvious—are the “lecture note” poems, their formal interest undercut by rather (by now) pedestrian concerns on “being,” “difference,” etc. Still, there is enough thorny, edgy, work here to make one eager for the first full book of Stackhouse poems.

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Natural Selection represents the first English translation of one of Uruguay’s most important “modernist” poets, Enrique Fierro. This ample selection from over forty years of work constitutes a sturdy defense and enactment of the radical implications of modernism, but whereas the American and British Language poets, for example, consistently situate language within its contexts (however infinite), that sense of exterior infinity drives Ferrio back into the “other” infinity—the transcendental interiority of the poem (e.g., “Door Without End”). Because he holds out the “poem” as the last perceivable form before language disappears into infinite self-reflexiveness, Fierro disdains Romanticism and its image-based, representation-oriented descendants (mocked in “I Want To See A Cow”) as well as the putative postmodernist leveling of all values (linguistic and otherwise). Yet, what makes Ferrio not another Pound (despite his insistence that “the poet/ is the enemy of the poem”) or Eliot clone, what makes him closer in spirit to Stein (without the self-satisfied cultural baggage) or Oppen (without the politics), is his deliberate refusal of normative narrative, what he calls in one poem the “Burial sentence.” Thus his poems read like—indeed, are organized like—those of an overly aestheticized Celan. I suppose, though, that the poet he most reminds me of, particularly in his quarrel with religion, is Dickinson. The very invocations of these names is an index of Fierro’s originality and these poems, almost despite themselves, represent some of the powerful formal inventiveness in poetry today.