The Geographic Information Systems defines "data fusion" as "organizing, merging and linking disparate information elements" to represent reality. Albert Goldbarth, Jordan Stempleman, Heid Erdrich, and Kevin Young create 21st-century literature by using multiple streams of information. In their works, science overlaps imagination, and perhaps this is the newest trend. Regardless, they each write books that enlarge the reach of American poetics.
Albert Goldbarth
A two-time National Book Critics Circle winner in poetry, Goldbarth is a Wichita State University professor and has one of the largest vocabularies of any English speaker on the planet, in part because he reads voraciously in science and technology.
"Most of Us," the first poem in his new collection, "Everyday People," establishes the scientific theme of the book, as he describes culture heroes that are "an isotope of you." Isotopes are elements on the periodic table that occupy the same space, even if their weights differ slightly. Goldbarth's controlling idea is not a literary metaphor, but rather a physics category. Like isotopes, humans have interior lives that are "immeasurably larger than our skins." People need larger identities, heroes, because "We need a second place/ to hold the extra 'us' of us." So a "starlet," Hercules, and an "Oscar winner" extend our identities. Goldbarth is slightly optimistic in his belief that "everyday people" are larger than the sum of their parts.
Goldbarth explores the Neolithic past of humans in "Minnows, Darters, Sturgeon." A lover holds her partner's head and "somewhere hundreds of brain-equivalent miles down/ inside him is a database/ of fossils of earlier women." The man puts his ear to this woman's back and hears a script "compounded of glial cells and electrical links." Yes, this is a 21st-century love poem. That Neolithic woman is an isotope of a contemporary woman. Both play the same roles in different eras. Goldbarth goes on to compare lovers to fish who mate amid an underwater cacophony.
This is Goldbarth's 26th book of poetry — his first was "Coprolite," named for a fossil — and he continues his essential commentary on scientific knowledge fused with human passion. He is a secular prophet.
Jordan Stempleman
Stempleman, a professor at the Kansas City Art Institute, embeds scientific knowledge within his short poems in his third book "No, Not Today," which is scheduled for release in April. Maps, sunspots, fossils and tectonic plates appear in this volume, juxtaposed with ordinary talk. He holds the collection together with the voice of a companionable if nervous narrator. He entertains, but underneath his jokes lie uncertainties. He worries, "I am still thinking too much/ about what the first moonwalk cost us." The cost is not just economic, but loss of dreams about the unknown.
After fretting about the moonwalk, he continues with a change of direction: "I have a secondhand horn." He piles together such comments, and just when a story begins to emerge, he shifts again. This poem ends with "lost alone in the weather again."
The moon and weather are brackets of physical reality. They are the scientific laws that mark boundaries of Stempleman's reality. Within the poem, however, his narration scatters like subatomic particles. This breaks down René Descartes' idea that mental processes are separate from other physical laws.
Throughout his book, Stempleman keeps tension between chaos and logical sequence. He arranges individual poems like a diary, with titles of "Monday" through "Sunday," but with unexplained gaps and repeated days. Disruption of weekdays parallels the non sequiturs of his comments.
One of the poems titled "Wednesday" celebrates maps, "I remember to laugh again when forced/ to look at the unforced motion in maps." He ends this poem with geologists, "who each morning/ wake up, look out at the world and sing hooray." The scientists who study solidified pasts, the geologists, cheer, and Stempleman shares this enthusiasm. Stempleman's writing is a physical phenomenon, drawing from science as much as the literary tradition.
Heid E. Erdrich
Erdrich also addresses science, but as a Native American, she finds the scientific method foreign. "Cell Traffic: New and Selected Poems" is the fourth poetry book by this enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain band of Ojibwa. She re-frames science in terms of her culture. She compares robotic surgeons to "The healers anthropologists called sucking doctors" in the poem titled "Own Your Own: Cellular Changes." Like Goldbarth, she sees a continuous line of healers who occupy the same space on a periodic chart, but distinct in each generation. No individual healer is more or less civilized, and continuity is her point, not progress.
Other poems grapple with the Frankenstein scientists. In "Upon Hearing of the Mormon DNA Collection," Erdrich writes about the appropriation of Cherokee DNA samples. Another topic is Kennewick Man, a thousand-year-old body excavated in Washington state in 1996 and central to a lawsuit. Erdrich chooses to give him voice as though he were a contemporary character. She imagines him as an online date in "Kennewick Man Attempts Cyber-date" and as a speaker presenting a news release in "Kennewick Man Tells All." In this last poem, his statement to the press is a brief couplet: "I am 9,200 years old. / I am bone. I am alone."
Erdrich's book asserts Ojibwa language and culture alongside the latest technology. She also explains, throughout the book, the Ojibwa experience within the context of the 21st century. The view is often amusing, as she shifts to playful "Indian humor" to describe not only the debacle of Kennewick man, whose DNA is being sampled, to lust of an "Indigenous Elvis" who works with scanning machine security at the airport and "eases in too close." Erdrich synthesizes high and low culture, as well as new technologies, to create her ambitious compositions in verse and prose. Adapting to new information is her survival strategy.
Kevin Young
Young takes science to its very originator, Aristotle, as he reconfigures poetic categories in "The Grey Album: Music, Shadows, Lies." Young creates his own genres based on African-American thought. He opens with an "Overture," a three-page, extended definition of the term "Storying." No verb appears. He follows this with a brilliant discussion of the
"shadow" book behind African-American written texts. Young names three types of shadow books: those that are never written, larger volumes that inform published books in fragmentary form, and lost books. Amiri Baraka's book of poetry titled "Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note" hinges on a haunting suicide note, even though it does not exist in physical form. This is an example of Young's shadow books.
Other topics are hip-hop, blues, slavery, Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence, postmodernism and post-soul poetics. As the author of seven collections of poetry, Young approaches his first book of prose with a lyrical ear. He breaks down Aristotle's separation of rhetoric from poetics, and his style marks his assertion of a separate aesthetics as much as his subject matter.
Young grew up in Topeka and now teaches at Emory University as the Atticus Haygood Professor of Creative Writing. This book won the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize, and it is brilliant entertainment as it reshuffles cultural history.
No comments:
Post a Comment