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Synopticon: A Collaborative Poetics
A collaborative poetics by Louis Armand & John Kinsella, with an Introduction by Pierre Joris.
"Who but John Kinsella and Louis Armand could have invented and laid out the 21st Century protocols that govern the intriguing collaborative poems in Synopticon? Encyclopedic, witty, packed with knowledge about arcane subjects, this is a book to sample and reread with ever-increasing knowledge, pleasure, and admiration." --Marjorie Perloff, author of Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy.
Synopticon was composed as a collaborative project during the course of an extended email exchange between 1998 and 2008. Part poetics of collaboration, part cultural archaeology, part textual collage, this book records an investigation into authorship and authenticity in the construction of social texts and cultural artefacts.
"Who but John Kinsella and Louis Armand could have invented and laid out the 21st Century protocols that govern the intriguing collaborative poems in Synopticon? Encyclopedic, witty, packed with knowledge about arcane subjects, this is a book to sample and reread with ever-increasing knowledge, pleasure, and admiration." --Marjorie Perloff, author of Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media and Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy.
Synopticon was composed as a collaborative project during the course of an extended email exchange between 1998 and 2008. Part poetics of collaboration, part cultural archaeology, part textual collage, this book records an investigation into authorship and authenticity in the construction of social texts and cultural artefacts.
107 pages, Paperback
First published March 24, 2012
3 people are currently reading
207 people want to read
About the author
Louis Armand
85 books126 followersLouis Armand is a writer and visual artist who has lived in Prague since 1994. He has worked as an editor and publisher, and as a subtitles technician at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival, and is an editor of VLAK magazine. He is the author of eight novels, including Breakfast at Midnight in 2012, "a perfect modern noir, presenting Kafka's Prague as a bleak, monochrome singularity of darkness, despair and edgy, dry existentialist hardboil" (Richard Marshall, 3:AM), CAIRO (Equus Press, 2014; short listed for the Guardian's Not-the-Booker Prize), and THE COMBINATIONS (Equus Press, 2016). Described as "Robert Pinget does Canetti (in drag in Yugoslavia)," Armand's third novel Clair Obscur was published by Equus in 2011. His previous novel, Menudo (Antigen), was described as "unrelenting, a flying wedge, an encyclopaedia of the wasteland, an uzi assault pumping desolation lead... inspiring!" (Thor Garcia, author of The News Clown).
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
June 19, 2013
Armand & Kinsella’s choice of the name Synopticon, without doubt, is accurate. A collaborative project composed during extended email exchange, Synopticon is a mix of poetics, cultural archaeology, and textual collage. The project records the authors’ investigation into authorship and authenticity in the construction of social texts and cultural artifacts. From the Author’s Note:
The term “synopticon” was intended to suggest, also, a type of generative textual synchronicity-machine, at work on the universal archive—questions of power and surveillance are implicit and their structures are matter, herein, for synoptic détournement and deconstruction.
If you were not convinced the project was drenched in academia and theoretical concerns from the title and Marjorie Perloff’s blurb on the back cover, that first page will clearly align you for the experience to expect of reading the poems. Or, if you are one of the many people who are not in need (or want) of this proximity to the poetic avant-garde, you can at least stop yourself from reading any further.
The book is definitely not one for the casual poetry reader. The look of pained thoughtfulness as some of my friends picked up the book on a random page was humorous, although I cannot be sure the looks I saw did not mirror my own while reading the densely encyclopedic and arcane language found within the poems. Even with the introductory material, I felt as though I had been dropped in the middle of a sea of words with a broken paddle. There is very little in the text to ground a reader—no discernable environment, no persona or visible characters, only language on a specific topic as far as your eye can see. Some poems were more accessible than the rest. Poems such as “A Symposium,” “Refractions,” and “Protologistic Poem” felt cohesive enough for me to read in their entirety without having that many literary spurts and sputters. But I must admit, for the first time since leaving graduate school I wholeheartedly wished that I had access to an entire classroom of intellectual minds and opinions to discuss a book. I wanted to discuss what I had read so badly with others that I yearned to hijack an upper level poetic theory course for a couple of weeks to flesh out what this book was saying, what it was doing, how it was accomplishing it, and whether or not readers find it successful in its intentions.
There is no question that the work is poetic, witty, and engaging. The language choices throughout Synopticon are lyrical and rhythmic as well as being educated. For example, lines 3-9 in “Triptych: Diseases of the Eye” part 2. self/portrait (solarisation):
a priori – through morbid reflexes, geothermal, pedantic,
in the virulence of its own phantasms – splitting hairs,
the gauche protest belies the take my point
of it, the internally focused eye of a mise-en-abyme
where the temples & forehead (bold as heraldry)
have received the electric power of recti-
fication…
Reading this passage on the page may not show the clever sound play that becomes all too apparent when reading aloud.
The expertise of the authors’ use of line and segment throughout the project is enviable. There are several poems created using such long lines the poems are printed vertically and to read them easily you must move either the book or the angle of your head. This visceral and tactile experiencing of the poems mimics the interaction of the reader experiencing the book as a whole. One must change their perspectives and their expectations to delve fully into the text.
While Synopticon does not lend itself to an embracement by the literate masses, I found the project to be engaging, thought provoking, and complex. Well worth the multiple readings and research time spent. If nothing else, the book deserves an award for being the most highbrow poetry book to include the words “slapstick poodle puffs” and “poop scoops” within one of its poems.
The term “synopticon” was intended to suggest, also, a type of generative textual synchronicity-machine, at work on the universal archive—questions of power and surveillance are implicit and their structures are matter, herein, for synoptic détournement and deconstruction.
If you were not convinced the project was drenched in academia and theoretical concerns from the title and Marjorie Perloff’s blurb on the back cover, that first page will clearly align you for the experience to expect of reading the poems. Or, if you are one of the many people who are not in need (or want) of this proximity to the poetic avant-garde, you can at least stop yourself from reading any further.
The book is definitely not one for the casual poetry reader. The look of pained thoughtfulness as some of my friends picked up the book on a random page was humorous, although I cannot be sure the looks I saw did not mirror my own while reading the densely encyclopedic and arcane language found within the poems. Even with the introductory material, I felt as though I had been dropped in the middle of a sea of words with a broken paddle. There is very little in the text to ground a reader—no discernable environment, no persona or visible characters, only language on a specific topic as far as your eye can see. Some poems were more accessible than the rest. Poems such as “A Symposium,” “Refractions,” and “Protologistic Poem” felt cohesive enough for me to read in their entirety without having that many literary spurts and sputters. But I must admit, for the first time since leaving graduate school I wholeheartedly wished that I had access to an entire classroom of intellectual minds and opinions to discuss a book. I wanted to discuss what I had read so badly with others that I yearned to hijack an upper level poetic theory course for a couple of weeks to flesh out what this book was saying, what it was doing, how it was accomplishing it, and whether or not readers find it successful in its intentions.
There is no question that the work is poetic, witty, and engaging. The language choices throughout Synopticon are lyrical and rhythmic as well as being educated. For example, lines 3-9 in “Triptych: Diseases of the Eye” part 2. self/portrait (solarisation):
a priori – through morbid reflexes, geothermal, pedantic,
in the virulence of its own phantasms – splitting hairs,
the gauche protest belies the take my point
of it, the internally focused eye of a mise-en-abyme
where the temples & forehead (bold as heraldry)
have received the electric power of recti-
fication…
Reading this passage on the page may not show the clever sound play that becomes all too apparent when reading aloud.
The expertise of the authors’ use of line and segment throughout the project is enviable. There are several poems created using such long lines the poems are printed vertically and to read them easily you must move either the book or the angle of your head. This visceral and tactile experiencing of the poems mimics the interaction of the reader experiencing the book as a whole. One must change their perspectives and their expectations to delve fully into the text.
While Synopticon does not lend itself to an embracement by the literate masses, I found the project to be engaging, thought provoking, and complex. Well worth the multiple readings and research time spent. If nothing else, the book deserves an award for being the most highbrow poetry book to include the words “slapstick poodle puffs” and “poop scoops” within one of its poems.
August 1, 2020
Sorry, someone may love this book but I couldn't get into it.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews