DaDaDa

by Catherine Daly

This triology of poetry manuscripts includes poems that add personal emotion and interest into what has become quite dry experimental poetry, and visual and sonic interest back into melodramatic narrative / confessional modes. While its main appeal is to play and pleasure, this verse may prove challenging for beginning readers of poetry while it will interest those who generally do not read poetry but read classics, science & technology, experimental fiction, criticism / critical theory, and philosophy.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sunday, August 26, 2007
Slain in the Spirit of Catherine Daly

I've been spending the past few days in some books by Catherine Daly, and when I found DaDaDa, I would have to say I sneezed the French word "Eblouissante!" I choose the feminine "dazzling" for a reason as the work reads like a great love poem to female poets, singers, filmmakers, visionaries and women creators and thinkers of many disciplines, eras and philosophies/spiritualities. These spirits and voices appear and disappear posthumously throughout this book as volatile entities still engaged in the world, real presences above a medium's rocking table.

Not that I want to start off by sticking this book into some sort of dovecote or playing librarian...it's a thick book and it has the sort of sweep that celebrated serial poems of the highest order (you know, like canon fodder) possess, but it's thoroughly above any sort of aspirations like that. This is lip service without the lip service. I have to love a poet who equalizes the sonic Akashic field by putting lyrics by P.J. Harvey or Lene Lovich or Siouxsie Sue in the middle of beautiful lyric poetry without trying to become that most annoying of hipsters, the "pop art poet." But the work satisfies the killer-joint requirement of both timeliness AND timelessness.

Stylistically, the text is subject to no end of countless innovations, tortures, ecstatic mutations, and the author is as capable of writing perfect small lyric poems seemingly inspired by Sanskrit poetry as she is writing poems which seem to eroticize technological components in machines and then using these machines to generate lyric love poetry as Duchamp did in that celebrated "glasswork." This is the sort of book you encounter once, and will not be likely to forget. Think Theresa Cha. Think Joan Retallack. Think Susan Howe.
DaDaDa will make many think of Stein for many reasons. One is the way the weave of life (and sound!) seem(s) to dissolve borders and create poems which flow into poems and achieve a larger weltanschaaung and gestalt...rather than making poems like products with clearly delineated borders, like sound bites or individual selves, both of which DaDaDa seems to disprove in its relentless onwardness.

There is a longish poem in here, "Mistress Plot," in which little summaries of novels (often unadept, written by students perhaps?) are used as fragments to compose a long poem which either foregrounds how misogynistic the majority of novels written tends to be, or else foregrounds how often said novels are read misognystically. It's actually a very funny, nay HILARIOUS, poem, and is every bit as much a great and subtle feminist poem as say, oh, Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market. Here are a few fragments from the work: "A real Lady moved to town, but married a doctor and became ordinary." (Shades of Flaubert if not an exact match!) AND "He forced her to serve him./She set the house on fire./She shot him./A bayonet ran through her.//He proposed to her again. She rejected him and went to Ohio." AND
"His sister was a sick woman./His sister was a prostitute and bootlegger./He found the mother of his lost son's child./His sister disappeared. She liked laughter and fun."

I couldn't begin to give you a list or compendium of the sort of ideas present in this volume, because it would take at least a year of living with this book. And the book would change during that time. Daly writes the sort of oeuvre, like Stein's, that morphs constantly, that lies there deceptively finished, but then as soon as you turn your back, the book is secretly sampling the world and changing all its configurations, its colorations and tenor. It's that sort of anima and animal.

Find this book, people.

If you don't it will probably find you anyway. It has legs and runs very, very swiftly.

[Dawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hello Catherine. I tried and failed to compare you to an eggplant today. You and the eggplant are neither too similar nor too different. The comparison was like soup and getting bloated so I tossed it and decided your proper foil was probably lettuce. I watched you eat a salad once and that was really something. But I wanted the eggplant to work so badly because I have a little painting of one on my desk. Everytime I look at it I become a little less motivated. I think of you and your space shuttles and capacitive touch. I visualized my feelings as little machines traveling to and fro. I saw my feelings become little beetles and buzzards and then the buzzing of the air conditioner and into the main shaft where they were (swisssssh) infrastructure. You are a system analyst and I say that with a really weird look on my face because I've got no feelings about it.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book is my now retired "purse book" and looks it...very tattered, dog-eared and disheveled, well loved little book. I'll read it again, it's been an inspiring treat reading the poems and the collections of words that ramble with an intense rhythm...it should be read aloud to appreciate them (the words.) I have read it backwards and forwards, random pick ups and pages, and read some multiple times and always discovering something new...things to think about. It always churned up my creative mind, priming it for making more...

[tyler collin · Rating 5 out of 5]

i very much enjoyed this !

[Sabrikaci]

its goods