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While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed by It
How do we react to disaster, to political uprising, to spectacle? With relief missions, donations, and what words? While You Were Approaching the Spectacle But Before You Were Transformed by It, the second book by Lytton Smith, explores the relationship between poetry, news, and the lives of others. Poised between Brecht’s critique of empathy and Martha Nussbaum’s politics of compassion, this powerful collection plays with direct address and personal testimony as it investigates the relationship between ethics and the aesthetic. Drawing on sources that range from travel guides, BBC reports, contemporary art exhibitions, and sixteenth-century debates about masque, Smith’s book offers a range of forms that test the edges of the page, the borders of communication.
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
First published March 12, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 20, 2013
I enjoyed being in this book's company. It did feel a little like a journey, through deserts and mountains, through sounds and silences, through landscapes of close attention and desiring answers to hardly-spoken questions:
Here's the last stanza of one of my favorites (one of the most dense to unpack, if you aren't content to go along in the felt-sense of it):
...
"If the owners of the voices unreeling
are the seasonal visitors whose coins
the boy finds in winter, their metal
& figurehead his want for elsewhere;
if the fire subsides; if the arcade's
neon & electric were to wash over
anything but the empty seafront
of a place on route from destination
to ghost" , from "Destination to Ghost"
And, hey, I met the poet at a writing conference bookfair, and he humored my joke about how I'd caught sight of the book from a distance, been drawn in from the crowds, and was looking forward to the transformation. So give it a read if you can dig poetry that makes you think, and especially if you happen to be thinking through some of those life-path questions.
(Does anyone have a reading for the poem with overlapped text? Or if the into-the-margins titling is intentional? Otherwise it's a beautifully laid out book.)
Here's the last stanza of one of my favorites (one of the most dense to unpack, if you aren't content to go along in the felt-sense of it):
...
"If the owners of the voices unreeling
are the seasonal visitors whose coins
the boy finds in winter, their metal
& figurehead his want for elsewhere;
if the fire subsides; if the arcade's
neon & electric were to wash over
anything but the empty seafront
of a place on route from destination
to ghost" , from "Destination to Ghost"
And, hey, I met the poet at a writing conference bookfair, and he humored my joke about how I'd caught sight of the book from a distance, been drawn in from the crowds, and was looking forward to the transformation. So give it a read if you can dig poetry that makes you think, and especially if you happen to be thinking through some of those life-path questions.
(Does anyone have a reading for the poem with overlapped text? Or if the into-the-margins titling is intentional? Otherwise it's a beautifully laid out book.)
February 17, 2016
"'How did you travel?' the people ask. 'Well,' you reply."
"Both looking and participating."
"What routes and habits people tread into local history"
"The internet can be switched off and those outside describe the land as gone dark."
"It tragic. It urgent. It"
"by flagged overlaid maps, by word on the ground on the sapling pages of a guide you kaw-wah-la, you outlander, you foreigner, you implicated and witness, you unavoidable event."
"The lost gather at airports, silent as geography. Observing their waiting we expect flight you I this theatre."
"What is natural about resources?"
"Within the cage we have tried wingspan."
"You traverse the internationally recognized area of outstanding national beauty. The breathtaking panoramic as the lungs stage their laboured inflations/deflations."
"A satellite image with a zoom and travel function. Earth as dispersed as the dirt our treads trail to the next destination. Something to the left or right of the edges of this picture."
"The loveliest of years. Saffron. Your imagination not nomadic, not exactly here. Your historied presence, here."
"Both looking and participating."
"What routes and habits people tread into local history"
"The internet can be switched off and those outside describe the land as gone dark."
"It tragic. It urgent. It"
"by flagged overlaid maps, by word on the ground on the sapling pages of a guide you kaw-wah-la, you outlander, you foreigner, you implicated and witness, you unavoidable event."
"The lost gather at airports, silent as geography. Observing their waiting we expect flight you I this theatre."
"What is natural about resources?"
"Within the cage we have tried wingspan."
"You traverse the internationally recognized area of outstanding national beauty. The breathtaking panoramic as the lungs stage their laboured inflations/deflations."
"A satellite image with a zoom and travel function. Earth as dispersed as the dirt our treads trail to the next destination. Something to the left or right of the edges of this picture."
"The loveliest of years. Saffron. Your imagination not nomadic, not exactly here. Your historied presence, here."
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews