Marine snow

by Karen Mac Cormack

In Marine Snow, her fifth collection of poetry, Karen Mac Cormack extends her investigation into sentence effects, particularly the integration of poetic line with prose period. By returning language to a functional mandate this work reveals how meaning emerges in the sites of its production. These poems fuse a propositional language with stanzaic configurations to explore phenomenological implications in perception as mediated through both the orthodox and the errant trajectories of language, writing, and space.

62 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Karen Mac Cormack (b. 1956) is a contemporary experimental poet. She holds dual British-Canadian citizenship, and lived for many years in Toronto; more recently, she moved to Buffalo, New York, when her husband, the poet Steve McCaffery, was hired by SUNY-Buffalo for the David Gray Chair.

Though she was not directly part of the Language movement, her work shows many affinities with it, in its use of disjunctiveness at a within-sentence and between-sentence level, and in her interest in the interrogation of cultural norms and ideologies through the skeptical reworking of "found" materials and genres. In Fit to Print, for instance, the poems mimic and distort the format and themes of a typical daily newspaper, while in At Issue the poems are quarried from the pages of women's fashion and beauty magazines. The prose pieces in the recent project Implexures are somewhat atypical in their use of biographical and autobiographical materials, especially a series of letters written from a variety of Mediterranean locations by an unnamed female traveller (possibly to be identified with the author, possibly not).

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

"There will thus be facts that are no longer truths."
- Michel de Certeau (The Practice of Everyday Life)

Michel de Certeau's words, quoted at the opening of Marine Snow, provides an appropriate introduction to Mac Cormack's disjunctive style. In Mac Cormack's poems, words retain their meaning, but they no longer coexist harmoniously or coherently in conventional sentences. The effect of this technique, however, is lost on me - despite the fact that I have read the language poets extensively.

Although Mac Cormach was not associated with the language poets, according to wikipedia, "her work shows many affinities with it, in its use of disjunctiveness at a within-sentence and between-sentence level, and in her interest in the interrogation of cultural norms and ideologies through the skeptical reworking of 'found' materials and genres".

In fact, it was my interest in the language poets that brought me to Mac Cormack. Her poems, rather than contribute to the goals/aims of the language poets, at best can be read as an homage to the language poets. Her form/style, rather than borrow from the language poets' inventiveness, instead limits itself to the conventional. Too many poems are centre-justified. I am unfazed and unimpressed by your centre-justification. At their most interesting, they are justified to the right rather than the left...

Act not liquid cushion but no horses just fans to circulate that which ultimately wasn't breatheable whatever chair the mirror was yesterday these disjunctions grant for the cold a companion re-routed before lapses from the hill this case has no mound and Voltaire isn't smiling morning as such pulse to leave meant no calling back upon tangle or arsenal all the fettered high grade actual in the sense of why these witnesses agree pealing is an employment worn thin strontium as the days edge cooler pealing is an employment worn thin strontium as the days edge a cooler Greek design in red and white hanging morbidezza monticule preceded by monthly rose in the shivers else a parting leaves both sides Montana in the gladiolae this prism leaf fertility downtown the slat empty reflection today those on track rise thermometer helf-read end of ever.
 - Braking Radiation (pg. 20)


irregular
 then
 obsolete
 weather
conveying
 stop
 snare
 call
 forward
fractures
 in
 clear
 points
 angle
 opposite
 a
 draw
 distance
 action
 circling
 walk
 predates
 if
 through
 in
separated
 pause
 union
 where
 every
 now
 makes
 to
 and
 stamping
 dust
 - Service (pg. 31)


 A stiff pageant.
 Leather's not a locus come to
 or compass points apart from
 the antidote to sleep.
 Why not two questions
 at the same time hair is red.
 Our lungs hurt more or more.
 Capital city
 as a name for its view
 of what denotes past industry.
 All stillness is illusory
 and we age
 even without the size of words
 Sex as amnesia.
 Phrase of paper and
 the arm slow alphabet.
 - Unspoken Isn't Invisible (pg. 41)