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Sensuous Debris : Selected Poems, 1970-1995
Sensuous Selected Poems, 1970-1995 [hardcover] Boston, Bruce [Sep 01, 1995]… 096267088X
96 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1995
8 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Boston
352 books117 followersI've published more than sixty books and chapbooks, including the novels Stained Glass Rain and the best-of fiction collection Masque of Dreams. My work ranges from broad humor to literary surrealism, with many stops along the way for science fiction, fantasy, and horror. My novel The Guardener's Tale (Sam's Dot, 2007) was a Bram Stoker Award Finailist and a Prometheus Award Nominee. My stories and poems have appeared in hundreds of publications, including Asimov's SF Magazine, Amazing Stories, Weird Tales, Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy, Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Nebula Awards Showcase, and received a number of awards, most notably, a Pushcart Prize, the Bram Stoker Award, the Asimov's Readers' Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Grand Master Award of the Science Fiction Poetry Association. For more information, please visit my website at http://www.bruceboston.com/
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 9, 2023
A best-of collection of poetry that includes a large assortment of sci-fi, fantasy, and other speculative poetry from a twenty-five year period of Boston's authorship, as well as the almost complete cycles of The Last Existentialist and The Alchemist.
There is no back-cover blurb here – why would there be? A blurb, it could be argued, would be disruptive to the reader's process of perception.
As the senses indiscriminately gobble up what is before them, without the interference of will or discrimination, a rush ensues where the throng of what was gobbled makes its way to the mind itself. It regresses and reduces, goes to pieces and some of the fragments are discarded. What is left is sensuous debris. This is the raw material from which the mind fabricates itself and its contents. This fabrication is made far easier when one is handed a blueprint or a sketch, or at minimum offered some helpful advice based on personal experience; when such aid is present the mind is wont to follow it, a predisposition towards the shedding of superfluous burdens.
But with poetry (predominantly if not as a rule) the burden is the very effect that is sought. Here the need for interpretation, induction, and investment is a privilege; the need for cogitation, the yearning to make sense of and transform our surroundings, is a privilege. So, why would there be a blurb? – the sensuous debris that would come from the encounter with it would present the mind with expertise and unwanted relief. The debris from the poetry needs to be alone before the mind in order to sate its appetite for creativity as fully as possible. And so there is no blurb.
From this line of reasoning there ought to be no review either – shame on me. But I would argue that without any information at all about a work there would be no curiosity either. Certainly, the adventurous among us require no more than to know that something is there in order to seek it out, continents have been explored on this premise alone, but most of us are less Eiríkssonian than that and require further incentives. Some kind of information wherefrom one could grab sufficient sensuous debris for the mind to make up itself on whether to further approach the contents. Which begs the question – where is that blurb? – because surely one is warranted.
So, how does one go about raising the curiosity of the potential reader? Well, poetry, perhaps more so than any other form of writing, has its appeal in its style rather than the story or theme it shapes, hence a taste or two of Boston's would be most welcome. A reasonable place to start would be with a couple of examples from 'In the Wake of Sensuous Debris,' the poem wherein the book makes it's own approach to the idea that I inadequately presented earlier in the review. It begins thus:
To ensure the clear passage
of entropy's leaden barge
down the switchback curves
and convoluted canyons
carved by sequential time
as it winds its steady way
through the veins and arteries
of a moment's maturation,
the vermiculate reaches
of chronological space
turn on the countersunk
hinges of cause and effect
in direct proportion
to the number of atoms
remaining before the Fall. (p. 50)
This effigy of the passage from the senses and into the wormholes where the mind begins, is convoluted, but vivid; demanding, (unusually so,) but monumental in its rewarding spectacle. Later what has been gathered is put to use:
In the wake of timeworn
and sensuous debris
the broken capillaries
and algorithms of desire
remain unrecanted,
the ontogenic ocean
still bathes the limbs
in degenerative fire,
you can almost hear
the skinned silence
which inhabits
the blood of light, (p. 51)
When the debris of the mind has staid long enough to become worn by time it's often spoken of as memory, and the poem has here arrived at the junction where memory meets the momentary external input. The poem takes the textbook definition of the mind's function, internalises it, but promptly tosses the textbook back out of the meta-window and into the world where it came from and belongs, then it takes what it has learned as well as what it understands must be implied and reiterates it as magic. Quite a few of the poems herein make such reiterations. Whether one sees it as reality honoured or superreality accepted amounts to the same, the difference lies in the viewpoints rather than in what is viewed, and part of the beauty lies in this duality.
Another obvious source for an example is The Alchemist cycle. Here I found one where artistic beauty is blended with the magical, a mixture which is as present in alchemy as in Boston's works, and in this particular example, by itself, it's impossible to tell whether it's the one or the other that is being spoken of.
Atop a stool
in his ramshackle laboratory
in the green glade,
his forearms resting
on the high slanting desk,
poised in concentration
deep into the night,
he inscribes his metaphors
with gold and rubric inks,
curlicues, dovetail allusions,
sharp breaks of the feather pen. (p. 23; 'The Alchemist in Place')
And just one more, to make sure the potential reader is left with enough of an impression to evaluate their interest with some accuracy. This time from a poem not collected elsewhere, a sample for those who are already familiar with Boston as a poet, but are considering whether they ought to add this particular publishing to their library. This is the first verse of 'from Cantos for a Common Tongue by Alanthe Vasti,' professedly as translated by Boston from the space language Metanese.
Earthen souls or souls of star flight,
the same demons with hides of fire,
the same angels with nebulae wings,
prance upon each of our chests,
dance to all of our songs
as they are piped and blown
past the bellows of our breath
and recede through the worldly ages
(faithfully structured on the facets
of the crystallized dwarf stars)
housed in the library at Londrai. (p. 90)
There is something empowering about the first lines, how souls burn and yearn irrespective of their elevation, and how the current state of one is the potential of the other – and also there seems to be a warning, but the rest of poem can deal with that. As for the potential, it's surely a fitting beginning for his poem in particular, since those who have encountered Boston's loftier sci-fi knows that he never needed any Metanese star artefacts to write such as this.
To return to the lack of a blurb, in its place there is an introduction by t. winter-damon, where one finds the following truth, stated by someone who had already been a fan for a decade and a half, and a friend of Boston for much of that time, a statement that bears the mark of being backed by years of contemplation:
[Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealist poetry, sees] all beauty as being for him, in essence “convulsive,” springing from antinomies formerly believed incompatible, creating a fusion “as the stillness after a collision.” Bruce Boston's poetry—whether an old favorite or a first read—never ceases to strike my mind with the convulsive impact of a just-viewed Dali painting...higher praise I cannot conceive. (p. 11; text in brackets added for clarity)
It's true that all things that pass before our senses are encounters, but not all encounters are collisions. A collision such as this would happen when the sensory richness/stimulation creates a rush of sensuous debris beyond a threshold of normality and into the exceptional and arresting. At this point there is a demand for processing, for focus, effort, and emotion, to resolve the collision. Exactly which emotion is evoked depends on the collision, and of course the observer, but, no matter what the result is, this book never fails to collide, again and again.
This probably turned out to be a somewhat unusual if not strange review. The distance from sensuous debris by themselves to association and in turn invention, isn't long, and I found it fitting to employ this chain a bit more than usual. Hopefully this in itself will say something of the successes of this collection.
There is no back-cover blurb here – why would there be? A blurb, it could be argued, would be disruptive to the reader's process of perception.
As the senses indiscriminately gobble up what is before them, without the interference of will or discrimination, a rush ensues where the throng of what was gobbled makes its way to the mind itself. It regresses and reduces, goes to pieces and some of the fragments are discarded. What is left is sensuous debris. This is the raw material from which the mind fabricates itself and its contents. This fabrication is made far easier when one is handed a blueprint or a sketch, or at minimum offered some helpful advice based on personal experience; when such aid is present the mind is wont to follow it, a predisposition towards the shedding of superfluous burdens.
But with poetry (predominantly if not as a rule) the burden is the very effect that is sought. Here the need for interpretation, induction, and investment is a privilege; the need for cogitation, the yearning to make sense of and transform our surroundings, is a privilege. So, why would there be a blurb? – the sensuous debris that would come from the encounter with it would present the mind with expertise and unwanted relief. The debris from the poetry needs to be alone before the mind in order to sate its appetite for creativity as fully as possible. And so there is no blurb.
From this line of reasoning there ought to be no review either – shame on me. But I would argue that without any information at all about a work there would be no curiosity either. Certainly, the adventurous among us require no more than to know that something is there in order to seek it out, continents have been explored on this premise alone, but most of us are less Eiríkssonian than that and require further incentives. Some kind of information wherefrom one could grab sufficient sensuous debris for the mind to make up itself on whether to further approach the contents. Which begs the question – where is that blurb? – because surely one is warranted.
So, how does one go about raising the curiosity of the potential reader? Well, poetry, perhaps more so than any other form of writing, has its appeal in its style rather than the story or theme it shapes, hence a taste or two of Boston's would be most welcome. A reasonable place to start would be with a couple of examples from 'In the Wake of Sensuous Debris,' the poem wherein the book makes it's own approach to the idea that I inadequately presented earlier in the review. It begins thus:
To ensure the clear passage
of entropy's leaden barge
down the switchback curves
and convoluted canyons
carved by sequential time
as it winds its steady way
through the veins and arteries
of a moment's maturation,
the vermiculate reaches
of chronological space
turn on the countersunk
hinges of cause and effect
in direct proportion
to the number of atoms
remaining before the Fall. (p. 50)
This effigy of the passage from the senses and into the wormholes where the mind begins, is convoluted, but vivid; demanding, (unusually so,) but monumental in its rewarding spectacle. Later what has been gathered is put to use:
In the wake of timeworn
and sensuous debris
the broken capillaries
and algorithms of desire
remain unrecanted,
the ontogenic ocean
still bathes the limbs
in degenerative fire,
you can almost hear
the skinned silence
which inhabits
the blood of light, (p. 51)
When the debris of the mind has staid long enough to become worn by time it's often spoken of as memory, and the poem has here arrived at the junction where memory meets the momentary external input. The poem takes the textbook definition of the mind's function, internalises it, but promptly tosses the textbook back out of the meta-window and into the world where it came from and belongs, then it takes what it has learned as well as what it understands must be implied and reiterates it as magic. Quite a few of the poems herein make such reiterations. Whether one sees it as reality honoured or superreality accepted amounts to the same, the difference lies in the viewpoints rather than in what is viewed, and part of the beauty lies in this duality.
Another obvious source for an example is The Alchemist cycle. Here I found one where artistic beauty is blended with the magical, a mixture which is as present in alchemy as in Boston's works, and in this particular example, by itself, it's impossible to tell whether it's the one or the other that is being spoken of.
Atop a stool
in his ramshackle laboratory
in the green glade,
his forearms resting
on the high slanting desk,
poised in concentration
deep into the night,
he inscribes his metaphors
with gold and rubric inks,
curlicues, dovetail allusions,
sharp breaks of the feather pen. (p. 23; 'The Alchemist in Place')
And just one more, to make sure the potential reader is left with enough of an impression to evaluate their interest with some accuracy. This time from a poem not collected elsewhere, a sample for those who are already familiar with Boston as a poet, but are considering whether they ought to add this particular publishing to their library. This is the first verse of 'from Cantos for a Common Tongue by Alanthe Vasti,' professedly as translated by Boston from the space language Metanese.
Earthen souls or souls of star flight,
the same demons with hides of fire,
the same angels with nebulae wings,
prance upon each of our chests,
dance to all of our songs
as they are piped and blown
past the bellows of our breath
and recede through the worldly ages
(faithfully structured on the facets
of the crystallized dwarf stars)
housed in the library at Londrai. (p. 90)
There is something empowering about the first lines, how souls burn and yearn irrespective of their elevation, and how the current state of one is the potential of the other – and also there seems to be a warning, but the rest of poem can deal with that. As for the potential, it's surely a fitting beginning for his poem in particular, since those who have encountered Boston's loftier sci-fi knows that he never needed any Metanese star artefacts to write such as this.
To return to the lack of a blurb, in its place there is an introduction by t. winter-damon, where one finds the following truth, stated by someone who had already been a fan for a decade and a half, and a friend of Boston for much of that time, a statement that bears the mark of being backed by years of contemplation:
[Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealist poetry, sees] all beauty as being for him, in essence “convulsive,” springing from antinomies formerly believed incompatible, creating a fusion “as the stillness after a collision.” Bruce Boston's poetry—whether an old favorite or a first read—never ceases to strike my mind with the convulsive impact of a just-viewed Dali painting...higher praise I cannot conceive. (p. 11; text in brackets added for clarity)
It's true that all things that pass before our senses are encounters, but not all encounters are collisions. A collision such as this would happen when the sensory richness/stimulation creates a rush of sensuous debris beyond a threshold of normality and into the exceptional and arresting. At this point there is a demand for processing, for focus, effort, and emotion, to resolve the collision. Exactly which emotion is evoked depends on the collision, and of course the observer, but, no matter what the result is, this book never fails to collide, again and again.
This probably turned out to be a somewhat unusual if not strange review. The distance from sensuous debris by themselves to association and in turn invention, isn't long, and I found it fitting to employ this chain a bit more than usual. Hopefully this in itself will say something of the successes of this collection.
Displaying 1 of 1 review