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Edge
- GenresPoetry
First published January 1, 1973
About the author
Bruce Andrews
63 books10 followersBruce Andrews is an experimental poet, performance artist, literary theorist & recently retired (after 38 years) left-wing professor of political science. As Musical Director for Sally Silvers & Dancers, he has created sound designs and, in performance, live mixes of music & text for over two decades of performances.Most recent of a dozen or so big books is last year’s "You Can’t Have Everything… Where Would You Put It!", followed by a chapbook, "Yessified (Sally’s Edit)" celebrating the Andrews Symposium and its expanded archive, online at www.fordhamenglish.com/bruce-andrews, with links to interviews, performance texts, poetry, collaborations, and critical essays on his work. Another online archive (and interactive project) materialized on April 1, 2014 as a curated 25 hour ‘twitter sculpture’ [Twitter.com @BruceAndrews25h], a 300 poem sequence.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 14, 2022
Like most of the so-called “Language Poets,” Bruce Andrews’ chapbook Edge is an experiment in a radical syntax of the word as word no longer attached to referentiality, meaning, or sense. Roger Shattuck’s epigraph gives the best direction towards the kind of writing that Edge is working towards, “joining items not by their centre (denotative meaning) but by their edges (sound and connotation)” (Andrews 2). Rather than viewing the centre of words in a poem as coalescing towards a central meaning by use of words and their meaning to encase a certain idea, thought, or feeling, Andrews goes to the edge of these words and brings them together through their sounds and juxtaposing of connotations to produce a new fragmented syntax. That’s a major thing I have gotten from a lot of LangPo, most of the poets wanted to treat words in a radical new sense and bring that to poetics/poetry to create a radically new poem, a new syntax, a “new sentence” to produce new and unknown results in poetry. Andrews does that here by attending to the “edge” of words as even the chapbook gets it’s title from this experiment in going towards the edge of words.
The most interesting part, to me, comes about sort’ve halfway thru when their is a facsimile of a letter to an unknown person explaining Andrews’ poetics of materiality. It’s a strange break in the poem because, typically, you wld think something that explains the experiment / project wld come either at the beginning, thus giving the reader a sense of what they are reading, or at the end then recontextualising everything the reader had previously read. But instead Andrews chooses to break up the poem and put this letter in the middle. I do really enjoy the effect it produces through this abrupt stop, it breaks up an expectation of giving sense either at the beginning or end. It does, somewhat didactically, direct the reader towards a sense of what it is they are reading, what all these radically broken up, disjunctive words are attempting to do. As the letter begins “Most of my stuff is based on fragmentation and the qualities of words other than (and along with) their meaning. The words aren’t related at the centre but by their edges (connotation, etc.)” (11). And in the next paragraph Andrews gives further details: “What’s stressed is sound, texture, rhythm, space and silence. Those qualities seem to get obscured when we focus too strenuously on the words’ ‘meaning’ (which is the referential aspect of the words, the part that draws the reader’s attention away from the words themselves)” (11). I find that to be almost like a thesis to the work — Andrews wants to direct readers towards the materiality of the word by creating these fragmented disjunctive words scattered across the page all breaking up through different types of forms in the poem. I enjoy particularly this idea that when words are too focused on their center rather than their edges, when readers focus too much on word’s and their meanings, this takes away from the material aspect of the words in their sounds, textures, spaces, and silences. Andrews’ experiment in Edge is to take words to their edges and push readers into a the creation of a new sense of language, a language of materiality. What I see here is also similar to what Clark Coolidge does in his poetics. And I do think Andrews succeeds here in Edge. He produces an entirely new sense of poetry here alongside all of the new experiments that were happening w/ LangPo. I am also just a sucker for these poetry experiments that treat the materiality of signs and experiment w/ typography.
The most interesting part, to me, comes about sort’ve halfway thru when their is a facsimile of a letter to an unknown person explaining Andrews’ poetics of materiality. It’s a strange break in the poem because, typically, you wld think something that explains the experiment / project wld come either at the beginning, thus giving the reader a sense of what they are reading, or at the end then recontextualising everything the reader had previously read. But instead Andrews chooses to break up the poem and put this letter in the middle. I do really enjoy the effect it produces through this abrupt stop, it breaks up an expectation of giving sense either at the beginning or end. It does, somewhat didactically, direct the reader towards a sense of what it is they are reading, what all these radically broken up, disjunctive words are attempting to do. As the letter begins “Most of my stuff is based on fragmentation and the qualities of words other than (and along with) their meaning. The words aren’t related at the centre but by their edges (connotation, etc.)” (11). And in the next paragraph Andrews gives further details: “What’s stressed is sound, texture, rhythm, space and silence. Those qualities seem to get obscured when we focus too strenuously on the words’ ‘meaning’ (which is the referential aspect of the words, the part that draws the reader’s attention away from the words themselves)” (11). I find that to be almost like a thesis to the work — Andrews wants to direct readers towards the materiality of the word by creating these fragmented disjunctive words scattered across the page all breaking up through different types of forms in the poem. I enjoy particularly this idea that when words are too focused on their center rather than their edges, when readers focus too much on word’s and their meanings, this takes away from the material aspect of the words in their sounds, textures, spaces, and silences. Andrews’ experiment in Edge is to take words to their edges and push readers into a the creation of a new sense of language, a language of materiality. What I see here is also similar to what Clark Coolidge does in his poetics. And I do think Andrews succeeds here in Edge. He produces an entirely new sense of poetry here alongside all of the new experiments that were happening w/ LangPo. I am also just a sucker for these poetry experiments that treat the materiality of signs and experiment w/ typography.
Displaying 1 of 1 review