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Explosion Rocks Springfield
Explosion Rocks Springfield is eighty one-page iterations of the following The Friday evening gas explosion in Springfield leveled a strip club next to a day care. Each iteration consists of analytical-philosophic queries, lyrical diffractions, and paranarrative documentary. Sixteen sub-topic variations appear. Every single word of the primary thematic line is exfoliated, extended, and exploded, multiplied, in a fugal structure, seeking the effects of content density, tension, and return. Continual re-figuration of all themata invites the reader to experience a pleasurable engagement with a material transparency that is neither prepackaged ("found") nor fancied from thin air ("inspired"). What is explosion to a slab of drywall?
What is "drywall" exactly?
HEIGH-HO!
Why do people strip?
What is "day care"? Why "day"?
What is night care?
Why daylight why daylight why daylight.
What is "care" exactly?
Gas. Wherefrom gas? Raised in southern California, experimental poet, playwright, and labor activist Rodrigo Toscano is the author of seven collections of poetry including Collapsible Poetics Theater (2008), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series, and Deck of Deeds (2012). His work has been widely translated and anthologized; his radio pieces have aired on stations across the country. Toscano works for the Labor Institute in conjunction with the United Steelworkers and the National Institute for Environmental Health Science. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
What is "drywall" exactly?
HEIGH-HO!
Why do people strip?
What is "day care"? Why "day"?
What is night care?
Why daylight why daylight why daylight.
What is "care" exactly?
Gas. Wherefrom gas? Raised in southern California, experimental poet, playwright, and labor activist Rodrigo Toscano is the author of seven collections of poetry including Collapsible Poetics Theater (2008), which was chosen for the National Poetry Series, and Deck of Deeds (2012). His work has been widely translated and anthologized; his radio pieces have aired on stations across the country. Toscano works for the Labor Institute in conjunction with the United Steelworkers and the National Institute for Environmental Health Science. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published April 12, 2016
14 people want to read
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September 4, 2016The Structuralist Activity of Rodrigo Toscano's Explosion Rocks Springfield
(Fence Books, 2016)
To use a phrase, from early in Roland Barthes’s career, Explosion Rocks Springfield deploys, in successive poems (all poems bearing the same title), “mobile fragments whose differential situation engenders a certain meaning.”
Let me (pedantically) parse Barthes’s phrase in the context of Toscano’s book.
The meaning engendered by its “mobile fragments” is meaning that each fragment alone could not engender in itself—for these underdetermined fragments to receive meaning, they need to achieve a degree of mobility so that they can reappear elsewhere in the booklength poem in a slightly different guise. “The meaning” of the fragment alone is uncertain and questioned. Each mobilized fragment achieves a degree of meaning as the booklength poem unfolds and as the fragment is repeated in variation within differing contexts of different poems. “Fragment” can take the form of a word, phrase, mode (interrogative, declarative) and stanza.
Explosion Rocks Springfield exhibits, in other words, “the structuralist activity” of meaning-making (as the title of Barthes’s 1964 essay would have it), which is an activity that focusses on the how and not the what of it—on how meaning may be engendered and not on what the engendered meaning means.
To say so is to say that Explosion’s “mobile fragments” function in the same way as do “a square by Mondrian, a series by Pousseur, a versicle of Butor’s Mobile,” as well as “the ‘mytheme’ in Lévi-Strauss, the phoneme in the work of the phonologists, [and] the ‘theme’ in certain literary criticism [he could mean Voloshinov].”
Well, Explosion gets to what the meaning means, too. It has to. The what of it (“it” in the broadest sense) is in fact the dilemma of the book. Facts are the dilemma. As poetry by Donato Mancini, a recent essay by Peter Quartermain, Times articles and, behind them all perhaps, historian Mary Poovey among others, remind us in conclusion, the fact can only very tenuously consitute itself as fact these days. Facts no longer seem to have cultural, political traction.
Explosion is witness to the fundamental What is…? question itself breaking down. Break down. Ex-plosion.
Toscano offers a structuralist antidote to official evasiveness concerning what are the facts we need to know, for example when it concerns an event of fire and when the vocabulary of fire comprises associated words (incuding the double sense of “billows”), some of which, were they set in narrative relation to each other, might even establish cause:
[“….] Punked—by language—like this:
‘Those billows, I’m sorry
Not quite official yet,
And smoke, being registered
As semi-official:
Billows can’t play with smoke.’
See? The very whiff of
Matched teams competition
Gets shut out the picture.
The shit—should rather go:
What is smoke—to billows?
How do billows juke smoke?
These inquiries bring game.
These inquiries punch home.
Don’t think so? Check this out:
‘Smoke . . . rarely’s billowing’
‘Billows . . . rarely mean smoke’
Bump that!” (92-3)
“What is smoke—to billows?” begins to restore value to the fundamental What is…? question by structurally differentiating related terms “smoke” and “billows.” But this poem also begins: “’Does smoke often billow? / Be real! Of course it does” (91). A play on verb and noun “billows” in part, sure. So, repetition in variation, deferring the reality-effect of it.
In this last regard, note the quotation marks around this particular poem (as around others, too); the resultant distancing isn’t ironic exactly nor Brechtian in that the direct address of the alienation-effect isn’t there either. A book of seams.
Seamy in more than one sense that this sketch of a review can’t breach, but the question of Why early Barthes, if? intrigues me for now.
(Fence Books, 2016)
To use a phrase, from early in Roland Barthes’s career, Explosion Rocks Springfield deploys, in successive poems (all poems bearing the same title), “mobile fragments whose differential situation engenders a certain meaning.”
Let me (pedantically) parse Barthes’s phrase in the context of Toscano’s book.
The meaning engendered by its “mobile fragments” is meaning that each fragment alone could not engender in itself—for these underdetermined fragments to receive meaning, they need to achieve a degree of mobility so that they can reappear elsewhere in the booklength poem in a slightly different guise. “The meaning” of the fragment alone is uncertain and questioned. Each mobilized fragment achieves a degree of meaning as the booklength poem unfolds and as the fragment is repeated in variation within differing contexts of different poems. “Fragment” can take the form of a word, phrase, mode (interrogative, declarative) and stanza.
Explosion Rocks Springfield exhibits, in other words, “the structuralist activity” of meaning-making (as the title of Barthes’s 1964 essay would have it), which is an activity that focusses on the how and not the what of it—on how meaning may be engendered and not on what the engendered meaning means.
To say so is to say that Explosion’s “mobile fragments” function in the same way as do “a square by Mondrian, a series by Pousseur, a versicle of Butor’s Mobile,” as well as “the ‘mytheme’ in Lévi-Strauss, the phoneme in the work of the phonologists, [and] the ‘theme’ in certain literary criticism [he could mean Voloshinov].”
Well, Explosion gets to what the meaning means, too. It has to. The what of it (“it” in the broadest sense) is in fact the dilemma of the book. Facts are the dilemma. As poetry by Donato Mancini, a recent essay by Peter Quartermain, Times articles and, behind them all perhaps, historian Mary Poovey among others, remind us in conclusion, the fact can only very tenuously consitute itself as fact these days. Facts no longer seem to have cultural, political traction.
Explosion is witness to the fundamental What is…? question itself breaking down. Break down. Ex-plosion.
Toscano offers a structuralist antidote to official evasiveness concerning what are the facts we need to know, for example when it concerns an event of fire and when the vocabulary of fire comprises associated words (incuding the double sense of “billows”), some of which, were they set in narrative relation to each other, might even establish cause:
[“….] Punked—by language—like this:
‘Those billows, I’m sorry
Not quite official yet,
And smoke, being registered
As semi-official:
Billows can’t play with smoke.’
See? The very whiff of
Matched teams competition
Gets shut out the picture.
The shit—should rather go:
What is smoke—to billows?
How do billows juke smoke?
These inquiries bring game.
These inquiries punch home.
Don’t think so? Check this out:
‘Smoke . . . rarely’s billowing’
‘Billows . . . rarely mean smoke’
Bump that!” (92-3)
“What is smoke—to billows?” begins to restore value to the fundamental What is…? question by structurally differentiating related terms “smoke” and “billows.” But this poem also begins: “’Does smoke often billow? / Be real! Of course it does” (91). A play on verb and noun “billows” in part, sure. So, repetition in variation, deferring the reality-effect of it.
In this last regard, note the quotation marks around this particular poem (as around others, too); the resultant distancing isn’t ironic exactly nor Brechtian in that the direct address of the alienation-effect isn’t there either. A book of seams.
Seamy in more than one sense that this sketch of a review can’t breach, but the question of Why early Barthes, if? intrigues me for now.
October 13, 2020
Absurd humor is a very individual thing. The tone of voice that cracks up one reader will do nothing for another. I'm sorry to be in the latter category with this collection. It felt like one joke that went on too long and didn't build up to anything.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews