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Irresponsibility
Poetry. "Put this book down and go be with other people," urges Chris Vitiello in his playful and grave second book. Where music, science, and poetry discover the grounding necessity of measurement in this work, Vitiello is just as likely to destabilize, boldly, all manner of life, repeatedly undercutting urgent concrete statements and smashing them into granular moments. "The great pleasure of Chris Vitiello's IRRESPONSIBILITY comes from its outrageous to write ambitiously while refusing to render the act of writing in any of its normative or nostalgic guises. 'All you have to do is pay attention,' Vitiello writes, 'and it's not that simple.' Each page of this absolutely essential book is a testimony to the thrills and difficulties of such unceasing attention"--Tony Tost.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
First published March 15, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
October 8, 2014
Kind of a cross between Duchamp's quasi-scientific quasi-serious Green Book and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. An interesting read so far, the kind of writing that pulls your attention away from the words on the page and into your own mind, as if you're an observer behind your own perceptions. Like Wittgenstein's book it takes nothing for granted as far as language and perception are concerned. What I like about my own reading of it is that I have a tendency to find it humorous, just as I find Philosophical Investigations humorous. But seriously humorous, mind you. When someone takes nothing for granted to such a degree it's fun to watch them squirm their way out of one potential mental cul-de-sac after another, creating an irregular spidery word labyrinth along the way. It also creates the comic Zeno-like image of someone pausing and stuttering at a doorway, unable to walk through until they specify and categorize all the ramifications of the concept "doorway", as he/she traverses smaller and smaller fractions of linear space; meanwhile everyone else in the household is passing in and out going about their day.
October 13, 2008
Is writing poetry, by default, an irresponsible act? The thing we say we have to do to get out of dumping the garbage, cleaning toilets, or changing the world? Irresponsibility tests this hypothesis through a game-like feeling for language, not Wittgenstein’s so much as one of those simple Milton-Bradley jobs that are easy to get out of the box and play, but a few moves in and you’re finding holes in the directions that send you crying to the folks to adjudicate.
Vitiello’s métier is the syntactically direct but semantically rich puzzler, somewhere between an SAT thought problem and a Steven Wright zinger, that accumulate into weirdly resonant conjunctions. The different registers of language and observation include signage, pop science, childspeak, standardized fill-in-the-blankery, war news, conversational addresses to family and friends, and sharply descriptive passages of weather, nature and road conditions, all of which work to connect the surface banality of daily existence with the surprising beauties latent in the process of writing it down. The book’s answer, I think, is that all language we attend to becomes poetry: the attention is the responsibility.
Vitiello’s métier is the syntactically direct but semantically rich puzzler, somewhere between an SAT thought problem and a Steven Wright zinger, that accumulate into weirdly resonant conjunctions. The different registers of language and observation include signage, pop science, childspeak, standardized fill-in-the-blankery, war news, conversational addresses to family and friends, and sharply descriptive passages of weather, nature and road conditions, all of which work to connect the surface banality of daily existence with the surprising beauties latent in the process of writing it down. The book’s answer, I think, is that all language we attend to becomes poetry: the attention is the responsibility.
June 2, 2020
Good poems that also reveal about Vitiello's arrangement process. Great meta lines direct to reader
October 19, 2022
I don't get this poetry, at all. I must be missing something, but since I don't know what, I just can't give this any kind of a rating. I found it to be just words randomly thrown on a page.
June 17, 2008
IRRESPONSIBILITY by Chris Vitiello - Ahsahta Press , Boise, Idaho / 978-1-934103-00-5 / 101pps / $17.50
Oozing philosophical statements in conceptual verse and injecting emotions as if a side thought (or hidden meaning) Vitiello is a thinkers poet. Poems titled as dates and places, one needs to decipher just what really happened there. Take “September 2002/Topsail Island, NC” with it’s opening
Midmorning beachcombing
This rock is four letterforms
The diametric opposite of any experience
is not the absence of that experience
Rocks are graphs
Seeing is a perpetual axis//An understood axis
Brent, I have to break out of this and
not just to do something new
Is this a sweet parting? Are these all poems of such losing? Riddle me this..
Doorways frame
where inside touches outside
Not itself a space or place but a planar edge
Is this the key to the poems? The look inward from this outside perspective? The actual planar edge being being the line breaks?
The door is either open or closed and
there are many degrees of being open
Picture Bilbo & Golum. How Golum masked his pain with taunting riddles. Clever diversions from his loneliness. It’s like the DaVinci code of poetry.
But meanwhile, on the beach, collecting white stones and searching for a cure. A relationship flows in with the mechanics of writing, with the worry of a diagnosis in that scattered frenzy of anticipation and diversion.
In “April/May 2004/Blowing Rock, NC”, Vitiello writes of writing, abstractly, while including truths. Moths & lichen & rain & guilt. As mother & friend. She surrenders nothing with vulnerability. A daughter & friend, the Blue Ridge Parkway. Nobody explains from what the guilt derives.
She is observant. Perhaps she expects as much from us. To look at things beyond as they are. That planar edge again. Such as in “9 May 2004/Baltimore, MD/3 hours” where she snippets observations while killing time.
From Federal Park the new cultural buildings look like kitchen appliances
Had she not said so, I would have never seen it. I look around where I sit and nothing seems the same. Her writing is like taking a walk and letting your mind wander, jotting down every thought & observation & making them jell into coherency.
And finally, ”Appendix/Sentences for use” where she states “Any information can be contained in, and any passage of writing converted into, sentences like these. Use them as you see fit. This book’s copyright does not cover theme, so they can be disseminated freely without credit given or compensation due.” Right generous, no? I’ve culled these;
“The mirror does not reflect the dark.”
“You are either close to me or unknown.”
“The opposite disappeared in solitude.”
and this final synopsis:
“It was red until she painted it.”
Which she did.
*Review appeared in Oranges & Sardines
Oozing philosophical statements in conceptual verse and injecting emotions as if a side thought (or hidden meaning) Vitiello is a thinkers poet. Poems titled as dates and places, one needs to decipher just what really happened there. Take “September 2002/Topsail Island, NC” with it’s opening
Midmorning beachcombing
This rock is four letterforms
The diametric opposite of any experience
is not the absence of that experience
Rocks are graphs
Seeing is a perpetual axis//An understood axis
Brent, I have to break out of this and
not just to do something new
Is this a sweet parting? Are these all poems of such losing? Riddle me this..
Doorways frame
where inside touches outside
Not itself a space or place but a planar edge
Is this the key to the poems? The look inward from this outside perspective? The actual planar edge being being the line breaks?
The door is either open or closed and
there are many degrees of being open
Picture Bilbo & Golum. How Golum masked his pain with taunting riddles. Clever diversions from his loneliness. It’s like the DaVinci code of poetry.
But meanwhile, on the beach, collecting white stones and searching for a cure. A relationship flows in with the mechanics of writing, with the worry of a diagnosis in that scattered frenzy of anticipation and diversion.
In “April/May 2004/Blowing Rock, NC”, Vitiello writes of writing, abstractly, while including truths. Moths & lichen & rain & guilt. As mother & friend. She surrenders nothing with vulnerability. A daughter & friend, the Blue Ridge Parkway. Nobody explains from what the guilt derives.
She is observant. Perhaps she expects as much from us. To look at things beyond as they are. That planar edge again. Such as in “9 May 2004/Baltimore, MD/3 hours” where she snippets observations while killing time.
From Federal Park the new cultural buildings look like kitchen appliances
Had she not said so, I would have never seen it. I look around where I sit and nothing seems the same. Her writing is like taking a walk and letting your mind wander, jotting down every thought & observation & making them jell into coherency.
And finally, ”Appendix/Sentences for use” where she states “Any information can be contained in, and any passage of writing converted into, sentences like these. Use them as you see fit. This book’s copyright does not cover theme, so they can be disseminated freely without credit given or compensation due.” Right generous, no? I’ve culled these;
“The mirror does not reflect the dark.”
“You are either close to me or unknown.”
“The opposite disappeared in solitude.”
and this final synopsis:
“It was red until she painted it.”
Which she did.
*Review appeared in Oranges & Sardines
March 21, 2008
See Anthony Robinson's comments at http://luckyerror.blogspot.com/
Better thank I could say it.
R
Better thank I could say it.
R
August 10, 2008
Simply the best book I have read all year!
Read
December 20, 2008I got an autographed copy in Asheville
March 15, 2012
One of my favorite books of poetry in 2008. Vitiello combines erudition with wit and pathos and a whole bunch of prime numbers to make a thought-provoking and affecting sequence.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews