Seismosis

by John Keene

Poetry. Art. African American Studies. Featuring line-drawings by Stackhouse and poems-as-essays by Keene--handed back and forth and back, written and rewritten, drawn and redrawn--SEISMOSIS penetrates the common ground between writing/literature and drawing/visual art, creating a revisioned landscape where much of the work is abstract or abstracted or both. The multiform agreements the texts & the drawings make, from a brilliant & decisive center, are revolutionary, antilinear, and highly responsive. SEISMOSIS is a formal experience. The result is a highly sophisticated call-and-response affair. A pioneer occasion, in which two African American artists have collaborated on a book of this nature, weaving a cohesive study of abstraction in both poetry and drawing, 1913's printing of the acclaimed collaboration approaches fine-press quality in mass-produced, perfect-bound, book-as-art-object form--in keeping with 1913's mission of integrating the visual and verbal zones.

Genres: Poetry, Art

100 pages, Paperback

First published May 30, 2006

About the author

John Keene is the author of the novel Annotations (New Directions); the poetry collection Seismosis (1913 Press), an art-text collaboration with artist Christopher Stackhouse; the short fiction collection Counternarratives, published in 2015 by New Directions; and the poetry collection Punks: New & Selected Poems, published in 2021 by The Song Cave. His translation of Brazilian writer Hilda Hilst’s novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books) appeared in 2014. His stories, poems, essays, and translations have appeared in a wide array of periodicals and anthologies, including most recently Vice, TriQuarterly, The Offing, and Boundary. An artist as well, he has exhibited his work in New York and Berlin, and teaches at Rutgers University-Newark.

Reviews

[Jim Elkins · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the second book of Keene's I read -- this one was to see if he intended his old-fashioned locutions or not. Apparently he didn't, because they're pervasive in this book as well. This book is much better: it's experimental, with all sorts of formal inventions: words in grids, columns, arrays, faux glossaries, prose poems, alternating lines of roman face poetry and italicized bracketed words, and so forth.

The problem is that despite the fact the book cribs from a number of art historical sources (Danto, Bois, Libeskind) it comes across as naive about art history and disconnected from contemporary art criticism and theory. That's Keene's prerogative, but it makes the book much less engaging than it might have been.

It's a dialogue, supposedly, with drawings by Christopher Stackhouse, which are unfortunately very typical post-Wols, post-Twombly gestural abstractions.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love the way Chris' art (all the line squiggles) penetrates the text and the way Keene explores the inner- parts of this reminded me loosely of Ashbery's 3 Poems- there's a sense here of attempting to get at something unexpressable- a feeling of slippage and then glints of light, clear passage and simple images then the feeling of being submerged again. This book makes me wonder why more writers don't collaborate with artist...

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

drawing as noise/noise as drawing, a true collaboration

[a l n · Rating 4 out of 5]

probably the most analytically avant-garde / conceptually cerebral poetry collection i’ll read this year that also reads like a theory of what language can do (contra / with drawings), and some of the most enigmatic, yet stirring abstract pieces i’ve seen in a while

[misha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wait we’re officially in the post-postmodern era…