Multiversal

Poets Out Loud

by Amy Catanzano, Michael Palmer (Foreword)

Winner of the 2010 PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry and the Fordham University Press 2007-2008 Poets Out Loud Prize, selected by Michael Palmer.

From the Foreword by Michael Palmer:
Amy Catanzano offers us a poetic vision of multiple orders and multiple forms, of a fluid time set loose from linearity and an open space that is motile and multidimensional. The work exists at once in a future-past and in a variety of temporal modes. At one moment the scale is intimate, at another infinite. She interrogates our means of observation and measurement(the telescope, the ice-core), our mappings, our cosmic calculations, our assumptions about cause and effect. In the background, “there is a war being fought,” though which of many wars—cultural, scientific, military—we are not told. In a time of displacement such as ours, she seems to say, in place of “universals” we must imagine “multiversals,” in place of the fixed, the metamorphic. As much as the frame may be cosmic (micro- or macro-), it is important to remember that the work serves the vital questions of the here-and-now, “the flowering of the world,” the corrosiveness of violence, the primacy of desire, the necessity of wonder. Multiversal represents an effort to see things as they are through an act of poetic reimagining, that is, to see variously within the folds and fields of the actual, where the physis, or life force, resides.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Hardcover and Paperback

First published February 15, 2009

About the author

Amy Catanzano is the author of three books. Her cross-genre novella combining poetry with fiction, Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella (Noemi Press, 2014), received the Noemi Press Book Award for Fiction. Multiversal (Fordham University Press, 2009) received the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry and was selected by Michael Palmer for publication as the recipient of Fordham University's Poets Out Loud Prize. iEpiphany was published by Anne Waldman’s independent publishing venture, Erudite Fangs Editions, in 2009. She is also the author of an electronic-chapbook, the heartbeat is a fractal (Ahadada Books, 2009). Her poetry, fiction, and cross-genre writing has appeared in literary journals such as Aufgabe, Colorado Review, Conjunctions, Denver Quarterly, Fence Magazine,and New American Writing. Recent speculative essays on the intersections of literature, art, and science appear in Jacket2 and Poems and Poetics. Catanzano is an Assistant Professor of English, the Poet-in-Residence, and the Director of the Creative Writing Program at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Prior to teaching at Wake Forest, Catanzano taught at Naropa University in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, co-founded by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman. She holds a Master of Fine Arts degree with an emphasis in poetry writing from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Selected Links:
Jacket2: The Imaginary Present
Quantum Poetics at Poems and Poetics
Jacket2: Poetry & Science
I09: Best Books of Poetry for Every Kind of Science Fiction Fan
Action Yes
Tarpaulin Sky Journal
La Petite Zine
Web Conjunctions

Reviews

[Tentatively, Convenience]

An amorphous & not necessarily anthropomorphic or in any way detectable 'being' that's large enuf to touch more than one solar system at the same time, more than one galaxy - &, yet, also capable of being so small that it moves freely amongst the as-yet-undiscovered parts of infinitesimal to the power of "e".

It strays in the Enclosure of Beams, of Cores, of Depths, of Fields, of Notes, of Shores, of Spans, of Sparks, of Spheres, of Sums, of Waves. Feelers/Appendages? These F/As walk or crawl up the steps of:

"
Dear Developer
Dear Discovery
Dear Rosewood

[..:]

Dear Dinosaur
Dear Intersection
Dear Orderly
"

They grip, w/o putting pressure,:

"Dear Evasive Precaution"

simultaneously holding dear:

"Dear Successive Square Levels"

& stabilizing on:

"Dear Sudden Camouflage".

The F/As, potentially infinite(simal), even touch upon:

"Dear Enter (a Country, etc.)".

Bringing them all together, we find:

"
We should take a panoramic view,
for flowers have never appeared,
never arisen,
never vanished,
flowers have never been flowers,
space has never been space,
and space flowers
give forth space fruit and drop space seeds,
and since what we perceive
are the five petals
opening the flowers of space, we should see
the flower form of all things,
since anything
that can be imagined is a flower and fruit
of space.
If there is a single cloud in the eye,
flowers in the sky
will tumble in all directions.
"

As Michael Palmer writes in his Foreword:

"Amid such crises, rather than gazing into the mirror, or "holding the mirror up to nature," poets have often passed through the looking-glass into the domain of psyche, dream and counter-logicality, where "poetic logic" operates beyond the constraints of narrative unity, ordinary perception and traditional formal boundaries."

If nothing else, poets move words around the page like pieces on a 3-tiered chess board, pieces not originally intended for the game.

&, besides, any bk that mentions "Neoism" (p17) & "Captain Cook" (p11) can't be ALL BAD, can it? This is a bk of "playful physics", to use Duchamp's term:

"Since only by way of counterpoint can I build an invention

to measure the behavior of everything

clockwise."

If I take some phrases that I particularly like & arrange them at my 'whim', what's their relation to Amy's psyche, where & how is she located?

with and, of, 54; turn to page 36.
Bird of Joy, 12; turn to page 23.
the bystander, 8; turn to page 12.
caryatid of the universe, 5; turn to page 18.
a devourer, 44; turn to page 15.
playing cards, 19; turn to page 36.
by the wood, 56; turn to page 36.
our marionettes, 51; turn to page 36.
the color of capsules, 30; turn to page 36.
International Flag Code, 2; turn to page 36.
coiled around, 6; turn to page 36.
like fossil bones, 9; turn to page 36.
If an event is something that happen at a particular point in space and at a particular time, turn to page 36.

singularities

A blaze within a tighter blaze, engulfed.
Scarlet poppies bloom, or blue nights--
and people, too, just beyond their
peripheries.

If one can describe a position in space by three numbers, turn to any page. Wavering in me is the science I made for you--It began as a temporary opening-- If stars appear to shine with intermittent gleams: The

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is just faultless: every line delights--lyricism happens at the speed we WANT it to happen--a superb (an active, an on-going) accomplishment!

[PEN Center USA · Rating 5 out of 5]

PEN Center USA 2010 Poetry Award Winner

[Alain · Rating 3 out of 5]

I expected so much more...