Pagan Operetta

by Carl Hancock Rux

Poetry. Upon publication of PAGAN OPERETTA, Rux's debut collection of poetry and prose, Rux was selected by the Village Voice Literary Supplement as one of Eight Writers on the Verge of Shaking Up the Literary Landscape. Like a play iteslf, this collection of poetry begins with Act 1 and the memory of a matriarchial history, to a second act cavorting through Europe and the ghettos of Ghana, West Africa -- to the third act, a sampling of Rux's politically charged text, and surrealist fiction. The result is a lavish literary spectacle. Ultimately, Rux's work belongs to his own genre, a postmodern Marquis de Sade, a writer arguing with mortality. As described by one critic, Rux is most impressive...a gifted poet who offers up vibrant imagery like a street corner preacher in the midst of a nervous breakdown. -- The New York Times, 1999. There is such drama and down to earth grooviness in PAGAN that it can only be described as Funky Decadence.

Genres: Poetry

150 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

Reviews

[Ben Bonyhadi · Rating 4 out of 5]

[i]Pagan Operetta[/i] is personal and invasive, projecting the reader so far into the experiences of others (experienced immediately within the pages, not re-remembered and recapitulated) that the reader himself feels vulnerable and laid open. Just as trauma and mortality are at once viscerally overwhelming and surreally beautiful, so to is Carl Rux’s exploration of these themes, intensely carnal and powerfully driven, yet with an attention to sound and image that speaks to a serenity of control in the writing.

It’s almost a shame that there is so much, both in terms of actual pages and in terms of density of meaning, to this text; the variation of styles between poems makes for a dynamic, vibrant whole, but the size of the whole means that the variety cannot necessarily be appreciated in one sitting. [i]Pagan Operetta[/i] was one of those works of poetry that I was very hesitant to skip through, wanting to enjoy a cumulative reading experience rather than a composite one. This may be because Rux pays exquisite attention to the ebb and flow of human emotion, both within a given piece, tracking a narrator’s self-empathy rise and fall throughout the course of a traumatic event, and within the work as a whole, aware of when the reader’s prolonged compassion might be stretched to thin without some interceding humor or transcendence or distraction. And indeed, this work is made beautiful with the interplay of sarcasm and sacrament, who roots (etymologically and in Rux’s writing) are flesh and devotion. There is a means of objectification without dehumanization and of worship without idolatry with which Rux investigates the flow of humanity, turbid and inexorable. I wonder from what vantage point he writes: I am inclined to believe that he is not so much reflective, as he is catching up, making sense of the act of living through the act of writing. This might be, then, why his endings seem at odds with themselves, trailing off in ellipses or conjunctions, leaving out periods or concluding with a question. Sometimes his poems feel as if they are simply waiting for continuation, sometimes as if the author has become lost in thought, sometimes as if they are deliberate - and trite - attempts to look “unfinished.” In a collection that relies so heavily on the dynamics of the spoken word and on the sound of language, both architected and vernacular, ellipses can play a strong role as in “Languid Libretto” (page 96, where the tension between spaces and ellipses forces the reader to differentiate two kinds of pauses, expectant or final), or a weak one, as in “Red Velvet Dress Lullaby” (page 29, where ellipses appear so frequently I’m inclined to ignore them).

I am inclined to agree with Rux on his assertion that “There is no such thing as performance poetry,” and that all poetry is written, in one way or another, performatively. The graphic designer inside me, however, must confess that he does not like some of the visual translations of what would no doubt be effective vocal gestures. For example, the “climb d/o/w/n” on page 24 implies exactly what sort of drawn out reading I would give it out loud, but on the page, it seems overwrought and a little tired. I realize that this is much more the failing of the medium – unless we write poems using the IPA, we must resort to visual metaphors to convey such nuances as intonation – but I feel that Rux can and should place more trust in the strength of his work to convey itself. If a paper reading cannot present exactly what an out-loud recitation can, so be it; it will speak with other strengths. The beauty of poetry, and of Rux’s work in particular is that it lives such different lives on and off the stage, each worthy of separate and critical examination.
Overall, the resounding [i]relevance[/i] of [i]Pagan Operatta[/i], the way it forces its relevance onto the reader, makes evident the need for a comprehensive appreciation of poetry, as sound, as image, as object, subject, and action. Rux spitscrawls a drumbeat hymn of blood and sweat into an asphalt symphony that swings from dreaming to screaming the indeterminacy of the difference between the prison and the paradise of human flesh, life, experience.