Making it New

IS

Thus starts Vernon Frazer’s Selected Improvisations. A boldface, capitalized, emphatic statement of being, an ontological imperative. From here on, 132 pages unfold entangled, jazzy syncopated worlds of words: harmonic, dissonant, diurnal and transcendent poet-speak interspersed with accessible lyrical interludes, riffs and tropes creating a castellated, musically intoxicated epistemological edifice. None dare enter without trepidation.

But this is not the place to start, not the moment of conception, not the point of origin. For this we must go back to 2005 when Beneath the Underground published poet and musician Vernon Frazer’s massive 8 ½” x 11”, 700 page tome Improvisations. Upon opening its pages and giving it a cursory inspection, one is taken with its semantic complexity, sheer density and idiosyncratic erudition. This is not a “light” read. It can easily intimidate even the well-seasoned reader of poetry and seem practically impenetrable to those not familiar with poetry at all. Works on this scale are intriguing and a challenge to be undertaken; a metaphorical “scaling of Everest,” if you will. Conversely, works on this scale and magnitude are not everybody’s “cup of tea.” Maybe that’s why Frazer chose to cull choice sections from his massive tome and create his Selected Improvisations, recently published by Beneath the Underground and the subject of this review. At 132 pages and 8 1.2”x 11” format, it is a more manageable and accessible work. It also serves as a suitable introduction to both the complete Improvisations and to Frazer’s recent poetic works, books such as T(exto)-V(isual) Poetry (2012), Unsettled Music (2011) and Three Long Poems, to name but three.

In Selected Improvisations, the author sums up his intentions quite succinctly in the opening Author’s Note: “Selected Improvisations highlights the progression of the full-length Improvisations from its origins in projective verse through its fusion of textual and visual poetry.” “Projective Verse” brings Charles Olson into the spotlight; and indeed Olson’s ghost permeates Improvisations. His epic The Maximus Poems (1953–1983) seems to have been a model for Frazer, both in scale and content. But comparisons between the two authors and their respective works never run deeper than surface impressions. Olson wrote A Tale of the Tribe, a narrative, albeit a bit meandering and amorphous at times. Frazer’s work most decidedly steers clear of narrative, at least the narrative with which most readers are familiar. It can also be speculated that Olson’s seminal essay “Projective Verse,” proffering “composition by field,” among other new ideas, was a guiding force behind Frazer’s poetic technique; it could be considered an evolutionary outgrowth of Olson’s mid-20^th century essay. So, what are some other structural mechanisms Frazer uses in his construction of Improvisations and how does the content present itself? In its opening pages Selected Improvisations has built into it an elucidative statement, which offers a clue to its own process of becoming. Page 12 one reads:

IF YOU PLAY (OR WRITE) LONG ENOUGH, A FORM WILL ASSERT ITSELF

Here we have “form,” its conception and progression, born from the capricious vicissitudes of music and/or writing: a primal, chaotic realm, which eventually will achieve some empirical presence of structure. But form with Frazer is in constant flux, never stable, never predictive. It is the spontaneous assertions of a skewed and indeterminate reality molded into a syntactical design. There is no stasis or sense of repose. Every line or phrase is a jumping off point, a surrendering to the turmoil and the result is a semantic tumult, which overwhelms and threatens to swamp every mooring grasped at for safety and rigidity. This is the norm in Selected Improvisations. At times, Frazer seems intent on undermining the poetic status quo—any epistemological dogmatism and seemingly a Cartesian hierarchy of cosmic order. This, from section LX:

the prose intense defies gravity’s encumbrance a noetic nuisance to a self tuned metric at the foot if not the root of all sensitive declarations… waylaid turnstiles demanding fixity as product samples atrophy the limbs of entropic...