Backlist: Chop Wood, Carry Water

Backlist: KVlCW Chop Wood, Carry Water Chris Murray Even the Java Sparrows Call Your Hair George Kalamaras Quale Press http://www.quale.com 116 pages; paper, $14.00 A playful and soulful energy runs through the neosurrealist prose poems of George Kalamaras in a book full of insight about, and devotion to, life as lived. Each poem is an invitation to readers to take an active part in the linguistic transaction by engaging with various personae and perspectives. The poems ask, or would have readers ask, what the phenomenon of reading is and what it accomplishes . The dialectical tension of such questioning has always grounded the surrealist aesthetic, which operates by frustrating the expectations of readers not accustomed to asking how and why textuality is enlivened by imaginative variation. Kalamaras's work is surrealist in this regard, yet it also revels in artful paradox and contradictory images, and is grounded in philosophical and spiritual discourses. These factors combine to form a continuous flux of linguistic energies capable of conveying—and perhaps even imparting—transformation through the resultant rhetorical dynamic. Poets andpoetry are once again a meta-subject: we are invited to participate in multiple layers ofreading. Surrealism challenges overly authoritative or dictatorial approaches to interpretation, or what Breton in his Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) exposed as "the reign of logic." In western discourse, the emphasis on coherence (but whose coherence?), formulated via linear exposition and logic, tends to dominate evaluation of rhetorical art. In terms of contemporary poetry, for instance, one might cite Joan Houlihan's continued assault on poetry that fails, in her view, to speak sufficiently to coherence and pattern-making. In Breton's view, however, such an emphasis on coherence only buys into logical overdetermination, which limits the breadth and scope of imagination. In the delightful "Wang Wei Board Game," Kalamaras highlights the limitations and narrowness of linear logic by adapting and transforming the familiar linearity of an instruction manual to yield anything but the customary item. This is a poem that effectively mimics and expands the instructional mode to parodie effect. If the result is not mere parody, though, neither is it an exercise in simple heuristics, for the poem offers another kind of instruction, one rooted in the belief that our ways of knowing and being are virtually infinite, and not confined to reason alone. By turning conventional form inside out, shopworn language and form are thus reenergized, and the "players" are re-attuned to resonant objects, mythos, and the wonders of everyday life. This book makes abundant use of intertextual allusions to poetry in general, and to surrealist art in particular. The title poem is a dialogic interweave of one of Breton's best known surrealist poems, "Freedom of Love" (Libertéd'Amour [1946J), doubling the intertextual surreal effect by picking up after Breton's lines, "My wife with feet of initials / With feet ofrings ofkeys and Java sparrows drinking. ..." Kalamaras's first line not only cites the "Java sparrows," but has them calling the addressee's hair "sand," both extending Breton's non sequitur and offering a new one. This is typical of Kalamaras's poems: they gently complicate the creative mind-stretch between reality and surreality, inviting readers to the brink of a transformative dialogue, a brink where there are choices entailed in playing the "game." Surrealism's more demanding challenges take a different turn, then, under Kalamaras's lead. Here the surrealist mode is invitational, emphasizing the poetic agency of readers no less than that of writers. An intricate example of this invitational dynamic is "Williams in the Hospital, 1952." The poem begins with a (first-person) speaker's seemingly conventional, expository introduction to its subject, a black and white photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt (as noted by Kalamaras, and perhaps similar to the one on the cover ofWilliams's collection, The Doctor Stories [1984]). The poem explains that the picture is of a youngish Dr. Williams holding a child outside a hospital. By the third line, the scene and the three characters (the speaker, Williams, and the child) begin to stretch, to slip from their character-boundaries , via a subtle shift in perspective, from that of the speaker's observations alone...