In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles, by Mark Scroggins, and: Red Arcadia, by Mark Scroggins
  • Kristina Marie Darling (bio)
Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles, by Mark Scroggins The Cultural Society, 2011
Red Arcadia, by Mark Scroggins Shearsman Books, 2012

Recent years have seen many poetry collections that instill the detritus of contemporary culture with greater philosophical significance. All too often, these books privilege modernity over literary tradition, ultimately failing to situate the work within a greater artistic conversation. Mark Scroggins’s poems are a rare exception. His two most recent books, Red Arcadia and Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles, read as an ongoing engagement with both urban modernity and the work of writers like Louis Zukofsky, William Carlos Williams, and Walter Benjamin. Much like Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers and Williams’s Spring and All, Scroggins’s new collections explore the sonic qualities of language, and often use sound to depict objects in the world. The cityscapes of Red Arcadia and Torture Garden echo with “hoarse whispers” and “furtive flamboyance,” offering the reader a thought-provoking relationship between the musicality of the language and its semantic meaning.

In Torture Garden, the earlier of these two collections, alliteration and assonance not only contribute to, but in many ways define, the possibilities for interpretation associated with a given piece. Scroggins adeptly uses sound to complicate the meaning associated with the language itself. Consider “Cairo Chop Shop”:

Celebrated the birdsong and updates of the letter made free textured cloth sewn-in weight lead brass golden yod cubits the myriads poised to rise gold-webbed

Here Scroggins uses the sonic qualities of language to problematize its semantic meaning. Although he states that “the letter” has been “made free,” the poem’s frequent use of spondees [End Page 165] suggests an alternative possibility for interpretation. Because the musicality of the poem is impeded by these harsh spondaic phrases, Scroggins suggests that what is being described is not language “made free,” but a mere pretense of freedom. Torture Garden is filled with finely crafted works like this one, in which the musicality of the language subtly complicates its semantic meaning.

Red Arcadia reads as an extension of Scroggins’s work in Torture Garden, as the two books exhibit a similar concern with the musicality of language and its role in creating meaning. Throughout Red Arcadia, Scroggins uses sound to construct a series of cityscapes, which echo with the magnificent noise of urban industrial modernity. He writes in “Untitled,”

It thinks in me. I cannot resist it. As if all our darting attentions were waterbugs on a stream of commodities, channel-switching infomercials for rubber band body-building machines and alarmingly cute ceramic animals. It thinks in me. Like yesterday’s sirloin on its peristaltic odyssey.

Although Scroggins describes the modern consumer’s attention as “darting” from object to object, his use of alliteration and assonance suggests an alternative reading of the poem. Using such phrases as “rubber band body-building,” “cute ceramic,” etc., Scroggins suggests the monotony inherent in this bombardment of the senses. In many ways, Scroggins uses style and technique to modify Walter Benjamin’s earlier description of the city, in which the senses are constantly “bombarded” and “shocked” by various phenomena. By utilizing sound in such a way, Scroggins underscores the monotony inherent in this onslaught of perceptions. As in Scroggins’s previous collection, the sonic qualities of language complicate semantic meaning in the most fascinating ways. Carefully crafted and thought-provoking, Red Arcadia offers a graceful extension of the aesthetic concerns of Torture Garden.

Scroggins’s new collection exhibits a novel concern with the role of these urban soundscapes in shaping one’s personal identity. Throughout the book, the city’s constant bombardment of [End Page 166] sensory phenomena gives rise to, and at the same time limits, the possibilities for constructing the self. Scroggins writes in “John Milton Blues,”

The stars tell us, in daily doses, that we are who we imagine ourselves to be. Let me begin here, under an auspicious sign: double dashed American dollar. Cynicism taken too far threads one into the labyrinth of self-conscious nihilism, fancy-free anomie. Lone gunman, unspeaking patron saint of quiet boys...

pdf

Share