Seismosis Paperback – May 30, 2006

What can be said in conversation with a swirling line, a blot of ink, a seismic scribble across a page? If the speaker is John Keene then the answer is everything. Like the right song hitting the movement of film in syncopation Seismosis is finds that cross-medium harmony of image and text, and revels in the interconnected motion of mind and pen in a way that is both instantly arresting and unapologetically mysterious. This esoteric dialogue between poet and artist hinges on questions of process, form, and the human desire to interpret, to "gradually perceive the performance: and all its configurations" ("Field"). In his introduction Ed Roberson describes this book as "the complete text for the course" but this is not a lecture with a neat thesis, it is a wild aesthetic discourse, a slide-show from the other side, an adventure into abstraction where all our maps blossom into cryptic mathematical grids and leave us with our erasure marks and charcoal smears in some conceptual heart of darkness. Like Conrad's Marlow, who saw the blank places and lost himself there, John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse seek uncharted ground and dig it. This is no easy anthology, but it's certainly something that invokes a second, third, or ninety-ninth read. There's always something beyond the readers getting, but there's no fun in the destination, just the road, the conversation, the lingering effect of having visited Keene's "augured grids" and "ghost trails" ("Field"). Christopher Stackhouse's frenetic illustrations invoke classic Abstract expressionism, particularly the spirit of Franz Klein (alluded to in "Klein Bottle"), but where Klein uses broad brush-strokes to create the effect of Japanese calligraphy Stackhouse takes his fine-point pen and creates the effect of Rorschach ink blot tests. The eye wants so badly to make something of the images. Keene responds to these images not with static ekphrasis or simple descriptions, but with complementary visual forms that stretch the interplay of word and text. Poems like "Membra", "Anti-Kantian", "Cuts", and the almost-unreadable "Index" are as visual as they are literary, both artists play with the page and flirt with form but never commit to definitions. This makes Seismosis an ever-changing experience, you never know which boundary the next page will push. Readings with Keene and Stackhouse together prove how open the field of interpretation is, how enthralled they are by the prospect of altering and tinkering with perception. You may never read the same poem twice, as your eye follows the swirling lines of Stackhouse's sketches so does it dance across Keene's stranger form-bending poems. Works like "Oscillation" and "Geodesy" don't possess by even the most insubstantial ghost of form, they are essentially a collection of well-chosen words, arranged on a page like chemicals on an alchemist's table, ready to become anything. "Cuts" harkens back to cut-text experiments of William Burroughs, but with a mathematical and meta-poetic edge. The choppy "Chamber Cinema" contains a brilliant discussion of process, an important theme throughout the text, "reminded of drafts I / have seen, a tension of spiral, extending / sensation into tone time and rhythm / mark architecture / attentive to the physical conversation / I am behind an oscillating / psychic screen." With the exception of a few first-person prose poems the artist recedes into the art, the "psychic screen." This is not a conversation between people but between ideas. The artist's identity is not evident, it is a shifting question, as in the poem "Self". "In the mark, we choose and loose signature" Keene writes in the final poem, "Process". It seems that in this process the hand of the maker is lost, you will find no discernable person or life-based anecdotes in Seismosis, signatures made are instantly erased by the mystery of the next image. The two collaborators are writing, typing, reaching, scratching, and scribbling their way towards something deeper and more abstract. These are poems not juicy poems from a diary, they seem more like marginalia from a trigonometry or philosophy of aesthetics notebook, they are dry but not dispassionate notes on artistic experience. "Here the artist challenges the writer with `the lines of drawing that written language is, without the discipline of its given systems'," writes Ed Roberson in the forward. In pushing abstraction, breaking down "the discipline of given systems" Stackhouse and Keene have gone back to art's "synthetic origins", the math, the "shadow geometries", the interplay of image and mind, the very first Cuneiform scratches that made up the word ("Aura"). The language is often mathematical, which is sometimes intimidating but very indicative of Keene's reach for the universal, the base experience. What he and Christopher Stackhouse have made from their two-man communal experience is a self-sustaining art form of its own. Their playful form manipulation, abstract mutations, and their aesthetic meditations produce an endearing collection that is open to "a diverse set of interpreters" ("Field"). No matter how strange this important text-aesthetic experiment may appear at first read, "With respect / to result, no values are refuted" ("Azimuth"). The result is an austere and arresting mind-sparking experience that will be worthy of random perusal and thoughtful study for years.

SEISMOSIS is a hypnotizing powerhouse, a mesmerizing conversation between words and drawings that propels the reader to the final page. It makes one realize that language can take on a concrete texture, become blocks of scratchy asphalt that can cut your palms. You will be looking, searching for the patterns between the words and the abstract sketches, trying to see if they are truly counterparts cooperating from the realms of two different mediums. The seams of each art is strenuously tested; the ripping sound you hear as you read is that of previously sacred borders being demolished. SEISMOSIS is something new, still shrinkwrapped, waiting to be unwrapped by daredevil readers.