Salt Modern Poets
2 total works
Source Codes is a collection about how we represent the world to ourselves and to each other in an era when the images and words we receive are often generated and received without being marked by even a trace of author or consumer. The poems are linked one to the next only by the words that begin and end each; otherwise, there is no stylistic or (on a specific level) thematic connection. They function, then as a "miscellany," an approximation of the paradoxical finitude in the rush of information and images we believe we experience, hour by hour.
The poems and images are not titled except by numbers, by which the reader navigates a key to their sources in the table of contents.
"In the fast flow of capital, we need slow space," and "Information is dark, not light," the Dutch design group, NL.Design, writes, and in similar spirit, Source Codes is not neutral in intent. Its appendices - HTML code framed by typescript and longhand drafts of poems from this book and poems from the author's first book, Bag `o' Diamonds - attempt to highlight the idiosyncratic imprint of an individual in the drafting of the HTML. Intended, likewise, is the loss of some authorial romance in the typescript poems and handwritten notes without their losing that quality of like imprint.
Many of the individual poems and images seem to treat a bridge - between the homogenous plethora emitting from the fast flow of capital and the individual gesture from within "slow space" - skeptically, and gravely. In this sense, too, it is not a neutral book.
Assorted Poems is a generous selection from the first four books by one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary poetry. In Bag o' Diamonds (1993), Smokes (1998), Source Codes (2001), and Ledger (2005), Susan Wheeler has established herself as a poet of rare gifts. Her work is allusive and searching, sweeping over time and place, from the art of the northern Renaissance to corporate logos, observing and exploring everything with characteristic precision and intelligence. The poems are both rigourous and free, taking on our culture, its beauties and cruelties, its relationship to the past and its uncertain future. Assorted Poems is a vibrantly thoughtful and entertaining book, a must read from a poet whom Harold Bloom has called "an exuberant, subtle, endlessly inventive original."