4.0 out of 5 stars
sketches of an (art) epoch, January 16, 2011
This review is from: Abstraktion und Einfühlung (Black Goat) (Paperback)
percival everett has chosen for his cogitations certain artistic decisions from europe made primarily within france during the early and mid 20th century. my choice of the word `cogitations' isn't rarefied given the context of mr everett's title Abstraktion und Einfuhlung. his poems begin with Picasso 1916, a poem that lightly sketches the relationship among the artists, cocteau, picasso, and diaghilev at the inception of their art work, the ballet, Parade.
everett extends his theme from poem to poem to discuss art not relegated to canvas, duchamp's ready mades, rodin's gates of hell, architecture, and, even the gallery itself, as art.
his poems are brief performances of transcendence, philosophy put to art forms where traditionally knowable art forms do not exist. each poem is presented in three parts, the first two parts are sometimes descriptions, sometimes reflections when there is nothing to describe. and the third part of each poem is a group of words selected from the previous two parts and altered to read as though mr everett has stumbled onto a code for the language of james joyces' Finnegans Wake and john berryman's Dream Songs. from the second part of Studies:
If only these notes could
Drag nails against pages' backs,
become in the third part:
derag
nayails
aginsty
payages
bax
the reader is left with the impression that percival everett is cerebrally hard at work, to the extent that one expects footnotes with this work, which, by the way, are not unfounded in some poetic works; to cite one, eliot's The Wasteland. it's the halfway house of contemplation between poetry and philosophy that shuts the reader out of much that isn't in mr everett's poems. the real phenomena of reflection and meditation are in the mind of mr everett, and he has not yet sufficiently worked out what he believes he should be sharing with his reader.
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