Age of the Demon Tools [Paperback]

Mark Spitzer (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0980887313 | ISBN-13: 978-0980887310 | Publication Date: April 4, 2008 | Edition: First

You have to slow down, and absorb calmly, the procession of gritty, pointillist gnarls of poesy that Mark Spitzer wittily weaves into his book. Just the title, Age of the Demon Tools, is so appropriate in this horrid age of inappropriate technology you know, corruptly programmed voting machines, drones with missiles hovering above huts, and mind reading machines looming just a few years into the demon-tool future. When you do slow down, and tarry within Spitzer's neologism-packed litanies, you will find the footprints of bards such as Allen Ginsberg, whose tradition of embedding current events into the flow of poesy is one of the great beacons of the new century. This book is worth reading if only for the poem "Unholy Millenial Litany" and its blastsome truths. -Ed Sanders.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Ultimately, Age of the Demon Tools is less concerned with stanzaics or tone than with cutting a wide swath of social lambasting. Spitzer unapologetically targets Bush and his cronies, Anna Nicole Smith, Spam Mail, "obese flugging slugs" lazing on the "McCouch," and self-absorbed "me-pod" listeners, to name a sliver. Some readers might argue that he lacks control and gives itno the excesses of his ear (and his crassness), and as a result, the poems lack rehetorical focus and emotional and intellectual depth. But that type of reading misses the point. America is excessive, sprawling, crass, and, at times, socially unjust. If one role of a writer is to be a social conscience and a catalyste for change, then that role requires candor and urgency at the expense of palatability. --Rain Taxi

Mark Spitzer has been an advocate of a rather esoteric spirituality, having achieved that sublime state of finding his inner catfisherman. Fish, and more particularly those of the bottom feeder variety, have been a mainstay theme in most of Spitzer's offerings, but to rely solely on this distinction would be limiting and giving short shrift to the cavalcade of other thematic nuances Spitzer spots his work with. In his newest poetry collection, following his last volume (The Pigs Drink From Infinity), we find Spitzer both at the height of his brazen invective and the depths of humourous self-deprecation. Flurries of neologisms and portmanteaus greet the reader on every page, attaining a kind of special economy of words that truly delight and discomfit. These madcap inventions are essentially eddying shoals that ride the infernal crest of Spitzer's unapologetic narrative as he fumbles his way through life in Kirksville and beyond. Spitzer is both stoic and comedian, and occasionally a mad wordplay pundit. But it is not just the harlequin moments that resonate in Spitzer's bizarre tour de force, but as well the dips and deviations into that sonorous poetic voice and the earnest politically astute commentator that seems to believe in a kind of Jeffersonian-style democracy that has yet to truly be made manifest. In this way, he is both ponderous poetic voice and sociopolitical soothsayer, frocked as a kind of post-beat logomancer whose poetic "splatterns" never fail to resonate with the sharpness of their delivery. With its many "hazeled lakes", "me-pods", "lurky leviathans", and hailed nutmeats, Spitzer bends his phrases over his knee by the logic of more scatometrico, issuing a polemical discharge that is beyond the commonplace flatulence of pundits on either side of that butt-cheek ideological divide. The political call-to-action is much more pronounced in this volume, and it is with invective, bile and warning that Spitzer declares that the age of the demon tools is quickly upon us, taking aim at thinly disguised politicos that care more about senseless wars and ignoring environmental degradation. Spitzer's anchor in his double-barreled poetic critique comes to the fore by arraying the many ugly baubles together of modern woe into a bracelet of catastrophe, and his proof comes on the page where it all seems to return: the increasing levels of fatally toxic levels of chemicals in our rivers and lakes where fish populations dwindle. At heart, Spitzer appears to be an eco-conscious spokesperson, and poetry is his conduit, his forceful critique of attack against indifference in an age where demon tools are becoming sadly de rigueur. --Journal of Experimental Fiction

Mark Spitzer writes with a ferocity and intensity not seen in much of today's poetry. His words are intellectually aggressive as they grab the reader by the throat saying, 'Open your eyes and your mind will follow.' --Illogical Muse

About the Author

Mark Spitzer (poet, novelist, literary translator, essayist and muckraker) grew up in Minnesota and lit out for the University of Colorado, where he earned his MA in 1992. He then ended up as Writer in Residence at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris, where he translated manuscripts by French criminals and misanthropes. After a few years being Bohemian, Spitzer went back to America and the big old ugly fish he loves (ie, eely bottom feeders, primitive gar and monster cats) and got a job as the Assistant Editor of the legendary lit journal Exquisite Corpse (which, ironically, had forced him to assume the guise of bastard child of American avant-garde letters just a few years before). He then goofed his way through an MFA at LSU, got a professor job up in Missouri, and taught creative writing at Truman State University for five years. He is currently a professor of writing at the University of Central Arkansas in Toad Suck, AR.

Product Details

• Paperback: 60 pages
• Publisher: Ahadada Books; First edition (April 4, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0980887313
• ISBN-13: 978-0980887310
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.8 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,067,895 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's Vision Quest Time, June 20, 2008

By 

Bartleby the Scrivener (Mayberry, SC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Age of the Demon Tools (Paperback)

In a standard book review, this is where I'd try to relate Mark Spitzer's latest poetry collection, Age of the Demon Tools (ahadada books, 60 pages, $12.95), to his other books. I can't.

In a standard book review, this is where I'd attempt to place Age of the Demon Tools into a poetical evolutionary progression, comparing it to earlier books by other poets, shooting for a bookmarks magazine-type of sidebar you could clip n' carry with you on your next safari to Border's. I can't.

I can't do either of those things because this is not a standard book review. It can't be, because Age of the Demon Tools is a wholly unique, totally original book of verse. No kidding, people; Spitzer, like an erudite Huck Finn of the 21st Century, takes us out into the Indian Territory. It's vision quest time.

This is truly uncharted country. Stanzas creep and slither across pages like psychedelic snakes. The reader is bathed in a kaleidoscope of images and characters---a "tiny christ", an "anorexic possum/retching in the ethersphere", "Captain Tracheotomy". Words are spelled phonetically or flat-out invented---"a Flapalooza of Flinging Fladdle!/Uvulas of Udder Grubbage!"---as Spitzer riffs off the King's English like a jazz master bending musical scales to serve his vision. This is a new, intriguing language.

But this isn't mere surrealism for surrealism's sake. Sandwiched between the lights and sounds is telling commentary on a modern society drowning in its own bile. The corporatization of America, the Iraq War and the systematic destruction of the environment are among the topics addressed in honest and engaging ways.

Hear that? It's the sound of Mark Spitzer breaking new poetic ground. Buy this book now, so you can say you were There When It Happened.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Contemporary master of sound., July 17, 2008

By 

Perrin C. Carrell - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Age of the Demon Tools (Paperback)

Read this aloud, standing up and alone, or risk missing the experience completely.

I once heard that the two things that can't be taught in creative writing were metaphor and rhythm. If that's true, Spitzer came out of the lifeshoot endowed with extraordinary gifts. Poems here live in the mouth instead of on the page; and the physical pages seem only to present poems out of obligation, barely keeping them from running off the paper as the form literally follows gravity - down and to the right.

Everything about the book is awesomely wrong. The sections, as if about to be replaced by subordinates, have their own sections, which are right-justified procedural poems that suggest the books maddness comes from outside instead of in. The poems themselves are not marked by titles, but instead (and probably in a small effort to avoid comparisons to Dickinson) are marked by asterisks; and even then, several times, the tone and content of consecutive poems run together and disrupt the category distiction of "poem." Words are invented to suit the sound, punctuation is delightfully overused, taboo is finds itself revered instead of marginalized, and nearly every formal convention Spitzer establishes is at sometime or another broken (a few "normal" stanzas sprinkled throughout, for example, lend a few well-chosen moments a certain seriously-treated silence). Despite all of this, Spitzer avoids the powerful suction of the "Postmodern" label with shear emotional intensity and consistency.

More than anything, the book is music. And more than any other living poet, Spitzer is a master of sound. Spitzer's sound has been evolving in subsequent books. And it has all been for this. Sound has been an important part of his previous works, most notably his "Junkyard" poems and "The Pigs Drink from Infinity;" but it has always been controlled. Here, it is released. Any reader who reads this silently, hell, even in a whisper, is both missing a one of the only truly unique poetic experiences available and doing Spitzer (and themselves) a disservice.

Spitzer breaks away from the pack here.