Poetry. Fiction. Cross-Genre. "Marvelous! A book that thinks! and that speaks out plainly and politically. In this collection of short essays, poems, and various hybrid genres, Mark Wallace takes poetry seriously--and often in the most tongue-in-cheek way, but below the quick wit is a belief in and love of language and the art that it can make. Wallace has made that art here. "If poetry is, as I believe, the art that allows people access to their own complexity..." he writes, and goes on from there to show what can happen in a world where this is true. It's news"--Cole Swensen.
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About the Author
Mark Wallace's most recent book is Felonies of Illusion, just out from Edge Books. His most recent book of fiction is Walking Dreams: Selected Early Tales. Wallace has authored more than ten books and chapbooks of poetry, including Nothing Happened and Besides I Wasn't There and Sonnets of a Penny-A-Liner. Temporary Worker Rides A Subway won the 2002 Gertrude Stein Poetry Award and was published by Green Integer Books. His multi-genre work Haze (Edge Books) was published in 2004, and his first collection of fiction, The Big Lie, was published by Avec Books in Fall 2000. His critical articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications. Along with Steven Marks, he edited Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press) a collection of 26 essays by different writers on the subject of contemporary avant garde poetry and poetics. Wallace teaches literature and creative writing at Cal State San Marcos.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
"If poetry is ... the art that allows people access to their own complexity ...",
By Bean (Eureka Springs, AR) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Haze: Essays, Poems, Prose (Paperback)
Every once in a while you run across something that takes you where you are going. So it is with Mark Wallace's essay in his book Haze, "On the Lyric as Experimental Possibility." It's the poetry of politics and the politics of poetry, and how they can come to be in bringing us access to our own complexities as culture, and the material world, shape them. True to his own essay, Wallace's poetry moves beyond the too-absorbed "I" of many a contemporary lyric, or its totalizing tendencies, to a particularity in the "material, interpersonal, political" and detailed site of a poem. Following Adorno, he sees the possibility of lyric that shows its own "partiality, lack of transcendence, and situational, contingent, existence."
Others essays, however, are more imposing-- or should I say, impositional?-- arraying us with a kind of arrogance that I at any rate find unappealing. And the poetry survives its saying, but sometimes only barely. The lead poem "The Lawless Man," for example, works for the kind of poetry Wallace writes. How far it goes beyond that fulfillment I will leave to others to explore. All in all, this Wallace is good example of the mixed genre book-- poetry, essay, prose poem, and hybrids-- almost always reaching where he would go, and sometimes enlightening me in my complexities.
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