Customer Reviews

Medea the Sorceress (Archaeology of Movies and Books, Vol. 1)

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I'm not someone who normally buys poetry collections, although I do like poetry, and have several collections on my shelves (including a complete works of ee cummings that I'm still working my way through and a battered hardback of the complete poetry of T.S. Eliot). So why did I pick up this collection by Wakoski? A correspondent turned me onto this passage:

"My model is your double world reality in Sleeping In Flame, which people can conveniently interpret as the physical and the psychological if they wish to ignore magic."

She is, indeed, referring to the novel by Jonathan Carroll, and this collection is full of a strange interpretation influenced by and predicated on Carroll's novels. Like the best poetry, it is so much more, as well.

The structure is unlike any other poetry collection I've ever come across. Intermixed with the poems are letters purportedly from Wakoski to Carroll and a young protege named Craig--I say purportedly because I doubt that what we see are the same words that Wakoski actually might send these two--and quotes from Nick Herbert's Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics. The combination is appealing to a jaded, sound-bite audience, with its quick jumps from one style and tone to the next. We may not be sure what the hell Wakoski is trying to get at, but it is kind of fun to take the ride with her. And, every once and a while, the poetry truly shines, as in the self-effacing "My $15 Lily," wherein Wakoski details a purchase mistake, or the personally-revealing "Men's Eyes," in which she starts with those famous eyes of movie stars, but somehow ends up with those eyes of her husband.

I picked up this volume because of the Carroll connection, but I plan to pick up the successor to this (a planned trilogy of volumes under the heading "The Archaeology of Movies and Books") because Wakoski is interesting in her own right.

For her 1988 collection, "Emerald Ice: Selected Poems 1962 - 1987," Diane Wakoski was awarded the Poetry Society of America William Carlos Williams Award. That award is a fitting tribute, for Wakoski draws on Williams' book-length poem "Paterson" as a model for this 1990 volume, "Medea the Sorceress."

"Medea the Sorceress" - volume one of a longer work entitled The Archeology of Movies and Books - is a more ambitious project than Wakoski's initial attempt at a book length work, the ongoing Greed poems. Wakoski draws upon Williams example of incorporating short lyric poems, letters to various friends, prose fragments from other authors and meditations on various subjects (notably the new physics and Hollywood movies) into a layered verse structure. And like "Paterson," Wakoski enables a specific geography to speak to larger concerns.

However, Wakoski's specific geography (outlined by a map in the beginning of the book) is not an actual location but a poetic locale that expands across two continents and the poet's own lifetime. As in the short imagistic and lyric poems for which she is well known, Wakoski utitlizes the material of her own life in the creation of a personal mythology. The result, in "Medea the Sorceress," is an original work that expands upon earlier attempts at the long form.

The proposed title for this multi-volume work - The Archeology of Movies and Books (which is also the title of a remarkable poem in the present volume) - suggests the unearthing of personal meaning found in film and literature. The title hints at what the art critic Donald Kuspit calls "archaeologism," or post-modernism as excavation. Kuspit - linking such a practice to Freud's use of the archeological metaphor to explain the psychoanalytic method and Michael Foucault's archeological analysis - sees archaeologism as a method of establishing meaning from the discursive, fragmented depths of the unconscious. "Medea the Sorceress" may be read in this dusty light. Come prepared with trowels that dig at metaphor.