Source Codes (Salt Modern Poets S.) [Paperback]

Susan Wheeler (Author)

Book Description

Series: Salt Modern Poets S. | Publication Date: May 1, 2001

"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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Despite high-tech concerns and quips that place her within the interests of Charles Bernstein in his loopy "Nude Formalist" mode, Wheeler's "sources" in this third book seem equally drawn from the allusive grand style of the Bishop/Lowell/Berryman line. Taking overblown advantage of these poets' colloquially pessimistic strains, Wheeler's talent for crushing rhymes exposes total disaffection: "You've been pure trouble since I thought you up,/ Acie, hairnet, glass eye, wormy dick/ through stretch pants across a girth so thick/ even your dog don't jump." Wheeler's pantheon of effects, previously exercised in Bag O' Diamonds and Smokes, takes in everything from jingles, tight syllabic stanzas, the odd mix of stentorian modes and cartoonlike plasticity from middle-period Ashbery, pseudo-didactic literariness ("The death of peace is no literature/ Leisure is death without letters./ Death is without the leisure of letters./ A lettrist's death is without peace."), myths, fables, surrealist mantras and Swiftian turns. A table of contents that sources these 49 untitled, numbered poems including 24 jarring collages that are placed on equal poetic footing with the 25 texts is bookended by three appendixes of drafts, clippings and HTML code, further elaborating Wheeler's relationship to the strangeness of "being" in a time when any attempt at expression is echoed back by the circuit-board of media. Formally dazzling and spiritually unforgiving ("On an upper story, someone is dying./ On this lower floor, I am revising."), this is an important, limit-testing book. (May 1)Forecast: Wheeler's three collections have been published by the Univ. of Georgia, Four Way Books and now the Australian Salt. This book will be well-reviewed in literary venues and sought out by her solid following, and it should find her a steady U.S. house.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Review

Despite high-tech concerns and quips that place her within the interests of Charles Bernstein in his loopy "Nude Formalist" mode, Wheeler's "sources" in this third book seem equally drawn from the allusive grand style of the Bishop/Lowell/Berryman line. Formally dazzling and spiritually unforgiving, this is an important, limit-testing book. Publishers Weekly Part of the project of Wheeler's book is to turn the type itself into object (a thing which always happens, of course, but it is not always part of the awareness of the poet) which is read separately, perhaps, from the language ... and this is part of the larger project of contemporary poetry generally, to return attention to the ... extensivity of language into space, into physical therefore delicate and dangerous and temporary existence. -- Bin Ramke American Letters and Commentary #13 Wheeler skirts along the troubled borders where virtual reality and Robert Lowell's Maine lobster town vie for our central geographic tropes, and where the "self" is invariably a node in a cluster of rhizomatic meanings or enmeshed in an aging, none-too-pretty (but lyrical) body. In any case, Source Codes is one of the few books of poetry that truly synthesizes, even exhausts, the range of techniques that the 20th century provided for American lyric verse. -- Brian Kim Stefans www.alienated.com Perhaps Louis Zukofsky's paradign of poetry as "lower limit speech" and "upper limit music" described the best of Wheeler's poetry, as it hears the "lower limit" mechanics of culture sing, and carries meaning outside of logical-or even describable-argument. This seems to be the unifying element in all of Wheeler's poetry, this desire to state things while being unable to trust things long enough to have a saying hold. And perhaps then, more positively, moving through this skepticism to a place where saying, again, can be possible. -- John Gallaher Chicago Review

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Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Salt Publishing; 1st Ed. edition (May 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1876857064
• ISBN-13: 978-1876857066
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #475,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars shiny & shallow, November 2, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Source Codes (Salt Modern Poets S.) (Paperback)

There's skill here, but no heart. Just a poet who knows her intelligence and cleverness but's blocked. If you wrung out the soul from Ashberry, you'd have Wheeler. There's a poet in New England, Bill Knott, who is far more dextrous than Wheeler; he writes similarly, but the reader feels and laughs. Knott is a dazzler. But not Ms. Wheeler.

8 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Emperors new clothes, August 16, 2001

By 

sam tuckman (illinois) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Source Codes (Salt Modern Poets S.) (Paperback)

This book was lent to me by a friend who reads a good deal of poetry. I couldn't believe how bad it was. There is no sense whatsoever of the poet trying to communicate with anyone. To put it bluntly the book is self-indulgent and solipsistic. No wonder there is such a small readership for much of what passes for poetry. By the way I do not spend my evenings reading Longfellow and Emerson. I do read contemporary fiction and poetry. I am not one of those who say that if it doesn't rhyme it isnt poetry... but I draw the line at such self regarding work. Susan wheeler needs to get over her John Ashbury phase and think again. A book which I gave back to my friend with much relief.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, August 24, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Source Codes (Salt Modern Poets S.) (Paperback)

This book of poems is really cool. Susan Wheeler is intelligent and real. I can relate to the language and images she uses to propel her poems, poems that show me the world, show me myself. This book I picked up expecting to read one or two poems, but ended up reading it straight through one morning. It's odd that you can actually buy this kind of pleasure.