Zawacki’s Petals

I am going to begin my own somewhat rambling thoughts on Andrew Zawacki::Petals of Zero Petals of One with Andrew Joron’s description of Andrew Zawacki’s poetry:

Zawacki’s formalism renews the art of arabesque, a motif defined by 19th-century aestheticians as a perfect synthesis of enthusiasm and irony.

That word, arabesque, is indeed a word that jumps out from the first moment of the book:

I don’t sleep Georgia

I shoot bullets into the dark

the blunt mimeographic dark

the middle dark Georgia

outside the outside

These lines open the book’s first section, “Georgia,” which is best described I think as an arabesque-litany.  The repetition of words–I, Georgia, dark, outside–in these opening lines sets up what comes to be an interweaving from line to line.  Each line, like a thread of an arabesque design, is physically a separate entity.  But each has been weaved to fit into a thematic whole.  Even the first two lines, which don’t share a single word, fit into a single theme.  The narrator first announces an inability to sleep, introducing a likely setting of the night or the dark, an attempt at sleep that assumes night and dark.  The fifth line, “outside the outside,” fits tangentially with the first four lines, but is more important as the first declaration of a theme that presents itself further down the first page:

the fire is like the snow Georgia

the snow wipes out a oneway street puts nothing in its place

snow is not like the snow Georgia

Where we are transported outside and, as that fifth line states, outside the outside.  Our view has turned outside but it seems we are viewing the snow from a location other than the snow itself – inside, or in a dream, perhaps.  This outside the outside also reminds us as readers that we are outside the outside of the poem, our double remove.  The poem opens with the ‘I’ but we the reader are not the I, even if we see what the I sees, even if we relate to the state of the I.  We are outside the I in the first remove by simply not being the I.  The second remove, outside the outside, occurs by not our reading the book, in a chair or couch, causing the reader to feel almost violently removed from the scene within the book.  Yet, as we see with the descriptions of the snow, outside the outside is also a tautology that returns us to the point of origin.  Outside the outside is, possibly, inside and is, at the least, still a vantage point where everything pertinent can be witnessed, can be viewed.

The poem cannot be discussed without at least a nod to the title and the idea of a binary.  The title comes from a line in this poem:

the feedback Georgia

the anvil’s hymnal

a dial-tone looped in a flophouse Georgia

an explosive packed in a microchip

petals of 0 petals of 1

rips a hole of a fractal dimension

Binary code becomes an underlying logic that governs much of the poem.  A gun is either fired or unfired; there is no middle ground.  And the variance between these extremes is mimicked in the ‘explosive packed in a microchip,’ which is like a musket ball a frighteningly small piece of equipment capable of powers that older, larger pieces of technology could never even predict.

“Georgia” remains firmly rooted in the south, but Zawacki lets in at least a moment where the poem nods briefly to the cultural origins of the arabesque:

Some say your eyes are charcoal Georgia

some say siren some djinn

I don’t say Georgia

it isn’t for me

The second section, “Arrow’s shadow,” is a series of right-justified poems that draw a parallel between the use of language and the path of an arrow.  Or, to be more specific, there is a contrast between the parabolic flight of the arrow and the shadow (is diameter the correct mathematical terminology?) drawn on the ground during the flight.  The poem is rife with word play:

(cel-

luloid sleepers, a lol-

lipop stem, a wind-up whip-

poor-

will

making a racket of mala-

prop, of cel-

lo string and the rosined bow, of AM /

FM ephem-

era

in true-or-false false

-tto)

The reuses of phonemes, ‘cel-’ and ‘false-’ and ‘ephem-,’ for different purposes turns the poem into a delightful obstacle course, one the reader is required to pick through and consider closely each word and even each syllable.  The importance of each detail in language becomes heightened.  Zawacki seems to be also rebelling against the notion that when we read our brain can ‘recognize’ a word within a sentence in its first syllable, presenting us with example after example of situations where we can do know such thing, where we must wait patiently for the word to complete itself.  It is also interesting to note that, in contrast to the explosion of the gun in “Georgia” this poem features the relative grace and near-silence of the arrow.

The third and final section is “Storm, Lustral: Unevensong.”  This selection from the section I think was my favorite:

Anorexic & off-kilter    a snowflake

done brought the mountain

down  : reckons well what voice

will latch    beckoning

the dark    fathoms how a

halo catches fire

alike knows why

from now until never

if one be unslept to oneself

a kiss come wreck

this body & rearrange

our limbs    : December not

relaxed nor cut

the haywire of

its blear    but dragging

gaunt calligraphy over

the blue sharded glass

of being there    gone & left

a fraught    laconic poise

for none did see

:epilepsies

of sunlight marry the floor

I wish I could really talk about this passage, say something wonderfully insightful about it.  But all I can say is that I lingered on this page for a good long while, reading and re-reading it, reveling in the loneliness, the isolation, the interiority.  This might not be the intention, but I felt Emily Dickinson floating through this poem as the invisible subject.  The poem also loops back to the opening of “Georgia”–snow, fire, the dark.

From start to finish Petals of Zero Petals of One kept me entranced.  I read the book entirely in one sitting, unable to set it down for any reason, and am likely to read it again before this week is out.  Zawacki’s poetry uses linguistic experiment for more than simple fun and experiment; his language and his message fuse into a single arrow shooting through the book.  It reverberates on a number of levels–an initial emotional response, an acknowledgment of the wit and intelligence, and then finally the later resonances of intuition:

mercury Georgia

musket ball Georgia

unlessless Georgia

for the blossoms Georgia

the night is leaded with cheap perfume

I won’t sleep Georgia

I’ll wait up

Filed under: Poetry , Andrew Joron, Andrew Zawacki, Petals of Zero Petals of One, Poetry