[Futurepoem, 145 pp.]
Had been pulled to this book for a while by its title and the sensation of its cover (srsly), though not to the point of buying it until finding it tucked on a shelf at a store, having long forgotten of its existence. Nice at times to let a book maintain a distance for a while and continue to contain the possible potential of what it could be without exposing it to what it actually is.
I think then I really wanted to be absorbed by this when I finally opened it, and I knew already that it would likely not fit into any of the possible conceits I could assign it—knowing well as a regular purchaser of Futurepoem titles how oblique and quasi-intentionally anti-tag they end up being. Like Fence, they seem to a publisher who allows a book to exist without needing its explanation and direction to have space; a wonderful thing, if also one that creates a serial apparition of pretentiousness or ‘why’ to people suspect to not being allowed to follow along, who don’t like to read in a way that feels like being washed over, over and again. But I love that feeling, and as I read the first few pieces I thought I might come to appreciate this book the way I think I wanted to love Donald Dunbar’s Eyelid Lick before I read it, years ago, and then decided that I found the book (DD’s) irritating in its provocative evasiveness, its playing coy with equal doses of references and abstractions beyond the point of meaning, beyond even ridiculousness, which eventually instead began, in that case, to feel like a state of being, or a drug, more even than a tome or text; I mean that like that I accepted I would never fully understand the book, nor was it meant to, thus opening it to the possibility of returning to its possibilities forever, or at least as much as anyone might like—bearing its own mythos rather than an inherited one, perhaps, though also throttled by its authors’ fascinations, experiences, etc. This is, for me, one of the great powers a book can manage to achieve—like a window made of other windows.
I ended up long-term loving Eyelid Lick in this way, for its capability, and think of it still as a book that succeeded in assembling a new form of simulating existence while appearing to intend to disappear into itself rather than persist. I did not, however, end up loving The Crisis of Infinite Worlds in that way, at least so far, despite the similarity of initial intrigue mixed with consternation against what would actually appear. The book is made up of a variety of forms, including more formal poems (of course dedicated to other poets), and many concept-constrained essays, often self-referential and culturally tagged in equal parts, switching between a banal, matter-of-fact writing style, and intentionally theory-heavy recursive logic, sometimes to the point of “colorless green ideas sleep furiously” level thrust, often all within the same paragraph. The effect likewise continued shifting, from so flat in affect it’s like why are you telling me this, to elusive enough to make you double back and read a line again, to intentionally ridiculous, the latter of which began to accrue at a higher and higher rate as the rate of willingness on my end ran dry. In fact, by the end I found myself marking with little slips of paper the pages that irritated me more than other pages already had, and not directly marking them with a pen in fear that I’d one day look back and think I marked them because I appreciated what they said.
Whereas EL seemed to be the kind of creation that applies itself to the mind in such a way that it feels spiteful at first, then more slippery, eventually engendering your imagination with greater depth in how it resists rather than how it corresponds, TCoIW never managed to transcend, for me, the vogue of that irritation; the prickliness of the hyper-awareness with which Ward attempts to solidify observations, transmutative nuances of thinking and observation, ‘surprising’ personal references (such as in the closing essay which takes its title and its subject from Alvin and the Chipmunks 2: The Squeakquel). It all began to feel, I don’t know, still trying to force itself to go somewhere, despite begrudging the possibility of ever doing so all along the way? Like watching a video of one’s self performing a temper tantrum, full of tongues, at an age a bit too old, commenting on it with meta-lenses intending to seem to want to make low of high and high of low over and over, creating a system wherein no attention is to light long enough in fear of actually saying something?
On one hand, this effect is a delight: Ward is obviously brilliant with an ability to generate fluid structures of analysis to almost anything he wants. Reading his ‘time is of the essence’ style construction, through thoughts about reading, about objects, about being, about writing, memory, art, ideas, his best lines seem to enjoy their resistance to causing pleasure, or to wearing its friction like a toupee, and yet eventually the explorative intent seems to run up moored before the gloss has time to dry, leaving the thoughts sticky, maybe, or tacky, or intentionally dense. Seeing how the text manages to steer through so many essences of perspective—if all clearly the same thinker—becomes part of the fun of it: I found myself continuously wanting to keep reading to see where it might go, how else it might continue to defrag itself as it compiles; and I do enjoy, in a way, reading things that make me eye-roll, because I feel they’re fucking with me, or they are fucking with themselves—or U like to feel tension between the perception of the author’s most sincere points and how we’re supposed to manage being handed so much information that goes nowhere back deeper back into itself.
The way this book crops up among the 2010s framework of ‘experimental poetry’ seems indicative of something I feel aligned with in general, as a person who wants the system mangled, but at the same time feels clique-bait-ish in presentation, and even also in intent. I read the blurb on the back of this book telling me how this text contains magic, sleight of hand, but all I end up coming away with is the miraculous vapid again, if clearly bisected with the way Ward feels witty, if not wise, and funny, if not funny. Such a contraption of intentional meta-existential contradiction-speak is obviously honest, and surrounds us in the way all information now seems to have taught itself to, and in many ways the absence of an empirical relation or even firm direction but through broken aspects of nostalgia is more true of a subject than most subjects, if we have to say, even more so for how impossible it is to ever clench.
This book does succeed in that way, creating an object that refuses to even want to be an object of reflection, much less meaning. And yet the book is full of attempts to begin from somewhere: for instance, there’s a long, detailed and more plainly spoken essay about the birth of his first child, and the early days of feeling in fatherhood, which honestly felt tedious against what felt like the much more beguiling sections, such as the more overtly lyric-oriented poems, which do often contain dazzle. Another piece, titled ‘Things the Baby Likes (A-Z)’ seemed hilarious and strange in how it forced one to imagine a baby liking “Fraggle graveyards, Food comas, Formalism,” though then there are 20-some pages where Ward then writes a mini-essay after each, each acting like a little meta-memoir, which in total feels more like what the book wants to be: a synthesis of realism and conceptualism, in which nothing ever gels between.
What I’m trying not to say about this book is that it feels like a book that has nothing to say and yet is extremely qualified to say it, and from a voice that at least knows how to galvanize its fear. It feels ripe for the plucking by the same sort of critic who turns quickly to assess something as ‘navel gazing,’ as if the world isn’t made of navels. But still, I can’t help but wanting to be standoffish from this platform: to wonder: why? Why does Anselm Berrigan blurb the book saying, “This work is saving my stupid ass.” as the main header line in the book’s blurb, as if attaching a quip like that from a person like that should or could automatically legitimize its reason for existing? Nothing should exist, of course, but if it’s going to, on what terms? Or, to what end? Coffee table jackoff spritzer juicing? Happy fuckoff handstamp PhD noise? I don’t know. I don’t know that anybody knows; least of all the cadre of poetry-world insider-outsider folks whose participation in the formation of a publishing universe where no one has power, and yet it is conducted through the attachment of these names, of style over substance to the Nth degree, even in the agreement that nothing matters.
I’d say something is revealed late in the book when the author discusses the generation and means of publication of the book itself: that he wrote it as an assignment, knowing it would be a book, written after having received agreement to do so from a friend who ran the press. His description of the desperation and near-sickness creating by seeking time to think and write, particularly as a new father, felt true to me, sure, and gave the work retroactively the feeling of a time-document, a piece of space-shard, rather than something architectural, or even drug-like, the way Dunbar’s book felt. I’d also say his forthcomingness about the issues surrounding the creation do bear interest, in the way a car crash does, or a snuff film. But also, jesus christ, who fucking cares? Do I have listening to poets talk about the politics of becoming and being poets, as if all it takes is more than saying so and showing up? The emphasis on who and where and when, and how miraculous, versus the more private sensation of facing up to one’s self in the work, much less to the darkness, feels defeated, line by line, even while beautiful as language, as obfuscation, as a fakebook of jokes infused with artificial meaning in a world where meaning cannot be anything but. The mutant status the book gathers as a result of so many different kinds of thinking feels much more essential to it than any of its individual components, in the end, which is in vogue by now, for sure: these days eking out anything even moderately defiant to form, and often hyper-proudly, feels like the stripe that most anyone could imagine that they need: that the work is done because it’s done both assiduously and without bounds but in the mind, and at least it’s not another set of verse chord verse tropes by whatever hell poet people don’t want to be like anymore.
So I guess, in the spectrum of it all, while I didn’t love the experience of reading this contraption, I’ll take it one over a bunch of other things I’d have to take if ulterior conditions didn’t exist; and I do enjoy being irritated in a fresh way, and irritation is godly; but I still can’t say I think it gets there. And I can’t say I can imagine how it could save someone, unless that person was about to be shot unless they could wax weird about how much Evian fills a canyon, as Ward refers to, or what Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” sounds like on a piano with the “ebullience ripped out.” I can’t remember where I read the term recently “meta-diarist” but you can place this catalog of crisis-as-absence in that continuum for certain—and at least there are enough friends of friends of people who can theorize and type to be able to gather enough sparkle to imagined they’ve experienced something bananas, even gorgeous, the way nails are gorgeous, both on fingers and in pails. It’s definitely the kind of book that refuses to be diminished quickly as a reader’s memory, for what it embodies more than any particular line or section, even taste. I suppose I’ll keep this thing around. Maybe I’ll pick it up sometime and look again and see what happens.