Ogling Anchor

To readers familiar with Christopher Reiner as editor of Witz ["Witz," a term associated with the 19th century German theory of or poetics of "romantic poetry" and referred to by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthes in The Literary Absolute as the "other knowledge"--other than logical, discursive analytical knowledge], and to new readers, Ogling Anchor arrives as a delight. Its musical philosophy appears in four movements, or sections, each a self-contained yet outward-bound sequence of writing. The first section is "Doing Good," which begins with lines from Robert Creeley, then the mischievous "A Coward's Libretto, followed by the brooding "Industry Standards" and concluding with "Fan and Sickle," a painterly musing on time and space in the world.

Although distinct in temper, the four pieces are linked by concern, both thematic and poetic. There are, for instance, poets for whom the vowels are colors, and others for whom the colors are objects. In this book, the vowels are keys and they are played with a deft and varied touch of the hand, of the voice(s). Perhaps the vowels ARE the voices, the inhabitants of this country of both encounter and quest. For this is a land where the syntax is curious, very curious indeed. Curious about its habits, investigating its own possibilities, thwarting its natural limits if we understand "natural" in the Husserlian sense of "what is assumed" or "I'll have the usual." Not.

The metamusic of the "melody of state," the epic song of past-ness, presents the terms of the present while calling a past into account -- or just calling. The hidden density pre-exists the reader, lying in wait within the units of writing on a page, within the variety of sentence-like structures, within the phrases and within the words themselves. "Industry Standards," for instance, gives us the burial of nature in a key word, "signature." The nature of the sign and the sign of nature, of the industrial/cultural complex by implication, spell out for us here the autograph of the world. "Fan and Sickle" provides such constant and cyclical reference to roundness and to vision in a shadowy key of intentionality to the point where the panopticon looms into view without needing to be named.

And how is it that a serious and multifarious address is informed by a benign generosity and at the same time does not manifest false optimism? For one thing, its song is inviting, familiar, yet strange. Intriguing the way "ogling" strangely rhymes, in its incongruence, with the anchor's "bobbing," visually, sonically, metonymically, the implication being that what we can see, the bob attached to the anchor, a surface marker, a mnemonic device to help us locate our catch and bring it home, a homing device for the sound-thought-movement evokes and stimulates considerations of recognition, and therefore of cognition, of the familiar (heimlich) and the unfamiliar or uncanny (unheimlich). We find ourselves in the midst of a haunting, not always dark, and not inimical to play.

The open feel of this dense writing depends upon its infrastructure of rigorous speculative poetics which then supports its sonic texture. For instance, the relationship between painter and composition plays out in the sonic space between multiple encounters of "c"[k] and plosive "p." At another point extension gives way to parturition as "rags" becomes "rages," and ascending clauses and dates "perpendicular to memory" give birth to a book.

Only relentless behind-the-scene or in-the-wings rehearsal of disciplined activity could produce these four melodic proposals in spite of the relentless light of investigation playing upon the evidence presented in a timely fashion by poet and metadetective Reiner.