by
Geoffrey Gatza
The Mute
Canary, 2018
$20.00
FULL COLOR
As
the Ringing of Bells: A Review of Geoffrey Gatza’s
A Dog Lost
in the Brick of Outlawed Trees
by Nathan Spoon
Concrete poetry (or pattern poetry) is “verse
that emphasizes non-linguistic elements in it’s meaning, such as typeface that
creates a visual image of the topic.” In his new book A Dog Lost in the Brick of Outlawed Trees,
Geoffrey Gatza offers 22
concrete poems that are inspired by his many years of appreciating “change
ringing”: an English method for ringing church bells. As a result, reading this
collection involves following sometimes complex patterns that emerge when, in
place of bells and bell ringing, the sounds, words and phrases making up these poems
are subjected to predetermined numeric arrangements.
(Also, on a personal note, this is an
especially interesting book for me, since I have both a love of patterns and a
diagnosis of dyscalculia. To briefly explain, dyscalculia is “a specific
learning disability that affects a person’s ability to understand numbers and
learn math facts,” which may also involve difficulty with understanding math
symbols, memorizing and organizing numbers, as well as difficulty telling time,
and counting (learn more here).)
*
A central aspect of these poems is that
they each have been written to be performed in multiple voices. Poems in the
first and last section make use of colored text to help differentiate the
voices. For example, “Concentrate on the End of the Tunnel” is a poem in three
voices.
It consists of five unique stanzas and four
of these stanzas are repeated, resulting in a poem of nine stanzas. Stanza one
(“Dust To Dust”) is also stanza seven, two (“Don’t Give Dust”)
is also eight, three (“Don’t Give Up”) is also five, and six (“Concentrate on the end of
the tunnel”) is also stanza nine. Then there is stanza four (“Set your sights High”),
which is not repeated.
Taking the first lines of the unique
stanzas in order, this poem says, “Dust to dust. Don’t give dust. Don’t give
up. Set your sights high. Concentrate on the end of the tunnel.” But, aside
from the arrangement of the poem, there is also a pattern within each stanza allowing
it to alter and then return to its first line. Here is stanza six:
Concentrate on the end of
the tunnel
on the end Concentrate of the tunnel
on the end of
the tunnel Concentrate
of the tunnel on
the end
Concentrate
of the tunnel Concentrate
on the end
Concentrate of
the tunnel on the end
Concentrate on
the end of the tunnel
This gives readers a pattern, applied to
the poem’s other stanzas, of 123, 213, 231, 321, 312, 132, 123. Basically,
starting from 123, the 1 is moved one space producing line two and one more
space producing line three; then the 2 is moved in the same way to produce
lines four and five; finally, the 3 is moved in the same way producing line six
before returning everything to the original order in line seven. In relation to
this pattern, and as coloring of the text indicates, each repetition of
“Concentrate” should be spoken by voice one (red), each repetition of “on the
voice” by voice two (blue) and each repetition of “of the tunnel” by voice
three (orange). This gives the experience, when reading the stanza, of starting
from a place of familiar, determinate meaning (“Concentrate on the end of the
tunnel”) and then drifting into a space that allows for new possibilities of
association between the voices, words and phrases, before returning once again
to the familiar and determinate.
Without going into all the details, the
wonderful poem “Alpha Zeta” is a single, variegating column in twelve voices
using the sounds for all the letters of the alphabet, except for a and y. A
closer look at the column reveals that it is made up of seven sections of
twenty-six lines, the same as the number of letters in the alphabet. Sections
two, four and six have wider lines because they repeat “double u” as a way of
sounding out the letter. Each section is made up of thirteen couplets because
the opening sound and the closing sound repeats. Here are lines one through six
to give an example:
be ce de ee ef ge ech
eye
jay
kay
elle
em
be ce de ee ef ge ech
eye
jay
kay
elle
em
ce be ee de ge ef eye ech kay jay em elle
ce ee be
ge de eye ef kay ech em jay elle
ee ce ge
be eye de kay ef em ech
elle
jay
ee ge ce eye be
kay de em ef elle ech jay
Each of the twelve voices repeats its own
sound which alternates between the odd and even numbered sections, so that the
voice repeating ‘ef’ in the odd sections switches to repeating to repeating ‘are’
in the even sections.
*
The repetition in these poems perhaps resembles
the repetition of sounds, words and phrases in contemplative practice. A poem
like “Draw Up My Prisoned Spirit to Thy Soul” even has overtly spiritual
content, although the determinate meaning in other poems is not at all
spiritual. For example, the whimsical and ironic “I Hate Capitalism but I Want
to Fuck Santa Claus.” Still, reading one of these poems is very much like
sitting in a room and listening to the voices of monks or nuns chanting, albeit
each in his or her own voice and about a wider array of things.
*
Just over a century ago, in a dark
historic moment, as the Great War was raging, Guillaume Apollinaire was writing
the poems included in Calligrammes
and excerpts of “Zang Tumb Tuuum” by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti were appearing
in various journals. While any mode of verse concentrates and dissipates, comes
and goes, it is deeply reassuring to know that concrete poetry, the kind with
an overtly experimental bent, is still alive and well thanks to poets like
Geoffrey Gatza.
Notes
Calligrammes:
Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916), by Guillaume Apollinaire, translated by
Anne Hyde Greet, University of California Press, 1980
F.
T. Marinetti: Selected Poems and Related Prose, Selected by Luce
Marinetti and translated by Elizabeth R. Napier and Barbara R. Studholme, Yale
University Press, 2002
