Pierre Joris. "Revelry To Revery: A Review Of Karen Mac Cormack, Marine Snow
(Ecw Press, Toronto 1995)."
Sulfur 40 (Spring 1997). 178-81.


Marine Snow, Karen Mac Cormack's latest volume of poems, is her most
accomplished collection to date. Concerns as well as techniques that have
been evident in her previous books, resurface and find an even finer & a
more varied or modulated, expression here. This does not make them "clearer"
in any obvious sense: though leavened with humor, wit & tenderness, her
poems remain tough crystalline structures--the title "Marine Snow"
foreshadows these crystals--difficult work for an impatient reader looking
for some instantly consumable "meaning." In fact, one of the characteristic
movements of the poems is exactly the constant care to defer such instant
gratification, or to displace it from some Poundian level of "logopoeia" (or
thought that can he "grasped" in one fell swoop, as the "logos" is & will
always be, by its nature, unitarian) to one of "seme-poeia"a making of
"semes," pre- & post-semantic signs & cyphers & seeds, cross-pollinating in
a movement that makes meaning unstable, changing, nomadic. "As normal goes
nomad," she writes in the poem "Export Notwithstanding," pointing to, among
other things, what happens to meaning when words are set in motion, made to
cross the boundaries of their familiar contexts, in both our world (the
usual shared associations assuming words as pure signifiers of an absent
signified) and theirs (the words in their own contexts, i.e. language and
its structures, syntactic and grammatical.)

Which does not exclude EP's other terms, "melopoeia" or "phanopoeia": it
merely moves these too to other levels so that, for instance, the music of
the poem can no longer be based on "melos," those familiar melodic
structures, that have in Western culture always associated poetry with
songlike mimesis, based on repetition & minor variations within sameness.
And "phanos," image, can no longer be an aesthetic resting place, a
"resolution" where the imagination metaphors the disquiet differences that
gave rise to the act of writing into a unified concretion sublating all
prior tensions. That classical & thus classifying impulse to simplify &
hierarchize is continually & consciously fought & resisted--even, & maybe
most powerfully there where the poem tends toward aphoristic statement. A
resistance worked by displacement into heterogenous assemblages of
deterritorialized images, (re)turning the "phanos" on/to itself by, so to
say, backlighting the verbal materia that otherwise so easily gets lost in
the shuffle of image-making. Via these concerns, Mac Cormack inscribes
herself clearly within the line of contemporary experimental work such as
that of the Language poets (among others), though her moves, the delicacy of
her placings & humor are sui generis; as Marjorie Perloff notes in her
back-cover tribute, Mac Cormack's "exquisite poise, the integrity of her
poetic line, her command of verbal nuance, pun, and paragram" are matchless.

The 45 poems that make up the book show a return to more mixed forms than
the two previous books (Quill Driver and Quirks & Quillets) which used
prose-poem formats exclusively. In Marine Snow, here is a careful
orchestration of three basic forms, interleaved throughout the book: First,
her now familiar prose-poem forms, with the stanzaic paragraph as formal
unit (i.e. often there is no punctuation except for the white space
between/around these stanzas, or a final period.) Then there are centered
poems, a typographical device which to me has always seemed a difficult one
to carry off, pace McClure, but which Mac Cormack here uses deftly: most of
the centered poems are built up from one-line end-stopped phrases, usually
separated by double or triple spacings, and ranging from single words to
complete sentences that often bring to mind Stein's moves in Tender Buttons.
The third form is the more traditional looking left-justified poem (with one
right-justified, ragged-left poem thrown in), working with & against
enjambement & the more traditional line techniques of the lyric, as in the
following excerpt from "Untitled," also a good example of the poet including
hints at her poetic process in the work itself:

               north motions south days
               off nights on call
               heady hands-on-words
               everything smells of
               eternity if not escape
               winning without a title
               keeps the count down grafting
               not in the sense of safety net
               to take herself (so)
               seriously in case
               others don't ignore levity
               "I" was not the gift
               another language spoken
               could make sound of

The mix of forms is judicious & points to a careful composition of the
volume qua book rather than as a mere gathering of single instances. Though
the different forms make for different rhythms & reading pleasures in their
orchestration, they share similar concerns. Mac Cormack works at
investigating (& disrupting) language at all levels. At that of the sentence
she can move from small local syntactical subversions ("The adamant if
loadstone falling of fill" for example) to the stanza-length paratactical
orchestration of phrases that make the act of reading participatory at
exactly the syntax-making level. Here is one such stanza from the poem
"Conveyance:"

          This is where I leap prior to tip of speak slowly and the
          depth will be less so as eyes widen it's all follow between
          the teeth remove thorns but if everything reinforced
          nothing's changed may be transferable after secretion
          panels succeed where walls don't surface taking in what
          we don't most of all solutions according to steps taken
          back place.

Another level of pleasure in disrupting the text is that of grammar. She
often collapses traditional word classifications, as, to take a simple
example, in the line cited above, "north motions south days," where the
plural nouns "motions" and "days" easily turn into verbs. But, it seems to
me, her special focus & delight is in investigating individual words
themselves--"Here are the stronger shards, impassive verbs and pronouns
become trophies for no such thing as bearings." This is often accomplished
by means of puns ("All calamities find the name Jane for what nonfictional
Alice wore to the ball." "Radar or not hear it comes." "If the ring fits
answer the phone") and ostranenie- esque juxtapositions and riffs ("Revelry
to revery." "Remembered as strings the words too many times mean this
frantic deferral ablaze." "All acknowledgment undertow expels the word
dainty.")

The book's epigraph is taken from Michel de Certeau and reads: "There will
thus be facts that are no longer truths" and comes from his The Practice of
Everyday Life. Which is also exactly where Karen Mac Cormack's art is rooted
& finds its strength: a practiced, i.e sharply focused, attention brought to
bear on the details of everyday life, both "the outside real & the
insidereal," to quote Ed Dorn, & on the relations (or lack thereof) between
those details and language, the only tool we have to make (new) sense of how
we act & think, of how (much) we live in a universe in which facts are
indeed not necessarily truths any longer--something due, in great part, to
the careless use or willed abuse of language, an abuse it is the poet's job
if not to right, then at least to address & show. A demanding art requiring
(of poet & reader alike) an attentive listening both to the world around us
& to the particulars of language, down to the very constituent parts of
words--"If letters train a pattern too, the valleys cease in mountains"--to
ride not only "the size of words," but to travel for awhile in the company
of that nomadic caravan she calls "the warm slow alphabet."


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