Daniel Y. Harris, The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, BlazeVOX, 2016.
www.danielyharris.com/
Finally: a posthuman translation of Shakespeare. I'm glad Daniel Y. Harris beat Watson at it. There are still large chunks of human in his kind lineation." — Andrei Codrescu
In The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, Daniel Y. Harris has composed a wild poetic drama through realms of eros and spirituality. His writing is simultaneously playful and profound, transmuting ancient symbols and concepts into a contemporary wisdom, heretofore unknown in poetry. —Daniel C. Matt
Daniel Y. Harris has a perfect ear. Pass it on. “It’s the last season of day one.” Crisp consonants frame smart vowels betwixt parentheses that host deliciously true songs. Whole verse thrums from peak to sprawl. He crafts high-frequency fluidity. Each sonnet is agleam with future friction, “revers(ing) this law of creation.” The litmus state, “Unborn in choiring wings,” reminds us that “The topos is in the billions.” Each fleck of this multiplicative joy ride earns a resounding “YES”! —Sheila E. Murphy
Though last words are rarely included in blurbs, Jack Spicer’s “My vocabulary did this to me” is apt praise for Daniel Y. Harris’ linguistic tour de force, The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, which is a procedural and meta-linguistic commentary on Shakespeare’s sonnets and so much more—from Faustian saga of human creation to an ode to the mechanical and posthuman methods of gaining access once again to the imagination. The circle/cycle is unbroken and broken simultaneously—and that is the joy of this big, ambitious, and brilliant riff on what “revision,” at its most exuberant boundary can mean. Read th is forever and then start again. —Maxine Chernoff
The fourteen-line sonnet form is the setting for this epic homage to the Bard. Harris’ bold achievement is nothing less than a sustained ecstatic idiom—a combinatoria, encyclopaedic in range, via which this daemon, this genius, this attendant spirit he calls Daemon eddies uninhibitedly. —Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino, author of The Valise and Editor of E·ratio To be Human or… Posthuman? That is the question Daniel Y. Harris asks in The Rapture of Eddy Daemon, his new techno-savvy collection; an alluring post-avant garde ‘frieze of parabola and rosaries... eccentricities and personae’. Outraged critics may balk at the esthétique du mal infusing this neon-lit sonnet-homage to the Bard, but disregard their slings and arrows – just fasten your seatbelt for this white-knuckle ride through a multifaceted New Inscape of poetic phantasmagorical visuality. —AC Evans
The originality of Daniel Y. Harris’ writings is a multilayered surprisal, one of joyful momentum and challenging nuances that alters the reader’s understanding of language. In essence, one of the gifts of The Rapture of Eddy Daemon is its ability to advocate for poetic language, but too, for language in a general contextual awareness. This superb collection will create neoteric discernment for the reader ready to delve beyond what is currently being written. Harris has created, through Daemon’s interaction, something very new and deliberate, —something truthful into the paradigm of what creates rapture and its subsequent experiences. —Felino A. Soriano
Daniel Y. Harris, The Underworld of Lesser Degrees, NYQ Books, 2015.
THE UNDERWORLD OF LESSER DEGREES by Daniel Y. Harris is a post-digital and post-human literary oeuvre whose vortices are replete with the language of kabbalah, alchemy, holy writ, and the nuances of digital technology and social media. In illuminating a wide array of literary styles and varied poesis, THE UNDERWORLD OF LESSER DEGREES balances an amalgam between nihilism and transcendentalism by burrowing through the minutiae of self and identity to conjure the image of a post-human self as an inventor, engraving tropes of originality from the littered density of the literary canon. The book scrapes the periphery of form and style, but not to extol a certain impossible obscurity, futility, abstraction, disdain, flippancy, or the realpolitik of viral media. Technology and hyperreality meet Judaic midrash and biblical exegesis in stanzas which seek to create a human being from the refuse of bandwidth. THE UNDERWORLD OF LESSER DEGREES for a new spiritus, geist and religious ethos for the 21st century.
Daniel Y. Harris, Esophagus Writ (with Rupert M. Loydell), The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2014.
I didn’t see it cited in the notes from the Introduction by the little-known but clearly scholarly Dr Theodolite Cardew, but I am sure that the anthropoetjests Messrs Harris and Loydell will have referenced directly or indirectly the influential works of Fartov and Belcher in their own scholarly ruminations on the meanings of in their new poetry collection Esophagus Writ.
In the way cosmic coincidence will commune with those of us who listen, it was uncanny that I am currently reading Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded because this work is cited in the notes of that Introduction – the quote ‘the word is now a virus’ – and to expand on this reference, our dynamic duo explore the ‘other half’ which includes the meanings of, and do so with the compelling organism of their refracting poetic words.
I say ‘refracting’ because the poems in this anthology are placed side by side: one on the left [generally tempting with an organic accessibility] and then the one on the immediate right a bifurcated refraction of its leftie [generally teasing with an organic complexity] – never a copy or mirror re-working. Thus the organism of these shared words and ideas becomes a mutual virus that infects both and then spreads across the whole as a parasitic creator of new meaning.
The dichotomy of these refracted new meanings can be exemplified in titles like The Museum of Oblivion/The Museum of Oblation; The Ghost of an Impoverished Past/The Gimp of a Tumescent Now; Enter Babe Rainbow/Enter Billy-Bob Bovary, the latter in which ‘I suddenly felt much better’ and ‘I felt better in my thong’ wrestle with the plurality implicit in the meanings of.
A closer analysis of any more of these refractions – an inspection surprisingly missing from the otherwise erudite and learned exploration of Dr Cardew – reveals how the prism of this poetic intercourse shifts and splits meanings of to startling [and intentional] obfuscations. From the domesticity of
‘My beautiful time bomb,
will you dance before we explode?
How is the weather inside today?’
[The Mystery of the Mind]
to the psychoanalysis of
‘Hell is glial. Heaven, a dendrite. Between
podes, the myelin of a normative stint
in living with charm and poised saunter.’
[The Mystery of the Brain]
where the damaged layers of both our expression and understanding are wrapped up in each focus, one on love and one on over-analysis so that neither explains though one may seem more palpable.
I won’t comment further on the poems for these are for the reader to mainline and in doing so find their veins of personal meanings because ‘Everything should become clear to the most idiotic among us’ [Advice to the Reader]. I have just injected a tiny droplet of the virus.
I will nearly close on an admittedly pedantic point: I take issue with the esteemed Dr Cardew’s citing of the Blinky Snoodle work ‘Stupid Groups of Animals’ in The Journal of Behavioural Science vol. 12, #2, 1993 as a paper in any way informing the theoretical basis of these poets’ work as this fraudulent fancy was roundly discredited in the subsequent volume of that venerated journal by the renown American anthropology expert Wyde I Ceen.
I will, however, fully conclude by stating that this work is above and beyond any academic reference points a demonstrative hoot. If the virus is Poetry, the vaccine is reading the meanings of this challenging quality. - Some Awe
Daniel Y. Harris, Hyperlinks of Anxiety, Cervena Barva Press, 2013.
HYPERLINKS OF ANXIETY is a post-digital and post-human literary oeuvre whose vortices are replete with the language of kabbalah, alchemy, holy writ and the nuances of digital technology and social media. In illuminating a wide array of literary styles and varied poesis, HYPERLINKS OF ANXIETY balances an amalgam between nihilism and transcendentalism by burrowing through the minutiae of self and identity to conjure the image of a post-human self as an inventor, engraving tropes of originality from the littered density of the literary canon. The book scrapes the periphery of form and style, but not to extol a certain impossible obscurity, futility, abstraction, disdain, flippancy, or the realpolitik of viral media. Technology and hyperreality meet Judaicmidrash and biblical exegesis in stanzas which seek to create a human being from the refuse of bandwidth. HYPERLINKS OF ANXIETY is a new spiritus, geist and religious ethos for the 21st century.
Daniel Y. Harris’s new volume of poetry brings together a range of texts – older and newer – evocative of the qualms and uncertainties of our new millennium. A subtle and highly affective read.
—Sander L. Gilman
Is cyberspace the most recent iteration of the diaspora? Will the next Zohar be composed in computer code? Can notarikon generate lyric poems out of the discourses of pharmacology, neurology, biophysics…? Welcome to the Hotel Url, Daniel Y. Harris, sole owner and proprietor, where these questions—and others that the reader has yet to dream–will be answered. No need to be anxious: in less than a nanosecond, the hyperlinks elaborated in Harris’s poems will whisk you from catastrophe creation to apocalypse and beyond. Beam me up, Ezekiel!—Norman Finkelstein
Daniel Y. Harris combines impressive erudition with a profound awe for continuity–that the eternal energies underlying Life itself constantly (re)iterate and (re)incarnate in myriad waxing and waning forms. Ideas birth Art; Art births Ideas. In such fashion, to employ classic terms, the heart and mind forge a dynamic union resulting in both clarity of perception and depth of feeling. These are poems to be read and reread, concepts and descriptive phrases operating like portals into other worlds. In Hyperlinks of Anxiety, Harris functions as a twenty–first century, digital alchemist, adeptly yoking the abstract and concrete, offering us singular and transformative experiences, all the while reminding us that Poetry is trans-authorial, Mystery our only true teacher.—John Amen
In a radio broadcast of 1936 WB Yeats noted that, while TS Eliot was the most 'revolutionary' poet of his lifetime, his work represented a form of revolution that was 'stylistic alone', a product of the pessimism engendered by the First World War. Previous generations had rejected Victorian moral fervour in favour of Decadence and Aestheticism; the interwar generation marked a return to a new seriousness, matched by stylistic 'innovation'. The paradox being that 'radical' modernist techniques were now deployed in the service of various moral critiques of contemporary society typical of Calvinists, Greek Stoics, dour Roman Republicans, Hebrew Prophets and other prim ascetics. In the last century Conservative critics and Cultural Marxists alike tended to agree that contemporary life is dominated by a shallow narcissism, a hollow consumerism and the cult of celebrity. Now in the twenty-first century this fallen world has become a post-modern nightmare of emergent hyper-culture, of trans-national casino capitalism and of global mass media electronica. According to Baudrillard the hyper-real is best exemplified by virtual reality, a 'third order simulation' generated by mathematics and computer code, a cyber-model of existence disconnected from actual reality; a world of dead souls enmeshed in hyperlinks, as explored in many of Harris' poems that voice the angst and introspection of a new species: Dostoyevsky's Underground Man takes a ride with the Taxi Driver.
For Benedix Harris' most extended 'elucidation of the hyperreal world we occupy' is the poem entitled 'The Latecomer'; a treatise on 'the endless ways we have sold our souls, given in to the seductions of power and fame, to the sound of our own voices, given up on our longing for the sacred, on the possibility for connection...' This infernal hyperreality is often defined by mere soundbites or false messianic fantasies of redemption. 'Akiba feared the moral nebulae and died believing General Bar Kokhba was messiah' ('Transmigration'). Thus Hyperlinks of Anxiety illustrates Yeats's point about Eliot. This volume is an elegant, poetical exercise where postmodern linguistic style and experimental forms are utilized in the service of an ancient, 'prophetic' message of redemption; a vatic spirit of mysticism that flows throughout history, and by virtue of which, in an indeterminate space 'between' the hyperlinks, lost souls may regain connection with the real (i.e. sacred) through an experience of the ‘deepest intimacy’.
For Harris 'spirit is the last hope' and through a transcendental interpretation of the faculty of hearing ('Our ears are caverns reaching to the roots of the spirit') we may, perhaps, amidst our resignation and anxiety understand - by some intervention of grace - that the 'world is open/and waiting for us./ We see it better now with our ears'. The soul of the reader may find meaning in breathing the pure life of the spirit: perhaps an epiphany can be attained through an experience of dread some poets may call Anxiety. - A.C. Evans
Reading Harris’s far-reaching and complex work, questions quickly arise: Is the hyperlink ultimately an access point to a transcendent and immutable essence (Substance or God) or simply an illusory endpoint in and of itself? To stretch the metaphor to the realm of human psychology, is mystical union with a source possible or is what we have come to refer to as Petrarchan yearning, characterized by desire for that which is inevitably and irrevocably missing, the best we can hope for? Are our lives inevitably virtual and impersonal, infected, much like compromised documents, by a proliferative virus of cultural, conventional, and transpersonal anxiety? And who are we if we can’t claim with certitude to be experiencing what we think we are experiencing? Furthermore, who is it who/that experiences? At what point does the virtual become more real than that which it purportedly represents?
From the first poem, “Confessions of a Blogger,” we see Harris addressing the notion of contemporary identity:
Add a mix of theurgy
and hyperlink to neuts of gramme—I spin
henosis in blogland: neurons
in the wet gauze
of def, spores of tag—the zot in the stasis
of the Web…
Harris yokes the supernatural or mystical (“theurgy”) with the technical (“hyperlink,” “neuts of gramme”), suggesting that union and identity (“henosis”) occur, ultimately, in a virtual (“blogland”) domain. He goes on to explore the changing nature of relationship, writing
digits
for countless others probing
the Net for my name—
me numbered, me squared
to a thousand and one
nights of the boolean me….
Here again identity is presented as a “countless” phenomenon, the “name” simply a vehicle or sign via which one accesses or links to a permutating function of the virtual, a “numbered and squared” version of an indefinable and perhaps inaccessible origin. The reference to “boolean” implies that even given the complexity of “the Net”—or perhaps due to the complexity of “the Net,” itself a metonymy for the techno-infused dissociative labyrinth of modern life—simplicity prevails in the human realms of ethics, morals, emotion, and cognition. Amidst a contemporary plethora of information and virtual options, interpretation in real time is navigated inchoately. The complexity of the parameters (“the Net”) has bred a counter-tendency towards the primitive and over-simplified, in terms of response. The “boolean me” is true or false, this or that, rigidly and reductively disjunctive, and grossly one-dimensional. In the face of a virtual reality that proliferates exponentially, human response has, ironically, regressed towards a more primal orientation, a facile polarization of possibilities, narrowing reliance on expedient and dismissive categorizations. Harris continues:
…linkrot of vanity
shaping me as helicoid
in search of myself—to break
me, pulp my savage accent,
my hack-herd packing words
in viruses with a thin
mdash.
The poem concludes with a manifesto regarding the inevitable transmogrification of identity. The “hyperlink” is now referred to as a “linkrot of vanity,” a portal into the nullity of both the “search for myself” and the obfuscation or at least elusiveness of anything remotely personal or not part of a “hack-herd,” where “words” are “packed” into a “virus” characterized by the “mdash,” itself a truncation, non sequitur of sorts, a portal into a void or abyss, an infinitely proliferative limbo. Identity has been reduced to pure commercialism, mass packaging and production, a clonal and tautological construct, the “link” a black hole imploding into itself.
In a subsequent poem titled “I,” Harris again conjures the context of the pervasively deconstructive virtual and continues to explore what it means to “search for [self].” He writes,
I…
am hypertext, timpani of digits, remain
landed in chips, sites, fissures, soft as code
disappearing.
The poem is written in the first person and is, in part, a personal lamentation regarding the elusive nature of identity and the phenomenon of personal suffering; however, Harris is ultimately a poet-philosopher, rather than a Confessionalist, and his voice addresses the “I” of humanity, the “I” of Life or Eros itself, perhaps even the “I” of God. Can we say that God exceeds material reality, or are God and material reality tantamount (confluence of pantheism and nihilism), existence itself characterized by dispensability, recyclability, and ephemerality? Is God yet another aspect of the virtual (also a subset, aspect, or extension of the material), perhaps the gestalt of the virtual, but a gestalt that oxymoronically fails to exceed the sum of its parts? Milton and the later Romantics (British and American) would appreciate Harris’s inquiry as would William Gibson, the creators of The Matrix, and aficionados of the Steampunk and Cyberpunk genres.
In the later and epic “Thade the Dystopian,” Harris writes, channeling metaphysics through Thade,
I put my hands on my omentum and pray for what can save
a life from the urgency of dead referents….
But again, is it possible to be saved from, to transcend the “dead referents”? Perhaps with a hint of satire, Harris goes on to ponder whether the “urgency” mentioned is not perhaps the saving grace of our existence. Illusion though it may be, perhaps the “urgency of dead referents” is what gets us up in the morning. Harris/Thade proceeds to suggest, “Ciphers want to be deciphered.” And, “No closure, symbol, exergue, opening at the city center….” The poem concludes much as it begins: “…my name is Thade…just/Thade, extending a hand.” Identity is, again, tautological, a repetitive indicator pointing towards and imploding into its own nullity.
Harris has absorbed his Plato, Spinoza, and Locke, as well as a wide range of Eastern and Western religious texts, but he’s also ingested and transmuted Derrida, Foucault, Bronk, Ashbery, and the spirit of contemporary science fiction, represented most vividly by the development of technology and its central role in our lives. Harris writes in “Fire and Name (Version #3)”:
Extinction burns its ruined
force without insult given
or injury taken. It is its own
accuser and master, in wit bereft
of quick, overhearing names.
Existence is impersonal, operating without design, in contrast to the Greek depiction of Fate as associated with a pantheon of mercurial and easily offended Gods and Goddesses. Existence “burns” without discrimination, without intending “insult” or “taking injury.” This is not the palpable and visceral Eros we encounter in the Greek myths but, rather, a post-industrial, post-techno portrayal of a drier, more disinterested, perhaps even randomly dutiful energy, the prompting of which seems to occur without discernible method, the ongoing regression of a deist-like Primal Cause.
Harris proclaims that existence is its own “accuser [and] master,” suggesting that existence itself unfolds according to the dictates of an inherent anxiety (or ambivalence), governed by a cosmological virus of doubt as well as the counter-equivalent of an evolutionary certitude, one alternatingly compensating for the other. And perhaps our own anxiety—what we might stretch to interpret as original sin—occurs as a byproduct or extension of this fundamental energy. What we dub human psychology is tantamount to the nature of existence itself. It is impossible, therefore, to anthropomorphize, is fallacious to suggest that something akin to human nature exists in any primary or non-derivative form. The notion of anthropomorphizing is itself founded on a collective grandiosity, presumptuousness, and intergenerational hubris.
Of particular interest is Harris’s statement that existence is “bereft/of quick,” “quick” constituting a reference to the living or the life force. This is a remarkable paradox, one that will clearly appeal to readers with a bent for portraits of dystopianism a la Philip Dick. If existence is devoid of life, what then is its chief characteristic? What is existence, an after-the-fact, a program devoid of programming, a randomness that occurs neither randomly nor with set design, but perhaps according to the dictates of both alternately in complement (teleology) and opposition (sabotage)?
Harris ambitiously explores many issues and moves in numerous interrelated directions throughout his landmark Hyperlinks of Anxiety. At the core of his striking and memorable poems are inquiries into human identity and experience as well as metaphysical investigations into the nature of existence itself. Is Harris a nihilist? What we might call a material pantheist? Again, Harris is not taking a fixed philosophic position, and it is not necessary for us to assign him one. He is ultimately a poetic gadfly; offering possibilities, evoking and provoking, rather than promulgating a perspective, is his chief task. The range and scope of his work are compelling as are the complexity, integrality, and originality of his metaphors and references. Harris celebrates the music, history, and sublimity of thought. His work constitutes a true fete, the heart responding most fervently when the mind is also deeply engaged. - John Amen
Beth Benedix: Barely Listening: A Meditation on Daniel Y. Harris' Hyperlinks of Anxiety.
Daniel Morris: Tech support says 'Dead Don Walking': Tradition, the Internet, and Individual Talent
Daniel Y. Harris, The New Arcana (with John Amen), New York Quarterly Books, 2012.
THE NEW ARCANA is a multi-genre extravaganza featuring verse, fiction, mock journalism and academic writing, drama, and art. Both referencing and transcending various literary precedents, the book is a pronouncement for the 21st Century, an exploration of and commentary on the fast-paced and mercurial nature of life in the 2000s. Co-written by poets John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris, the book presents a compelling, jazz-like, and satirical style, a third voice born from the mingling of two distinct individual voices. THE NEW ARCANA is a memorable literary statement—a manifesto for our time—as well as a proclamation regarding the transformative qualities of true collaboration.
In The Art of Recklessness, Dean Young brings New York School surrealism into new relief. He talks of a poetry that contains the kind of stage-spanning acrobatic leaps you might have seen in vaudeville a century ago, or in balletic parodies performed by out-sized, operatic personae fluent in various arcane argots: at times witty, other times ludicrous, often madcap, always comic. The New Arcana, a collaboration of poets / artists John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris, demonstrates exactly the kind of reckless logic, syntax, and imagination that Young describes.
The book is a wildly antic collage of dramatic scenes, verse, diary and yearbook entries, phrases in Hebrew, clip art, illustrations, snapshots, and doctored photographs. Amen’s interest in alchemy goes back at least as far as his earlier book, At the Threshold of Alchemy, while Daniel Y. Harris’s immersion in the Kabbalah of Jewish mysticism underpins his book, Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue, selected by the Jewish Daily Forward as one of the most important Jewish poetry books of 2010.
In the first darkly comic “Section I,” we meet Jughead Jones and the flighty, unfaithful Sadie Shorthand who, like university students in every generation, sit in cafes and alternately discuss the nature of reality and their “fluttering day.” Here’s Sadie:
“Who I am essentially is always three steps ahead of who I am incidentally,” Sadie replied. “Even you, Mr. Don Juan, are an illusion.”
“’Touche,’ conceded Jughead and tucked a $20 bill into Sadie’s g-string.” Added to the narration are various artifacts or documents, submitted as if in evidence in a court of law, as the transcript of a radio show, or in mimicry of a graphic novel. The text, for example, quotes Sadie’s senior yearbook: “To be God—now that’s a strong karma” and includes clip art of a corset next to a fanged reptile. Tangential or irrelevant items—like a photo of aging parents—trail the characters. Jughead and Sadie are, at the outset, madly in love. A character referred to as “I” or “I and I” enters the scene rather like the Stage Manager in Our Town, and comments on the lovers:
Infatuation glows like a right angle––
Beware the bare, eroded slope of Eros.
Inevitably, discord occurs between the lovers. In Act III, Jughead sits alone in the café. In Act IV, more discord. “You really need to figure out what’s next for you, Sadie./ Math, theology, whatever. Why don’t you put out a book?” Jughead quips. Sadie responds, “Well, Jug, the truth is, you’re my first book. /I’ve been editing you since we met.” In Act V, Jughead is outside Sadie’s apartment, under the eave, watching her, “sketching in his resentment pad.”
The romance ends badly. Actions and interactions appear to be intentionally senseless. The text parodies and mocks literary prizes, adult chat rooms, and breast-feeding. Illogical documents appear: Austin Halford’s text on the Dark Ages and the Renaissance of Literary Insurgence is quoted in Act II. Enrico the Insouciant’s irrational equations appear in Act VI, where Yolanda the Crone eats a kefir and tofu sandwich. Following a detailed list of the cluttered contents of his apartment, one Eidenberry Whatever dies while wearing his adult diapers. (“I wish I’da met him when our parts was still workin’,” says Jacqueline the Mum, an ancient rock bank musician.)
Section Two continues a legal theme with a Judge and Lead Advocate Hortense, as well as other odd Dramatis Personae, like Constance Carbuncle, Justin Nurm, Dr. Yistrum Lee, Bus Driver, Don the Commuter, Freddie Brill or Sir Adrian the Fop-Murderer, and Thaddeus Felino. Section Three plays out a theme hinted at in Section One: the absurdity of artistic and literary striving and fame is demonstrated in portraits of six wacky artists, many prodigies, all coming to no good.
Klaus Krystog de Moliva combines an interest in music with toxicology. The poet-prodigy Ann Chuong-Sandrik dies at 29 by auto-asphyxiation. Marvin Fegley Waife, famous for “semen” poems first written when he was 11, and author of vaginal sestinas and lacteal villanelles, dies of heart failure at 20. Sally Pixton, began her critical essay on Thomas Carlyle, when she was 11, published her first book at age 13, graduated from Harvard at 14—well, you get the idea. She is dead at 28 of snakebite. The only one in the pantheon not dead, it seems is Marguerita Voeckers De Winter, a recluse whose photo remarkably resembles the photo of the poet John Amen. (So if she, being a recluse, is dead, we might not know.) In deliberate obfuscation, the pagination of this part of the book wavers back and forth between “Section Two” and “Section Three.” Where are we really?
Amen and Harris regularly wander into lexicography and malapropism, engaging in theological discussions of the Creator, “the Premier Cause, […] shondly [sic] beyond reproach”; enlisting dozens of poisons, from pesticides to biocides, as actors in the drama; and inventing delicious words like sluther, preffy, ran-moral, sufferal, anthroid sufferal, axan, de-terra, and so on. Here’s another sample:
In sucal yoifs, sufferal in exspansion may randily be an effecting of the Premier Cause’s sal-wiring or auto-mandalated karmica.
Interspersed with this nonsense are passages of lyric clarity: “My doppelganger and I now sport interchangeable heads.”
The fifth and final section consists of twenty wonderful seven-line cantos that conjure Eliot’s Prufrock and Stevens’ guitarist, but written in country slang and revolving around the life of one ordinary stereo salesman named JD who “strum [sic] his red guitar as sunrise/drape over the house.” He “skim [sic] headlines […]/ consider [sic] a sick day, sick with success and failure.” Gritty, evocative verses are hidden like gems in the pockets of this text. America of the 1980s, for Amen and Harris, is a matter of “revolving doors [that] spin like a dervish, diner grills steaming with cheeseburgers, steaks, eggs, French fries; ice cream scoops are blazing, cash registers chiming; intercom voices bellowing discount deals in strip malls, casinos, convenience stores [. . .]” They create a portrait of the American temperament and cast of mind that resonates with our current national malaise and depression:
dollar bills sucked into vending machines, credit cards flashing, fives and tens and twenties whisked from wallets and purses, the I want I want of ten million shrieking souls determined to have fun have fun
This is heady stuff. In the metaphor of the book’s title—obliquely referencing James Merrill’s occult communications with angels and spirits in his epic narrative, The Changing Light at Sandover—The New Arcana deals mixed genres and mysterious (not to say weird) significances, dramatis personae, dialogue, stage directions, and a panoply of visual props. It presents a vat of comic madness into which riffs, visual imagery, collages and much else have been mischievously stirred. - Zara Raab
La religion de séquentialité!”
And indeed for Descartes and the Cartesian religion, to be alive, awake and sane meant avoir de la suite dans les idées – to entertain only appropriate & approved sequences of mental events – and this is precisely what Amen and Harris refuse to do. As part of their strategy, their characters tend to conjoin math and theology, much like Descartes, but in a different spirit:
“I’m at my best when I think of myself mathematically.” (Jughead)
“I’m at my worst when I think of myself theologically.” (Sadie)
Jughead Jones and Sadie Shorthand, we should inform the reader, were two very precocious philosophers, the latter one wearing at present a g–string and four–inch heels – perhaps she does burlesque? When he was ten, JJ said to his father: “Dad, what you call your life is just an epistemological construct.” And SS quoted the following on her senior yearbook: “To be God—now that’s a strange karma.” Who could gainsay either one?
Don’t expect any monkey business or openly titillating shenanigans between those two, though: that sort of thing is the main locus of sequential, even obsessively sequential, thought, and as such it is not welcome here. Anyhow, unless you’re unremittingly into sex, all these characters will hold your interest and often make you laugh.
After JJ and SS, we meet CC: “Cult prodigy, mystic and healer” Constance Carbuncle has mental issues – “a potent Kali complex,” among others. We also meet Don the Commuter, a character who ends up being killed by a drunken driver while eating a pork taco on his lunch break, on November 1st 2002, quite appropriately on the Día de los muertos.
“‘Well, she was standing there lecturing a pigeon, for God’s sake,’ said Don the Commuter, testifying at Constance Carbuncle’s competency hearing. ‘I could tell right away that she was probably a bad driver. She said something about field meters, and the pigeon squawked, and then she pulled out the knife. It looked like a steak knife. A pretty good knife. One I’d like to keep in my car. By the way,’ Don added, ‘I’d like it included in the record that I’ve shaved twice a day without fail since the age of fifteen, often while driving to and/or from work.’”
I cannot describe here the tenth of the crazy Olympus Amen and Harris have erected, but I cannot let the Parisian professors go unmentioned. The Sorbonnagre Jean–Pierre Mouyabaise, whose dates are given as 1923–2007, and whose family name seems a combination of mayonnaise and bouillabaisse, is what our English departments call a “theoretician.” If The New Arcana has the diffusion and the success it deserves, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some new doctoral dissertations connecting Mouyabaise with Paul de Man and Bakhtin. And then there is the female counterpart, Professor Claudia Binot–Glas, whose “seminal work” is titled “The Speculum of Panatomism.”
For the sake of balance and of equal time I should mention, finally, JD, a male character known only by his initials, and by the fact that all that is written about him (though not what he says) must contain verbs only in the infinitive. He is definitely against theorizing:
“‘The theoretical,’ JD says, ‘is for the caged and collared lapdog’.”
The New Arcana is the poetic jeu of two very fine esprits. - Ricardo Nirenberg
Over milk, hypodermic restlessness, and mango sherbet, Sadie and Jughead
discuss their fluttering day.
Since it is de rigueur these days for reviewers to compare the work at hand to a seminal literary work of the past, please indulge me while I opine that The New Arcana, in spirit and form, lies somewhere between The Waste Land and Plato’s Republic, with a bit of Alice in Wonderland,in all its satirical whimsy, tossed in. But perhaps it would be more useful to forego the comparisons and discuss why this book is unique, and important, in its own right.
My ennui shall be my tabernacle,
temple, Delphi.
It shall lead me through rapacious waters
past sirens and reefs, deliver me
safe to Ithaca.
The cadence, throughout, is in striking alignment with the content. There is a vibrant breathlessness to the prose, which perfectly captures the wild fluctuations and hysteria of our daily lives. At heart, Messrs. Amen and Harris are poets and, as such, the dialogue is peppered with lyrically appealing, spiritually astute, imagery:
A hot wind whips across the eternal landscape;
;
archaic symbols are sold at auction north of Disneyland
to diehard antique–mongers and melancholy pedants…
Then, a flipped coin fell from the blue sky like an afterthought.
Will you stick round to hear the details—how it landed—
as they are cast and analyzed by the aging excommunicants?
Although there is no overt attempt to derange the senses, á la surrealism, the authors do play havoc with the reader’s notions of what, exactly, is vital to the zeitgeist. It is no accident that the book begins, “Our Father who art.” While, at first glance, there is a seemingly religious significance, it soon becomes clear that the real focus is on the word “art,” and how we define it. All roads lead to the Muse, who manifests in many colorful variations: high art co–exists peacefully with low art (i.e., discussing Descartes while stuffing money in a g–string); and the abandonment (or, even, annihilation) of the creative force altogether. Of course, there is also a healthy undercurrent of fetishist sex, if you are so inclined.
There are five discrete chapters, each one setting up a dichotomy (or maybe an existential crisis, depending on your interpretation). The first dramatic presentation, drawing on pop culture and wild imagination, features Jughead Jones (wasn’t he a character in the Archie comics?) and Sadie Shorthand (isn’t our language these days a sort of texted shorthand?)
Alas, I am being bombarded by wings, black embers,
velcro, and coupons, Sadie thinks, removing her 4–inch heels, hanging the riding crop on the smoke–yellow wall…
Too late, between crumbs of Cartesian hypochondria,
saturated fat of dictum, logic, syllogism…
The high–spirited debate focuses on the value of math versus theology, which can also be translated as: abstract versus concrete; spiritual versus physical; and, within the context of literature, experimental versus linear. The authors are decidedly on the side of free expression.
And, oh, did I mention there is sex?
It seems fitting that the sexual deviance of choice is adults masquerading as babies. But once you get past the symbolism of dirty diapers and breast–pumped milk, you can see this regression as a way to mitigate the stress of overwhelming stimuli that living in the real word entails, or, quite simply, a desire to shirk responsibility:
…Jug and Sadie confabbing in the milk–white kitchen,
pacifiers and Lego kits
strewn about the floor, bills unpaid…
In Chapter 2, we are treated to a mock trial in a kangaroo court, wherein the competency of one Constance Carbuncle is to be determined. The real question, though, is whether madness is a necessary by–product of a think–outside–the–box worldview.Constance Carbuncle
waved goodbye
to a few more neurons:
warrior cells and regenerative dendrites
were insufficient to counter her family’s wacked legacy.
But who are the final arbiters of Constance’s fate? Justin Nurm, Constance’s lover, “once flew into a rage when a hotdog vendor neglected to offer him mustard for his salty pretzel” and has “a penchant for eating lightly sautéed worms.” Dr. Yistrum Lee “challenged the dust mites to a vocabulary duel” and “once stuck a pencil up his right nostril while tweezing his left eyebrow.” Lead Advocate Hortense rehearses his closing statement in front of an albino doll. Let the judges themselves be judged!
“The actors…sit with their backs to the audience. They speak
neither to each other nor to the audience, as if they are completely
disassociated from both themselves and their immediate surroundings.”
By the next chapter, and as depicted in the above stage directions of this play–within–a–play, the characters have descended into apathy and disconnectedness. In this regard, perhaps I should not have been so hasty in discounting comparisons — there really are elements of The Waste Land here, although the sprinkling of foreign phrases is in French (and sometimes Hebrew) rather than Latin. T.S. Eliot staged a séance; Harris and Amen reference the tarot deck—both are intrinsically linked to the concepts of sex and death. The torrent of non–sequiturs denotes a similar decline in engagement, both due to untenable outside forces. But while The Waste Land, in each successive stanza, plunges further into chaos, The New Arcana does not, in the end, give in to pessimism, even despite the fact that most of the young practitioners of the new art have drawn the death card. The last chapter culminates in dialectical verse, laid out symmetrically on the page, which attempt to restore order and reconcile all previous disparities.
The New Arcana is not for the lazy reader. But for those who believe that contemporary American writing ought to push as many envelopes as possible, this book is not only worth the intellectual investment—it’s a really enjoyable ride!
Cindy Hochman is the editor–in–chief of the online journal First Literary Review–East. Her poems are upcoming in the New York Quarterly, CLWN WR, and the Cancer Project Anthology. Her latest chapbook is The Carcinogenic Bride. - Cindy Hochman
A reader still seeking the message may be determined to trace some of the strophes to one or the other poet, but such an exercise is not only unnecessary but impossible. True, most poets speak for themselves in their own voices most of the time, but in this book the two authors speak from the wings of a stage through a long cast of characters, each one defined only by some deformity their lines reveal. No other description is provided for them, and one is free to speculate. However, speculation is not the way to approach the text but by absorption, spiritual osmosis. The trickiest part is that some whole chapters – excerpts from plays, essays, interviews and doctoral theses − are given to voices that get a long biography, but when the uninitiated reader, innocent of the sly intricacies of the work, tries to look up any of these names they turn out to be totally fictitious. And so are the names quoted in the numerous authentic–looking footnotes and references. Only the authors’ names are true, but their biographies provided in the back are spoofs, and in their photos their faces are disguised behind goggles. A reader starting the book from the back is given a clear clue as to the tone of the rest.
Not quite though; the general tone is indeed Surrealist, but it spreads over a great variety of approaches, ranging from a few actually coherent and powerful poems (most notably in Section Two, attributed to a Larry Ormerod) and vivid one–liner metaphors to long–winded academic dissertations and extensive marginalia. The contorted academese texts will equally amuse academics and those whom they intimidate with their esoteric language. In a footnote the authors even quote themselves at considerable length but fail to cite a reference. (How about “From a paper in progress?”) The marginalia are extensions of the poetic lines, designed to beguile with more deception rather than explain anything. The last section is a prose poem in twenty short paragraphs written or told by a JD who may or may not be an amalgam of the two poets. That may be true of all the other characters as well. The liveliest and perhaps the most personal voice is that of Constance Carbuncle who appears in the first part of Section Two.
One section (Apotheosis) is a long poem (broken up by marginalia) written postmortem by a French professor, two years after his death; the bleak nonexistence of the dead is rendered in a poetic language and elegant metaphors worthy of Baudelaire. Paradoxically, this elegiac lamentation is the strongest part of the book, probably because it is not really about death but the fear of death.
I am the vacuum of absence. I am cold ash and the final illusion of a dying ember.
I am absolute love and the purity of horror,
an implosion without reference,
an incubator for what will never be born,
what will never die,
This is presented as “panatomist” poetry in the extensive but humorous gibberish in the footnotes. The authors’ newly invented concept of “panatomism” is often referred to as commonly known concept and thus never defined except in such a convoluted way that there is no concise quote that could summarize it. Ambivalence is the leitmotif here; it could be this, or could be that.
Not all the literary discourses parody academic style, some parts go well beyond that; they actually make sense or contain a kernel of truth. For example, in one of the purported dissertations the writer ascribes the invention of automatic poetry to the Surrealists and extols the virtues of the method (clipping all the words of a promising paragraph and then putting them together in random order) in eliminating intentionality and theme from the resulting poem, leaving a reader without comprehension but still curious, hung up in anxiety. That is the true purpose of art, say the Surrealists and the panatomists, as indirectly endorsed by the authors through an intermediary, another invented character: “Authenticity is achieved through the instantiation of a sustained paradox,”
Actually, randomized writing method was described in a poem by Tristan Tzara almost a hundred years ago under the aegis of Dadaism. Pairing disparate images together − as we find in this book – is a conceit of Surrealism, and it is hard to detect evidence of automatic poetry here, but the method is – like every other theory – is endorsed and rejected at the same time, apparently in the name of creating a paradox. Incomprehensibility is wholeheartedly supported in numerous instances in the make–believe but also credible literary criticism that intersperse the poetic material: “…we are often most alive when our not–knowing is most pronounced.” The thought practically punctuates the book in different formulations. Tzara would approve.
For a taste of what could be the product of automatic poetry see below (mixing in obscure technical terms, an ubiquitous panatomist ploy, almost ensures incomprehensibility):
“Antiferromagnatism
with Kagome lattice,
is spun glass: geophysics
of war paint,
chromium alloy to the dead
redux—
the tilting head, chalk red.”
Pure nonsense, would say the traditionalist, but to Dadaists it is pure poetry, free of a biased message. What better way is there to exclude unintended content that our unexpressed, unformulated and deeply ingrained assumptions might unconsciously suggest? If indeed all themes are suspect, it is better to avoid any content at all, even the possibility of one, by totally eliminating intentionality from the creative process as guaranteed by automatic writing. At least, that is the theory as this reader understands it. Understand? Please excuse the use of the dirty word…
The best poems in this collection are the old–fashioned comprehensible kind, regardless of what the marginalia next to it might say, but they would lose their essence if only quoted in part, because their power lies in making a statement in three or four stanzas that cohere into one whole, each line as essential as a layer of bricks in a tower. Parts of these poems would not do justice to the whole poem, whoever wrote them. Whether we call this wonderfully incomprehensible medley neo–Dadaist, surrealist or panatomist, behind it there are two very cultured (not only sophisticated!), creative and whimsical minds. One day it will be a classic, maybe another hundred years from now when poets of the time rediscover Dadaism again.
Just one more thought: essays presented within the framework of fiction or independently published fiction pieces written in scholarly or journalist jargon pose a special problem to the critic. How much of it is meant to be fact and how much fiction? This genre is the reverse of creative nonfiction and should have its own name. How about essay fiction? Fictional essay? - Paul Sohar
Some of those words are quite meaningful, as this poem from p.12 shows — note that the line breaks are correct, but the way the poem looks on the page is different than what I’ve been able to render due to the WordPress interface:
I’ve grown weary
of my residual self, for whom change
is a game of mercy with a suspicious stranger.
La vérité en peinture — clamped, sifted, raked, rotted
down to inherited imagery
through which I am again deceived.
Wait, not mercy after all,
but a clashing of fists — mea culpa. (poem quoted in its entirety — BC)
As this poem is in Part 1, which is all about a love affair gone bad and the very strange occurrences that follow from that, it’s especially appropriate. And while it shows a postmodern sentiment, it’s still comprehensible to most lovers of poetry and is not so arcane that it can’t be understood in context or out of it. (A neat trick, that.)
In Part II, there’s this poem about suburban life that rings true (from p. 35):
The patio party; I’m tired of these spoiled suburbanites.
I prefer back–river ingénues and trailer–park bullies
brimming with rage and remorse
(first three lines quoted — BC)
As this section is about an extremely unusual person, her quest for plastic surgery, and whether or not she’s a genius — a section that weaves poetry, faux journalism, and more into its eclectic mix — and she’s the suburbanite in question, this poem packs an extremely powerful punch.
The strength of THE NEW ARCANA is in its willingness to take risks. Some of them do not come off; I especially did not understand the four lines of “Mistress, I’ve forgotten my safe word” at escalating volume (shown by the use of font–size and bolding) on p. 99. But it’s good that Amen and Harris are willing to experiment, as they blend postmodern sentiment with more traditional forms of poetry, academic writing, and more.
And these risks mostly pay off, as THE NEW ARCANA is the most eclectic and innovative anthology I’ve ever read. Bar none.
Now, is this an easy book to read? Far from it. There are sections that read like plays for a few pages, until the section abruptly ends or transmogrifies into something else. There’s some material that’s obviously not meant seriously (such as faux biographies of people who exist only in the authors’ minds, complete with obviously bogus pictures), mixed in with some trenchant observations, then mixed further with some rather odd assessments regarding sex.
But is it a good book for poetry enthusiasts?
Upon reflection, I think it is. So long as you know going in that this is a postmodern anthology of sorts — and that due to its experimental nature, some pages seem to have more resonance than others — you are likely to enjoy the unusual angle of view authors Amen and Harris have come up with.
And their subtle, yet biting wit and sly amounts of dry humor are well worth the price of admission.
Poets and poetry enthusiasts should get a great deal out of Amen and Harris’s work, especially if they give THE NEW ARCANA more than one chance to work its wiles and captivate their attention.
- Barb Caffrey
My favorite section is the first, which features the characters Jughead Jones, Sadie Shorthand, Yolanda the Crone, Albert the Bore, and others. For the most part, Jughead and Sadie were the most memorable to me, especially since the first few pages highlight some of their ridiculous, pseudo–intellectual lines. On one page, Sadie says, “Mathematics is a thousand ladders to nowhere. Theology is a newborn sibyl cooling in the darkness.” Their actions remind me of hipster intellectuals I knew in college, trying to outsmart each other in dive bars or diners.
Amen and Harris enhance the spoof by developing backstory and history for the characters. Sadie is given credit for creating a book called The Crazy Tape, and the writers brilliantly added fake blurbs and journal reviews about it, perhaps to prove how academics strive to find the next hot movement, no matter how obscure it is. One of the fake reviews calls The Crazy Tape, “her (Sadie’s) generation’s literary Big Bang,” adding that Sadie “is like a demiurge in a postmodern Genesis.”
The first section also works best when it addresses consumerism and our appetite for destruction and human tragedy, themes that play out in most of the other sections too. On one page, Sadie is pondering buying a “multi–slice CT scanner, some baklava, an HD television.” A few pages earlier, one of the characters is drawn to a car crash and watches with other gawking drivers, unable to turn away.
As the book progresses, the characters become more bizarre. Section two features a character named Constance Carbuncle who has to undergo a competency test, and during the trial, she speaks utter gibberish to the judge. As in the first section, here Amen and Harris use outlandish comments by other characters to provide the history of some of the protagonists. A painter named Albay Thompson is quoted in the section through his fake memoir. He describes Constance’s eyebrows as “eaves of a floating palace, perches for disenfranchised griffins.”
What’s especially impressive is that Amen and Harris keep the farce going throughout the book. Even the author bios are just as off the wall as the rest of the collection and feature Amen and Harris wearing goofy goggles, though they stepped forth from some futuristic reality. The New Arcana serves as a reminder to not take publishing and academia so seriously, and it offers a sharp critique of consumerism and our culture’s appetite for destruction, tragedy, and the misfortunes of others. - Brian Fanelli
THE UNDERWORLD OF LESSER DEGREES by Daniel Y. Harris is a post-digital and post-human literary oeuvre whose vortices are replete with the language of kabbalah, alchemy, holy writ, and the nuances of digital technology and social media. In illuminating a wide array of literary styles and varied poesis, THE UNDERWORLD OF LESSER DEGREES balances an amalgam between nihilism and transcendentalism by burrowing through the minutiae of self and identity to conjure the image of a post-human self as an inventor, engraving tropes of originality from the littered density of the literary canon. The book scrapes the periphery of form and style, but not to extol a certain impossible obscurity, futility, abstraction, disdain, flippancy, or the realpolitik of viral media. Technology and hyperreality meet Judaic midrash and biblical exegesis in stanzas which seek to create a human being from the refuse of bandwidth. THE UNDERWORLD OF LESSER DEGREES for a new spiritus, geist and religious ethos for the 21st century.
Daniel Y. Harris, Esophagus Writ (with Rupert M. Loydell), The Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2014.
I didn’t see it cited in the notes from the Introduction by the little-known but clearly scholarly Dr Theodolite Cardew, but I am sure that the anthropoetjests Messrs Harris and Loydell will have referenced directly or indirectly the influential works of Fartov and Belcher in their own scholarly ruminations on the meanings of in their new poetry collection Esophagus Writ.
In the way cosmic coincidence will commune with those of us who listen, it was uncanny that I am currently reading Burroughs’ The Ticket That Exploded because this work is cited in the notes of that Introduction – the quote ‘the word is now a virus’ – and to expand on this reference, our dynamic duo explore the ‘other half’ which includes the meanings of, and do so with the compelling organism of their refracting poetic words.
I say ‘refracting’ because the poems in this anthology are placed side by side: one on the left [generally tempting with an organic accessibility] and then the one on the immediate right a bifurcated refraction of its leftie [generally teasing with an organic complexity] – never a copy or mirror re-working. Thus the organism of these shared words and ideas becomes a mutual virus that infects both and then spreads across the whole as a parasitic creator of new meaning.
The dichotomy of these refracted new meanings can be exemplified in titles like The Museum of Oblivion/The Museum of Oblation; The Ghost of an Impoverished Past/The Gimp of a Tumescent Now; Enter Babe Rainbow/Enter Billy-Bob Bovary, the latter in which ‘I suddenly felt much better’ and ‘I felt better in my thong’ wrestle with the plurality implicit in the meanings of.
A closer analysis of any more of these refractions – an inspection surprisingly missing from the otherwise erudite and learned exploration of Dr Cardew – reveals how the prism of this poetic intercourse shifts and splits meanings of to startling [and intentional] obfuscations. From the domesticity of
‘My beautiful time bomb,
will you dance before we explode?
How is the weather inside today?’
[The Mystery of the Mind]
to the psychoanalysis of
‘Hell is glial. Heaven, a dendrite. Between
podes, the myelin of a normative stint
in living with charm and poised saunter.’
[The Mystery of the Brain]
where the damaged layers of both our expression and understanding are wrapped up in each focus, one on love and one on over-analysis so that neither explains though one may seem more palpable.
I won’t comment further on the poems for these are for the reader to mainline and in doing so find their veins of personal meanings because ‘Everything should become clear to the most idiotic among us’ [Advice to the Reader]. I have just injected a tiny droplet of the virus.
I will nearly close on an admittedly pedantic point: I take issue with the esteemed Dr Cardew’s citing of the Blinky Snoodle work ‘Stupid Groups of Animals’ in The Journal of Behavioural Science vol. 12, #2, 1993 as a paper in any way informing the theoretical basis of these poets’ work as this fraudulent fancy was roundly discredited in the subsequent volume of that venerated journal by the renown American anthropology expert Wyde I Ceen.
I will, however, fully conclude by stating that this work is above and beyond any academic reference points a demonstrative hoot. If the virus is Poetry, the vaccine is reading the meanings of this challenging quality. - Some Awe
Daniel Y. Harris, Hyperlinks of Anxiety, Cervena Barva Press, 2013.
HYPERLINKS OF ANXIETY is a post-digital and post-human literary oeuvre whose vortices are replete with the language of kabbalah, alchemy, holy writ and the nuances of digital technology and social media. In illuminating a wide array of literary styles and varied poesis, HYPERLINKS OF ANXIETY balances an amalgam between nihilism and transcendentalism by burrowing through the minutiae of self and identity to conjure the image of a post-human self as an inventor, engraving tropes of originality from the littered density of the literary canon. The book scrapes the periphery of form and style, but not to extol a certain impossible obscurity, futility, abstraction, disdain, flippancy, or the realpolitik of viral media. Technology and hyperreality meet Judaicmidrash and biblical exegesis in stanzas which seek to create a human being from the refuse of bandwidth. HYPERLINKS OF ANXIETY is a new spiritus, geist and religious ethos for the 21st century.
Daniel Y. Harris’s new volume of poetry brings together a range of texts – older and newer – evocative of the qualms and uncertainties of our new millennium. A subtle and highly affective read.
—Sander L. Gilman
Is cyberspace the most recent iteration of the diaspora? Will the next Zohar be composed in computer code? Can notarikon generate lyric poems out of the discourses of pharmacology, neurology, biophysics…? Welcome to the Hotel Url, Daniel Y. Harris, sole owner and proprietor, where these questions—and others that the reader has yet to dream–will be answered. No need to be anxious: in less than a nanosecond, the hyperlinks elaborated in Harris’s poems will whisk you from catastrophe creation to apocalypse and beyond. Beam me up, Ezekiel!—Norman Finkelstein
Daniel Y. Harris combines impressive erudition with a profound awe for continuity–that the eternal energies underlying Life itself constantly (re)iterate and (re)incarnate in myriad waxing and waning forms. Ideas birth Art; Art births Ideas. In such fashion, to employ classic terms, the heart and mind forge a dynamic union resulting in both clarity of perception and depth of feeling. These are poems to be read and reread, concepts and descriptive phrases operating like portals into other worlds. In Hyperlinks of Anxiety, Harris functions as a twenty–first century, digital alchemist, adeptly yoking the abstract and concrete, offering us singular and transformative experiences, all the while reminding us that Poetry is trans-authorial, Mystery our only true teacher.—John Amen
A volume of collected poetry, a range of older/newer texts 'evocative of the qualms and uncertainties of our new millennium', drawn from numerous magazine publications including The Café Irreal, Exquisite Corpse, Mad Hatter's Review, Pinstripe Fedora, Poetry Salzburg Review and many others, including Stride. The book is organized into two roughly equal parts: Section I 'Hyperlinks' with 29 poems and Section II 'Anxiety' with 27. The main volume is preceded by an Introductory Essay entitled 'Barely Listening: A Meditation on Daniel Y Harris' Hyperlinks of Anxiety' by Beth Hawkins Benedix from DePauw University. Benedix is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Literature, while Harris himself is also an artist and essayist holding a Master of Arts in Divinity from the University of Chicago. (The distinctive collage cover artwork of the present volume is by the author himself.) Previous publications by Harris include The New Arcana (with John Amen, 2012), Unio Mystica (2009) and Paul Celan and the Messiah's Broken Levered Tongue: An Exponential Dyad (with Adam Shechter, 2010). Harris was born in Paris and now lives in Orange County, California.
We meet at that ancient crossroads: at the intersection of poetry and The Spiritual, at a time when the Digital Revolution amplifies dystopian speculations about 'wasteland' worlds of alienating modernity subsumed by 'virtual culture'. The two part structure of the book, says Benedix, 'prompts us as readers to think simultaneously in terms of antagonisms and resolutions, relations and oppositions'. In 'Section I: Hyperlinks' the wasteland is 'hostile and sleek, treacherous, seductive, inescapably feline, unmistakably academic', the lingo remorselessly on-trend, as in 'Confessions of a Blogger': 'I spin/henosis in blogland.... The zot in the stasis/of the Web...' In 'Section II: Anxiety' 'the air feels different', it projects a different atmosphere, a sense of optimism (perhaps) or 'anticipation of the as yet undiscovered', those unknown unknowns always a covert source of chronic anxiety. Here there are various epitaphs citing erudite influences, or points of reference; Derrida, Kafka, Hart Crane, the painter Pierre Bonnard, Balzac, Emerson and that ultimate cinematic icon of alienation, Travis Bickle (in Taxi Driver after John Ashbery). The overriding influence is Paul Celan, whose modes of Shadow Speech and Murder Speech (Schattensprache and Mordersprache) inform two linguistic strategies; the nuanced 'difficult' hermeticism and the infernal ‘consumer’ speech which is a speech of death and dehumanization.The general stylistic ethos of the collection is minimalist, yet a diversity of form continually engages the reader. Most poems are stanzaic constructs, although there are some prosodic pieces such as 'Epic of the Uncreature' and 'Republic of the 'Sitrah Ahra' which belong to the sphere of prose poetry. There are also some sets or poem-sequences such as 'The Agon Poems I-V' and 'Bequest I-V' and 'Ten Plagues'. Many pieces are sparse filamentous quatrains, triplets and couplets suspended against a white page like 'Oblique I' and 'Oblique II'. While others like 'Lilith's Wing' and 'Transmigration' are unitary stand-alone stanzas. Many titles project a techno- avant-garde feel such as 'Emoticon', 'Opuscule', 'Neutrality' or 'Parataxis' while others refer the terminology of mythico-mystical Judaism: 'Dybbuk', 'Shekhinah', 'Apocrypha', 'Shevirah', 'Balaam' reminding us that, as explained in About The Author, Harris specialized in the history of the hermeneutics of religion writing a dissertation on The Zohar, the thirteenth century quasi-Arabic kabbalistic text known as The Book of Splendor attributed the Moses De Leon. In a radio broadcast of 1936 WB Yeats noted that, while TS Eliot was the most 'revolutionary' poet of his lifetime, his work represented a form of revolution that was 'stylistic alone', a product of the pessimism engendered by the First World War. Previous generations had rejected Victorian moral fervour in favour of Decadence and Aestheticism; the interwar generation marked a return to a new seriousness, matched by stylistic 'innovation'. The paradox being that 'radical' modernist techniques were now deployed in the service of various moral critiques of contemporary society typical of Calvinists, Greek Stoics, dour Roman Republicans, Hebrew Prophets and other prim ascetics. In the last century Conservative critics and Cultural Marxists alike tended to agree that contemporary life is dominated by a shallow narcissism, a hollow consumerism and the cult of celebrity. Now in the twenty-first century this fallen world has become a post-modern nightmare of emergent hyper-culture, of trans-national casino capitalism and of global mass media electronica. According to Baudrillard the hyper-real is best exemplified by virtual reality, a 'third order simulation' generated by mathematics and computer code, a cyber-model of existence disconnected from actual reality; a world of dead souls enmeshed in hyperlinks, as explored in many of Harris' poems that voice the angst and introspection of a new species: Dostoyevsky's Underground Man takes a ride with the Taxi Driver.
For Benedix Harris' most extended 'elucidation of the hyperreal world we occupy' is the poem entitled 'The Latecomer'; a treatise on 'the endless ways we have sold our souls, given in to the seductions of power and fame, to the sound of our own voices, given up on our longing for the sacred, on the possibility for connection...' This infernal hyperreality is often defined by mere soundbites or false messianic fantasies of redemption. 'Akiba feared the moral nebulae and died believing General Bar Kokhba was messiah' ('Transmigration'). Thus Hyperlinks of Anxiety illustrates Yeats's point about Eliot. This volume is an elegant, poetical exercise where postmodern linguistic style and experimental forms are utilized in the service of an ancient, 'prophetic' message of redemption; a vatic spirit of mysticism that flows throughout history, and by virtue of which, in an indeterminate space 'between' the hyperlinks, lost souls may regain connection with the real (i.e. sacred) through an experience of the ‘deepest intimacy’.
For Harris 'spirit is the last hope' and through a transcendental interpretation of the faculty of hearing ('Our ears are caverns reaching to the roots of the spirit') we may, perhaps, amidst our resignation and anxiety understand - by some intervention of grace - that the 'world is open/and waiting for us./ We see it better now with our ears'. The soul of the reader may find meaning in breathing the pure life of the spirit: perhaps an epiphany can be attained through an experience of dread some poets may call Anxiety. - A.C. Evans
In his latest collection, Hyperlinks of Anxiety, Daniel Y. Harris serves as Virgilian guide, muse, and interlocutor, offering an ever-engaging commentary on contemporary life while making impressive use of complex metaphors drawn from psychology, philosophy, and a wide range of religious texts.
The term “hyperlink” immediately offers metaphysical implications, suggesting omnidirectional movement and positing the existence of a fundamental interconnectedness; metaphorically speaking, the hyperlink implies that existence occurs in a context of inherent or at least possible union (cf. Harris’s chapbook, Unio Mystica). Harris, however, is not making an argument for Essentialism. Enamored with ideas, Harris is even more enamored with the inherent poetry and drama of ideas. Also, in his own way, Harris has been deeply influenced by and thoroughly absorbed the techno-dystopian zeitgeist that pervades much of contemporary thought, literature, and pop culture.Reading Harris’s far-reaching and complex work, questions quickly arise: Is the hyperlink ultimately an access point to a transcendent and immutable essence (Substance or God) or simply an illusory endpoint in and of itself? To stretch the metaphor to the realm of human psychology, is mystical union with a source possible or is what we have come to refer to as Petrarchan yearning, characterized by desire for that which is inevitably and irrevocably missing, the best we can hope for? Are our lives inevitably virtual and impersonal, infected, much like compromised documents, by a proliferative virus of cultural, conventional, and transpersonal anxiety? And who are we if we can’t claim with certitude to be experiencing what we think we are experiencing? Furthermore, who is it who/that experiences? At what point does the virtual become more real than that which it purportedly represents?
From the first poem, “Confessions of a Blogger,” we see Harris addressing the notion of contemporary identity:
Add a mix of theurgy
and hyperlink to neuts of gramme—I spin
henosis in blogland: neurons
in the wet gauze
of def, spores of tag—the zot in the stasis
of the Web…
Harris yokes the supernatural or mystical (“theurgy”) with the technical (“hyperlink,” “neuts of gramme”), suggesting that union and identity (“henosis”) occur, ultimately, in a virtual (“blogland”) domain. He goes on to explore the changing nature of relationship, writing
digits
for countless others probing
the Net for my name—
me numbered, me squared
to a thousand and one
nights of the boolean me….
Here again identity is presented as a “countless” phenomenon, the “name” simply a vehicle or sign via which one accesses or links to a permutating function of the virtual, a “numbered and squared” version of an indefinable and perhaps inaccessible origin. The reference to “boolean” implies that even given the complexity of “the Net”—or perhaps due to the complexity of “the Net,” itself a metonymy for the techno-infused dissociative labyrinth of modern life—simplicity prevails in the human realms of ethics, morals, emotion, and cognition. Amidst a contemporary plethora of information and virtual options, interpretation in real time is navigated inchoately. The complexity of the parameters (“the Net”) has bred a counter-tendency towards the primitive and over-simplified, in terms of response. The “boolean me” is true or false, this or that, rigidly and reductively disjunctive, and grossly one-dimensional. In the face of a virtual reality that proliferates exponentially, human response has, ironically, regressed towards a more primal orientation, a facile polarization of possibilities, narrowing reliance on expedient and dismissive categorizations. Harris continues:
…linkrot of vanity
shaping me as helicoid
in search of myself—to break
me, pulp my savage accent,
my hack-herd packing words
in viruses with a thin
mdash.
The poem concludes with a manifesto regarding the inevitable transmogrification of identity. The “hyperlink” is now referred to as a “linkrot of vanity,” a portal into the nullity of both the “search for myself” and the obfuscation or at least elusiveness of anything remotely personal or not part of a “hack-herd,” where “words” are “packed” into a “virus” characterized by the “mdash,” itself a truncation, non sequitur of sorts, a portal into a void or abyss, an infinitely proliferative limbo. Identity has been reduced to pure commercialism, mass packaging and production, a clonal and tautological construct, the “link” a black hole imploding into itself.
In a subsequent poem titled “I,” Harris again conjures the context of the pervasively deconstructive virtual and continues to explore what it means to “search for [self].” He writes,
I…
am hypertext, timpani of digits, remain
landed in chips, sites, fissures, soft as code
disappearing.
The poem is written in the first person and is, in part, a personal lamentation regarding the elusive nature of identity and the phenomenon of personal suffering; however, Harris is ultimately a poet-philosopher, rather than a Confessionalist, and his voice addresses the “I” of humanity, the “I” of Life or Eros itself, perhaps even the “I” of God. Can we say that God exceeds material reality, or are God and material reality tantamount (confluence of pantheism and nihilism), existence itself characterized by dispensability, recyclability, and ephemerality? Is God yet another aspect of the virtual (also a subset, aspect, or extension of the material), perhaps the gestalt of the virtual, but a gestalt that oxymoronically fails to exceed the sum of its parts? Milton and the later Romantics (British and American) would appreciate Harris’s inquiry as would William Gibson, the creators of The Matrix, and aficionados of the Steampunk and Cyberpunk genres.
In the later and epic “Thade the Dystopian,” Harris writes, channeling metaphysics through Thade,
I put my hands on my omentum and pray for what can save
a life from the urgency of dead referents….
But again, is it possible to be saved from, to transcend the “dead referents”? Perhaps with a hint of satire, Harris goes on to ponder whether the “urgency” mentioned is not perhaps the saving grace of our existence. Illusion though it may be, perhaps the “urgency of dead referents” is what gets us up in the morning. Harris/Thade proceeds to suggest, “Ciphers want to be deciphered.” And, “No closure, symbol, exergue, opening at the city center….” The poem concludes much as it begins: “…my name is Thade…just/Thade, extending a hand.” Identity is, again, tautological, a repetitive indicator pointing towards and imploding into its own nullity.
Harris has absorbed his Plato, Spinoza, and Locke, as well as a wide range of Eastern and Western religious texts, but he’s also ingested and transmuted Derrida, Foucault, Bronk, Ashbery, and the spirit of contemporary science fiction, represented most vividly by the development of technology and its central role in our lives. Harris writes in “Fire and Name (Version #3)”:
Extinction burns its ruined
force without insult given
or injury taken. It is its own
accuser and master, in wit bereft
of quick, overhearing names.
Existence is impersonal, operating without design, in contrast to the Greek depiction of Fate as associated with a pantheon of mercurial and easily offended Gods and Goddesses. Existence “burns” without discrimination, without intending “insult” or “taking injury.” This is not the palpable and visceral Eros we encounter in the Greek myths but, rather, a post-industrial, post-techno portrayal of a drier, more disinterested, perhaps even randomly dutiful energy, the prompting of which seems to occur without discernible method, the ongoing regression of a deist-like Primal Cause.
Harris proclaims that existence is its own “accuser [and] master,” suggesting that existence itself unfolds according to the dictates of an inherent anxiety (or ambivalence), governed by a cosmological virus of doubt as well as the counter-equivalent of an evolutionary certitude, one alternatingly compensating for the other. And perhaps our own anxiety—what we might stretch to interpret as original sin—occurs as a byproduct or extension of this fundamental energy. What we dub human psychology is tantamount to the nature of existence itself. It is impossible, therefore, to anthropomorphize, is fallacious to suggest that something akin to human nature exists in any primary or non-derivative form. The notion of anthropomorphizing is itself founded on a collective grandiosity, presumptuousness, and intergenerational hubris.
Of particular interest is Harris’s statement that existence is “bereft/of quick,” “quick” constituting a reference to the living or the life force. This is a remarkable paradox, one that will clearly appeal to readers with a bent for portraits of dystopianism a la Philip Dick. If existence is devoid of life, what then is its chief characteristic? What is existence, an after-the-fact, a program devoid of programming, a randomness that occurs neither randomly nor with set design, but perhaps according to the dictates of both alternately in complement (teleology) and opposition (sabotage)?
Harris ambitiously explores many issues and moves in numerous interrelated directions throughout his landmark Hyperlinks of Anxiety. At the core of his striking and memorable poems are inquiries into human identity and experience as well as metaphysical investigations into the nature of existence itself. Is Harris a nihilist? What we might call a material pantheist? Again, Harris is not taking a fixed philosophic position, and it is not necessary for us to assign him one. He is ultimately a poetic gadfly; offering possibilities, evoking and provoking, rather than promulgating a perspective, is his chief task. The range and scope of his work are compelling as are the complexity, integrality, and originality of his metaphors and references. Harris celebrates the music, history, and sublimity of thought. His work constitutes a true fete, the heart responding most fervently when the mind is also deeply engaged. - John Amen
Beth Benedix: Barely Listening: A Meditation on Daniel Y. Harris' Hyperlinks of Anxiety.
Daniel Morris: Tech support says 'Dead Don Walking': Tradition, the Internet, and Individual Talent
Daniel Y. Harris, The New Arcana (with John Amen), New York Quarterly Books, 2012.
THE NEW ARCANA is a multi-genre extravaganza featuring verse, fiction, mock journalism and academic writing, drama, and art. Both referencing and transcending various literary precedents, the book is a pronouncement for the 21st Century, an exploration of and commentary on the fast-paced and mercurial nature of life in the 2000s. Co-written by poets John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris, the book presents a compelling, jazz-like, and satirical style, a third voice born from the mingling of two distinct individual voices. THE NEW ARCANA is a memorable literary statement—a manifesto for our time—as well as a proclamation regarding the transformative qualities of true collaboration.
In The Art of Recklessness, Dean Young brings New York School surrealism into new relief. He talks of a poetry that contains the kind of stage-spanning acrobatic leaps you might have seen in vaudeville a century ago, or in balletic parodies performed by out-sized, operatic personae fluent in various arcane argots: at times witty, other times ludicrous, often madcap, always comic. The New Arcana, a collaboration of poets / artists John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris, demonstrates exactly the kind of reckless logic, syntax, and imagination that Young describes.
The book is a wildly antic collage of dramatic scenes, verse, diary and yearbook entries, phrases in Hebrew, clip art, illustrations, snapshots, and doctored photographs. Amen’s interest in alchemy goes back at least as far as his earlier book, At the Threshold of Alchemy, while Daniel Y. Harris’s immersion in the Kabbalah of Jewish mysticism underpins his book, Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue, selected by the Jewish Daily Forward as one of the most important Jewish poetry books of 2010.
In the first darkly comic “Section I,” we meet Jughead Jones and the flighty, unfaithful Sadie Shorthand who, like university students in every generation, sit in cafes and alternately discuss the nature of reality and their “fluttering day.” Here’s Sadie:
“Who I am essentially is always three steps ahead of who I am incidentally,” Sadie replied. “Even you, Mr. Don Juan, are an illusion.”
“’Touche,’ conceded Jughead and tucked a $20 bill into Sadie’s g-string.” Added to the narration are various artifacts or documents, submitted as if in evidence in a court of law, as the transcript of a radio show, or in mimicry of a graphic novel. The text, for example, quotes Sadie’s senior yearbook: “To be God—now that’s a strong karma” and includes clip art of a corset next to a fanged reptile. Tangential or irrelevant items—like a photo of aging parents—trail the characters. Jughead and Sadie are, at the outset, madly in love. A character referred to as “I” or “I and I” enters the scene rather like the Stage Manager in Our Town, and comments on the lovers:
Infatuation glows like a right angle––
Beware the bare, eroded slope of Eros.
Inevitably, discord occurs between the lovers. In Act III, Jughead sits alone in the café. In Act IV, more discord. “You really need to figure out what’s next for you, Sadie./ Math, theology, whatever. Why don’t you put out a book?” Jughead quips. Sadie responds, “Well, Jug, the truth is, you’re my first book. /I’ve been editing you since we met.” In Act V, Jughead is outside Sadie’s apartment, under the eave, watching her, “sketching in his resentment pad.”
The romance ends badly. Actions and interactions appear to be intentionally senseless. The text parodies and mocks literary prizes, adult chat rooms, and breast-feeding. Illogical documents appear: Austin Halford’s text on the Dark Ages and the Renaissance of Literary Insurgence is quoted in Act II. Enrico the Insouciant’s irrational equations appear in Act VI, where Yolanda the Crone eats a kefir and tofu sandwich. Following a detailed list of the cluttered contents of his apartment, one Eidenberry Whatever dies while wearing his adult diapers. (“I wish I’da met him when our parts was still workin’,” says Jacqueline the Mum, an ancient rock bank musician.)
Section Two continues a legal theme with a Judge and Lead Advocate Hortense, as well as other odd Dramatis Personae, like Constance Carbuncle, Justin Nurm, Dr. Yistrum Lee, Bus Driver, Don the Commuter, Freddie Brill or Sir Adrian the Fop-Murderer, and Thaddeus Felino. Section Three plays out a theme hinted at in Section One: the absurdity of artistic and literary striving and fame is demonstrated in portraits of six wacky artists, many prodigies, all coming to no good.
Klaus Krystog de Moliva combines an interest in music with toxicology. The poet-prodigy Ann Chuong-Sandrik dies at 29 by auto-asphyxiation. Marvin Fegley Waife, famous for “semen” poems first written when he was 11, and author of vaginal sestinas and lacteal villanelles, dies of heart failure at 20. Sally Pixton, began her critical essay on Thomas Carlyle, when she was 11, published her first book at age 13, graduated from Harvard at 14—well, you get the idea. She is dead at 28 of snakebite. The only one in the pantheon not dead, it seems is Marguerita Voeckers De Winter, a recluse whose photo remarkably resembles the photo of the poet John Amen. (So if she, being a recluse, is dead, we might not know.) In deliberate obfuscation, the pagination of this part of the book wavers back and forth between “Section Two” and “Section Three.” Where are we really?
Amen and Harris regularly wander into lexicography and malapropism, engaging in theological discussions of the Creator, “the Premier Cause, […] shondly [sic] beyond reproach”; enlisting dozens of poisons, from pesticides to biocides, as actors in the drama; and inventing delicious words like sluther, preffy, ran-moral, sufferal, anthroid sufferal, axan, de-terra, and so on. Here’s another sample:
In sucal yoifs, sufferal in exspansion may randily be an effecting of the Premier Cause’s sal-wiring or auto-mandalated karmica.
Interspersed with this nonsense are passages of lyric clarity: “My doppelganger and I now sport interchangeable heads.”
The fifth and final section consists of twenty wonderful seven-line cantos that conjure Eliot’s Prufrock and Stevens’ guitarist, but written in country slang and revolving around the life of one ordinary stereo salesman named JD who “strum [sic] his red guitar as sunrise/drape over the house.” He “skim [sic] headlines […]/ consider [sic] a sick day, sick with success and failure.” Gritty, evocative verses are hidden like gems in the pockets of this text. America of the 1980s, for Amen and Harris, is a matter of “revolving doors [that] spin like a dervish, diner grills steaming with cheeseburgers, steaks, eggs, French fries; ice cream scoops are blazing, cash registers chiming; intercom voices bellowing discount deals in strip malls, casinos, convenience stores [. . .]” They create a portrait of the American temperament and cast of mind that resonates with our current national malaise and depression:
dollar bills sucked into vending machines, credit cards flashing, fives and tens and twenties whisked from wallets and purses, the I want I want of ten million shrieking souls determined to have fun have fun
This is heady stuff. In the metaphor of the book’s title—obliquely referencing James Merrill’s occult communications with angels and spirits in his epic narrative, The Changing Light at Sandover—The New Arcana deals mixed genres and mysterious (not to say weird) significances, dramatis personae, dialogue, stage directions, and a panoply of visual props. It presents a vat of comic madness into which riffs, visual imagery, collages and much else have been mischievously stirred. - Zara Raab
The New Arcana, by John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris is a comico–philosophical jeu d’esprit; like Samuel Beckett’s early poem “Whoroscope,” it seems sometimes to have as chief butt the 17th century philosopher René Descartes and his numberless descendants. For soon after the beginning of the book we find the expostulation:
“Flame, clangor, holy superstition of cause and effect.La religion de séquentialité!”
And indeed for Descartes and the Cartesian religion, to be alive, awake and sane meant avoir de la suite dans les idées – to entertain only appropriate & approved sequences of mental events – and this is precisely what Amen and Harris refuse to do. As part of their strategy, their characters tend to conjoin math and theology, much like Descartes, but in a different spirit:
“I’m at my best when I think of myself mathematically.” (Jughead)
“I’m at my worst when I think of myself theologically.” (Sadie)
Jughead Jones and Sadie Shorthand, we should inform the reader, were two very precocious philosophers, the latter one wearing at present a g–string and four–inch heels – perhaps she does burlesque? When he was ten, JJ said to his father: “Dad, what you call your life is just an epistemological construct.” And SS quoted the following on her senior yearbook: “To be God—now that’s a strange karma.” Who could gainsay either one?
Don’t expect any monkey business or openly titillating shenanigans between those two, though: that sort of thing is the main locus of sequential, even obsessively sequential, thought, and as such it is not welcome here. Anyhow, unless you’re unremittingly into sex, all these characters will hold your interest and often make you laugh.
After JJ and SS, we meet CC: “Cult prodigy, mystic and healer” Constance Carbuncle has mental issues – “a potent Kali complex,” among others. We also meet Don the Commuter, a character who ends up being killed by a drunken driver while eating a pork taco on his lunch break, on November 1st 2002, quite appropriately on the Día de los muertos.
“‘Well, she was standing there lecturing a pigeon, for God’s sake,’ said Don the Commuter, testifying at Constance Carbuncle’s competency hearing. ‘I could tell right away that she was probably a bad driver. She said something about field meters, and the pigeon squawked, and then she pulled out the knife. It looked like a steak knife. A pretty good knife. One I’d like to keep in my car. By the way,’ Don added, ‘I’d like it included in the record that I’ve shaved twice a day without fail since the age of fifteen, often while driving to and/or from work.’”
I cannot describe here the tenth of the crazy Olympus Amen and Harris have erected, but I cannot let the Parisian professors go unmentioned. The Sorbonnagre Jean–Pierre Mouyabaise, whose dates are given as 1923–2007, and whose family name seems a combination of mayonnaise and bouillabaisse, is what our English departments call a “theoretician.” If The New Arcana has the diffusion and the success it deserves, I wouldn’t be surprised to see some new doctoral dissertations connecting Mouyabaise with Paul de Man and Bakhtin. And then there is the female counterpart, Professor Claudia Binot–Glas, whose “seminal work” is titled “The Speculum of Panatomism.”
For the sake of balance and of equal time I should mention, finally, JD, a male character known only by his initials, and by the fact that all that is written about him (though not what he says) must contain verbs only in the infinitive. He is definitely against theorizing:
“‘The theoretical,’ JD says, ‘is for the caged and collared lapdog’.”
The New Arcana is the poetic jeu of two very fine esprits. - Ricardo Nirenberg
arcana [noun]:(Spirituality, New Age, Astrology & Self–help/Alternative Belief Systems) either of the two divisions (the minor arcana and the major arcana) of a pack of tarot cards.
Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, especially when the cover art boasts a glossy texture and a modern, cutting–edge feel which accurately mirrors the lush and lively text. The New Arcana both inside and out, offers a stylish, sexy, intellectually challenging, genre–jumping discourse which poses several questions: How can we live productively and contentedly in this frenetic and kinetic, high–tech world without succumbing to dementia or despair or death; how to choose between ambition and ennui; and to what extent are we willing to die for our art. Beyond the camp and hyperbole, this is a serious work that avoids pretension by not taking itself too seriously&—it is, at once, a multi–faceted mockumentary, replete with sound bites, sidebars, and a deconstruction of the lexicon, and a veritable theater of the obscene and absurd. John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris have embarked on a daring and daunting collaborative effort that demands a good deal of attention, but rewards us with highly caffeinated, and often hilarious, entertainment.Over milk, hypodermic restlessness, and mango sherbet, Sadie and Jughead
discuss their fluttering day.
Since it is de rigueur these days for reviewers to compare the work at hand to a seminal literary work of the past, please indulge me while I opine that The New Arcana, in spirit and form, lies somewhere between The Waste Land and Plato’s Republic, with a bit of Alice in Wonderland,in all its satirical whimsy, tossed in. But perhaps it would be more useful to forego the comparisons and discuss why this book is unique, and important, in its own right.
My ennui shall be my tabernacle,
temple, Delphi.
It shall lead me through rapacious waters
past sirens and reefs, deliver me
safe to Ithaca.
The cadence, throughout, is in striking alignment with the content. There is a vibrant breathlessness to the prose, which perfectly captures the wild fluctuations and hysteria of our daily lives. At heart, Messrs. Amen and Harris are poets and, as such, the dialogue is peppered with lyrically appealing, spiritually astute, imagery:
A hot wind whips across the eternal landscape;
;
archaic symbols are sold at auction north of Disneyland
to diehard antique–mongers and melancholy pedants…
Then, a flipped coin fell from the blue sky like an afterthought.
Will you stick round to hear the details—how it landed—
as they are cast and analyzed by the aging excommunicants?
Although there is no overt attempt to derange the senses, á la surrealism, the authors do play havoc with the reader’s notions of what, exactly, is vital to the zeitgeist. It is no accident that the book begins, “Our Father who art.” While, at first glance, there is a seemingly religious significance, it soon becomes clear that the real focus is on the word “art,” and how we define it. All roads lead to the Muse, who manifests in many colorful variations: high art co–exists peacefully with low art (i.e., discussing Descartes while stuffing money in a g–string); and the abandonment (or, even, annihilation) of the creative force altogether. Of course, there is also a healthy undercurrent of fetishist sex, if you are so inclined.
There are five discrete chapters, each one setting up a dichotomy (or maybe an existential crisis, depending on your interpretation). The first dramatic presentation, drawing on pop culture and wild imagination, features Jughead Jones (wasn’t he a character in the Archie comics?) and Sadie Shorthand (isn’t our language these days a sort of texted shorthand?)
Alas, I am being bombarded by wings, black embers,
velcro, and coupons, Sadie thinks, removing her 4–inch heels, hanging the riding crop on the smoke–yellow wall…
Too late, between crumbs of Cartesian hypochondria,
saturated fat of dictum, logic, syllogism…
The high–spirited debate focuses on the value of math versus theology, which can also be translated as: abstract versus concrete; spiritual versus physical; and, within the context of literature, experimental versus linear. The authors are decidedly on the side of free expression.
And, oh, did I mention there is sex?
It seems fitting that the sexual deviance of choice is adults masquerading as babies. But once you get past the symbolism of dirty diapers and breast–pumped milk, you can see this regression as a way to mitigate the stress of overwhelming stimuli that living in the real word entails, or, quite simply, a desire to shirk responsibility:
…Jug and Sadie confabbing in the milk–white kitchen,
pacifiers and Lego kits
strewn about the floor, bills unpaid…
In Chapter 2, we are treated to a mock trial in a kangaroo court, wherein the competency of one Constance Carbuncle is to be determined. The real question, though, is whether madness is a necessary by–product of a think–outside–the–box worldview.Constance Carbuncle
waved goodbye
to a few more neurons:
warrior cells and regenerative dendrites
were insufficient to counter her family’s wacked legacy.
But who are the final arbiters of Constance’s fate? Justin Nurm, Constance’s lover, “once flew into a rage when a hotdog vendor neglected to offer him mustard for his salty pretzel” and has “a penchant for eating lightly sautéed worms.” Dr. Yistrum Lee “challenged the dust mites to a vocabulary duel” and “once stuck a pencil up his right nostril while tweezing his left eyebrow.” Lead Advocate Hortense rehearses his closing statement in front of an albino doll. Let the judges themselves be judged!
“The actors…sit with their backs to the audience. They speak
neither to each other nor to the audience, as if they are completely
disassociated from both themselves and their immediate surroundings.”
By the next chapter, and as depicted in the above stage directions of this play–within–a–play, the characters have descended into apathy and disconnectedness. In this regard, perhaps I should not have been so hasty in discounting comparisons — there really are elements of The Waste Land here, although the sprinkling of foreign phrases is in French (and sometimes Hebrew) rather than Latin. T.S. Eliot staged a séance; Harris and Amen reference the tarot deck—both are intrinsically linked to the concepts of sex and death. The torrent of non–sequiturs denotes a similar decline in engagement, both due to untenable outside forces. But while The Waste Land, in each successive stanza, plunges further into chaos, The New Arcana does not, in the end, give in to pessimism, even despite the fact that most of the young practitioners of the new art have drawn the death card. The last chapter culminates in dialectical verse, laid out symmetrically on the page, which attempt to restore order and reconcile all previous disparities.
The New Arcana is not for the lazy reader. But for those who believe that contemporary American writing ought to push as many envelopes as possible, this book is not only worth the intellectual investment—it’s a really enjoyable ride!
Cindy Hochman is the editor–in–chief of the online journal First Literary Review–East. Her poems are upcoming in the New York Quarterly, CLWN WR, and the Cancer Project Anthology. Her latest chapbook is The Carcinogenic Bride. - Cindy Hochman
Let’s get the summary out of the way right here at the beginning: there are no problems with The New Arcana, it is an immensely enjoyable – albeit not easy – read, but problems may arise when the reader approaches it with the habitual intention of understanding it. Even if he is able to set aside that old habit, he will not be initiated into any great secrets; his mind will not be enlightened but definitely enlivened. The authors seem to have faithfully followed Tristan Tzara’s Dadaist dictum: “Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself, a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist. We need works that are strong, straight, precise, and forever beyond understanding.”
In his earlier three volumes of poetry John Amen was progressively pushing the boundaries of the genre, almost to the breaking point in the last one (At the Threshold of Alchemy, 2011; by contrast, a volume of intensely personal and confessional poems). Did he step over that threshold in The New Arcana, or is this a temporary detour from his rapidly evolving style? The latter must be the case, because the book is a collaborative effort with Daniel Y. Harris, in itself a radical departure for any poet from his usually solitary work. In addition, the collaborator is known to dabble in Hebrew mysticism in his own poetry which makes it tempting to ascribe this eccentric and esoteric project to his influence.A reader still seeking the message may be determined to trace some of the strophes to one or the other poet, but such an exercise is not only unnecessary but impossible. True, most poets speak for themselves in their own voices most of the time, but in this book the two authors speak from the wings of a stage through a long cast of characters, each one defined only by some deformity their lines reveal. No other description is provided for them, and one is free to speculate. However, speculation is not the way to approach the text but by absorption, spiritual osmosis. The trickiest part is that some whole chapters – excerpts from plays, essays, interviews and doctoral theses − are given to voices that get a long biography, but when the uninitiated reader, innocent of the sly intricacies of the work, tries to look up any of these names they turn out to be totally fictitious. And so are the names quoted in the numerous authentic–looking footnotes and references. Only the authors’ names are true, but their biographies provided in the back are spoofs, and in their photos their faces are disguised behind goggles. A reader starting the book from the back is given a clear clue as to the tone of the rest.
Not quite though; the general tone is indeed Surrealist, but it spreads over a great variety of approaches, ranging from a few actually coherent and powerful poems (most notably in Section Two, attributed to a Larry Ormerod) and vivid one–liner metaphors to long–winded academic dissertations and extensive marginalia. The contorted academese texts will equally amuse academics and those whom they intimidate with their esoteric language. In a footnote the authors even quote themselves at considerable length but fail to cite a reference. (How about “From a paper in progress?”) The marginalia are extensions of the poetic lines, designed to beguile with more deception rather than explain anything. The last section is a prose poem in twenty short paragraphs written or told by a JD who may or may not be an amalgam of the two poets. That may be true of all the other characters as well. The liveliest and perhaps the most personal voice is that of Constance Carbuncle who appears in the first part of Section Two.
One section (Apotheosis) is a long poem (broken up by marginalia) written postmortem by a French professor, two years after his death; the bleak nonexistence of the dead is rendered in a poetic language and elegant metaphors worthy of Baudelaire. Paradoxically, this elegiac lamentation is the strongest part of the book, probably because it is not really about death but the fear of death.
I am the vacuum of absence. I am cold ash and the final illusion of a dying ember.
I am absolute love and the purity of horror,
an implosion without reference,
an incubator for what will never be born,
what will never die,
This is presented as “panatomist” poetry in the extensive but humorous gibberish in the footnotes. The authors’ newly invented concept of “panatomism” is often referred to as commonly known concept and thus never defined except in such a convoluted way that there is no concise quote that could summarize it. Ambivalence is the leitmotif here; it could be this, or could be that.
Not all the literary discourses parody academic style, some parts go well beyond that; they actually make sense or contain a kernel of truth. For example, in one of the purported dissertations the writer ascribes the invention of automatic poetry to the Surrealists and extols the virtues of the method (clipping all the words of a promising paragraph and then putting them together in random order) in eliminating intentionality and theme from the resulting poem, leaving a reader without comprehension but still curious, hung up in anxiety. That is the true purpose of art, say the Surrealists and the panatomists, as indirectly endorsed by the authors through an intermediary, another invented character: “Authenticity is achieved through the instantiation of a sustained paradox,”
Actually, randomized writing method was described in a poem by Tristan Tzara almost a hundred years ago under the aegis of Dadaism. Pairing disparate images together − as we find in this book – is a conceit of Surrealism, and it is hard to detect evidence of automatic poetry here, but the method is – like every other theory – is endorsed and rejected at the same time, apparently in the name of creating a paradox. Incomprehensibility is wholeheartedly supported in numerous instances in the make–believe but also credible literary criticism that intersperse the poetic material: “…we are often most alive when our not–knowing is most pronounced.” The thought practically punctuates the book in different formulations. Tzara would approve.
For a taste of what could be the product of automatic poetry see below (mixing in obscure technical terms, an ubiquitous panatomist ploy, almost ensures incomprehensibility):
“Antiferromagnatism
with Kagome lattice,
is spun glass: geophysics
of war paint,
chromium alloy to the dead
redux—
the tilting head, chalk red.”
Pure nonsense, would say the traditionalist, but to Dadaists it is pure poetry, free of a biased message. What better way is there to exclude unintended content that our unexpressed, unformulated and deeply ingrained assumptions might unconsciously suggest? If indeed all themes are suspect, it is better to avoid any content at all, even the possibility of one, by totally eliminating intentionality from the creative process as guaranteed by automatic writing. At least, that is the theory as this reader understands it. Understand? Please excuse the use of the dirty word…
The best poems in this collection are the old–fashioned comprehensible kind, regardless of what the marginalia next to it might say, but they would lose their essence if only quoted in part, because their power lies in making a statement in three or four stanzas that cohere into one whole, each line as essential as a layer of bricks in a tower. Parts of these poems would not do justice to the whole poem, whoever wrote them. Whether we call this wonderfully incomprehensible medley neo–Dadaist, surrealist or panatomist, behind it there are two very cultured (not only sophisticated!), creative and whimsical minds. One day it will be a classic, maybe another hundred years from now when poets of the time rediscover Dadaism again.
Just one more thought: essays presented within the framework of fiction or independently published fiction pieces written in scholarly or journalist jargon pose a special problem to the critic. How much of it is meant to be fact and how much fiction? This genre is the reverse of creative nonfiction and should have its own name. How about essay fiction? Fictional essay? - Paul Sohar
John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris’s THE NEW ARCANA from NYQ Books is an unusual book. It posits poetry as a tesseract — a four–dimensional look at a traditional cube — and is original in scope and execution. THE NEW ARCANA uses as many forms as authors Amen and Harris could, including but not limited to: mock autobiographies, faux academic writing and journalism, and poetry of as many types and descriptions as possible. All of this was intended to get at the poetic version of Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” — a different way to approach poetry than is normally the case.
Before we go any further, this might be a good time to ponder the definition of the word arcana. According to the online version of Macmillan’s Dictionary, arcana means “things that are mysterious and difficult to understand.” This definition is absolutely essential to remember before you dive into the ocean of words Amen and Harris have provided, as otherwise you might not follow their reasoning.Some of those words are quite meaningful, as this poem from p.12 shows — note that the line breaks are correct, but the way the poem looks on the page is different than what I’ve been able to render due to the WordPress interface:
I’ve grown weary
of my residual self, for whom change
is a game of mercy with a suspicious stranger.
La vérité en peinture — clamped, sifted, raked, rotted
down to inherited imagery
through which I am again deceived.
Wait, not mercy after all,
but a clashing of fists — mea culpa. (poem quoted in its entirety — BC)
As this poem is in Part 1, which is all about a love affair gone bad and the very strange occurrences that follow from that, it’s especially appropriate. And while it shows a postmodern sentiment, it’s still comprehensible to most lovers of poetry and is not so arcane that it can’t be understood in context or out of it. (A neat trick, that.)
In Part II, there’s this poem about suburban life that rings true (from p. 35):
The patio party; I’m tired of these spoiled suburbanites.
I prefer back–river ingénues and trailer–park bullies
brimming with rage and remorse
(first three lines quoted — BC)
As this section is about an extremely unusual person, her quest for plastic surgery, and whether or not she’s a genius — a section that weaves poetry, faux journalism, and more into its eclectic mix — and she’s the suburbanite in question, this poem packs an extremely powerful punch.
The strength of THE NEW ARCANA is in its willingness to take risks. Some of them do not come off; I especially did not understand the four lines of “Mistress, I’ve forgotten my safe word” at escalating volume (shown by the use of font–size and bolding) on p. 99. But it’s good that Amen and Harris are willing to experiment, as they blend postmodern sentiment with more traditional forms of poetry, academic writing, and more.
And these risks mostly pay off, as THE NEW ARCANA is the most eclectic and innovative anthology I’ve ever read. Bar none.
Now, is this an easy book to read? Far from it. There are sections that read like plays for a few pages, until the section abruptly ends or transmogrifies into something else. There’s some material that’s obviously not meant seriously (such as faux biographies of people who exist only in the authors’ minds, complete with obviously bogus pictures), mixed in with some trenchant observations, then mixed further with some rather odd assessments regarding sex.
But is it a good book for poetry enthusiasts?
Upon reflection, I think it is. So long as you know going in that this is a postmodern anthology of sorts — and that due to its experimental nature, some pages seem to have more resonance than others — you are likely to enjoy the unusual angle of view authors Amen and Harris have come up with.
And their subtle, yet biting wit and sly amounts of dry humor are well worth the price of admission.
Poets and poetry enthusiasts should get a great deal out of Amen and Harris’s work, especially if they give THE NEW ARCANA more than one chance to work its wiles and captivate their attention.
- Barb Caffrey
Too often, poetry is reduced to long–winded lectures in a classroom or pages in obscure literary journals. It’s rare to find poets willing to joke about what the process has become and the race within the academy to add more journal credits to one’s academic CV, but in their collaborative, mixed–genre collection, The New Arcana, John Amen and Daniel Y. Harris offer a blazing satire of academia and a critique of the hyper–consumerism in American culture.
The New Arcana is broken into five sections and filled with absurd characters that had me laughing harder and harder after each turn of the page. The book mixes poetry, fiction, drama, and random photos that look like they were pasted from a Google search. The result is a hysterical satire that should be read by academics that take themselves too seriously.My favorite section is the first, which features the characters Jughead Jones, Sadie Shorthand, Yolanda the Crone, Albert the Bore, and others. For the most part, Jughead and Sadie were the most memorable to me, especially since the first few pages highlight some of their ridiculous, pseudo–intellectual lines. On one page, Sadie says, “Mathematics is a thousand ladders to nowhere. Theology is a newborn sibyl cooling in the darkness.” Their actions remind me of hipster intellectuals I knew in college, trying to outsmart each other in dive bars or diners.
Amen and Harris enhance the spoof by developing backstory and history for the characters. Sadie is given credit for creating a book called The Crazy Tape, and the writers brilliantly added fake blurbs and journal reviews about it, perhaps to prove how academics strive to find the next hot movement, no matter how obscure it is. One of the fake reviews calls The Crazy Tape, “her (Sadie’s) generation’s literary Big Bang,” adding that Sadie “is like a demiurge in a postmodern Genesis.”
The first section also works best when it addresses consumerism and our appetite for destruction and human tragedy, themes that play out in most of the other sections too. On one page, Sadie is pondering buying a “multi–slice CT scanner, some baklava, an HD television.” A few pages earlier, one of the characters is drawn to a car crash and watches with other gawking drivers, unable to turn away.
As the book progresses, the characters become more bizarre. Section two features a character named Constance Carbuncle who has to undergo a competency test, and during the trial, she speaks utter gibberish to the judge. As in the first section, here Amen and Harris use outlandish comments by other characters to provide the history of some of the protagonists. A painter named Albay Thompson is quoted in the section through his fake memoir. He describes Constance’s eyebrows as “eaves of a floating palace, perches for disenfranchised griffins.”
What’s especially impressive is that Amen and Harris keep the farce going throughout the book. Even the author bios are just as off the wall as the rest of the collection and feature Amen and Harris wearing goofy goggles, though they stepped forth from some futuristic reality. The New Arcana serves as a reminder to not take publishing and academia so seriously, and it offers a sharp critique of consumerism and our culture’s appetite for destruction, tragedy, and the misfortunes of others. - Brian Fanelli
more reviews:
www.danielyharris.com/book-new-arcana.shtml
www.danielyharris.com/book-new-arcana.shtml
Daniel Y. Harris, Paul Celan and the Messiah's Broken Levered Tongue (with Adam Shechter), Cervena Barva Press, 2010.
As Ron Sukenick so aptly put it in his last book "Mosaic Man," Jews are both proto and posthuman. Adam Shechter and Daniel Y. Harris are possessed of that molten globe of fiery perdition that draws the brighter children of the tribe to the flame. Add poetry and oy! What can I say? Shechter and Harris have made another journey to the hellchamber of Jewish mystery/creation/death and came out in company, a big company that includes a lot of fried geniuses, but most if all they came out, and it’s good to see them.— Andrei Codrescu
Jake Marmer: The Messiah Cut-Up
I can’t begin to comprehend/surround all that is transpiring here in this Harris/Shechter collaboration/fusion—I'll need other readings toward adequate bearings—but as Seine suicide Paul Celan hovers among these pages of prayerful heresies—"no Shabbos–always Shabbos"—I experience a language that wields "pen as scalpel," and I feel flayed but grateful for this awakening into wild inquiry/attack. By way of thousands of years of Jewish history & of their own lives slashed out in poems & prose pieces of mesmerizing power, even as they wonder if they've gone too far, these two visionaries/revisionists have made something powerful & new here, something of charismatic complication. Oi Vey, & mazel tov. — William Heyen
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week Jake Marmer writes about the surrealist dialogues of Adam Schechter and Daniel Y. Harris.
The family of Jewish Surrealists and Dadaists is extensive, ranging from Dada’s founding poet Tristan Tzara, to French filmmaker Nelly Kaplan, to American media artist Man Ray. This family has now experienced a seismic shift with the inclusion of two new members — Adam Shechter and Daniel Y. Harris, whose chapbook “Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue: An Exponential Dyad” was published by Cervena Barva Press earlier this year. The previous collaborative work of these two authors, “Seven Dead Kafkas and a Fork,” has been featured in Exquisite Corpse, the prestigious online journal of Surrealism, but this is their debut appearance in print.
The chapbook is a dialogue that exiles itself from easily identifiable goals and whose subject escapes specific plot lines. Perhaps, this work is an attempt to re–map the history of Jewish esoteric mythology, focusing on Messianic obsessions as well as a kaleidoscope of traumas — national, universal, metaphysical, and the authors’ own.
Here’s a segment, where Harris takes the voice of Paul Celan, the great Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor, who committed suicide by jumping into the Seine river, while Shechter responds as the Messiah:
me ten days later. Do you remember
the Bug River, émigré historian
of dead mothers?
Flows the pneuma, the mail
piled up, students pinned to their benches
at the Ecole Normale — no one
to wear
Hölderlin’s head.
You swallowed
me too
late.
drained from their breasts, granite
Obliquely reverse—pure nausea
That drew me to the air.
I sensed, as I do
The needed gap
The textual hole
No tongue, no lips — you were always incinerated
and half way there — my most favored residue.
Really Celan, I told my Tzaddikim,
His stolid head will hang with your apples
Eyes empty of suppressed chronology
Feathers and leaves at his ears — in your Orchard.
And they laughed at the sunlight gelatin,
Their own turgid feet dismembered
Ornamenting my diametric mechanism
with the sudden vacuous shaft
that even breaks my concentration.
in league with the axis,
ruah’s doyen,
stilled by a grate of vowels — antic
yes-tones of no
with my rucksack of psalms.
Sinai lodestar.
at the gouged crest — the Mosaic crust
in your eyelashes.
Sweat dust in your hands.
In this vein, the poets take turns addressing each other as various characters: Paul Celan and the Messiah, Shabbetai Tzvi and Nathan of Gaza, the Lubavitcher Rebbe and a Baal Teshuva. No matter what masks they don, however, or which settings they’re in, their two voices are distinct. Harris takes the tone of an overeducated madman, whose range of reference and highfalutin’ vocabulary is forbidding, yet, in its disorientation and piling–on, there’s a visceral music and, at times, irony. Shechter is basically a trickster, a shaman: one minute he erects edifices to Freud, Hassidic philosophy and poetic melancholy, and the next moment he emerges from behind them and laughingly shatters them into dust. Here’s a particularly memorable sampling of Shechter channeling:
Having said all that, please reproduce.
Aside from the Surrealist mode, the dialogue occasionally veers into straightforward bits of autobiographical narrative. It is as if the dybbuks possessing the two authors take off for an impromptu vacation, and the two temporarily relieved writers converse in almost–human language.
Here’s Harris, speaking as himself:Memory is a hunger artist, Adam, and my memory is the ruined prayer of Mnemosyne. As a boy of ten, freshly usurped from Paris, my entire physical presence was relegated to two eyes and large extended ears attached to a long thin torso. Our Brookline home was filled with books and imitation Louis XIV furniture. My father composed on his mother’s piano – serial chromaticism – I would later understand it to be, and my mother taught French. We lived a quiet, French–Jewish life in Boston’s colonial suburbia, save the physical violence dispensed upon me by my mother. Littered among biographies of Arnold Schoenberg and a vast collection of books from the Biblioteque de la Pleiade, were police reports and psychiatric evaluations. At twelve, the daughter of Yves Oppert, my mother, broke my arm. At thirteen, she broke my father’s collarbone. Similarly, here are two pieces from Shechter:I have always been a tower of words crashing down in parental trickery – at thirteen years old they bribed me out of my Bar Mitzvah. Instead we took a trip to Disney World. At Epcot Center, not within the borders of any one specific national recreation but in between the numinous synthetic signifiers, I became a Man – three Jews wandering, loud shameful arguing in the Goy Land of Fun – Fun for the whole Jewish family. That was my parsha.
At eighteen, I am sorry to say I believed I was Jesus and was in fact plagued by other out of control Jewish boy thoughts. The thrust of trauma, drama, and disorientation is so harsh that catharsis does not exactly arrive, and yet somehow follows behind the imagistic onslaught at all times. Not surprisingly, the book ends with a melt–down, which, however is not devoid of hope, or at least irony: the ghost of Paul Celan appears, addressing Paul Celan himself, as well as Daniel and Adam, and advises all:Eke’s davar to hunks of swill,
the dry eye, pink, blur–crust
to pilaster strip – sees
Lecha Dodi marry itself. - Jake Marmer
Our Virgils through this drama of eons are three. The first is Paul Celan, a Romanian Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor whose years in Auschwitz informed much of his work, including the notable poem “Todesfugue.” He was also profoundly influenced by the surrealist movement, a fact which can be seen in his hybridized language choices and quickly shifting imagery.
A brief digression now, but one I promise will provide a solid map for the esoteric terrain ahead. In researching for this review I, of course, read Wikipedia’s entry on Celan (while noting with bemusement Harris’s reference to the much–criticized free encyclopedia as the “obese child” of “the google monster”). In doing so I came across a quote from a speech about the state of the German language after the Holocaust that Celan gave when accepting a literature award from the city of Bremen. I reproduce it here, because I think this quote cuts to the heart of the efforts of our two remaining Virgils, Harris and Shechter, in Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue.
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.
While Harris and Shechter do not focus primarily or even predominantly upon the Holocaust, the language in their poem serves much this function. Language preserves Jewish culture, history, and religion from loss through its capacity to cycle through millennia and through its ability to bridge centuries. In one of the most interesting passages, for example, prophet, visionary, and excommunicant Nathan of Gaza speaks to a young (and somewhat bored) messiah named Shabbatai Tzvi, whose name plays upon that of kabbalist and later Islamic convert Shabbatai Zevi, whom Nathan proclaimed to be the messiah. In this excerpt, Nathan and Tzvi converse not only about the Kabala, but also about the collapse of the Shabbatean movement the two men founded. Note the ease with which Harris and Shechter here juggle not only Jewish mysticism, but also details from Zevi’s life (his imprisonment in the Castle at Abydos, for example) and the nature of time itself.
Nathan of Gaza
…
(To Tzvi)
The breastplate of your tract
is purged—acrostic formed by Torah
and backsliding bodies of demons.
The Sea of Reeds is a River of Dragons.
(To himself)
You think you’re a Lurianic
zelem? Try the butcher! The one who choked
on a leg of lamb, after eating nine borek.
(to Tzvi)
Left of the lower
golem, that is the black-purple
boils of tehiru, primordial man
was inflated by a demiurge—veiled
consort in arch and prepuce. You are imprisoned
for our good on aion in the Castle of Abydos.
Shabbatai Tzvi
Nathan, bro, lets not be too hard on ourselves
here. Don’t forget the dream. That was real
my man! I mean I think your mother must
have hidden your Zyprexa that morning,
but schizophrenics are genuine psychics just the same.
…
(Clearing his throat and getting serious)
Nathan, the fact of the matter is that they
used us, bro. Listen, I’m not saying that we
didn’t have good times. But they played us
for a couple of self-important jerks!
Man!!! We were the anti–psychotic medicine
for World Jewry in its completely destroyed
17th Century pogrom-ed out state. Where would
they be with out us? Do you hear me Nathan?
I am the Messiah!
Celan also believed that, following World War II, the German language in which he wrote needed to go through a change. In Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue, Harris and Shechter write in lively and ever–evolving English, to the limits of which they constantly strain. In this passage, for example, the poets attempt to describe the Tetragrammaton—that is, the four Hebrew letters that make up YHWH, or Yahweh, in English. This is an interesting feat, considering that those four letters—Yod, Heh, Vav (or Waw), and Heh—later became the Latinate Jehovah, or IHVH, in perhaps the ultimate transmigration and transformation of language.
In this passage, Celan learns of his mother’s death at the hands of the Nazis. This was a significant event in his life as it was his mother who taught him German, the language in which he would later write. Harris and Shechter symbolize this linguistic gift by the “deposit” of “a mummified Yod” in young Celan’s “tiny cupped hand.”
Here, Celan, as seen by Harris and Shechter, struggles not only with the contradiction between Semitic and Germanic language, but also with the ultimate meaning of language and the existence of God following and in the face of the Holocaust.
As Ron Sukenick so aptly put it in his last book "Mosaic Man," Jews are both proto and posthuman. Adam Shechter and Daniel Y. Harris are possessed of that molten globe of fiery perdition that draws the brighter children of the tribe to the flame. Add poetry and oy! What can I say? Shechter and Harris have made another journey to the hellchamber of Jewish mystery/creation/death and came out in company, a big company that includes a lot of fried geniuses, but most if all they came out, and it’s good to see them.— Andrei Codrescu
Jake Marmer: The Messiah Cut-Up
I can’t begin to comprehend/surround all that is transpiring here in this Harris/Shechter collaboration/fusion—I'll need other readings toward adequate bearings—but as Seine suicide Paul Celan hovers among these pages of prayerful heresies—"no Shabbos–always Shabbos"—I experience a language that wields "pen as scalpel," and I feel flayed but grateful for this awakening into wild inquiry/attack. By way of thousands of years of Jewish history & of their own lives slashed out in poems & prose pieces of mesmerizing power, even as they wonder if they've gone too far, these two visionaries/revisionists have made something powerful & new here, something of charismatic complication. Oi Vey, & mazel tov. — William Heyen
Each Thursday, The Arty Semite features excerpts and reviews of the best contemporary Jewish poetry. This week Jake Marmer writes about the surrealist dialogues of Adam Schechter and Daniel Y. Harris.
The family of Jewish Surrealists and Dadaists is extensive, ranging from Dada’s founding poet Tristan Tzara, to French filmmaker Nelly Kaplan, to American media artist Man Ray. This family has now experienced a seismic shift with the inclusion of two new members — Adam Shechter and Daniel Y. Harris, whose chapbook “Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue: An Exponential Dyad” was published by Cervena Barva Press earlier this year. The previous collaborative work of these two authors, “Seven Dead Kafkas and a Fork,” has been featured in Exquisite Corpse, the prestigious online journal of Surrealism, but this is their debut appearance in print.
The chapbook is a dialogue that exiles itself from easily identifiable goals and whose subject escapes specific plot lines. Perhaps, this work is an attempt to re–map the history of Jewish esoteric mythology, focusing on Messianic obsessions as well as a kaleidoscope of traumas — national, universal, metaphysical, and the authors’ own.
Here’s a segment, where Harris takes the voice of Paul Celan, the great Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor, who committed suicide by jumping into the Seine river, while Shechter responds as the Messiah:
Paul Celan
Bare signs and ciphers, fisherman’s bait — foundme ten days later. Do you remember
the Bug River, émigré historian
of dead mothers?
Flows the pneuma, the mail
piled up, students pinned to their benches
at the Ecole Normale — no one
to wear
Hölderlin’s head.
You swallowed
me too
late.
The Messiah
It was the red milk thatdrained from their breasts, granite
Obliquely reverse—pure nausea
That drew me to the air.
I sensed, as I do
The needed gap
The textual hole
No tongue, no lips — you were always incinerated
and half way there — my most favored residue.
Really Celan, I told my Tzaddikim,
His stolid head will hang with your apples
Eyes empty of suppressed chronology
Feathers and leaves at his ears — in your Orchard.
And they laughed at the sunlight gelatin,
Their own turgid feet dismembered
Ornamenting my diametric mechanism
with the sudden vacuous shaft
that even breaks my concentration.
Paul Celan
Then jocular,in league with the axis,
ruah’s doyen,
stilled by a grate of vowels — antic
yes-tones of no
with my rucksack of psalms.
Sinai lodestar.
The Messiah
Look for the anxiety calmat the gouged crest — the Mosaic crust
in your eyelashes.
Sweat dust in your hands.
In this vein, the poets take turns addressing each other as various characters: Paul Celan and the Messiah, Shabbetai Tzvi and Nathan of Gaza, the Lubavitcher Rebbe and a Baal Teshuva. No matter what masks they don, however, or which settings they’re in, their two voices are distinct. Harris takes the tone of an overeducated madman, whose range of reference and highfalutin’ vocabulary is forbidding, yet, in its disorientation and piling–on, there’s a visceral music and, at times, irony. Shechter is basically a trickster, a shaman: one minute he erects edifices to Freud, Hassidic philosophy and poetic melancholy, and the next moment he emerges from behind them and laughingly shatters them into dust. Here’s a particularly memorable sampling of Shechter channeling:
God
If you have sex (even try) with your mother, I will kill you. I apologize for being so blunt, but creation can tire. Please do not overreact. In exchange for your mother’s body, I will mysticalize your hopelessness, and there will be literature. I assure you, the ultimate pleasure derived from this muted desperation will far outweigh the physical attainment of her. And don’t try anything stupid! Contrary to popular belief, I cannot be killed. That is a fallacy of literature’s hopeful byproduct, religion.Having said all that, please reproduce.
Aside from the Surrealist mode, the dialogue occasionally veers into straightforward bits of autobiographical narrative. It is as if the dybbuks possessing the two authors take off for an impromptu vacation, and the two temporarily relieved writers converse in almost–human language.
Here’s Harris, speaking as himself:Memory is a hunger artist, Adam, and my memory is the ruined prayer of Mnemosyne. As a boy of ten, freshly usurped from Paris, my entire physical presence was relegated to two eyes and large extended ears attached to a long thin torso. Our Brookline home was filled with books and imitation Louis XIV furniture. My father composed on his mother’s piano – serial chromaticism – I would later understand it to be, and my mother taught French. We lived a quiet, French–Jewish life in Boston’s colonial suburbia, save the physical violence dispensed upon me by my mother. Littered among biographies of Arnold Schoenberg and a vast collection of books from the Biblioteque de la Pleiade, were police reports and psychiatric evaluations. At twelve, the daughter of Yves Oppert, my mother, broke my arm. At thirteen, she broke my father’s collarbone. Similarly, here are two pieces from Shechter:I have always been a tower of words crashing down in parental trickery – at thirteen years old they bribed me out of my Bar Mitzvah. Instead we took a trip to Disney World. At Epcot Center, not within the borders of any one specific national recreation but in between the numinous synthetic signifiers, I became a Man – three Jews wandering, loud shameful arguing in the Goy Land of Fun – Fun for the whole Jewish family. That was my parsha.
At eighteen, I am sorry to say I believed I was Jesus and was in fact plagued by other out of control Jewish boy thoughts. The thrust of trauma, drama, and disorientation is so harsh that catharsis does not exactly arrive, and yet somehow follows behind the imagistic onslaught at all times. Not surprisingly, the book ends with a melt–down, which, however is not devoid of hope, or at least irony: the ghost of Paul Celan appears, addressing Paul Celan himself, as well as Daniel and Adam, and advises all:Eke’s davar to hunks of swill,
the dry eye, pink, blur–crust
to pilaster strip – sees
Lecha Dodi marry itself. - Jake Marmer
One of the most challenging collections I have ever reviewed for The Pedestal Magazine was Unio Mystica, Daniel Y. Harris’s wide–eyed exploration of Judaism and the Kabala that closed my featured look at Cross Cultural Communications in April of last year. As I did at the outset of that review, I offer once again this disclaimer and caveat: I am not Jewish, nor have I studied the Kabala in depth. Further, I have only an undergraduate history student’s understanding and insight into such monumental events in Jewish history as the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, Spain’s Reconquista, and countless pogroms, enslavements, and massacres in Europe and Asia that culminated in the Holocaust. Compared to the wealth of historical, religious, cultural, and literary knowledge of Harris (a Master of Arts in Divinity) and Shechter (founder and, along with Harris, editor of The Blue Jew Yorker), I am at several obvious disadvantages. Thus, I beg the more educated (and Jewish!) reader’s patience and pardon for the mistakes I will probably/inevitably make in analyzing Harris’s and Shechter’s dynamic, educated, erudite, and ultimately overwhelming long poem.
I can, however, say with all confidence that Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue is not only a dynamic, educated, erudite, and overwhelming work, but also a major work, one that I think will be (or, at least, should be) counted among the most imaginative and provocative American long poems of the 2010s. In just 60 pages, the two poets take the reader on a whirlwind journey through Jewish history, the Hebrew alphabet, the culture of the Diaspora, the intricacies of familial relationships and poetic inspiration, and the very mind and body of God.Our Virgils through this drama of eons are three. The first is Paul Celan, a Romanian Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor whose years in Auschwitz informed much of his work, including the notable poem “Todesfugue.” He was also profoundly influenced by the surrealist movement, a fact which can be seen in his hybridized language choices and quickly shifting imagery.
A brief digression now, but one I promise will provide a solid map for the esoteric terrain ahead. In researching for this review I, of course, read Wikipedia’s entry on Celan (while noting with bemusement Harris’s reference to the much–criticized free encyclopedia as the “obese child” of “the google monster”). In doing so I came across a quote from a speech about the state of the German language after the Holocaust that Celan gave when accepting a literature award from the city of Bremen. I reproduce it here, because I think this quote cuts to the heart of the efforts of our two remaining Virgils, Harris and Shechter, in Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue.
Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. Yes, language. In spite of everything, it remained secure against loss. But it had to go through its own lack of answers, through terrifying silence, through the thousand darknesses of murderous speech. It went through. It gave me no words for what was happening, but went through it. Went through and could resurface, ‘enriched’ by it all.
While Harris and Shechter do not focus primarily or even predominantly upon the Holocaust, the language in their poem serves much this function. Language preserves Jewish culture, history, and religion from loss through its capacity to cycle through millennia and through its ability to bridge centuries. In one of the most interesting passages, for example, prophet, visionary, and excommunicant Nathan of Gaza speaks to a young (and somewhat bored) messiah named Shabbatai Tzvi, whose name plays upon that of kabbalist and later Islamic convert Shabbatai Zevi, whom Nathan proclaimed to be the messiah. In this excerpt, Nathan and Tzvi converse not only about the Kabala, but also about the collapse of the Shabbatean movement the two men founded. Note the ease with which Harris and Shechter here juggle not only Jewish mysticism, but also details from Zevi’s life (his imprisonment in the Castle at Abydos, for example) and the nature of time itself.
Nathan of Gaza
…
(To Tzvi)
The breastplate of your tract
is purged—acrostic formed by Torah
and backsliding bodies of demons.
The Sea of Reeds is a River of Dragons.
(To himself)
You think you’re a Lurianic
zelem? Try the butcher! The one who choked
on a leg of lamb, after eating nine borek.
(to Tzvi)
Left of the lower
golem, that is the black-purple
boils of tehiru, primordial man
was inflated by a demiurge—veiled
consort in arch and prepuce. You are imprisoned
for our good on aion in the Castle of Abydos.
Shabbatai Tzvi
Nathan, bro, lets not be too hard on ourselves
here. Don’t forget the dream. That was real
my man! I mean I think your mother must
have hidden your Zyprexa that morning,
but schizophrenics are genuine psychics just the same.
…
(Clearing his throat and getting serious)
Nathan, the fact of the matter is that they
used us, bro. Listen, I’m not saying that we
didn’t have good times. But they played us
for a couple of self-important jerks!
Man!!! We were the anti–psychotic medicine
for World Jewry in its completely destroyed
17th Century pogrom-ed out state. Where would
they be with out us? Do you hear me Nathan?
I am the Messiah!
Celan also believed that, following World War II, the German language in which he wrote needed to go through a change. In Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue, Harris and Shechter write in lively and ever–evolving English, to the limits of which they constantly strain. In this passage, for example, the poets attempt to describe the Tetragrammaton—that is, the four Hebrew letters that make up YHWH, or Yahweh, in English. This is an interesting feat, considering that those four letters—Yod, Heh, Vav (or Waw), and Heh—later became the Latinate Jehovah, or IHVH, in perhaps the ultimate transmigration and transformation of language.
In this passage, Celan learns of his mother’s death at the hands of the Nazis. This was a significant event in his life as it was his mother who taught him German, the language in which he would later write. Harris and Shechter symbolize this linguistic gift by the “deposit” of “a mummified Yod” in young Celan’s “tiny cupped hand.”
Here, Celan, as seen by Harris and Shechter, struggles not only with the contradiction between Semitic and Germanic language, but also with the ultimate meaning of language and the existence of God following and in the face of the Holocaust.
Paul Celan
Purified disquiet interned with idiom
at nadir’s retort, hollow
and hectic, my name
manshaped: words signal
expulsion with burnt bronchial
tubes—psaltar, in slots,
liquidates share, the copied
person pillorying since Eden.
Born into a thousand exiles,
dates are cancers—remove the amygdala,
yizkor of barbaric recall and undo birth:
Yahwhc lungs abetted by doxology,
never tissued. No writ. No gist.
No stock. No shoot.
Yod: return uber and sub to the bestiary.
Heh: return homunculus and dolt.
Vav: return Aleph to its rude cosmology.
Heh: return implode to stasis.
Uncreate.
As Celan struggles with the very prefixes that lead to this latest and worst attempt at exterminating the Jews—that is, the “above” and “below” in Nazi concepts such as “übermensch” and “subhuman”—Harris and Shechter struggle through the 21st Century’s own linguistic paradoxes, several of which have been brought about by the advent of the internet. The book is peppered with email exchanges between the two, in which they discuss not only their shared project and its theological and cultural ramifications, but also their family history; Harris’s grandfather Yves Oppert aided the French Resistance before being murdered by a Vichy policeman, while Shechter’s Brooklynite grandfather committed suicide after failing to live up to his ambitions. Inevitably, their communications and poetic ruminations pull them into the whirlwind history of Judaism and the Jewish people and bring them face to face with Celan himself in the poem’s enigmatic final lines.
Like Unio Mystica before it, Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue is not for the casual reader. Unless one is either highly educated in Jewish history or familiar with the Kabala, piecing through this dizzying and dense array of language will prove next to impossible without the aid of a few good research books and/or a good search engine. Nonetheless, it’s a journey that should be undertaken. Not only is this long poem innovative, thoughtful, disturbing, and sometimes hilarious, it’s also exciting. Harris and Shechter know how to play with language, how to break it, reshape it, and how to bring it to heel. Their journey through thousands of years of history and religious thought is nothing short of an epic. - JoSelle Vanderhooft
Daniel Y. Harris, Unio Mystica, Cross-Cultural Communications, 2009.
“Harris's poetry transmutes ancient symbols and concepts into contemporary wisdom. His work stretches and surprises our imagination.”–Daniel C. Matt
Helpfully for novice and master alike, Harris has included quotations from the works that inspire each of this chapbook’s thirty–four pieces. Indeed, the following poem often reads like a commentary on the idea or quotation that precedes it. Consider, for example, “Orchard” (which, coincidentally, Harris has dedicated to Cross–Cultural Communications’ founder and publisher Stanley Barkan).
Four entered into the orchard of mystical knowledge: Ben Azzai, Ben
Zoma, Aher and Rabbi Akiva…Ben Azzai looked and died…Ben Zoma
looked and was affected mentally…Aher cut down the plants…Rabbi
Akiva departed in peace.
–Talmud: Tractate, Hagigah 14b
This is where peace is shaped through declensions
of nothing: Eckhart’s nicht, Saint John of the Cross’s nada,
the Taoist wu, the Buddhist sunyata, and the Kabbalist
ayin. This is where peace is ghost–faint, sun–dark
and sequenced through pardes, the pomegranate orchard,
Edenic alias, where Akiva eyed the mystical shape
of the Godhead. The sacral grid emits the words of Akiva’s
vassals, generations later, and we hear the shibboleths,
idyllic as anyone who emerges unscathed from millennial
hysterics. This is where peace, then, is the colored strand
of yihudim–the future primordial, unified, departing in peace,
which is the arrival, before a name occupies our attention.
The four holy men mentioned in the Talmudic quotation are the four rabbis of the Mishnaic period, and from what I can understand this account of their visit to paradise (“pardes”) is a fairly famous story. As with all mystical accounts, the story is multilayered, as is the term “pardes.” From what I have gleaned while doing research for this review, pardes is also an acronym that stands for an understanding of the Torah on four different levels: literal/simple, allegorical, comparative, and mystical. It seems to me, then, that the four rabbis symbolize these levels in ascending order. For example, one who understood the Torah on only a literal level would be overloaded in front of the full godhead, and one interested only in dissecting the Torah (the comparative level) would cut down the plants of paradise. Only the mystic (who arrives at this understanding only through mastering the preceding levels) can look on paradise unscathed.
Although paradise is often conceived of as a place of blithe and rather unremarkable happiness in today’s popular culture, Harris (and these four rabbis) sees it as a far more dangerous plane. It is, Harris explains, a null place, a place of peaceful nothingness that many world religions and their sects speak of and which few individuals can understand without proper reflection. It is a slippery place that names alone cannot describe, as it is often the very act of naming which takes away from or undermines a pardes–like (prerequisite) understanding.
As you can probably see, Harris’s poetry touches on deep and deeply complicated themes and concepts, and each piece must be read on multiple levels, which means that exploring each poem in any detail requires near–Talmudic commentary. While I would very much like to wrestle with more of the poems in Unio Mystica, doing so would, unfortunately, take up the bulk of space allotted for the other two chapbooks slated to be reviewed. The desire to do so, however, exists, which means, I think, that Harris’s work has accomplished what mystical poetry of all religions sets out to do: invite the reader into meditation, thought, and an openness to sitting with the unknown. This is a dizzying and deeply satisfying book for me simply because it has whetted my thirst for the divine and further contemplation.
- JoSelle Vanderhooft
Daniel Y. Harris and Irene Koronas, heshe egregore, Swan World,
Scheherazade 1001 The logic of a base is misnomer and defamation.
Eddy overrehearses his punk-garage band, Libido
of Eunuch’s, antipop single “Brat Crud Harbinger,”
grafted as condemned stock and mutation mass,
itching to pierce the shape-shifters on a night
of tribunals in flash drives. Sequences of toxic
side-effects coaxed from pricked licks and one
octave chants, court triumphalists to mock-up
and bulk. Eddy Daemon sashays his effete bod
against the press and the bleak community who
seek his agony as black-purple lump strangled
beside a hacked-off head. They’re spoilsports
of an ancient peoplehood. We’re the bystanders.
Eddy’s the falsely accused executioner’s heir.
Nebuchadnezzar 587
Fatigued with indolence, blunted by a clichéd
Mesmerism—haggard, stony, half-buried wreck
and autoclave of ambition, Eddy Daemon sports
a gigantic horn of spite and ushers in a minute
era of hyphenation and circumventing sleights:
nerve-gleamed, raw-seamed, witty-sullen-jowled,
ghost-crabbed, thorn-tattered, messiah-hived-sick,
god-castrated, sod-smutted, swivel-jerked and tasty
morseled feminazi as manbearpig in low mondaze.
How unjubilant and malice-yielded! Nothing stays
the course, gloss-throated and flaked in foaming
at the mouth. Cylinders and spires pass from sight.
There’s no chance to get a bearing. Even to scroll
back to Ezra’s Walt concession stigmatizes clarity.
Anthropoid 3761
It all comes down to the prophesied sedge:
achenes and solid stems, the blackthorned scag
skullcap and skinsuit of woody lobes with spikelets.
In the marsh, the worn down nub of concupiscent
curds ribs the mascary buggered one or another
as plunger-name of the raw crease. Today, Eddy’s
nosed, clutching his sachet of cosmetics in his gold
clipped komodo-dragon bag. No nostalgia. No edits.
No quiddity with its affected monism. It’s the last
season of day one. We’re on our way kthxbai! Omg
liek u wana c my fab nu jurnal? Dude, no, you make
me sick n00b. Something about searing sophistry
and prelapsarian catpiss. Incomplete, bottomline.
Eddy prostrates before the doorjamb in defeat.
(Excerpt from Underscotch Zorg: A Posthuman Love Epic):
Essays:
Purified disquiet interned with idiom
at nadir’s retort, hollow
and hectic, my name
manshaped: words signal
expulsion with burnt bronchial
tubes—psaltar, in slots,
liquidates share, the copied
person pillorying since Eden.
Born into a thousand exiles,
dates are cancers—remove the amygdala,
yizkor of barbaric recall and undo birth:
Yahwhc lungs abetted by doxology,
never tissued. No writ. No gist.
No stock. No shoot.
Yod: return uber and sub to the bestiary.
Heh: return homunculus and dolt.
Vav: return Aleph to its rude cosmology.
Heh: return implode to stasis.
Uncreate.
As Celan struggles with the very prefixes that lead to this latest and worst attempt at exterminating the Jews—that is, the “above” and “below” in Nazi concepts such as “übermensch” and “subhuman”—Harris and Shechter struggle through the 21st Century’s own linguistic paradoxes, several of which have been brought about by the advent of the internet. The book is peppered with email exchanges between the two, in which they discuss not only their shared project and its theological and cultural ramifications, but also their family history; Harris’s grandfather Yves Oppert aided the French Resistance before being murdered by a Vichy policeman, while Shechter’s Brooklynite grandfather committed suicide after failing to live up to his ambitions. Inevitably, their communications and poetic ruminations pull them into the whirlwind history of Judaism and the Jewish people and bring them face to face with Celan himself in the poem’s enigmatic final lines.
Like Unio Mystica before it, Paul Celan and the Messiah’s Broken Levered Tongue is not for the casual reader. Unless one is either highly educated in Jewish history or familiar with the Kabala, piecing through this dizzying and dense array of language will prove next to impossible without the aid of a few good research books and/or a good search engine. Nonetheless, it’s a journey that should be undertaken. Not only is this long poem innovative, thoughtful, disturbing, and sometimes hilarious, it’s also exciting. Harris and Shechter know how to play with language, how to break it, reshape it, and how to bring it to heel. Their journey through thousands of years of history and religious thought is nothing short of an epic. - JoSelle Vanderhooft
Daniel Y. Harris, Unio Mystica, Cross-Cultural Communications, 2009.
“Harris's poetry transmutes ancient symbols and concepts into contemporary wisdom. His work stretches and surprises our imagination.”–Daniel C. Matt
Whenever I review a book on a subject with which I am only partially familiar or entirely unfamiliar, I like to state my limitations upfront; and when it comes to the Jewish mysticism explored in Daniel Y. Harris’s Unio Mystica, I am on deeply unfamiliar ground. As readers may have noticed (and will see later in this review), I am a Catholic who is more at home with the mystical work of St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avilla, and St. Hildegard of Bingen than I am with the Kabbalah, about which my reading has been sparse and ventured little beyond adolescent curiosity. My lack of dialogue with this text is the biggest limitation I face when discussing this chapbook, which is grounded largely in Jewish mysticism, Talmudic commentaries, and rabbinical writings. Though I will proceed as carefully through these gaps in my knowledge as I can, I may still make a number of errors. Thus, I beg the more informed reader’s patience and charity.
Even with allowances made for my own ignorance, I can say that Unio Mystica is a startling and provocative collection that dazzles both in image and execution, and which, I think, will push most readers (even those familiar with Jewish mysticism) towards dictionaries and encyclopedias of angels and philosophy in order to better engage with its mysteries.Helpfully for novice and master alike, Harris has included quotations from the works that inspire each of this chapbook’s thirty–four pieces. Indeed, the following poem often reads like a commentary on the idea or quotation that precedes it. Consider, for example, “Orchard” (which, coincidentally, Harris has dedicated to Cross–Cultural Communications’ founder and publisher Stanley Barkan).
Four entered into the orchard of mystical knowledge: Ben Azzai, Ben
Zoma, Aher and Rabbi Akiva…Ben Azzai looked and died…Ben Zoma
looked and was affected mentally…Aher cut down the plants…Rabbi
Akiva departed in peace.
–Talmud: Tractate, Hagigah 14b
This is where peace is shaped through declensions
of nothing: Eckhart’s nicht, Saint John of the Cross’s nada,
the Taoist wu, the Buddhist sunyata, and the Kabbalist
ayin. This is where peace is ghost–faint, sun–dark
and sequenced through pardes, the pomegranate orchard,
Edenic alias, where Akiva eyed the mystical shape
of the Godhead. The sacral grid emits the words of Akiva’s
vassals, generations later, and we hear the shibboleths,
idyllic as anyone who emerges unscathed from millennial
hysterics. This is where peace, then, is the colored strand
of yihudim–the future primordial, unified, departing in peace,
which is the arrival, before a name occupies our attention.
The four holy men mentioned in the Talmudic quotation are the four rabbis of the Mishnaic period, and from what I can understand this account of their visit to paradise (“pardes”) is a fairly famous story. As with all mystical accounts, the story is multilayered, as is the term “pardes.” From what I have gleaned while doing research for this review, pardes is also an acronym that stands for an understanding of the Torah on four different levels: literal/simple, allegorical, comparative, and mystical. It seems to me, then, that the four rabbis symbolize these levels in ascending order. For example, one who understood the Torah on only a literal level would be overloaded in front of the full godhead, and one interested only in dissecting the Torah (the comparative level) would cut down the plants of paradise. Only the mystic (who arrives at this understanding only through mastering the preceding levels) can look on paradise unscathed.
Although paradise is often conceived of as a place of blithe and rather unremarkable happiness in today’s popular culture, Harris (and these four rabbis) sees it as a far more dangerous plane. It is, Harris explains, a null place, a place of peaceful nothingness that many world religions and their sects speak of and which few individuals can understand without proper reflection. It is a slippery place that names alone cannot describe, as it is often the very act of naming which takes away from or undermines a pardes–like (prerequisite) understanding.
As you can probably see, Harris’s poetry touches on deep and deeply complicated themes and concepts, and each piece must be read on multiple levels, which means that exploring each poem in any detail requires near–Talmudic commentary. While I would very much like to wrestle with more of the poems in Unio Mystica, doing so would, unfortunately, take up the bulk of space allotted for the other two chapbooks slated to be reviewed. The desire to do so, however, exists, which means, I think, that Harris’s work has accomplished what mystical poetry of all religions sets out to do: invite the reader into meditation, thought, and an openness to sitting with the unknown. This is a dizzying and deeply satisfying book for me simply because it has whetted my thirst for the divine and further contemplation.
- JoSelle Vanderhooft
Daniel Y. Harris and Irene Koronas, heshe egregore, Swan World,
heshe egregore by daniel y harris and irene koronas is a composite unbook of unpoetry engaged with the appropriated concept of male and female archetypes skewing traditional notions of authorship in an unfettered void where authenticity and originality are a shared wiki culture phished scooped reblogged retweed regrammed and reposted ad infinitum for file sharing sampling and trolling in the digital arena of the internet to repurpose words —maximillian pissante
Scheherazade 1001 The logic of a base is misnomer and defamation.
Eddy overrehearses his punk-garage band, Libido
of Eunuch’s, antipop single “Brat Crud Harbinger,”
grafted as condemned stock and mutation mass,
itching to pierce the shape-shifters on a night
of tribunals in flash drives. Sequences of toxic
side-effects coaxed from pricked licks and one
octave chants, court triumphalists to mock-up
and bulk. Eddy Daemon sashays his effete bod
against the press and the bleak community who
seek his agony as black-purple lump strangled
beside a hacked-off head. They’re spoilsports
of an ancient peoplehood. We’re the bystanders.
Eddy’s the falsely accused executioner’s heir.
Nebuchadnezzar 587
Fatigued with indolence, blunted by a clichéd
Mesmerism—haggard, stony, half-buried wreck
and autoclave of ambition, Eddy Daemon sports
a gigantic horn of spite and ushers in a minute
era of hyphenation and circumventing sleights:
nerve-gleamed, raw-seamed, witty-sullen-jowled,
ghost-crabbed, thorn-tattered, messiah-hived-sick,
god-castrated, sod-smutted, swivel-jerked and tasty
morseled feminazi as manbearpig in low mondaze.
How unjubilant and malice-yielded! Nothing stays
the course, gloss-throated and flaked in foaming
at the mouth. Cylinders and spires pass from sight.
There’s no chance to get a bearing. Even to scroll
back to Ezra’s Walt concession stigmatizes clarity.
Anthropoid 3761
It all comes down to the prophesied sedge:
achenes and solid stems, the blackthorned scag
skullcap and skinsuit of woody lobes with spikelets.
In the marsh, the worn down nub of concupiscent
curds ribs the mascary buggered one or another
as plunger-name of the raw crease. Today, Eddy’s
nosed, clutching his sachet of cosmetics in his gold
clipped komodo-dragon bag. No nostalgia. No edits.
No quiddity with its affected monism. It’s the last
season of day one. We’re on our way kthxbai! Omg
liek u wana c my fab nu jurnal? Dude, no, you make
me sick n00b. Something about searing sophistry
and prelapsarian catpiss. Incomplete, bottomline.
Eddy prostrates before the doorjamb in defeat.
(Excerpt from Underscotch Zorg: A Posthuman Love Epic):
Essays:
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