Passion Orbits the Peripheries of Symbols (or, iLove U.)

The books of poetry I want to read require me to think and see and hear, and Sharon Harris’ AVATAR does pretty well in most of these regards. Growing out of an imaginative tradition that includes Darren Wershler-Henry’s Nicholodeon: A Book of Lowerglyphs (1998) and Christian Bök’s Crystallography, Harris’ Avatar mixes poetry (of an interestingly twisted variety), visual poetry, visuals, and various codes and tricks into a book of subtle delights. Scattered across its pages are twenty-six lettered “figures” that serve as illustration and text. The book itself even carries a logo that recombines the letters of “AVATAR” into a small pyramid of meaning.

The book is divided into six distinctly different parts.

On World W/ Arrow Keys

This section quickly introduces Sharon’s passion for the phrase “I Love You” (as is clear even from the URL of her website). The figures immediately start presenting us with versions of “love”—in Braille, in Morse code, in arrangements of dice, even in the Latin alphabet. Strangely, most of the poem poems have usually only a tangential connection to this concept of love. What really smooshes these various pieces together is the question of meaning, interpretation, and reality—a congeries of interrelations that come together best in a few lines of the poem “properties of the universe”:

we get more out of it/
than was originally put into it

love

is a poetry of superfluous words
passion orbits the peripheries of symbols

we work hard to wrest something from nature
delivering information like signposts

Working out the coded messages—simple as they are: in Braille, etc.,—is part of the fun in the book. For instance, 8- and 16-character strips of binary code appear in the bottom outside corners of some of the pages (only those pages without visual and vispoetic material). I assumed that this was ASCII binary code, that some message was held in that code—and a little bit of investigation proved me right. Though it was merely amusing to discover that the only messages coded thereby were the page numbers: 9, 10, 12, 17, etc. On page 0011001000110110, bits of Morse code separate the lines of the poem, “a little peace here,” but they spell out the word “reace” (instead of the expected “peace” that is the subject of the poem and the process poem on the facing page).*

Fun with ’Pataphysics

The strongest section of the book is the least visual and consists of a set of numbered (but out-of-sequence) prose poems that are ostensibly didactic. An example will do here:

227. Confused Writing

Would you bet that you cannot write a poem if you make circular movements with your leg at the same time? You will likely manage nothing more than an unreadable scribble.

Each action needs so much concentration that both cannot be carried out at the same time, but a minuscule percentage of poets thrives on futile exercises such as this. Be thankful you’re not a concrete poet.

Occasionally, these poems are a tiny bit sentimental but they still work. They carry Sharon’s voice into our ears:

92. I’ve Written a Poem. How do I Get it Published?

Write the poem and your name on a tulip bulb. Plant the bulb in the earth and when the tulip blooms, so shall your poem.

Virus

The section entitled “Virus” essentially examines the famed “I Love You” computer virus. We are presented with the story of the virus, a snippet of its code, a poem with one of the filenames of the virus, and visual pieces that repeat “I LOVE YOU.” Again, the point of this section eventually revolves around a single poem (this time, “Bizarre Love Triolet”). In this case, the poem throws the meaning of “love” and love into question, admitting that meaning depends on context—just as “I love you” means something much different when coming at us from a lover or a computer virus.

Line in Line out —

The next section focuses on process poems, visual matter coded to create new conceptual processes in the mind of the reader. For instance, a joystick (in Figure Q: “Joystick”) is tagged so that we understand different movements of the joystick mean “enlightenment,” “inner peace,” “nirvana,” and “the american dream.” Figure R: “Advanced Emotional Quotient” (“for e. e. cummings”) appears to be some kind of meter that measures “star,” “alone,” “open,” “IYou,” and a number of other properties written mirror-reversed. And best of all is Figure S: “Geodesy” (the science of measuring the earth), which is a solid black circle divided, by three white lines going horizontal and three others going vertical, into a pattern of black squares and partial squares. The legend to the poem marks the black as “us” and a small smudgy grey circle as “them.” Except there are no smudgy grey circles. Only by staring at the image does an optical illusion cause the “them” appear. Thus we learn that we imagine the other. That we are all we.

Salutogenesis

The next section is dedicated to the vowels, setting aside poems to examine each of the classic five of English. The section ends with an outline of a naked woman standing within a six-pointed star (a series of triangles reminiscent of those in “AVATAR”). From just above the woman’s head down to her pubis, a sequence of true vowels (not letters, but sounds) are spelled out in the International Phonetic Alphabet (another code). These vowels move from the bright sound of the long e (i:)† down to the dark rouxy sound in the middle of “book” (an upside-down omega). At this specific point in the book, sound is allowed to be sound, rather than letter—even though it is frozen on the page of the book.

Poetic Method

I may be reading this section wrong, but it appears to me to be nothing but the part of the book that explains the poems to the reader, and there’s a bit too much of this. I had quite a good time figuring out the code to these poems, so I was unhappy to see most of the book’s half-secrets revealed at the end of the book. For instance, we are told here that one of the poems in the first section of the book is an acrostic—a fact I thought well enough clarified by the fact that each initial letter in the acrostic (which runs horizontally across lines) is capitalized. The hint was big enough to dispense with any other explanation. There’s plenty of other explanation here that we just don’t need. Or shouldn’t. I don’t mind the occasional gloss in a poem, but for the most part poems should be set free by their author to make their own way in the world without their parent as intermediary

One explanation that I have enjoyed, however, is the explanatory text that has accompanied all notices of this book and that appears on the back of the book itself:

’Pataphysics is a fictional science: the science of imaginary solutions. Sharon Harris proposes a problem for poetry to solve: how to unfold a book if the book is a lotus; how to unfold a word at the centre of that book? AVATAR is a word that is commonly heard but rarely understood. AVATAR (in virtual reality) is an icon representing a person online. AVATAR is the bodily manifestation of a God in Hinduism. AVATAR is a little like dancing with a cartoon after it shimmies off screen.

AVATAR is an Abstract Visual Asymmetric Technology Apperception Resource. AVATAR is writer and photographer Sharon Harris’s first collection of poetry.

That explanatory text is illuminating and obfuscating at once, and makes the point of the book without telling it to us outright. It works like a poem. Coyly. And that’s all I ask.

_____

Harris, Sharon. AVATAR.” Toronto: The Mercury Press, 2006. ISBN 1-55128-121-X. C$16.95

_____

* I assume this is a coding problem since . . .

P in Morse code = . - - .

and

R in Morse code = . - .

† The colon is my replacement for the symbol in the IPA that notes the elongation of a vowel sound. Most people wouldn’t notice the difference, but since I know the IPA relatively well, for an amateur, I feel it necessary to point out that I know the difference.

ecr. l’inf.