Art if Ice, Art if Not Ice

Some thought, some maybe is, that a poem without artifice, stripped of the revolving mirrors of art, were the poem, good, better, best, and finally perfected. Yet everything we create is artifice, artificial, art, a making, not simply, nor merely, a being, a meaning.

Yet, struggle as we do to remove the rococo tendencies of our creating, we must use the artifice of word, the artifice of meaning, the artifice of sound (even if only written), the artifice of letter (even if only heard).

So what does the poem stripped of artifice look like? How does Mark Lamoureux do this in his masterful chapbook and poem, Poem Stripped of Artifice?

It looks like a poem that cares about words, and emotion, and intellect, and body, and mind, and shape. What is most surprising is how this poem uses shape and space. It is a prose poem in shape. But why?

Divided into eleven sections (nine columnar paragraphs; one [“X”] a blank, praecisio; and one a multi-page series of small but wide paragraphs), the poem plays with shape. The first nine sections are oriented from the bottom of the pages, beginning wherever, but always ending at the bottom margin. All but one of these tall thin paragraphs (with plenty of leading between the lines) of this prose poem fit on one page. The Xth section is shapely by being shapeless, but eschewing the concept of shape, by showing us nothing, thus making us look harder for something. (And we are reminded that X = Christ and that the poem discusses the non/existence of God among many other ideas. X may be the answer.) Finally, we have the XIth section, which runs the lines of its paragraphs out not as long as they can go, but only long enough to jump the gutter of the chapbook and continue on the next page. Each page of section XI is a verso and a recto page together, a page spread. I must assume that this visual trope is there merely for the artifice, to overcome the artifice of the page, and to announce the artifice of the page.

Because this is not a poem stripped of artifice. It is a poem about talking about a poem stripped of artifice, a poem about artifice and what it might be like to examine, coldly, rationally, the world in such a way.

This poem is about building wordships piece by similar piece:

III.
I dreamt I was cleaning my room.
There is no end to banalities.
There is no end to the other things I
do in dreams, of which I will not
speak. There is this poem, & there is
the one I will dream of writing.
There is no air in this one, no death;
whereas the poems in dreams will
die, just as the dream itself will die.
No, wait. The dream is sitting on a
table in the foyer. The dream
contains dust. The dream contains
ice & water & steam. No, wait.
There is no dream. There is only this
brain, thinking.*

This brain thinking, because this is a poem about concepts and thinking and thinking through and questioning assumptions and poking holes in reality, and working the words to work the ideas.

Mark is a philosopher. That is the work of the poet, to outdo the philosophers at their own game. His philosophical considerations are poetic, swirling with ideas, coming into a thought and leaving out it from behind, because he is a poet, not a philosopher.

The last section is almost clinical, providing us with a discussion of the distinction of heart (the traditional locus of emotion) and the head (the locus of thought). Merging thoughts on cultural mores and concepts and empirical fact, Mark ends this poem with longer sentences, and more practical and explanatory. We are dreaming through libido and intellect at the end of the poem. We are surfing through death and illness and ethics (“Dying of heart failure is not considered to be a crime”—good to know!). We consider mental illness, sex, the existence of God, and this poem makes clear that this is but one topic, the focus of living the human life.

Find this book and read it aloud to yourself (especially the opening nine sections). This is the music of your heartmindbodysoul, and you do not even know that yet.

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Mark Lamoureux’s Poem Stripped of Artifice won The New School Chapbook contest of 2007. I have no idea how to procure a copy, except through Mark himself.

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* Of course, this paragraph should be right-justified, but I’m too lazy to figure out the code to do that at the moment.

ecr. l’inf.