Spring

Oni Buchanan

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780252075643, 9780252033643
• eBook ISBN: 9780252090684
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

2009 Massachusetts Book Awards Winner Representing nothing less than a tour-de-force of formal invention and emotional intensity, Oni Buchanan's Spring encompasses radically contrasting work. Ecstatic, visually intricate rhapsodies are juxtaposed with tight, sonnet-like poems, and wispy columns of verse brush up against large-scale epics and kinetic text. This collection's point of departure is the paradox of existence as an individual in a political and violent world. All of the formal innovations in this book have in common an urgent need for texture and polyphony, and the poems attempt to discover how to fulfill the individual human responsibility of surviving as a resiliently loving and hopeful living creature. An accompanying multimedia compact disc offers a full Flash-animated version of the printed kinetic work, "The Mandrake Vehicles."

NOTE ON THE MANDRAKE FORM

Paper version:

The following pages contain the physical version of three kinetic poems called the Mandrake Vehicles, scored for paper, letters, and imagination, each vehicle represented here by seven stilled frames selected from the vehicle that itself is in constant motion. Each of the three vehicles begins with a large text block concerning the biological development, folklore, occult ritual, magical association, and medicinal/homeopathic usages of the mandrake plant (sometimes spoken in the voices of the plants themselves). In selecting material for the Mandrake Vehicles, I conflated some of the more famous occult associations of the European mandrake with the biological structure and development of (as well as the many diverse associations and medicinal uses relating to) the American mandrake, also known as the mayapple. Both the European and American mandrakes have a rhizomatous root structure, meaning that the plants themselves are all connected underground by horizontal subterranean stems shooting off from the vertical root of each individual plant. This rhizomatous characteristic of the plants gave rise to the layered, interconnected form of the Mandrake Vehicles.

Formally, all three vehicles are connected by their surface layers, as the large text blocks that begin each of the vehicles can themselves be read continuously from one text block to the next (in their consecutive order). However, each text block also conceals a depth of two additional “secret” poems that can be distilled from the top layer (these inner poems appear in their solidified forms on pages 4 and 7 of each vehicle). In each vehicle, both of these inner poems have technically been visible all along in the top layer, but their embedded letters remain undetected because of the presence of the other letters and characters. Each embedded poem becomes revealed as the “lighter” letters float off the surface of the vehicle and the “heavier” letters remain anchored on the page (the grids of heavier letters that remain after the lighter letters lift off are shown on pages 2 and 5 of each vehicle). The remaining heavier letters eventually solidify into one of the two inner poems, forming new words, new contexts, and new patterns of sound, structure, and meaning, while still maintaining the order in which they appeared in the initial text block. In addition to the new and sometimes parallel relationships created between the contents of the three poems of each vehicle, relationships are also forged between words of the different layers that share the same letter(s). The trajectory of a letter can be traced by following the words it helps to form, and necessarily the relationship of these words to one another must then be considered, as residue of meaning is carried by the letter as it moves from one word to the next.

Finally, pages 3 and 6 of each Mandrake Vehicle depict stilled shots of the “liquid” layers contained in each of the vehicles. These are the pages on which the reader witnesses the remaining grids of heavier letters in the moments just after the lighter letters have unmoored and floated away. The remaining letters are then in transitional states, loose states of organization in which their spacing no longer functions to delineate one word from another, and there is no punctuation to regulate words into grammatical units. In these unstable “liquid” layers, the letters function by fluctuating through the spaces that surround them toward the letters nearest to them in their loose grid (one must imagine the constant atomic movement that is present on this very oversimplified printed page). Letters move horizontally, attracted to the letters on either side of them, forming multiple words simultaneously. In addition, the letters in the liquid layers begin to shed scales of themselves. While the letters themselves stay in their grid space, their shed scales fall down the page vertically, colliding with other scales and eventually forming detritus words which accumulate in a heap at the bottom of the page (again, the page functions as a stilled snapshot of a continuing process, and one can imagine the parade of detritus words continuing to fall well ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• The Smallest Plant
• I. The Floor-Creatures Begin
• II. Envelopes of Sky
• III. The Lonely Animal
• IV. Text Message
• V. The Mandrake Vehicles