Steven W. Beattie on The Politics of Knives

An extremely adept reading of The Politics of Knives by Steven W. Beattie has appeared on his site, That Shakespearean Rag. He does an especially nice job of contextualizing the poem “Psycho” both within a history of film analyses and according to the avant-garde techniques I mimic. I am an oddity as a writer in that I often mimic avant-garde techniques (in this case, the “cut-up” technique) rather than actually executing them. I also tend to be densely allusive, and Beattie does a good job of teasing out some of the instances when I allude within and across the text, which other reviewers have overlooked or at least not written about:

The opening three poems form a triptych that serves as a kind of invocation to the muse, also seeding the ground for what is to come. The insistence on knives reappears in “Psycho,” and again in the title sequence, in which words and phrases have been blacked out, literally excised as though having been sliced through. The blacked-out portions call to mind redacted government documents, an association made explicit in the poem’s last line: “What to do when the sheep elect wolves.” (This is also an example of Ball ratcheting up the tension in the language by substituting a declarative statement for what would more commonly be cast as a question.) The wolves here echo the “chiselling” teeth of an early poem, and prefigure the book’s final image, of the mythical Cerberus, “that most terrible of dogs.”