A Book for Our Age

John Bloomberg-Rissman's Flux, Clot & Froth is a modern-day epic, which is to say that it contains no adventures, no treks, no quests, yet mirrors the world it comes out of and all of its desires, and is huge in the way that an epic should be: inches thick when printed as a codex. The book is a memory of reading, a memory of a single synchronic slice of a civilization run through the consciousness of one poet. John has harvested whatever sequences of words interested him and he has melded these into a single frame, a giant canvas, its mirrored surface hidden from us by the deftness with which he has woven these various and dischordant texts into a single song, as if from a single source, in much the same way that a river is enriched by the tributaries feeding into it even if it seems but a single rolling force of water to our blindered eyes.

There is something hypnotic about this text to me, about the way that it fades in and out of focus, or from one focus to another, and always seeming to just one voice, his voice, though in various states and moods, coming at all. When I dip into it, I run over fifty pages at a clip wondering how I'd made it so far, and losing grip of the story, because there is none, because there are many, because I cannot hold onto the richness of the thing, how it is bigger and brighter than all of us, and eager to exceed our grasp.

So when John asked me to design the cover of his book, I did, though slowly, and awkwardly, making more errors in the construction of this cover than in almost anything I've ever made. (And error is a cornerstone of my poetics.) In the end, I'd devised a cover where the title is almost totally obscured, as is the author's name, a cover where the text is inscrutable in many ways: thrown into brambly piles of characters, obscuring the few recognizable forms, using almost nothing but letters that don't exist, a little rongorongo for the eye. You have to read the spine for the title, since the front cover is nothing but a reproduction of my feeling reading the book.

But this poem of John's is more than the poem itself. It is also a system of recording the sources of all the texts John has snatched from the river of words he read during its construction, and that system is both ingenious and beautiful. At the bottom of every page of the poem, in light-grey is the sequence of endnotes covered by that page. And if you buy volume 2 of the book, you will have the apparatus and be able to find all the sources of the poem, as well as nice little extras, like another poem. Volume 2 would be the essential disc of extras of this movie if this book were a movie, which it almost is. In this volume, you'll find an explanation of all the sources as well as the means to return to that place in the poem where any source is used. I used this to see how the words John appropriated from me were used in his text, and I was proud every time I saw what he'd done with my words.

Flux, Clot & Froth is a challenging book, but a rewarding one, a beautiful, an incantatory one. I sing its pages through my fingers to my eyes as I sleep.


ecr. l'inf.