Propagation

by Laura Elrick

Poetry. PROPAGATION's minimalist scoring belies an obsession with the gestural repleteness of discourse, with what poet and linguist Henri Meschonnic called the embodied aptitude of language ("a poem is an activity, not a product"). One central activity of this poem is listening, to language public and private, living and mediated, and to texts we read silently or aloud to one another. A series, the poems in PROPAGATION also test audible vectors by sifting and colliding, graphing and distilling. What emerges is both residue and a materialist sensing of the complex ecosystems of language and experience.

"Laura Elrick's PROPAGATION is incantatory, magical, mischievous, devilish. Its syntax is resistant, fluid, impeded; its lineation outwits givens, decommodifies ideas, modulates stances, transforms terms. The poems are moody—sullen, fanciful, sardonic, meditative, funny, mad. PROPAGATION, in other words, invites multiple readings, but not only because one can voice its polyphonic perspective so variously; it does so, above all, because it is enchanting, wondrous. In the myth, Pandora's box turned out to contain mostly sinister forces and the origins of human woe. Elrick's PROPAGATION acknowledges the presence of this sad panoply, but what emerges most forcefully from this book is the revolutionary power of hope, not as mere promise but as an articulate practice."—Lyn Hejinian

Genres: Poetry

106 pages, Paperback

First published November 15, 2012

Reviews

[Maud · Rating 2 out of 5]

feh

[Joe]

in / the parking lot / outside / in the parking lot / in the parking / lot outside in / the parking lot / inside / the parking lot / inside / the parking

It is language that whirls in Elricks’s 2012 collection Propagtion. Phrases are repeated using the linebreak as a way to vary emphasis in that repetition. The word repeats but microshifts in its context make its connotational values unfold until the word is a panoply of possible tones and meanings and/or the reverse, the word is a depletion revealed, like a secular version of John Taggart’s loops—in the looping is the pressure the mirror puts on the word and what is looking at the word through itself, a leaky container, a crisis—

This is Elricks’ work : Revealing the scripted through the iterative and pushing back-- operating in the membranes between the body and the street, the and I and the we, the local and the distant, the sign and the system without ever losing track of its ethical center in the terror-pleasure of its movement or the terror-pleasure of its movement in its ethical center.

if this is lyric / as echo / and narcissus / as echo / this lyric is / an echo this / echo is

[Carolyn · Rating 2 out of 5]

An exercise more fascinating in concept than in realization. Neurotic loopings and weavings of language, an exploration of nuances and wordplay. Propagation is an amorphous figure. Its amoeba encloses a benign smattering of words. While the content of the poems is largely insignificant, this work highlights the disparities in seemingly-identical turns of phrase. Thus, a battery of questions are raised on translation, tone, embodiment (as writer) and various other aspects of what is best termed as "metalanguage." A tumultuous exercise in conceptual poetry somewhat reminiscent of some 21st century Ron Siliman.