In Incitements (Gaspereau Press, 2011.), Sean Howard uses a cut-up method, making poems from three prose texts, demonstrating that it is not the source material or the process but the writer’s hand that creates the end result.
Although the subjects of each base text are different, the effects of Howard’s poems are similar. The text plays differently in the real estate of the page in each section, disassembling, leaping and controlling speed. On the surface, his first two sections seem to hold to one topic, natural history, while on the microlevel of sound, they veer all around. For example, “Understructure Cantos” is ostensibly about biology, habitat and species, but it is plundered for fragments and those fragments are then broken up, so that half to three quarters of the right margin consists of hyphenated words, syllables competing against the text. “ XIII,” for example, reads as a series of hesitations:
The rain’s ros-
ary. Algon-
quin, names as
verbs. The calv-
ing bay. Heron: taut:
shadow. Flesh-
eaten worms. Berr-
ied light. Floun.
The lines and stanzas break in mid-word, which troubles the text and slow the reading, yet to lineate conventionally would be to miss part of the exercise. Taking the words slowly prevents the reader from racing past. It makes strange, and new meanings surface from being buried in words. The first stanza quoted above, for example, invokes both “the rain’s rosary” and “the rain’s rose”; it is both images. Howard’s tousled form also results in a clustering, such as “shadow flesh.” Aloud, sounds can reconfigure themselves to the ear: some hook forward as phonetic phrases and some fall to lack of sense. Some, disconnected, evoke something that remains incomplete.
Incitments plays on some of the same ground as the title section of Donato Mancini’s Ligatures (New Star Books, 2005)—both look at the materiality of language, how embedded parts hinge together. Sometimes the fragments turn up intriguing parts, though it is a little like panning for gold. The ending of “XVIII” is striking: “Silence, / mother ton / gue.” The weight of the language is pulled out, seen, and the second half of the syllable, which is itself mostly silence, is the definition of silence, standing alone in its stanza without meaning, its diphthong split so it has no sound.
In the title section of the book, Incitements, the game changes considerably from natural history to human history, notably in Howard’s treament of postcards sent during WWII as a resistance campaign against Hitler by Elise and Otto Hampel. Using that story and Hans Fallada’s novel on the subject, the lessons of Nazism are re-filtered as poetry, “the führer! (stamping // on god’s spectacles)” or looking at “herculean effort / to maintain our passivity! (number- // ..less prisoners.) the executioner’s / assistants; all ages and // professions.” Bringing forward resistance to the current of our time seems timely.
Incitements is a complex read, the eye physically moving rapidly with the narrow columns of poems, or across gaps, while the mind’s eye flips back and forth among the layers of text. The text forces a slow read, or leads to a dizzy one.