EILEEN TABIOS Engages
WORDS ON EDGE by Michael Leong
(Black Square
Editions, New York, 2018)
Music. Humor. Wisdom. Just to name a few reasons to explore
Michael Leong’s latest book, WORDS ON
EDGE.
Music, say, from
the book’s aptly titled first poem “Ignition Compendium” for starting with the
bolstering
To wake late in the not-too-distant
20th Century
to the fragrance of the digital future
on fire…
It
started with the lifelong quest
of
the ancients to pass judgement
on
the abstract use
of
music and voting machines
whose energy never abates through the entirety of this 2
1/3-page poem.
Humor, say, from
the opening of—and I recognize humor is subjective and I assess this as one
whose people was colonized by English—“Politics and the English Language
(George Orwell Through the Looking Glass)”:
A
not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit
across
a not ungreen field.
Wisdom, say, these
lines from “April 28, 2013”:
On the haphazard canvas of memories
fragments zigzagged into a dumb
sort of
coherence, the shape of a life not
your own
Throughout the collection, the internal nature of words is discernibly at
the forefront—the diction is carefully smart and/or smartly careful so as to
maintain a forward and rhythmic propulsion in the reading of it.
Such propulsion is admirable against the at times opaque
façade presented by the poems. For instance, when Leong writes (in “Politics
and the English Language (George Orwell Through the Looking Glass)”):
One cannot change all this
schizophrenia in a moment,
just as one need not swallow
a seventeenth-century sphere full
of mirrors and light.
For in real life it is always
the anvil that tricks the hammer by
visualizing
unfashionable noises braying
against the bloodstained,
incendiary air.
you’re caught up by the flow to nod in agreement and stop
only when you think to think, “What am I agreeing with?” which is to say, “what
did that poem just say?”
However, readers need not rely on (abstract) enchantment with
the music (a music particularly showcased by the section “Fruits and Flowers and Animals and Seas and Lands Do Open”). There are enough portents throughout the book—e.g.
boom,
fracking, fracking, fracking
fracking,
fracking, fracking, boom
—from “the transmission of (other
subsurface agents may be considered necessary for underground Control”
He worked for Homestead Steel Works
so that his daughter could be an adjunct in a department of modern languages
and literatures and die in poverty after being let go after 25 years of
teaching.
—from “(Be)labored Posterities
Rat relations—
Riot
against the clock {race}
—from “Words on Edge”
to show that the poet remains attentive to his
environment/the external world (so that the dysfunctional state of affairs is
addressed) and not just mired in wordplay (pleasingly gallivanting though they may be).
The book’s title comes from a section “Words on Edge” as
inspired by the Oulipo Compendium’s
definition of “edges”:
“[E]dges are short texts each
composed around a given word that is entirely represented by other words
commonly associated with it. Neither the given word nor any extraneous words
appear.”
Leong’s WORDS ON EDGE
is, in fact, a testament to the freedom and freeing found when one operates
within constraints.
Indeed, if the book itself operated along Oulipo’s concept
of edges, one might say that WORDS ON
EDGE very much reveals its times: a world on edge.
As to the particularities of significance of what are in the
poems? Well, Leong also created a capacious enough space to allow readers a
variety of interpretations and the promise that new reads will provide new
meanings. Reading the book is a RECOMMENDED path if you appreciate music,
humor, and wisdom.
*****
Eileen Tabios is the editor of Galatea Resurrects (GR). She loves books and has released over 50 collections of poetry, fiction, essays, and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. Her 2018 poetry collections include HIRAETH: Tercets From the Last Archipelago, MURDER DEATH RESURRECTION: A Poetry Generator, TANKA: Vol. 1, and ONE TWO THREE: Selected Hay(na)ku Poems which is a bilingual English-Spanish edition with translator Rebeka Lembo. She is the inventor of the poetry form “hay(na)ku” which will be the focus of 15-year anniversary celebrations at the San Francisco and Saint Helena Public Libraries in 2018. While she doesn't usually let her books be reviewed by GR since she's its editor, exceptions are made for projects that involve other poets; in this issue, her COMPREHENDING MORTALITY collaboration with John Bloomberg-Rissman is reviewed HERE. Elsewhere, her LOVE IN A TIME OF BELLIGERENCE was reviewed in Contemporary Literary Review India. More information about her works is available at http://eileenrtabios.com.
