EILEEN
TABIOS Engages
THE BOOK OF MARK by Amanda Earl
(above/ground press, Ottawa,
Ontario, 2018)
I
suspect—or hope—that there’s a brilliant conceptual underpinning to Amanda
Earl’s THE BOOK OF MARK, which is
part of her “life’s work to translate every chapter, every of the Bible into
visual poetry.” I suspect that such conceptual framework is brilliant. But I can only suspect, or imagine, as one
can’t know for sure without more information about Earl’s intent and/or poetics
as regards this project. That is, what did/does it mean for Earl to change the
Bible—which is text and narrative and of course a religious philosophy and, as
many believe, the “Word of God”—to something “visual,” something “poetry,” and
something “visual poetry”?
THE BOOK OF MARK is only one
of the series (at the time of its printing,
Earl also has done Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Esther, Jude and Revelation) and
presented in chapbook form. I hope that if and when the entire or a
significant grouping of the series is available, there also would be an
accompanying poetic statement about Earl’s thought process. (Alternatively, would someone just interview
her about it already?! I honestly think there’s something important or worthwhile
being brewed here.) But until Earl’s
poetics is available, the reader of any of the series’ available works can only
speculate … and my own speculation leads me to believe that this project’s
conceptual framework is brilliant and possibly brilliantly subversive.
For, as everyone’s 21st century source Wikipedia says about the Bible, it is
“is a collection of sacred texts or scriptures
that Jews and Christians consider to be
a product of
divine inspiration and a record of the relationship between God
and humans.” The Bible is a sacred text and
Earl’s visual poetry translations dilute if not erase its message(s). I mean,
look at this—
Can you, by looking at the
above, glean the underlying message of the excerpted gospel?
Yet I’m hard-pressed to
interpret Earl’s translations as disrespectful to the gospel. For her visual
poetry translations are simply lovely and inviting. A reader/viewer can be
moved to inhabit their images for some time and the experience is not one of
diminishment. In fact, the images can transport the viewer into imagined
narrative realms (i.e., thinking about the significance of what one sees) in
the same manner of effective abstract
art. Some images reach for the sublime as if Earl, indeed, is a “believer”—if not
as a Christian then certainly the transcendent possibilities of art. Here’s another example:
As well, ponder the possible significance of this particular image:
That space in the center
certainly evokes the idea of clearing a space for the reader/viewer to inhabit
with their own views of the image and/or the project as a whole. It looks like
a framed mirror, too, for reflecting the reader/viewer, which is to say again,
to acknowledge the presence of someone else than the author—it evokes both
poetry’s reader-response concept as well as the idea of certain cultures’
weavers deliberately including a gap or a hole in rugs or other weavings so as
to make space for others (including spirits).
And of course I can be
entirely wrong in thinking that respect rather than subversiveness attends Earl’s
treatment of Biblical gospels. The Bible is the best-selling book of all time
(it sells about 100 million copies annually) and turning the texts into lovely
images but which are mostly not legible to read may be a poke at the whole thing
and what the Bible signifies (human atrocities, too, after all, have been waged
on behalf of the Bible’s characters and thoughts).
But, again, when I return
to Earl’s visual poetry results, I am transported in a positive way and can
only be grateful for this type of embodied religion. Thank you, Amanda Earl!
And I’m moved to end with
one more image—I, for one, see a lovely dress for a dance, evoking of course
Earl’s lovely dances with words.
*****
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 invented 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 edited EVIDENCE OF FETUS DIVERSITY is reviewed HERE. More information about her works is available at http://eileenrtabios.com.
