Saturday 23 February 2019

A review by Aad de Gids of 'Cold Zero Reflect', VoidFront Press 2019



 (while the content of Michael's 'new' book 'coldzeroreflect' isn't for the weak of mind nor for rigid formalists, its introductory phrase reveals musicality and an opening to 'sensibility', 'sensitivity', the realm of the senses as what could be heard and smelled alike.) "traceless.../vapour tones...". (the auditive entry goes on) "//all spoken for/asked of/reduced to stammering in neon exigent...". (this lemmatum [as the article in an encyclopedia] ends with) "utterance/utterance of...". (here we see that what has started with a kind of invitation to the senses and proceeds herein, an auditivity, ends with an indeterminacy, worse, an indifference, which nevertheless shall appear to be one of the accuratest mirrorings I have ever encountered in poetry, of 'what it is', this world now, this fucking world now, what the hell that is.)
(on page 8 we see the interesting suffix "(etc.)" out of which a terrific, terrifying, frightening and laughable worldvision speaks, not laughable in the sense of ridiculous but bc of its sheer radicality. to kind of reinforce that still it also speaks of an "absenteeism" and this is the delectable as horrid outlook we simply have if we look in clarity around us.) (Michael doesn't shy away to show the stuttering, stumbling, rambling of the language itself:) "an abort of....// shadow of...meat trinkets of....". (here we see the ample indifference of [he invites us to chose for ourselves] any word to describe any situation almost in inarbitrary manner, random manner. because it doesn't matter anymore. postMao Deng Xiaou Ping said: "it doesn't matter if you're bitten by the dog or the cat". and now we have TrumpPutin. in a sense Michael words the status even after this.)
"(the) skeletal peak a solace of unknown orchids...// denuded silence...". (a landpsychoscape of vegetality is sketched here where the vegetality isn't something inferior to the antropocene yet we bend, we better lay low now, in a denuded silence.)
(where we find ourselves in is in morguelike, streetity athmosphere like, environments, and the litterary voyage is an exact mappology of these catacombes, crypts, but not as how we imagined these to be. no it is what now is around us.) "echo-chamber of...
(as if to say…)".
(here an indeterminacy, an uneagerness is described. of course this is anathema to regular 'poetry'. but the gatekeepers of that poetry do not matter. here we have the
ravenous new descriptive style of Michael, for him also in a more 'aerial style', which in the mean time doesn't falter for an icy exactitude, a matter-of-factly inconclusiveness left open as the wound of the world.) "oxidate shadowings given to astringent...// cold shale of the...// bodily the body degorged of sound...". (this 'matter-of-world', a materiality, is also caught in the saturative titers of "oxygenation". the very matter is astringent. Michael discovers the sheer chemification again, even inmidst human enterprise.) "oxygenate(d)... // (“no, not of...”) // blind light of (the) electro-surreal kissing the tungsten teeth of blindness..." (we're in the mines. we're in the trenches, we were never out of them. chemification and metallurgy of the human endeavour. in the sense that we do not so much shape the world [even if we do with the climate], the world regains its place and rechemifies what already chemical was only executes a drastic redistribution. hardcore metallic ores come to the fore. [Tungsten, or wolfram, is a chemical element with symbol W and atomic number 74. The name tungsten comes from the former Swedish name for the tungstate mineral scheelite, tung sten or "heavy stone".] as hardness is chosen for metaphor, there is somewhere a softer side. here the poetry of Michael circumvents around.)
"terse light/sheared speech/colloreality unsung devouring...// spun (as if to) lies bloodily abandoned...".
(to reconstruct what with incisive poetry can be pinpointed silent witnesses can fulfill 'the descriptive landscape'. the poetic description loses itself willfully in what circumstantially is presented. then Michaels poetry helps to reveal almost as in 'écriture automatique' what is hidden in plain sight. here we have a kind of forensic research of a place delict: the world with which we grew up. a 'collaterality' is the almost accidental coincidence of different 'events', and all the other old-fashioned regulatives have become preposterous and obsolete: causality, development unto a better goal, an ethical imperative. Michael shows that these aren't still yet absolved, not met, not reached. there comes no replacement, just this accurate descriptive power to fragmentatively and in an esthetic theatrality denoted tanatoscape of "world", much more modern than what was and is offered in marketing strategem presented 'litterature'.)
"with from out of which...// silentee(ism)...// struck marrow what edge of it as given to follow naught...// traceless senseless recollect...// bind (the) wound (the) broken body vocal...// trace left neither right neither right nor left...";
(here the almost threatening [within a litteral text notwithstanding] of 'stopping the words' and the flirtation, threatening, with precisely the continuation of the words makes Michaels poetry inclusivistic and visionary, cut to the schizoid domain of our sociuses now.) "trace left neither right neither right nor left..." . (this fragment contains a hilariousness and if this is clearly visible then also a postnihilist absence of even this notion [nihilism] . it remains a philosophical question if we have builded ourselves an ontology, latticework of existence, at all.)
"trace left neither right neither right nor left...". (if there is satiricism in here, than it is also postsatiricism, postironicism. why? with satire we still try to restore something, enriched as it is now with its vulnerability shown embodied, incorporated. yet here we see the accurate desription of a socius, societal complex, hyperurbanity hystery, as it is. 'what it is'. 'what there is'. "the 'there is' is being recovered' (Deleuze-Guattari). after the causality [which still implies improvement], after irony [off off broadway has been gentrified, disneyfied]. it is postmodernism and then still also after that.)
"(the) eye’s deceive it spoken a closed fist of // empty promise...".
(there is an acribic hermetism in this formula [as with Adornos writing] but then also an irreversible cadencing, repetitionism, as in poetry. a paradoxical 'closed fist of empty promise'.)
(furtheron we have some ideomatic lemmata symptomatic and facilitative towards Michaels irreplaceable style:)
"echo-echo chamber of drought wherein (the) closure of what bitten// ever of/ bound as if unto what edge of clime irrespective...";
"(start-stop then...)...// the bitten fingernails of drawers unopened in // rooms of acrid// final waste....".
(here we find a certain stasis described ['echo-echo chamber of drought', words as 'closure', 'bound', 'drawers unopened', 'start-stop then...', etc.] which covet to encompass a kind of Endjazz. we think of Walter Benjamins "Dialektik im Stillstand" and Beuys's "Und jetzt brechen wir den Scheiße ab" in his artwork 'Grond' [ironically the Dutch word for the German 'Grund' and English 'Ground']. in neowording Michael seems to treat language as subject to vortices: "shadowling".)
"circumference of flame from which to inhale...// all sense devoured...// glisten of flesh...
// of meat cast to (the) hyenic...".
"close (the) final door to be done...// in anaemic shadow of...// silenced from (the) once to (the) hereafter-long...// cold currents of stripped flesh ever...".
(as well a dynamism as a finalism is documented here. it is the finalism of decay which isn't linear, which is quite dynamic and forensic. in this sense Michaels poetry is an entomology of the future and a futuroscope of now. "the histories of now" [Michel Foucault].)
(IF, we thought the poetry of Michael McAloran already is a dense [while the above section is written in more aerial style, both qua syntax as per semantics, as I allowed it to appear in my review in denser form] we shall be utterly surprised by what follows. WE, US, and.....me. I have read Gertrude Steins 'The Making of Americans', James Joyce's 'Ulysses' [unfinished], far more challengeing several 'nouveau roman' romans: Alain Robbe-Grillets 'Le Voyeur' [with in it, the 30 pages long description of how a seagull sat on a pole in a harbour] , Marguerite Duras's books [with in it, copious descriptions in annoying yet when acclimatised, narcotic descriptions of a life in the Mekong Delta, of a loveaffair, etc., her 'Hiroshima mon Amour' [as well as the almost unbearable film made of it], her filmed book [by Alain Resnais] 'les Années dernières à Marienbad' plus Géorges Pérec's 'la Disparition' wherein he describes an entirely intelligible book WITHOUT THE LETTER 'E'. Robert Musil's thousands of pages of 'Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften' [man without features] [unfinished] and Célines, Célans, Ciorans resp. vindictive journey to the end of the night; hermetic poetic figments; quadrupulted nihilistic aphorisms ['de l'Inconvénience d'être Née' -- of the inconvenience to be born],
Kapielski's 'Mathematisierung des Todes' an almost brutalist, dadaist, nearly webby incomprehensable tractate of death, foreseen in formulas. so I have read some of the most austere, weird, estrangening, outerworldly texts but nothing, NOTHING, could have prepaired me for the immensely textual onslaught which awaited me simply by turning a page. and ploughing through this text of Michael I got accustomed to the sheer linguisticity of the language. a BALLISTIC influx of seismic trembling avalanches of language nowhere and seemingly never to be stopped anymore. and alone already in this, we find this genial, supermirroring, [Hubble] telescoping, Zeisz's microscoping image of 'what the hell is going on', and even a supplementary dimension outside of this emblematum, this enduring flood of words so intricately as also indifferently mimicking [fill in any word] the disappointment, approval, reinforcement, fracking, undermining of all the developments which make our geodesic, geopopulistic, geopolitical barrenscape visible in this extraordinarily FORM.)
"…asks of…ever of the bind-breathe…fallen unto measure of…spat out the wings of long forgotten else…night for blood & a…cold depth of denuded all stepped alone…breakage nullity of herein where not of a in or of nor nothing be…strip solace…broken bones scattered across rotting floorboards…dense will end rising up to splendour eye’s disregard…a sentence a frenzy of…turns into cannot other than where to have neither of the held close the door…bathes in the eclipse of meat…hyenic/ the blood to flow…effortlessly consumed …where traceless of what in of/of the desire for the garotte…spoken of through silence break/ shrift…the shattered teeth of exodus & the laughter of echoing in the core of breath…reflexive…taint without longing breakage colours of all spoken for…silence as if there were any other than where to sever/no/a ghost-limb fallen silt…passes through one surface unto another…till trace forgotten never of the spe/cial bound by walls constructed of…glass works & the snare of teeth breakage valve of purposeless driven by the desire to final…laconic…no nothing of that yet of the disappearance of yes what matter as if to choke unspoken…dead as…rip of flesh in an outcry of blood & meat…the vocal of it sounds out from out of severance…nothing of the matter a taste of for it forgotten erasure pageant depth kisses of the forgotten…the null light permeate…there go the fingers useless implements…flung to the dogs of…as all that be was never once…neither from the outset nor the outset other than…plumes of…reflections of…nothing…of…".
"…of meat sink further unto…to the…gathered up in tune in turn of bereft exigent…breakage languish as the phlegm fills up the lung of pulse…strips away the skin of it the eyes ablaze some circus dreaming…shard upon shard swallowed down to birth the echo of redundant soundings…all blackened of where nothing…sacred teeth & the skin tacked to the fence-posts of some sudden desire…as close all tongue in dense apparition of expel…through which…from out of…dead-end traces & of/a to be gone…all is of one unsaid as an echo breaches…extracted fingers beseech upon one knee in the dark as the screw bites into membrane’s children… cannot…nothing ever…there nothing there in a stance light end of broken fallen sickness to caress as of the flesh that carries it as an unwanted foetus…it eye lapse…here the eye this is not the overture merely the…casts out yet no answer…none shall…frozen limbs caress the endless night…till sickened of & unto the flight of oblivion where to have is to bruised fruit meats the colours of which…cast out yet no other of…as broken the body vocal is the shit-stained garments of speech unclaimed…as if to…not a…of…it closure speech lost to the non-being in a head of dense sand it dwelleth…shiv tight blend of razor syllabus unclaimed…till broke frozen…pissing as if to say it upon the papyrus claims of sheets crumpled like broken swans…till further nowhere…endless nowhere…zero as the reflect in the… exhalations of cigarette smoke…nothing onwardly exhalations into a transparent room of spoke unspoken…
…cold reflect of blood shed where to…genuflect of some final reaching for…slap to the face begins again…having forgotten cannot…it-surface of blind light reflect of null that cannot…broken glass rupture through which it can or only through the eyes of the silence broken only by…torn to shreds in bask of territory…spitting out the shit force-fed it can only…never yet as…tension light arrested flesh the body broken entity of nothing ever in where trace of languish collapses into foreign…taste waste attrition…bone dice a winter pageant…the roots reach for the nothingness as if else were to be of any…spit tongue lapse…dense accord…there is laughter yet no more…begins again false promise remembers…rat reflect…rat from out of which…keener the eye of some ballast a frozen fragment …dense what will in salve no nothing of the blood…froze light breathe…black casket room of nowhere out as if there ever could have been…spills of entrails from eviscerate a soundless speech neither the speechless nor the following after…hyenic the blood continue to flow until…bled out…nothing of it black polka soundless penetration vibrate of…sees eye see…not a…nothing for this… nothing of that or…ever of the taste of shit in the mouth in the reek of fumes arising from the virgin sands freshly placed before in any given hourglass…as kicked from once of one throughout kicked from one until what of in ever till…as the bleed of which is ever the closure wound non-viable…all as sung through a talus closure of the bloom of razor discharge cascade of breathless speech of the words that never could… ".
(in my, so generously by Michael to me presented book, this absolutely breathless as asphyxiating, overpowering as intravenous, mining operation project desire rapids narrows, textual detextualising attaque of any unprepaired 'reading', goes on page 20-47, instilling in the mean time an attunement as in listening to unforgiven music, free jazz, Yoko Ono, Plasmatics, John Cage études australes', all, aleatoric music with clangs dissonantly following upon other dissonant clangs, etc. that music and this text accomplish a kind of druginduced haze, narcotic high, Dublin (Lyon, Phoenix, Bangkok) bad drugs mosaical night, postmedicated stupor, torpor, rigor, crypsis, stasis, chorea, pogo, epileptoid episodic ellipsophobic Endreading.)
(followed by a tome of again aeronautic, LSD-cosmonautic, chaoscomatose aperçus to the equally stupefying stratagems of neoCapitalist, neopostTrotzkist, neopostMaoist, designs of DubaiBeverlyHills societies with their SaoPaulo, Rio, Manaus, Medellin, Caracas, Djakartalike favelas, barrios, slums. so if there is any violence in the text so much the better. its relevance as poetry is measured after this: a supermirroring of the
hypercomplexisized weave of our leaden, thungsten, besnowed societies, the valutas covered in the finest nanodustings.)
(we have taken any encyclopedic or narrativistic or metatheoretic lettrist work and shaken that up so its words came tumbling down into a big pewter vessel,then took the words randomly in Adolph Wöllfli-style as disregulative dense (nevertheless) figurative lemmatum [think the articles of an encyclopedia], then, this, was and is a new (satiric dynamic) lemmatum, tome, of the world, now, 'worldling'.)
"...cold chase of breakage what of till dense ocular closure tomb dissolve listless design of what which seethe in black light whereof of broken collapse into dread what matter vacant to pose upon in shattered mirror of recollect a dry season of a teeth of sky where once closure discharge effortlessly outspoken a deft eye claim of which desirous embalm what as if to echo-none cold chalice of forgotten bled as it must whereof some talus lightless stricken of what speech reclamation from dregs what sudden nothing of to gain all spun alack ever of if to ever-fragment steel closure effortless design not a trace of lung extinguished in rot of rat where being rot cold zero reflect stillness unto breach birth nothing collect spun lest of will it all whittle it all down to a point of light displaced seemingly to adjust a shudder a mockery laughter of upon where none only surface tension of some abort closure discharge eats where in nothing in or ever much cold spasm disregard it none stammers upon whereof in eye of spectre disregard it once more a recollect a breakage of light ever to return to swim in nothing ever of beyond surface tension that cannot be altered other than through breakage point cold syllabus a nothing more once more as once in dread what speaketh to get it over with till once more in hyenic a body a pulse a strip of null redeem in surrogate waste in absurd closure of unsaid ever of reflect a temperate bloodless field of a scattering of murder of outstretched wings black as was or once whereby till fragment shatter of bones to silenced never a sound of in purity of expectancy expel where drift of is intent given through desire it-lock nothing drift of eye what wither of cold once more cold temperate it shines in broken nocturnes null to flow throughout in vibrate of steel shimmer breakage nothing repeats itself cold once more steel once more an it sarcophagus & lock turned bustle of here & now erase all reduced to whisper tangents null & of till turn beyond into none a closed reap of winds cascade of where scrags of meat devour themselves subtle temperate not a trace of less than was before eye dies it what forgotten bitter pips of forgotten resurgence sickness to breathe beyond nothing of in vocal that compels desirous after-math closed wound in excreta bleed a rim a shattered sun a leakage of transparent blood impenetrable ice inserted into where fresh wound & drift of null echoing out forgotten spasm dead end a pit a nothing ever of ventured lack no nothing ever of it…".
(iconisation of classic use of prose into the haphazardly placed words [here and there and then more here than there] as daring new esthetic plazas, nevertheless demanding space as newer punkfunkier niche of s(t)ayingpower. we can take any slice, choose random beginning and accidental end and illustrate herewith the urgency of both prose, poetry, world and art and the reversal and negation of it.)
(after this as terrifying as releaving BLOCK in the third part of aperçus we find a now almost enbalming formula wherein the language immanently [imminently] destructs itself in usage:)
"the scattered teeth of syllabus arch devouring its own purpose".
{I can now safely conclude my review of Michael McAlorans 'coldzeroreflect' with some zealous words about how the threatening of the teeth of the night embody a sure affirmation of any evenementiality. the brutalist suddenness of certain catacombic surfacialities form the microaccurate as well as visionary universe indigoscoping of what happened before and has never left.)
"…in a strip of skin neither pressure nor dissolve/ as final out of in echo-echo neither the valve the circus pageant/ a dressage of tears flung to the dawn light echo in of which/ flung to the dogs the hyenic the amber naught cold chase some never of laughter all long/ a bitten cleft into where to into/ feeds upon/ struck out…".
"…astringent teeth of a bled carcass of kaleidoscopic waste/ given to where nothing of a whisper a breathless desire for the one thing adamant/ a steel of clipped wings ablaze as catascope revisited births a nullity of breathless landscapes & corridors meshed as one till closure of final door/ as form stare cold white flash of…".

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