Rodrigo Toscano
The Disparities
Green Integer
2002
104 pages
Softcover, $9.95



The Disparities is a book of often short notes, piled onto one another, which prismatically shifts the reader into continual motion, however abridged, by rather staccato rhythms. One of the intentions of the writing is to debunk the hidden (-agended) narrator of his/her/its powers by denuding him/her/it of representation by the common signifier (modifier), I.

Consequently, the writing tends to purl like this bit from "Premise No. 2":

Concrete, lips, 8 p.m., entireties or partials
Portend, broach, agonistic floor plane, (sloping) Hail
Intermittent, sounds seldom, there, clips, green bulbs, beam
Noise, as much as line (any poised radiance), blurt
Charity, a moral floral decay, spinal

*

Of course, this is a bit of a game being played, because the person/s/entities who wrote this are here, or were, having written it, just not specifically acknowledged. But one goes along just the same, because the constant disjunction/conjunction of Rodrigo Toscano’s writing sends one into the often forgotten or taken-for-granted minutia of what it takes to live and experience things at the rate one thinks one can—one can’t—handle.

For instance, in the partial poem above, in the list-making, where did the lips go to after the first line? Are they the same as the broach, the same as the green bulbs? In Toscano’s poems, one feels like really nothing is sticking to the narrator. He senses and discards what’s sensed.

The quick shifts of time and space can bridge interpersonal/inter-cartal connectivity, as in the carts and the confusion in the beginning of "Portrait 7":

Not remembering much? Carts of copper. Alter.
About it. Tipped over. It. But being influenced by.

*

Note the "influenced by". The mind of the narrator is made aware of the "it" that is or may be the carts containing copper, once it tipped over. It’s also more than likely that the carts of copper are not being tipped over, that something else is. They may not refer to each other. And the "it" is stranded.


The shifts can also move outward, beyond the influence of the narrator, as on the previous page’s "Portrait 5", where the narrator witnesses, "A bird eye blinks, looks to Moscow".

Why Moscow? Why not Minsk?

The specificity—like the Moscow—in the pieces sometimes feels strange, as they often don’t carry any more weight narratively than their insistent, evanescent presences.

*

Toscano’s earlier work Partisans and this one have in common the poet Leslie Scalapino. Scalapino’s O Books was the publisher of Partisans and the sub-publisher? of the Green Integer book, which is listed as An O Book on its spine. The connection between Scalapino and Toscano makes a lot of sense, as there is resonance between their poetics, especially of how a self or the selves are constructed by one and the worlds, and the worlds through whom one is one or several. They are also both interested in social justice, human rights, and this finds its way into both of their poetries quite readily. Toscano is much more likely to use more disparate sources, however. One feels a multivocality in his work, which includes sources outside of the narrator’s un/natural voices. Whereas Scalapino’s disjunctions appear more about possibly different sides of polyvocal self.

*

In the multifurcation of the selves and societies and the abuses back and forth, Toscano seems interested in not making a lot of the material lyrical. This seems a conscious choice. The writing often feels like broken up prose bits at times, even ungainly, but then switches suddenly toward a penchant for tight sound structures and their movements, as in this section of the piece, "Journal":

Had to keep working with them, though I needed peace
The night before, of 75 years ago
Its wares and wiles, just hangin’ out, you call "Lucid"?
Look (saying that as if I’d had a clear sight of it)
Tomorrow’s wordweek could be a prelude to arms
Shuttled along merely a stanza’d snack for it
Of a too late we couldn’t do jack type—journal.


*

Note how syntactically slack the opening four lines are compared to the denser expression and syntax in the final three. Note the sudden internal rhyme, the shift to a pronounced lyrical sensibility, in line six’s ‘snack’ and line seven’s ‘jack’. These shifts between more open and more condensed strategies make the writing flow unexpectedly at times.

I felt the short-lined form of the book’s final three pieces, "non-confidential memos", "Corollary A", and "Corollary B" worked better than the box-like forms previously seen because it gave more white space, more silence, to the distances between words and reflections. I had a feeling of being crowded-in when reading the longer-lined pieces that appear earlier in the book.

Toscano has a more recent book called Platform, published by Atelos, and another one due out next month by Krupskaya called To Leveling Swerve. The Disparities, though published after Partisans, is actually his first work. I wanted to start there, here.

O, Vozque Pulp
Carlos M. Luis (images) and Derek White (text)
Calamari Press
2004
40 pages
Softcover, $6



A self-publishing venture by Derek White, O, Vozque Pulp joins rather frazzled and fragile ink images (also watercoloring) by Carlos M. Luis with White’s short prose works, often carrying titles and travel narratives, slightly surreal, that attempt modern mythologizing casually and the reconstruction of pasts imaginatively. The texts use older, loaded symbols like ‘temple monkeys’, ‘divining rods’, ‘totem poles’, and bridge them with newer rituals, newer stories, but still with the feeling of creation stories lingering in the background. I kept thinking of J.G. Ballard’s, Joy Harjo’s, and Wassily Kadinsky’s stories while reading and viewing the chapbook.

Here’s "The False Hopes That Airports Raise":


It was when I was crossing a single-file bridge that every one I didn’t know yet came streaming from the other direction. We were all clinging to pieces of debris, just trying to get by each other.

On the suspension supports below was a brilliant red woodpecker perched on a nest just beneath the water line. It was alive and desperately defended itself every time a fish came along to get at its eggs. Human nature caused me to stick my foot under to nudge at it—to selfishly verify I wasn’t seeing things.

The red bird latched onto my shoe and started pecking and peeling back the sole. When I pulled my shoe out, the woodpecker held on. Once out of the water, it was dead, and it wasn’t really red, but a mottled grayish-orange. It was the same bird that rattled my chimney every morning when I didn’t live near a body of water.




Luis's image to/of/against/after the above is too large for the blog--I tried.

*

The abstract drawings by Luis are what the viewer wants them to be. To me, they seem cellular, or almost what I would imagine goes on when one’s synapses fire. I don’t know which came first—the image or the text or both—but there are seeming correlations between them, most acutely in the story, "Eyes On The Divining Rod" and the image on the facing page. The image is slender and black, which sometimes looks like a tear in a fabric—there is ruffling at the edges. Or it’s a close-up of an artery. Or the divining rod. Or, or, or.

The experience of reading and viewing the book pushed me toward primordial thinking, that long taproot back to early utterances and images. Yet one also follows along with the specifics of the travels detailed in the texts. The mappable travels are mostly in the American West and Southwest. And Pacific Northwest. Utah. But there are other travels as well, usually involving animals. Here’s the brief "We Keep Reminding Ourselves To Remember":


The fountain in our garden was running until we painted our walls orange and changed the shower curtain to an opaque one with haphazard black lettering. Soon I will hear the birds calling, if it is still not too wet.


Luis's and White's book is a dreamlike visitation, a bit haunted, a bit humorous, tender, veering toward cosmological responses. Responding to the cosmos. And the cosmos responding through them. It is a convincing work, brightening and darkening, and especially welcomed.