The Imperfectionist (Page 2)

In the great essay he wrote to introduce his translations of poems by Reverdy, Kenneth Rexroth distinguished between Apollinaire's collagelike technique, in which "the elements, the primary data of the poetic construction, are narrative or at least informative wholes," and Reverdy's more extreme reduction of those elements to "simple, sensory, emotional or primary informative objects capable of little or no further reduction." Picabia's method differs as much from Apollinaire's as does Reverdy's rapt essentialism. In fact, it is impossible to generalize about the fundamental constituents of Picabia's verbal structures. In his case, for that matter, these poetic molecules tend to be internally twisted or fractured: they have what poet Ron Silliman recently called torque, a tendency to veer off unpredictably, producing effects "of far greater power than referential"--think Apollinaire--"or abstract meaning"--as in Reverdy--"would lead one to suspect."

Women men
Affairs
A country ambitious
For sovereignty
I love it when someone folds the eyes
Of troubles
Especially in the sea of the thorax

That seventh line is the pivot: proto-Surrealist, torqued sharply within itself, it lends a ricocheting motion to the poem as a whole, which then doubles back and begins critically taking apart the poetic voice he started out with, only to subside into his initial melancholy:

But I'm telling disinterested lies
It's almost the same thing
The soul's truth
Is the great cowardice of academic arrogance
Looking into your eyes
I'm content
In my forgotten solitude

Other poems, even quite long ones, are much more densely packed, torquing from line to line or within each line the way only the central one of "Alas!" does. One might imagine the results could be exhausting, leaving the reader with no point of reference, but more often Picabia offers a remarkably vivid experience of such poetic turns as phenomena to be savored--poetic plasticity as an end in itself. This is particularly true of extended works like "The Mortician's Athlete"--one better comprehends its highly charged disjunctiveness upon learning that its five "cantos" were composed by taking a quantity of short independent poems and mashing them together without their titles--and Picabia's early masterpiece, "Purring Poetry," over 800 lines of giddy, unpunctuated, uncapitalized, free-associative poetry on love and the gloom of the wartime that had just ended, to which is appended the following note: "This poetry has no beginning or end; imagine that there's no cover and that it is bound with copper rings."

For Lowenthal, the disjunctiveness of Picabia's poetry should be seen as a form of abstraction, comparable to that which would be periodically manifested in his paintings. Which is fair enough, except that in poetry the word "abstraction" connotes something dry, detached and possibly pedantic--"personal removal by the poet," as Frank O'Hara famously put it. Picabia is actually closer to the "personism" that O'Hara set in opposition to abstraction, but which he only half-jokingly considered "so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time"--wrongly, since Picabia got there first.

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