[REVIEW] road, road, road, road, road by M; Margo

(MA Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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M; Margo (Margo Emm), Editor of the online poetry journal, Zoomoozophone Review, identifies as “transgender” and “non-binary.” I have called them a poet of angst, because of their penchant for dark ruminations about “gender dysphoria” and life, in general. road, road, road, road, road (hereafter, “road”) is their fourth collection of innovative poetry in a conceptual mode whereby precise rules were determined in advance, fixing structure and form. According to Margo, “road is a book of chance-based texts, comprising random wikipedia clusters.” Each “text” includes 50 words, and the collection includes 50 poems.

I have followed their career as a poet and musician since first encountering their writing which is characterized by skillful use of repetition, “psychological transformations,” metaphor, innovations of form and hybridity, as well as, creative manipulation of embedded meanings. For example, road‘s reliance upon the numbers 5 [pertaining to one’s love life or to human anatomy] and 50 [seeking personal and spiritual freedom] invoke a concern for the subjective, as well as, for mathematics and formal operations [e.g., a random numbers device], and the number 5 is fundamental to our base-10 numerical system. Thus, in one “text,”

 

“five menfolk murdered in /

addition     five     suffering /

half-finished facsimile of /

the    groove     a     powerful /

slapdash botanist altogether /

his     lifecycle,     also     a /

longtime     fellow     of     the /

Normal  Times  gone  by…”

 

Furthermore, in addition to repeating the word, “road,” five times in the collection’s title, Margo is most likely calling the reader’s attention to one of the word’s dictionary meanings—“a series of events or a course of action leading to a particular outcome,” a perspective that they no doubt intend to challenge by using statistical probability to compose his 50 “texts.” This bold point of view is reminiscent of Geert Buelens’ comment concerning the “constructed nature” of contemporary poetry that employs “smart, rich, and didactic language.” In addition to possessing these features, however, Margo’s “texts” in road extend traditional definitions of what we mean by “poetry,” and Kenneth Goldsmith, as well as, others, have asked, without agreed-upon answers: “What does it take to be a poet in the Internet Age?”

The first page of road includes an “Author’s Note” entailing 5 statements. The author’s notes delimit and bound the collection, preventing the randomized “texts” from sinking to the levels of nihilism, mimicry,  or gratuity. Indeed, as Marjorie Perloff has stated about “conceptual” poetry, what may appear random or undirected is, in the hands of a skilled craftsperson, work borne of intentionality, choice, and forethought. The first note states: “The road is a literary form that is similar to a poem but not quite the same as a poem.” Paraphrasing Marcel Duchamp, “It is not a poem; it is an idea of a poem.” One would like to know more about Margo’s views concerning what constitutes poetry, particularly, in a literary climate with increasingly blurred boundaries between poetry and prose, indeed, poetry and anything else [e.g., see Flarf, “epic” poetry, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, internet poetry, vispo, and other experimental forms].

Note 2 states: “The road is a fifty-word text-collage produced by means of chance operation.” Importantly, though, as Goldsmith has pointed out, most literary formulations require a human “hand” at some point in any process, even if random-order machines or tables determine final results [Is there ever a “final result?”]. Perloff has said of “collage” poetry, “Each element in the collage has a kind of double function: it refers to an external reality even as its compositional thrust is to undercut the very referentiality it seems to assert.” Thus, parts of a collage are juxtaposed in relation to others—and the juxtaposition may be “chance-based” or not. Each of Margo’s “texts” may be viewed as a whole, as well as, as a pastiche of discrete units, both with [or, as Margo will point out below, with and/or without] significance to the reader. Thus, “Physical     model     of     a / bacterial     flagellum     is / expressed (hence the season, / first at Pocono Raceway and / tenth at the track for teams / not being allowed to run….” The author’s incorporation of white spaces not only slows the reader’s motion across words, but, also, inserts a visual component, and Ulla Dydo has discussed “visuality” in relation to the poetry of Gertrude Stein.

Margo’s Note 3 asserts that, “The road is a semantic pathway leading to no particular semantic destination.” The author’s “texts,” then, are not goal-directed, contrary to the dictionary definition quoted above, bringing to mind the roles of luck and chance in anyone’s life. There are limits to intentionality and choice, echoing the ongoing scientific debate about the validity of “free-will.” Goldsmith has written that a feature of some experimental works is to be, at the same time, “unboring” and “boring” and that writers need to “re-imagine our normative relationship to language,” a process certainly performed when Margo’s methodology produces lines such as, “(arrowheads and hammering / devices) km team event New / York at the age of 79,….” Goldsmith has, also, said, “We need to employ a strategy of opposites: defamiliarization and disorientation.”—a good description of the effects produced by Margo’s “texts,” in which the author defamiliarizes our common notions about what a poem is and disorients the reader-viewer so that they are unable to make those assumptions.

“The road is not necessarily asemic nor exactly pansemic, but perhaps post-semic.” is Margo’s fourth note. Again, they emphasize that the texts are random but not, actually, random at all. There is, then, “method” to “madness,” and a domain exists beyond physical and material formulations of reality [i.e., according to mathematics, events-in-the-world cannot be random and non-random at the same time], referring back to the numerical symbolism of #50 presented above.

Note 5, “The road is something that can be read or not.” reflects a topic commonly discussed by Goldsmith relative to “conceptual” writing. He has pointed out, “Conceptual writing is a type of writing that doesn’t require a readership.” He goes on to say that unread writing is characterized by “illegibility” that disrupts the normal reading process. I understand these pronouncements to mean, in part, that language, as conventionally understood, can be re-arranged in ways that make a text [sic] un-knowable, thus, in some sense, un-readable. Such manifestations of phonemes, graphemes, and morphemes render some experimental texts, essentially, unreal and inaccessible.

What, ultimately, is “post-semic” or, even, post-conceptual writing? Are we necessarily blurring distinctions between the written word and visual art? Are we inventing “texts” comparable to Kazimir Malevich’s revolutionary black paintings, creating literature’s own version of Suprematism—moving as far away as possible from the representational and the objective—the expected, the learned, the social, the “normal—toward the numerical 50?”  Wherever these inventions take us, I suspect that Margo will be at the forefront of innovation. Every reader-viewer who appreciates, or is curious about, experimental literature, however defined, will want to read road, road, road, road, road, as well as, Margo’s past and future work.

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Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD (USA). In 2019, GaussPDF published her collection, Poems for Rachel Dolezal.