by: Daniel Dissinger
There is something to be said of the poet who grabs hold of intangibility with such a firm grasp, enough to grind it into solid matter. Words have become the shapes, sounds, tastes, textures, and smells that they seem to be attracted to, and with the technological hurdles that keep challenging today’s young wordsmiths, exploring new and exciting venues to exhibit poetry has become essential to the medium. James Kerley stretches and pushes the boundaries of what could be considered tangible and/or intangible with his work The Archivist. His work defines an erasure of traditional cover-to-cover books, while maintaining the integrity of fine poetic craftsmanship through careful web development. His words and ideas are excavations of historic fact that have been filtered through a fine mesh of surrealism interactively working within an ever evolving landscape. But the question is, who is the archivist-its creator or its reader?
The reader comes to the beginning and they are presented with a map. Brushing the cursor over the landscape, the potential energy of the space begins to expose itself. Expectations and wild fantasy start to intermingle. Click on “Greenland”, and you find yourself face-to-face with, “The monster resides in Thule”, (Kerley). Scroll further down the body of this find and, “Greenland” suddenly comes to life, “Land is known to gain weight through eons of communal praying”, (Kerley). The cursor races towards the bottom, across the word “circles”. Click and enter “The Mechanical City”. Every “click” of the mouse brings the reader further and deeper into the world of The Archivist. Each time a word pops out at the reader, it seems for good reason that the reader should pay attention to this world’s details. James Kerley’s environment allows the reader to explore the inches and molecules that keep moving, closely.
But what makes this constant exploration satisfying to the reader? Why does The Archivist never grow stale? Wallace Stevens writes in his essay “Imagination as Value”, “The world is no longer an extraneous object, full of other extraneous objects, but an image” (Stevens 151). In The Archivist, James Kerley extracts many objects, displays them in this precise environment, but it is the reader that creates the images. By entering and exiting and re-entering at will all the possible locations, the reader teases their own experience with a playful, almost sexual attraction. It is kind of fumbling and awkward at first, like trying to unhook a bra in the dark with one hand for the first time. There is a line that James Kerley writes, “.electric between foreheads”, (Kerley). His environment is very much like this image-two beings interacting with one another with explosive energy being created through communal evolution and absorption of potential energy. This interactive experience is made possible by multiple, and simultaneous readings.
James Kerley, in essence, is exploring multiple dimensions in this poetic gesture. In his book The Fabric of the Cosmos, Brain Greene has said, “If superstring theory is proven correct, we will be forced to accept that the reality we have known is but a delicate chiffon draped over a thick and richly textured cosmic fabric”, (Greene 19). Poetry is there to discover and uncover-awakening corners of our brains to corners on our bodies that have been dormant for centuries. James Kerley has begun this digging with The Archivist-providing the tools to answer that question asked by so many writers and creative thinkers: what has not been done yet?
It is important to point out that The Archivist is rooted deep in historic fact. The reader will meet with two important characters in this environment-Edward Drinker Cope and O.C Marsh. Besides their last names providing a clever play on words throughout the piece, Cope and Marsh bring a very real and factual tone to The Archivist. Edward Drinker Cope and O.C Marsh were paleontologists in the 19th Century. Though both of these men were brilliant thinkers in their time, their opposite ideologies formed a strong feud between them that even lasted through to Cope’s death in 1897. A major factor that fueled this feud was Marshes strict Darwinism, while Cope couldn’t accept the absence of a divine creator, (heavily due to his beliefs as a Quaker). Cope went on to become a huge supporter of the Neo-Lamarckian school of evolution, (Jaffe). Of course, one would not know this strictly reading James Kerley’s text alone-another great aspect of his work. The Archivist lends to much curious research to be done on the part of the reader. This exploration propels the reader, and the reading in all sorts of directions. Much like the work of a paleontologist, the reader must create timelines and historic background checks in order to unlock certain locked doors to this poetic structure. The reader finds part of a fossil in James’s poetry, then follows the clues to another part of the internet, or another book, in order to piece together this excavated poetic gesture.
Andre Breton says it best, “Surrealism, such as I conceive of it, asserts our complete nonconformism clearly enough so that there can be no question of translating it, at the trail of the real world, as evidence for the defense”, (Breton 196). “Appendix I” of The Archivist takes Breton’s nonconformism and drives it into the ground with such force it becomes unrecognizable. James Kerley exhibits an uninhibited sense of space and construction with the shapes, sounds, and textures of letters and words. In the first piece, “Thought Map: Antlers”, the reader is presented with a rule, “Everything is a word, not everything is a word”, (Kerley). Below the rule is what can be best described as a graph of letters. Inside his winding conglomerate, the reader will find words that don’t necessarily form a linear narrative, but that interact with each other, the reader’s sense of sight, and sense of grammatical balance. Even for the writer of this paper, MLA formatting doesn’t have the parameters to quote from such a text, but it is a must. There is an interesting line, or find, in this piece, “ev e / r / y / o n eisstaring”, (Kerley). Everyone is staring-this idea can be carried with the reader throughout the exploration of The Archivist. But it also says something important about humans as a whole. This idea that when people encounter something different, something that pushes against the current of what is supposed to be normal, they stare, long and hard and without consideration. Further on down this section, the reader finds an underlined word that when clicked on, moves them onto the next poetic structure. James Kerley doesn’t leave any stone uncovered. In fact, he crushes these stones to pieces, and rearranges them to create all sorts of new species. There is a section of “Appendix I”, entitled “Thought Map: Sharks”, that plays with mathematics and poetic gesture to create a new form of life, “plas m³ - tou ch³ = ( plasm - touch ) (p la s m² + self + k ing² )”, (Kerley).
It is quite evident that James is influenced by Concrete Poetics. In the introduction to Mary Ellen Solt’s book, Concrete Poetry: A World View, she states, “…there is a fundamental requirement which the various kinds of concrete poetry meet: concentration upon the physical material from which the poem or text is made”, (Solt). But, what if the material that the poet was concentrating on was invisible? Would an invisible material disqualify the work as Concrete Poetry? The internet is a tricky subject, especially in these poetic realms. But, consider the process of Plasmonics, “The goal of plasmonics is to ‘squeeze’ light so that one can manipulate objects at the nanoscale…”, (Kaku 26). Manipulation being the key word here, James Kerley molds and re-molds spaces to accrue precise reactions from these spaces when one interacts with his poetic environment. The interpretations are always different and always evolving, but the actions and reactions that one takes to move in and out of these spaces have been manipulated by James Kerley. No matter how many times the reader leaves and returns to The Archivist, if he or she clicks on “Exploding Harpoons”, they are redirected to the same place. The reader might choose to interact with it in a different pattern, but the places stay put. This process in which James worked in is kind of like sublimation-he was able to somehow turn a gas into a solid. Yet, at the same time, the readers are interacting with it on the gas level still, moving without an inhibitor or walls. James’s concentration, and care working in and with such a material, like the World Wide Web, puts him in a new category of Concrete Poetics. Wallace Stevens says it best:
The truth seems to be that we live in concepts of the imagination before the reason has established them. If this is true, then the reason is simply the methodizer of the imagination. It may be that the imagination is a miracle of logic and that its exquisite divinations are calculations beyond analysis, as the conclusions of the reason are calculations wholly within analysis. (Stevens 154)
One must not forget that The Archivist is poetry, investigative poetry to say the least about it. Beyond its abilities to warp our reality into flashes of historic wit and excavative complexities, the gestural personality of James Kerley comes through clearly, “He slits the throat of a red bird. a red bird dead on the ground. Its chest opens the wind. The wind outside is a throat, red bird. – silence, morning. The dead girl. Hands behind her back, symbols of / Thane and the Monster. He found her, drew her body before he forgot-”, (Kerley). That is what makes this space independently special, these moments where pausing to stare is not rude but warranted. In her essay “Modern Poetry”, Mina Loy says, “And why has the collective spirit of the modern world, of which both are the reflection, recognized itself unanimously in the new music of unprecedented instruments, and so rarely in the new poetry of unprecedented verse?”, (Loy 269-70). Here, Loy is speaking about the collaborative potential of American Jazz’s language and American Poetry, but it can be related to Modern Technology and Modern Poetics. Why haven’t poets really embraced this medium? There is the underground movement of Digital Poetry being fore fronted by poets such as Christopher Funkhouser, but James Kerley has really married the integrity of the written word with technology-it is an equal partnership, “history-shared liver, shared technology build yourself up to the city doll bird / impressions cut out cracks, warm bath water tattoos small spine-shared knuckle joints”, (Kerley).
Work Cited
- Breton, Andre. “Manifesto of Surrealism”. Kwasny 160-196. Print
- Green, Brian. The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Print.
- Jaffe, Mark. “The Profile of Edward Drinker Cope”. The Gilded Dinosaur: The Fossil War Between E.D. Cope and O.C. Marsh and the Rise of American Science. The Niagara Fall Museum. October 3, 2009. Web.
- Kaku, Michio. Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel. New York: Anchor Books , 2009. Print.
- Kerley, James. The Archivist. http://thearchivistonline.com/index.php. October 3, 2009. Web.
- Kwasny, Melissa, ed. Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2004. Print.
- Loy, Mina. “Modern Poetry”. Kwasny 269-273. Print.
- Solt, Mary Ellen. “Concrete Poetry: A World View”. UBUWEB. Indiana University Press: 1968. October 3, 2009. Web.
- Stevens, Wallace. The Necessary Angel: Essays on Reality and the Imagination. New York: Vintage Books, 1951. Print.
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