Metropolis 1-15
Robert Fitterman
publisher: Sun & Moon Press, 2000
isbn: 1-55245-063-5
price: $11.95
Fitterman mates a certain classic "Objectivist" style (in the manner of George Oppen and Louis Zukofsky) with a hip, contemporary sensibility which borders on the techno-ambient, thus sacrificing some of the angstier concerns of his Modernist predecessors for an interest in pure, accessible verbal pleasure.
Metropolis, an on-going work which should reach 24 sections when completed, is very much a New York poem, filled with the chatter of that city's highly social scene with the everyday weirdness of an often nomadic life lived deep in the shadows of skyscrapers.
The first section, despite its cross-cutting collage style, nearly recalls Breton's Surrealist masterpiece Nadja (itself an homage to a city, Paris) in its roving-eye view and the heady, decentered feeling of its urban phantasmagoria:
But grander than that
L'Hotel actually happened
scaffolding in some circles
gone twilight & Lex essences
sipped down subdeveloper more (bestial, residual,
festive red clay livery
homespun depot some yellow western atmospheric glib hog
I was there
but there was no espresso bar
did you time this? the connection
between us is sheerly residential
minus crossed our paths are starred
in an awkward upper west side hey-day
[9-10]
Part of the beauty of Fitterman's style is that it lets him drop odd, potentially dull stock phrases that one remembers from somewhere -- "we got / a situation here" from the police radio in a b-movie, or "lighting fixtures the last word in / chrome" from sales parlance -- and puts them in contact with more purely poetic ones -- "a lay sky plurals dusk about us," or the last lines of section 1: "the dead lose / their defenses" (which he then undercuts: "that's been my experience").
This technique creates a strange floating sensation that elevates the individual units of the cliché -- the chrome, the situation -- while not letting the classically poetic moments get precious or sententious.
Section 7 is a sort of fake dictionary utilizing many of the formal devices -- quotes from literature, dates, abbreviations, etymologies -- to create a difficult but familiar surface in which the humor of not quite knowing what a word means combines with a quasi-exposé on the mystical nature of words that dictionaries, with their lexical depth psychology, suggest. Like a series of brief portraits of the dreamlife of spoonerisms (later in Metropolis he writes "My favorite opera is Il Trattoria"), section 7 pushes the limit between poetry and goulash syntax:
Fade -[~]^^^ I. droop, whither, a company of hunters, any sawed-off weapon that has lost taste to corrupt, weaken. 1303 Syn. neuer gres, ne neuer sall, bot euermore be.. falow, and fade. 2. barber's term, Life began to vade. 3. shrink. Lit. and Fig. OE. fadian., WGer. ORG. *fadia. 4. v.3. dial. to dance around from town to country. 5. Spec. Cornish. A passel of maidens... begin'd for... to fade so friskis.
[60]
Section 8 is a "libretto" in which several landmark buildings -- the World Trade Center, the Flatiron, Rockefeller Center -- take part in an orderly but disjunctive choral crown:
FLATIRON:
Open up
your heart
and see it
the other way.
What makes
a hat felt?
[70]
Other sections use odd word breaks to shimmy grammar back and forth in a flotsam/jetsam manner:
loo
ming sud
den a mall
all ang
el & la
ttice at aw
ning's va
se & sparkl
es pill
ars lewd ac
cusa
[22]
Reduced forms like the three word poem ("Life / long / fishcakes") or other manners of verbal dislocation create stucco-like surfaces over which the eye roves for meaning, getting hooked there and being let loose elsewhere.
It is perhaps useful to compare Fitterman's technique (which relies very much on arrangement on the page) to that of an abstract painter, like Robert Ryman or Cy Twombly, who deals with single colors (in this case, white) over long stretches of canvas to highlight sculptural surface play.
In such works, the "white space" becomes more than a unit of composition and dominates the terms of engagement, such that attention is turned to the minor things -- paint flecks, the chiaroscuro effects of small shadows -- the art becoming both "busy" and calming, but in any case not making huge, impenetrable philosophical gestures.
Fitterman's sensual relationship to words -- in both sound and color -- and his light touch makes reading Metropolis a uniquely satisfying aesthetic experience.
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