The All-Union Day of the Shock Worker
Edwin Torres
publisher: Roof Books, 2002
isbn: 1-931824-00-2
price: $10.95
"AYYY: soy bilingual... pero BILINGUALISSIMO!... de nada!" screams the 18-point sans serif font of "A Nuyo-Futurist's Manfestiny," the Blast-like final section of this cartoon mushroom cloud of a book.
A frenetic, but elegantly conceived, admixture of the most significant poetic and philosophical trends of the last decade -- digital media and information arts, multiculturalism, performance and sound poetry, and the return to subjective lyricism after the waning of deconstruction -- Shock Worker is one more unexpected twist in the career of Torres, a New York poet who was once associated with the performance poets of the Nuyorican cafè.
Torres' slam heritage comes through strongly in his jangly, El Lissitsky -inspired graphics as each of its pages -- the delicately arrayed computer vomit of the series "I.E. Zagmm" in which bits of Spanish and English can be gleaned from its entropic sludge, or the Lettristic panels of "What What What Now," some of which look more like exploded eye charts or astrological diagrams for deviant religions than poems -- has an "in-your-face" quality that shouts over the crowd as much as seduces them with clever, unpretentious and agile displays of Quark acuity.
This isn't to say there aren't quiet moments -- the delicate lyric "Separatist Invasion" is a little mantra against the alienated sensibility:
There have been a thousand sightings
of people I used to know.
Separations of copies of
who it is they look like, backed up
by carbons of who they are...
The concert has happened
and all these people of me,
have still to go home.
[36]
Indeed, it is these lyrical elements that shape the main thematic of this book, a sort of diary of a New York poet in the tradition of Whitman and O'Hara who seems to be in bodily contact with everything -- people, things, noises, smells, and in this case letters -- and responds to this field of experience like a prophet in agony over the sense of the infinite he finds in a single flower -- but a whole lot funnier.
One might expect a ton of agitprop politics with his self-conscious overloading of verbal and visual effects, but the politics are in the process -- the poet moving forward in fleshly 3D, formatting his words graffiti-like on the page and asking in his inebriated digital creole: "Ever put the New in Yo?"
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