about:blank by Adam Wyeth
about:blank is a fiercely intelligent, philosophically complex book of poetry resonating with references to philosophy of language, existentialism, Beckett and Descartes amongst others. The poet himself discusses the process of writing it in reference to the “Jungian active imagination.”
Wyeth invites us here into a haunting, protean, rhizomatic dreamscape which forces us to question everything. Immerse yourself in its rhythm and language, let yourself fall into a trance and find some part of yourself altered.
The work is prefaced by several quotes but the one which struck me the most was Harold Pinter’s, master of psychological drama, of spaces. Instantly I thought of the quote: “no man’s land… does not move…or change…or grow old…remains…forever …icy…silent,” of how some memories remain frozen and others, perhaps most others, fade and change and continue to do so. But I also thought of a no man’s land, a terrifying and dangerous place between the trenches where deserted soldiers would hide and appear as “ghoulish beasts” to scavenge from the dead, which poet Wilfred Owed described as “the face of the moon, chaotic, crater-ridden, uninhabitable, awful, the abode of madness.”*
My mind was equally drawn back to Giacometti, the painted frame around his portraits, the sculpted figures, elongated, warped and distended in space for this is a book whose anxious, hallucinatory loops play with your perception and imbues its sensory space with profound questions and contradictions. It forges infinite connections while also imparting a sense of alienation.
The “blank,” a non-linguistic form, here both visual and auditory, reinforces this idea of a “structural transformation.” Myth, chimera and alchemy, Wyeth’s poetry challenges the reader’s reality through a richly imaginative, Joycean journey of his unconscious.
To purchase the book and read more about Adam, see link below:
https://www.salmonpoetry.com/details.php?ID=552&a=191
*https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/legends-what-actually-lived-no-mans-land-between-world-war-i-trenches-180952513/