dublinka

To me, Karen Volkman's Sonnet captures and exhibits, an ongoing process of digital reconfiguration of our world. With shades of William Gibson's neuromancer, whose novel portrayed skies of television gray, Volkman speaks of data from the skies, particles, and retinal snowfalls. By doing this, you can almost, envision, a future whose metaphors for nature are dominated by technological etymologies, and where all the old metaphors, based on animism or proto-human substrates, have been abandoned or forgotten. And yet the poem (complete with a doff of the hat to Louis Mac Neice: 'World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural...), seems to suggest that this verisimilitude should be taken apart where it lies. I like it. There's a lot more going on elsewhere in the poem too - though it guards itself well against the impatient. See for yourself below:

Retinal snowfall, anything that slips,
where children kick a snowman in the dim
winter increment, the gray of 3 p.m.
Two red cars, one blue. White wing that dips

and opens softly in the eyes’ ellipse,
an n dimension furling at the rim—
a down is paling—shyer motions limn,
shyest motions adumbrate the tips—

the edges ether, falter. World will be
reconstituted as an airy scree—
white waif particles, a haze of eyes,

meticulous slippings, data from the skies.
O angry kids, the semblance you don’t see
dissembles also. Kill it where it lies.



You can also catch more of her work at ploughshares here.