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Poetry. "The ambitious poems of Marc Vincenz don't fit into any poetic scene or aesthetic camp I can name--he is an internationalist, and his work mixes far-flung flavors: a little Hart Crane, a little Italo Calvino, a little Pavese...possibly a little Vallejo? These poems don't stand still, but rocket around, through tones that range from the highly romantic to the ironic to the analytic. They incorporate the vocabulary of chemistry, anthropology, and ecology--and marry it to flamboyant verbal stylistics. Vincenz seems unafraid of being exotic or abstruse, but his poetry is also soundly grounded in a recurrent emotional urgency, and by returning with great plainness to the irrefutable pain of the human condition." --Tony Hoagland
Marc Vincenz seeks nothing less than to track and sing "the forms life takes / as it vanishes and reappears / then as it dissolves." Marc Vincenz's The Pearl Diver of Irunmani charts the paths of consciousness on an aquatic journey into the heart of mind and matter. What does it mean to be alive? What does it mean to be alive preparing for death? What animates the soul moments before death? In this collection, Marc Vincenz trans-navigates the oceans of consciousness that contain all the elements of life and death ... and rebirth. In a language that is spare and ghostly, the narrator embarks upon finding that pearl of knowledge embedded in the heart of meaning.
"Does the death of a daughter mean naught? Beautiful Rush, Marc Vincenz' fifth collection, is haunted by the muse of Cassandra: the speaker acts as witness to her alienation and burden of debt ('your neck . . . Prodded / with a loan shark's knife'), an empathy attenuated by his own scientific ratiocinations as 'other' ('What's it like / to be the victim?') and offset by his own poetic and anthropologic labor ('silent grave-digging / for antediluvian bones, for crude evidence / of concerned mammals . . . and those unrepeating, / unrepeating worlds'). The burden of proof Vincenz frames first as beauty, titularly and in 'ode to beauty,' yet ultimately, as this book is scored by the hunt for truth (however impossible, as were Cassandra's words), not comfort, its speaker finds peace in the liminal, before acquiescing to the arrival not of Venus in Furs but a voice speaking in a language we are finally prepared to receive: 'you hear voices / in hard labor, / and behind closed rooms...something / like knowledge, clearing its throat.'" - Virginia Konchan, Matter Monthly
In subtitling this book "A Divine Comedy," the poet Marc Vincenz brushes up against Dante, and yet he does so "in the pulse of a breath, /waiting for the rain / to wash away the dream." There is light here--not perhaps the roseate of the Florentine retinue--but one we can use right now: "All visions / gone, but this, a world, / a world / dancing ahead." Vincenz questions notions of humanity, the potency and power of language over time, implying perhaps that codes have driven us throughout history and that the emergence of the AI will yield the next stage in its evolution. After a long night of the soul, where formal religion yields to love and imagination, we emerge to a healing space that is both inner and outer, physical and spiritual. The Syndicate of Water & Light gives us a sense that we can grow in knowledge and that we can change--if not, perhaps, the world, then at least within ourselves.
"Gods of a Ransacked Century is infused with the knowledge that by creating a universe, creating individual humans, and by creating their love, Marc Vincenz has doomed all these phenomena. To identify is to create. To create is to ensure destruction. These are the circumstances under which lovers are obliged to create sweetness and artists are obliged to create beauty. Gods of a Ransacked Century—with economy, strength, and passion, shares these truths, with a sanguine sincerity unlike anything I’ve read before." --Jonathan Penton
Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice vigorously engages with the Why? and the How? of prose poetry, a form that is currently enjoying a surge in popularity. With contributions by both practitioners and academics, this volume seeks to explore how its distinctive properties guide both writer and reader, and to address why this form is so well suited to the early twenty-first century. With discussion of both classic and less well- known writers, the essays both illuminate prose poetry’s distinctive features and explore how this "outsider" form can offer a unique way of viewing and describing the uncertainties and instabilities which shape our identities and our relationships with our surroundings in the early twenty-first century. Combining insights on the theory and practice of prose poetry, Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice offers a timely and valuable contribution to the development of the form, and its appreciation amongst practitioners and scholars alike. Largely approached from a practitioner perspective, this collection provides vivid snapshots of contemporary debates within the prose poetry field while actively contributing to the poetics and craft of the form.
The Mayfly Codex unfolds with such a deftly woven oscillation between high and low (though which is which in the 'frothy brew?'): mechanical and organic, bawdy and reverential, declarative and interrogative.
'Thank the gods for poets like Varn who stand undaunted at the prospect of unmasking the “bloodied face of history” as inextricably tied to the most pervasive prophecies of religion—those stories that leave “not a creature…unshivering.” Varn’s Apocalyptics shies from neither grandiosity nor grotesquery, neither high nor low society, for isn’t it precisely the blood—some stranger’s bodily fluid—that is to save? From “dumpster diving,” ghosts take flight. From “rancid butter,” a flock of magpies. Enter this text prepared to rub shoulders with archetypes amidst a house of mirrors in darkness, to open old tomes with your teeth and drool enough to smudge creation. And of all the “thou shalt nots” you can recover from the rubble, only remember one: Do not be afraid.' —Dylan Krieger, author of Giving Godhead
Issue no. 4 of spoKe, a poetry annual based in Boston. This issue features POETRY, DRAMA, and CRITICISM.