{"id":33006,"date":"2016-04-03T09:04:50","date_gmt":"2016-04-03T15:04:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=33006"},"modified":"2020-08-21T10:47:19","modified_gmt":"2020-08-21T16:47:19","slug":"poetry-as-mineralogy-craig-dworkins-conceptual-poetry-crystalizes-in-alkali","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/poetry-as-mineralogy-craig-dworkins-conceptual-poetry-crystalizes-in-alkali\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry as Mineralogy: Craig Dworkin’s Conceptual Poetry Crystalizes in Alkali"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"dworkin-cover-1\"<\/a>Craig Dworkin, a professor of English at the University of Utah, is a bright star in the avant-garde conceptual poetry movement.\u00a0 Conceptual poetry is the opposite of what most people think of when they think of poetry.\u00a0 Rather than using expressive language to explore the human condition, conceptual poets design their poems according to rules or plans, often by repurposing or remixing existing text. \u00a0It\u2019s a post-Internet idea that has been termed \u201cuncreative writing,” and in his introduction to the online UBUWEB :: Anthology of Conceptual Writing<\/em>, Dworkin asks, \u201cWhat would a nonexpressive poetry look like? A poetry of intellect rather than emotion? One in which the substitutions at the heart of metaphor and image were replaced by the direct presentation of language itself, with \u2018spontaneous overflow\u2019 supplanted by meticulous procedure and exhaustively logical process?\u201d<\/p>\n

So, the type of poetry Star Trek\u2019s Mr. Spock might write.\u00a0 It\u2019s fair to ask, is Dworkin\u2019s poetry any good? Is it even readable?<\/p>\n

Take the poem \u201cFeldspar\u201d for example.\u00a0 It was originally composed for letterpress at the University of Utah J. Willard Marriott Library Book Arts Studio to be printed on a complexly folded sheet of paper so that the words make grammatical sense read in any permutation, or as Dworkin describes it in the notes, \u201ca verbal landscape filtered through the strata of the Oxford English Dictionary<\/em>.\u201d \u00a0As a person who holds an undergraduate degree in geology, this concept appeals to me\u2014the poem is supposed to be like a phase diagram; external geochemical conditions determine which particular mineral assemblages and crystal morphologies form, to generate sentences like,<\/p>\n

Fold grown feldspar in spathe fields sprat pleats failing to pare.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

A tongue-twister, and as the words and phrases recur the whole poem takes on a formal quality like a nonsense villanelle.\u00a0 I would be curious to see \u201cFeldspar\u201d in its original origami form (maybe Alkali <\/em>could have included a fold-in like Mad<\/em> magazine?) but even without literally taking crystalline form the themes in \u201cFeldspar\u201d are recursive throughout the book. \u00a0In other words, when you remove human sentiment from language you might get science.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Crystal Text,\u201d a poem after Clark Coolidge, reads as if Dworkin were trying to re-create Coolidge\u2019s book-length poem from distant memory. \u00a0While Coolidge wrote, \u201cWhat I discover in writing comes out of the mess, the mix,\u201d Dworkin\u2019s remix includes a line credited to the French poet Fancis Ponge:<\/p>\n

A rose encodes. The crystal quills. It evinces a will to formation, and the impossibility of forming any other way.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So while Dworkin\u2019s crystal is a geological object it is also a crystallized example of conceptual poetry\u2014like \u201cFeldspar,\u201d \u00a0\u201cThe Crystal Text\u201d is literally a text that is also a crystal.<\/p>\n

Dworkin has a keen ear for language.\u00a0 His poems are full of puns and wordplay.\u00a0 For instance, the title of the poem \u201cHaligraphy\u201d (writing about salt) could be a pun on haliography <\/em>(writing about the sea) and, since it is followed by a short, unintelligible poem titled \u201cAll Saints,\u201d perhaps also a pun on hagiography<\/em>.\u00a0 Translated into geological terms, salts fall out of aqueous solution due to evaporation to form minerals according to geochemical conditions.\u00a0 In \u201cHaligraphy,\u201d these evaporites form patterns on the landscape as if salt itself were writing in a kind of nonsentient language.\u00a0 Or as Dworkin writes,<\/p>\n

Some pinnacled salts maze with manacled molecules;\/Chlorides, in fragile shackles, concatenate; traceries of\/ natric lattices encase the pan in lace.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These natric lattices appear again in \u201cThe Falls,\u201d a poem about the expenditure of potential energy and patterns created by statistical chance.\u00a0 This poem contains an excerpt from Robert Smithson\u2019s description of the salt flats on the edge of Great Salt Lake where he built \u201cSpiral Jetty\u201d:<\/p>\n

And then \u2013 as one\u2019s downward gaze pitches from side to\/ side, picking out random depositions of salt crystals on the\/ inner and outer edges \u2013 a vertiginous keel.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Later in the poem, chemical solution becomes an analogy, Salt: Water :: Love: Time:<\/p>\n

Love acts as a kind of amnesiant, making us forget that emotion, \/including its own, is completely soluble, however slowly, in time.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dworkin\u2019s linguistic tricks are often transparent.\u00a0 The poems come right out and explain themselves:<\/p>\n

Felt understood as the past-tense of fall; left as the past-tense of leaf.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

With fourteen pages of notes to credit his sources (many in non-English languages) these poems seem to have precipitated like salt crystals from the oversaturated solution of Dworkin\u2019s mind. \u00a0Kenneth Goldsmith, who is the most famous of the conceptual poets, has said, \u201cConceptual writing is good only when the idea is good.\u201d\u00a0 The idea of poetry as mineralogy seems good to me, but then again, you don\u2019t have to sell me on rocks. I\u2019m already a fan.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Alkali<\/em>
\nCraig Dworkin<\/em>
\nCounterpath<\/a><\/em>
\n2015<\/em>
\n$18<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Craig Dworkin, a professor of English at the University of Utah, is a bright star in the avant-garde conceptual poetry movement.\u00a0 Conceptual poetry is the opposite of what most people think of when they think of poetry.\u00a0 Rather than using expressive language to explore the human condition, conceptual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1518,"featured_media":33007,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_piecal_is_event":false,"_piecal_start_date":"","_piecal_end_date":"","_piecal_is_allday":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2589,35],"tags":[2759],"class_list":["post-33006","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews-literary-arts","category-literary-arts","tag-craig-dworkin"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/dworkin-cover-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-05-06 23:16:06","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33006","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1518"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33006"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33006\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54591,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33006\/revisions\/54591"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33006"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33006"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33006"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}