A Playful Coexistence of the Eye and the Ear
Daniel Barbiero
locust blindfold stompchant rain (Arteidolia Press) is Neil Flory’s latest collection of poems. It follows 2023’s mudtrombones knotted in the spill by pushing farther into the territory opened up by the earlier book. What it finds there is an unconventional linguistic landscape whose defining features are diverse and ambiguous.
The book’s title hints at the way Flory plays with ambiguity. We can read “locust blindfold stompchant rain” as a phrase of three adjectives modifying the noun at the end, or as a run of four consecutive nouns. Taken as a whole the text itself is aporetic in that it doesn’t tell us which option to take; that’s a matter left up to the reader’s interpretive discretion. Each choice carries its own semantic implications, but that may be a secondary consideration once we consider sound and stress. The rhythms read differently, depending on how the words are parsed. Take the route with the adjectives, and the words are divided by the brief pauses we’d expect from the commas that aren’t there. Choose the four nouns instead, and the phrase comes at us in an acceleration-driven pile-up. It’s almost enough to make us overlook the strangeness of that third word. Almost, but not quite.
“Stompchant” is just one of many new coinages that Flory mints over the course of the book. Open to a page at random and you’ll find hybrids like “mistymurky,” “engineflow,” “pistonflopping,” “ironcast blazemolten,” “mophead draincloud squeezeworkings.” (All of these occur in “mesh.”) Flory’s fusions of words, which are made as much on the basis of sound as on meaning, have the playfulness of not-quite-forced marriages between words that ordinarily are adjacent but hadn’t yet thought to take the leap into union. His hybrids represent a variety of condensation, or a way words overlap or nest in our minds based on the connections we forge between them based on their concepts or thing-presentations, and even their sounds and appearances. In putting them together as he does, Flory brings out the humor in words’ promiscuous flexibility through a kind of reversal of Reverdy’s definition of the image as the bringing together of distant realities. Here the realities are close, and the condensed images intuitive rather than alien.
Much of the poetry in mudtrombones knotted in the spill had the feel of stream-of-consciousness mind unraveling itself in words. We get a good deal of that in the new book as well. Here, for instance, is the beginning of “Junk World”:
man what a world we live in what a weird freakedout
junkedout world it is unto itself in the middle of the
day at the beautiful glittering corner convenient store
junk world with the piles upon piles piles mountains of
junk food junk drinks junk magazines junk trinkets
colorful screaming junk advertisements screaming
howling fortissimo right in your face
There’s social commentary here as the mind engages with its world (and doesn’t necessarily like much of what it sees), but it does so through the push and pull of language following its own tempo—in the momentum of the unpunctuated line—and accented rhythms, as it repeats the single-syllable key words “piles” and “junk.”
The implicit musicality of the language in “Junk World” and other poems in locust blindfold stompchant rain is appropriate, since in addition to being a poet, Flory is a composer and pianist. Thus it isn’t surprising to find allusions to music throughout the collection, from a poem titled “listening to Ornette Coleman” to references to harpsichords (in “wobblybox”), extended string technique (in “mesh”), and bassoon overtones (in “reedstack”), as well as the appearance of actual and invented musical terminology such as “molto agitato dissonance,” “appoggiatura,” “bluenote chordsequence,” “slapdash cadenza,” “tessitura,” and “gracenote cracknote” (in “Nautilus warts ignore bluenote cadenzas”). In “ostinati” Flory, following the example of John Cage, suggests that the repetitive sounds of truck engines are analogous to, if not the moral equivalent of, Keith Jarrett’s piano ostinati.
At the same time that Flory engages in the fusion of words into playful chimeras, he balances it with a complementary fission of both words and phrases. In a good number of the poems in locust blindfold stompchant rain he deploys non-alphanumeric characters to intervene in and interrupt the appearance, and thus the legibility, of the words on the page. We see these characters salted throughout and within the words, fracturing them and stringing their parts across a scaffolding made up of open and closed brackets and parentheses, ampersands, asterisks, virgules, and mathematical symbols:
ALASDelphi>basi n’s/motor
METHINKS the temp>est nighofSP
/ent evid/ent chancely prince>ssly Persephone
>announcing o/ver bould>er>>ly expa/ nse cedarsplitting
of a click/tra >ck switchb/a >ck terracotta
Stitched together and ironed out, the passage reads “Alas Delphi basin’s motor methinks the tempest nigh of spent evident chancely princessly Persephone announcing over boulderly expanse cedarsplitting of a click track switchback terracotta,” which seems to have Flory bringing Persephone up out of the underworld and into the modern recording studio with its click track—which ironically ensures the kind of rhythmic uniformity that is broken apart here on the boulderly expanse of splintered words, like so many shards of terracotta.
Or fractured sentences. The kinds of graphic symbols found in that just-quoted passage from “sh>amiseNDELphi” and elsewhere throughout the book read like so many metaphorical roadblocks or potholes breaking up the flowing thisness of fluent language. They’re reminders of the hesitations, lacunae, and rhythm-breaking silences that punctuate both speech and writing. In exchange for these knots in the weave of the text we get a view into the often overlooked material means—seen here as marks on the page—through which language’s thisness actually flows. It’s literally a view, since these symbols work at the visual level, on the eye rather than the ear. They’re necessarily page-bound and incidentally silent. In the visible patterning they lay out they, along with the letters in which they’re interwoven, dramatize in a playful way the precipitation of the written mark out of the spoken sound, and the restless coexistence of the visual sign with the speaking voice.
Note: This review was written from notes taken shortly in advance of an interview conducted with Neil Flory, as a way of gathering my thoughts before any questions could be asked.
Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, London Grip, and at ērā/tiō. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score “Boundary Conditions III” appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press). Daniel Barbiero is online at https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.