Traverse, by Laurence Carr and Power Boothe, Review by Sarah Wyman

Laurence Carr and Power Boothe, Traverse. Lightwoodpress, 2022

What ensues when text and image reflect across an open binding? When a poem breaks its own rules for the betterment of knowing? When a pair captures randomness between the covers and something new is born? Traverse the transom of this book, revising abstraction into worlds and words, and your own mind may reveal a perspective conceived in spirit and laid out in blocks of exotic wisdom.

In Traverse (Lightwoodpress 2022) Laurence Carr and Power Boothe playfully present mirrored blocks on facing pages: brief eight-line lyrics by Carr set against 8 x 8-inch grids painted or drawn by Boothe. Poet and painter demonstrate the generative force of placing word and image in conversation then inviting the reader/viewer in to explore meanings that emerge. Sometimes Carr’s poems or “micro-essays,” blank a line or dangle over the octet limit; sometimes Boothe slants or smears his checkerboard, but neither ever leaves the box.

Carved from mica quartz, 
the presentational chest 
is offered to visitors of rank. 
The cup-shaped interior is filled
with the juice of the uchasa berry, 
known for its soothing properties
and is said to bring on 
waking dreams.                                               (52)
 
What do such ritual ceremonies do, but place us in time and space, according to calendars and coordinates we have devised? These mini-incantations act accordingly, as they evoke captured moments and place them side-by-side. Cosmologies of being include creation myths, a fascination with female generative power, and the squares and circles that enclose and anchor the human to the universe. As Hawthorne assured, “a single dream is more powerful than a thousand realities” and Carr and Boothe deliver. Earth mother conceives; the moon goddess monitors energy flow from earth to celestial arch. There is a fascination with the seen and the unseen, with what lies just below the surface: lost skin tattoos “found through micro-surge excavation” (28) or lower layers that generate the radiance of “skinglow” (38). Such dips into depth seem to deepen the shadow and pop on their complementary pages from Boothe’s sketchbook, to intensify 3D effects on the flat page. 

The poet’s ear for assonantal sonic patterns - astral travel, gnat’s eyelash, dental garlands, gender destiny of the unbornmake for ritual myths of echoing sound: yet another aspect that weaves the words and swirls together. These combinations, illuminated by their aural identities, highlight recurring gestures of the book including journeys, sweeping changes in scale, the unexpected perspective, and ceremonies around sex and star tracking. The visual works engage a range of media and combine the biomorphic with the geometric in map-like renditions that tend toward full abstraction. Lines thicken to tubes to intensify origami effects – but there it is again… the words dictating interpretation; the shaded sections rising to comply.

Time is measured in units of forever, as if to rival Prufrock’s coffee spoons with cat whiskers and tables unfolding right down to the solipsistic moment where visions appear and the lyric ends:

words forming lips
the song
that sings itself (8)
 
The number eight peppers the book. And the selected cipher occasionally appears in fractions of two and four, as in the Bear-Husk headdress with four rows of upper and lower teeth (30). Or in light speed’s 2x2x2 multiple of full awareness (32). Ultimately, the perfectly square volume feels like a meditative mathematician’s daybook, an ode to the I Ching, or a farmer’s almanac with a cosmic vision.

When the first aporia appears as a blank to break the 8-line fixed form and words sink invisibly into the wet sand of the floor plans, the reader enters in to complete the floating stanza (22). While bridges have been built from left-hand page to right, the entry into the white space of the paper may be even more challenging. Yet one has learned the rhythms of the work by this point, and familiar pattering makes it easier to complete the square. When Carr severs his poem so, the concluding couplet gives the look of a mini sonnet. He even goes fully graphic with slanted lines (///) that recall Boothe’s confident strokes (40; 98) and balances out the bleed of watercolour that tries the boundaries but never leaks. Or the poet wedges whiteness into a concrete poem with a triangular space that rises to empty out “that perpetual light within” (102).

The co-authors reveal that these are not traditional ekphrastics, artworks that take other artworks for their subject, such as Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” or John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Instead, these are opportunities for the audience’s discovery, arbitrary combinations in wait for the reader/viewer to decipher. While the first and last painting-and-poem combos were intentionally paired, each intervening couple was randomly assigned. Poet did not work with the paint drying on the page before him; painter did not take inspiration from the block of type presented. This means the reader/viewer is more radically implicated in the meaning-making process than ever. And, as Hawthorne would remind us, each act of interpretation reveals more about the consumer than it does about the collaborators who brought us these duets.
 
Sarah Wyman

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Sarah Wyman lives in the Hudson Valley and writes and teaches about literature and the visual arts at SUNY New Paltz. She co-facilitates the Sustainability Learning Community and teaches poetry workshops at Shawangunk Prison. She is co-founder of earthrisecommons.org. Her poetry has appeared in The Ekphrastic Review, aaduna, Mudfish, San Pedro River Review, Potomac Review, Lightwood, Heron Clan XI, A Slant of Light: Contemporary Women Poets of the Hudson Valley, and other venues. Her books are Sighted Stones (FLP 2018) and Fried Goldfinch (Codhill 2021). Website: https://hawksites.newpaltz.edu/sarahwyman/

An example from the collection of artwork by Power Boothe (USA) contemporary.