Karen Garthe
with art by Tod Thilleman
Spuyten Duyvil ($35)
by Lawrence R. Smith
vagrant (one) in thin air, Karen Garthe’s fourth poetry collection, is also a collaboration, an integration of her fascinating poems with the color collages of Tod Thilleman. Every page of this avant-garde work is a surprise, taking readers to visual, intellectual, and emotional extremes in innovative ways.
Because Garthe’s poetry itself has many of the qualities of collage, the mix of text and visual art makes perfect sense. Garthe’s poems are a collision of different speech elements, including slang, colloquialisms, archaic speech, and cultural references. Like a musical score, typographical variations convey a spectrum of sounds and moods, from quiet laments to shouting anger. Sometimes there are even distinctly different internal voices that play against one other in the manner of an opera duet. In “Great Vocal Recess,” Garthe creates a performance that is both frightening and intriguing:
LunetteHalfmoon Horror sunrise
causing birds to silence
Big BOOT DOWN THE STAIRS TO where are my elders
Mentors
Revving-up
Hope full sight
far as I ca n tellThe body landed Here
in its tortures its lone throng in
The Great Vocal Recesses’s wire shut orbits Here
where violence has really come
hulking
front and center
at the top of the stairs a dragon scaled with martyr
smear and tars of avenue
As we move through these allusions to violence, we grasp for the precise narrative that lies behind them. We feel the passion and betrayal, but any attempt to nail it down fails to clarify the ambiguities. As in Luciano Berio’s near-language musical compositions, we are sure of what we hear, but it is in a language just beyond our grasp. The works of both Garthe and Berio engender that wonderful sense of excitement, of being right on the edge of discovery.
Despite this play with uncertainty, there is an assured voice in Garthe’s work. Its cadence of logic and argumentation is similar to that which animates Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons. Garthe’s practice, however, is more radical. It is akin to Basquiat’s canvases, where the interplay of image and text in spatial tension creates a critical mass of meaning, passion, and critique. “Palette rose” has a particularly Basquiat feel to it, as a painterly theme joins the musicality:
I rest in
unkempt
attars
twiddling fingers 10 kissings in air
rendered mulberry pink so bound in
laughter amongst the images
Alone in my corner befellsolace befell reaching my hands in the sorest
rose of opening illness
tantamount’s pinkest
salmon-colored coruscations effervesce
Vast Absence twilight harbors The gray blue East River
Slips
450 East 52nd Street
The poems in this collection offer a journey into the unknown, one in which generally recognized objects and feelings go in unexpected directions—and yet despite the constant surprise, it all seems absolutely right. For the intrepid reader, vagrant (one) in thin air will surely be a rewarding venture.
