George Quasha
The Daimon
of the Moment Preverbs ISBN: 978-1-58498-114-5, paper, $18.95 |
“Words say too much to let you know the truth.’’ George Quasha’s torqued, enigmatic proverbs create unlikely balances among discrepant engagements. The vectors of these marvelous poems work at cross purposes, keeping each other aloft. These are sparkling aphoristic aporias for a new age in an old time. “Poetry,” says Quasha, “resists immortality with difficulty.” And also with wit and charm. Be here now, in which case immortality will take care of itself.
—Charles Bernstein, author of Recalculating and Attack of the Difficult Poems Ludic, glittering dialectic, that’s the true feeling of the ongoing dance in preverbs…. The lines are all children, bright and witty children, egging each other on to say fast as they can what they don’t yet know. And we can know only by listening to them tussle. It’s the antiphonal give-and-take that makes these poems so different from other couplets, qasidas, dyads. They refuse to be ruled even by the form they propose. So reading them is an athletic conversation. And not just the poem with itself. What happens is that as I read along, I begin to talk back—in accord or grumblement—with some brave line, only to find a line or two later the poem answering my comment. The poem gets there before me. I like that. —Robert Kelly, author of Fire Exit, Uncertainties and A Voice Full of Cities |
"Speaking generally about agency in poetry — what actually makes the poem — text-generation is probably best viewed as a sort of continuum, one end of which is deliberate construction, by whatever poetic principle, and the other end something like pure and spontaneous inspiration (“received”), whatever that in fact means. Probably most poetry is at best only approximately positioned somewhere along the continuum, even when it makes definite claims. Preverbs actively contemplate this poetic problem of source and agency, and so I can’t take a firm position here without undermining the work’s “uncertainty” principle. Yet there’s always more to say, which is one reason why the agency issue implicitly or explicitly comes up inside the process of the poems." --George Quasha, from an interview with Thomas Fink, Jacket2