INSTANTS by Philip Metres
(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006)
muybridge’s photos are as iconic for art students as gray’s coloring book of human anatomy or as little, articulated wooden manikins.
i’ve known the detail’s of his discovery of the lunging tread of the racing steed since i was a little boy. i’ve always known the frame-by-frame grids of his divers walking across a field of vision, wrestlers, panthers, buffalo, men and women, their quivering muscles.
it was a dream inherited by edgerton: to capture the erotic maneuvers of victoria with flashes of light; to invent the exact violence of fist to face, of a struck golfball, of a bullet passing through balloon, crystal, apple—all previsioned by muybridge’s cameras, muybridge’s gun.
and benjamin, with zoopraxis and germ fixed in his mind: the camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses. this was not retarded motion, but gliding evasions of gravity and time.
the voice is a little like frank bidart’s doing his esenin and cellini impressions, as metres does his best muybridge.
(
the cover is a blue two-tone photo of wrestlers frozen mid-toss, some antaean death scene. the title page hides like a ghost behind a blank sheet of amber glassine vellum, and a picture of—what, spent flashes? the gradually progressing flash frames of a hand writing across a surface with a piece of chalk juxtapose the text of the long poem en face. it’s the most beautiful book in my library.
(
the poem is broken into fifteen ‘plates’ and each plate is broken into 7 couplets, each separated by the waning crescent of an initial parenthesis. these severe shutter interruptions emphasize not the disjunction, but the action of the poem, the style an obvious ecsphratic allusion to muybridge’s technique.
(
muybridge’s biography leads from his innovations to his cuckoldry and the murder of his wife’s lover. in metres’ poem, the studied eroticism of his subjects leads to the violent passion of a spurned husband. the body itself is an attempt on time, a container of movement: as if you could master motion,/ the body’s liquid//(//frozen & sliced/into aspect, form, specimen. the camera itself is a weapon, and a gun is an attempt on time:
[…] a snap
shot a sudden
(
cut of lens open
& shutter & lead
(
bullet & watch the blood
slip through the ap
(
erture
the stutter
systole diastole
(
the hole you made
systole diastole
(
no frame to hold
the hole you made
(
to still to still
to still to still
*****
J.H. Stotts is a writer and photographer living in Boston and starting a family. His essays, poems, and translations have been published in Circumference, Hanging Loose, The Atlantic, and numerous e-zines. He's exhibited his photography and paintings in Boston, Russia, and Mexico. What he can't publish elsewhere he posts on his blog, The Fugue Aesthetics of J.H. Stotts. He finished an 'inauspicious' shotgun anthology of Russian poetry, from Fet to Esenin to Ryzhii, in formal and experimental translations and is currently at work on a selected poems of Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, to come out in '09 from Whale and Star Press.
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