Gravity

Fisher, Allen (2004) Gravity. Salt. ISBN 1844710343

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Abstract

Gravity presents the first five books of poems from the sequence Gravity as a consequence of shape, started in 1982 and scheduled for completion in 2005. Gravity includes the books Brixton Fractals, Breadboard, Civic Crime, Dispossession & Cure, and Fizz. The sequence is an inversion of empirical demands. Each untitled poem has been relabelled with a jazz dance from a list of dances, from African Boog to Zip. The design of the overall work uses the model of a crushed cylinder, the process of a crumbling wall and a variety of contingent energies, interrupted narratives demonstrating crowd-outs, descriptions of shifts in focal consciousness, fleeting interruptions that damage continuities and expectations with named actors; Burglar, Badger, Fireman, Mathematician. These narratives are supported by decoherent syntax, moving positions that question strident notions of coherence and over-determined incoherences. This is a syntax that sometimes avoids and sometimes embraces tried stanza structures through the use of unreliable sentences and designed forms that exercise deliberate breaks from golden mean or idealised exactness. The poems rely on inconsistency leading to prepared and unexpected transformations that link or rhyme into following or previous poems. One preparation involved labelling a cylinder with stanza indications to provide sonority, bending the cylinder in upon itself and producing new damaged sonorities from the crushed indications. This transformed geometry energises the process of aesthetic productions in each reader’s involvement. One activity transforms words by sound, another by meaning and another by inversion or critique of its proposals. One unrealised proposal is to demonstrate truth. Another is to confirm a lack of reliance upon expectation. The subjects bridge biotechnology and quantum physics through a system of urban gardening and leaking streets. The proposals demand civility and are preposterous.