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Earlier today, I received my contributor’s copy of viviparous blenny, volume one, which centers on the theme of synchronicity. This concept has long been significant to my own poetics because that sort of non-causal yet significant relationship demands that one be in the mysteries of negative capability in order to see it as well as because making a poem that is real rather than realistic requires a giving-over of some of the process of creation to the world rather than merely the world of the conscious mind. Indeed, synchronicity may be another word for what the poet seeks to create, for it is such a meaningful coincidence that makes readers go hot and cold all over, or simply recognize themselves, on reading a poem.

I have four poems in this edition. “An Airport of Three Years Ago” takes as its basic the discovery my beloved Scholastic and I made that we had passed through JFK airport at the same time long before we ever actually met. The other three come from my tarot series; in creating this sequence, I actively court synchronicity. When I sit down to work on it, I draw a card and either write a new poem from it or revise the one I’ve already written. This process imitates the more general relationship of tarot to synchronicity, so one could say these poems have something of a conceptual relationship to theme.

Among others’ poems, those that struck me most combined a conceptual approach with a narrative one: rob mclennan‘s “a question for my mother” gives the reader glimpses of (or―what is ultimately the same―glimpses from which to construct) incidents of synchronicity through an experimental structure, form, and grammar. Jane Rice manages something similar in her poems, though with less attention-grabbing technique. A few of her poems additionally use repetition to create the sort of frenetic sense of spiraling I have often experienced as part of synchronicity.

Of the prose pieces, Christophe Casamassima‘s “An Open Letter” is both vital and real, though not entirely realistic. Charles Rammelkamp’s “Stitches” seems to be a story of a near-miss with synchronicity and so gains poignancy from being set among the other stories in the volume.

Overall then, the anthology provides an intriguing set of approaches to an artistically significant theme. I know that I haven’t yet exhausted my readings thereof.

Related posts:

1. New Issue of Blue Turtle Crossing
2. Year in Review: Publication

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