BOOK RECEIVED FROM SAD PRESS - Karl M.V. Waugh's Obsessed by Proportions

these started as private reading notes, it seemed not entirely pointless to put them here, in case other people are reading it. There's a lot more to say than them, but they're a start. Karl M.V. Waugh's _Obsessed by Proportions_ can be got here: https://sadpressarchive.wordpress.com/

On Karl M.V. Waugh’s Obsessed by Proportions

Quickly the obsession feels like it belongs to a particular time: “a management style devoid / of evergreen”. The ‘style’ here is not eternal: any such aspiration is betrayed by how dated the phrase ‘management style’ sounds - we know management styles, we know jargon, we know they are a presence in our lives somehow: these are poems with an obsession that operates in a particular historical moment - perhaps worth keeping in mind, however obvious. The obsession here soon becomes grounded on a somewhat broader historical plane: “drawing graeco-latin squares on every surface” - applying specific ordering techniques everywhere we can, trace memory of Euclid et al. The verses scatter across the page, a little like projective verse, or a kind of inquisition of silence like Roger Giroux’s Blank (A Poem) - but there is a slightness and compression that draws away from the grander, or perhaps ‘deeper,’ ambitions of Olson and the facing up to nothing of Giroux. This lack of 'depth', or parodic engagement with the 'depth' of past projects, is perhaps in line with the troubled description of private experience (the birthing place of 'depth' beyond surface) that emerges. The five sections this book is drawn into are slight, and modest, in an appealing way - they remind me a little of kevin davies’ book-practice in comp & the golden age of paraphernalia - though here there less of a sense of irony in the arbitrariness of the sections’ curtailments: they are ordered units with purpose. This is another proportion the poems are obsessed by - constraint - and it is an obsession like a love obsession: they give themselves up to it at any chance. this is a powerful drama in the course of the poem. there is a recurrent room, with a clock and alarms and little gridded windows - later we hear of “paper rooms” - a desire to create rooms, private spaces, familial spaces, at every point. “my elegant desire to draw a map that has never been drawn” in no way escapes an obsession with proportions: perhaps it carries proportion to its ultimate degree - to be applied to things that in no sense already exist. there is a conceptual room that renders life down to the kind of day-to-day detritus found in a kitchen - cups, plates, and cutlery stained with soup, beer, and water. day-to-day life does not overwhelm these poems, however, and I think they open up strange vantage points to consider. evergreens are out of all proportion, and i think haunt the poem: in this sense the poem is truly domestic, set in a house in a city and dreaming about pastoral. late night, lonely poems, that pretend to resurrect the memory of a private self. This in a time where, perhaps, hope is particularly unable to be found in any notion of a private self.