| Hyperglossia: Main | Excerpt |
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Stacy Szymaszek
Stacy Szymaszek’s poetry makes clear for her reader the distinction between vertical and horizontal. Reading Emptied Of All Ships, one is lulled, as by waves, by narrow lines of verse flowing, page by page, most of them composed of only one or two words. The whole book takes seafaring as its métier, and this is both literal and metaphoric, historical and current, about craft and emotion. As abstract as much of the language is, due to its determined diminishing of syntax’s constraints, still the personal keeps making itself felt: “width of / back / belted // sodium / poultice // exhausts / courtship” “drain / a home / of you” “phenomena / foregone / for me” and significantly “assonance / her aspect”. Lulled, as I said, by such lines, it is a shock to discover, on page 53, in the poem “some mariners,” a completely opposite sense of line, one that moves from side to side in long sweeps: “sequent of waves albumen ferment / white cap floats hum syllables of elegy”. From there, the flow opens, and there is a playing with translation. Ostensibly by an unidentified “James,” these translations from the Chinese, notes at the back reveal, are really by Kenneth Rexroth and others. Translation plays a central role in Szymaszek’s chapbook, Pasolini Poems. Read on its own, Pasolini Poems is a tasteful homage to the master cineaste, poet and novelist. When you compare it with Pasolini’s own Roman Poems, published by City Lights in 1986 in a bi-lingual edition with translations by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente, you find that Szymaszek has actually written one poem for every Pasolini poem, keeping his original titles. It is common for poets to base works on other works — whether literary, visual, performative, sociological, historical, etc. Somehow, Szymaszek manages deftly to avoid the pitfalls of idolatry. While hewing closely to Pasolini’s original lines and ideas, she distills a verbal and personal experience that is utterly distinct. Szymaszek’s most recent book is Hyperglossia, which my memory of Greek tells me should mean “An over-tonguing.” As in Emptied Of Ships, the visual aspect of the poems is central, with words separated on lines in a way that reminds me of certain Anne Waldman poems from the 1970s. Again, though, Szymaszek exploits this genre in a way that was only hinted at before. It is a mode that is at once welcoming and highly entertaining, though only intermittently comprehensible in the standard sense. The first page of the first section reads in its entirety: “ka ker flutt / clutter head injry / sincere corps // compendia / ah / guardiam // sachets of natron / pork crackle / armor // bid // ity” Humor is a constant ingredient as well, as in the page which has as its header in italics the abbreviation “cont.” If you pronounce that aloud, it has a decidedly different meaning from the word originally italicized and abbreviated. In fact, you could say, on a linguistic — or hyperlinguistic — level, Szymaszek has unabbreviated and unitalicized a word, that, in its sudden revelation, elicits a smile along with much else. I hope that Stacy will be read some of the poems from Hyperglossia tonight. Whatever she reads, I can guarantee that she will stimulate your intellect, your senses, and your sensibility. Please welcome to DIA Stacy Szymaszek. —Introduction by Vincent Katz for Stacy Syzmaszek's reading at DIA: Chelsea
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Stacy Szymaszek was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in the summer of 1969 and grew up there. She studied at the University of Wisconsin (Milwaukee), graduating in 1991 with a BA in Literature. She is the author of the books 
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