Exercise in reduction, a de-evolution of text: Bradley Harrison's Diorama of a People Burning, #poetryreview

Bradley Harrison’s Diorama of a People Burning, from Ricochet Press, an imprint of Gold Line Press, is a exercise in reduction, a de-evolution of text , and sequences, or cycles of poetry. The chapbook features six poems, and their variants whose parts have been “erased” by the author to reveal a new poem, a process that repeats until the final variation is little more than a shoestring poem. Each poem contains the words and images for the other variants in the sequence, as if the poems were Cornell boxes that the author rearranges.

To understand what is happening on the page, we should begin with an explanation.

The sequence of poetry begins with “Her Problem of Gravity” which is followed by “Her Probe of Gravity,” and then “Her Gravity” and finally “Gravy.” The erased variants look as if the author has used white out to reveal a poem hiding underneath. The good folks at Ricochet Press have even pulled out the stops so we can almost see the text ghosting out from under the white out, a visual confection. “Her Problem of Gravity,” a prose poem, or perhaps a flash fiction piece, is an elegy about a pretty woman in a yellow dress walking down a dead, deserted, sun-blasted street. A fine work of both loss and yearning that is followed by “Her Probe of Gravity” which features a landscape of words spread out by long dashes of white out that reveal a poem that is all about Isabella, the girl from the first poem. Harrison has stripped down the poem, the images and the language, and this process continues. “Her Gravity” is a further reduction of “Her Probe of Gravity,” and the final poem “Gravy” is an eleven word reduction of the poem that preceded it in the cycle, “Her Gravity.”

Harrison has set up an interesting conceit: what hidden works are underneath. He is poet as archeologist, as reductionist. One poem, a variant of the title poem is entirely whited out, reduced to nothing, and the final poem is cast in reverse, building itself up over the sequence from a five word poem to a full blown block of text.

The chapbook as a whole would have made a wonderful gallery installation, all of these manuscripts blown up impossibly large, looming above the viewer, the dashes of white over the text like a bandage over a wound. Poetically, the language moves from evocative to elliptical, the reduced text skirting the Eastern edge of American letters; poems that sound dangerously like haiku but are not rooted in the forms of the East, only in their quick haunts. I wonder how many drafts of reduced text Harrison had to go through, for he offers up something writers, especially poets, know so well: that you are never done with the writing, there’s always something to be cut out.