John Sibley Williams debut collection, Controlled Hallucinations $14.95, FutureCyclePress, is bare ghostly work of vision. It is a work of negative space, a work of spare words, a work of economical images, and a work of ache.
It’s a numbered collection, the poems themselves lacking titles, one poem sequencing into the next. The title evokes a Rimbaudian world of fever, delirium, and excess, but Controlled Hallucinations is just that, controlled, honed; the excess is cut from the carcass, leaving spare poems that form a body that aches.
The collection opens with a dedication to the “coming extinctions” and prepares the reader for an apocalyptic vision, however, Williams’ apocalypse is a personal one; a collapse of relations, of love, of family, and work. The opening poem is call to vision, a call to being. “To be the effect./To be a thoughtful pause/and restrained response...To be the scent/translated as toxin/or perfume...To be love/itself,/neither the loving/nor the beloved./To be translatable.” The book prepares the reader for a voice that wishes to be anything but it’s throat; to lose one’s identity in something greater than itself is often associated with spirituality, as well as art, and Williams seeks to cut down his vision to the point where the identity is nearly stripped from the poem, where the poet is enveloped in the poem.
Williams choice of poetics is bareness, and at first glance recalls the shoestring imagery of William Carlos Williams, or the spare blues of Sam Cornish, but Williams creates a shimmering world where he gives the reader an image, and then in the next instant removes the image, a illusory trick where the reader is left with afterimage. And like a photographer Williams captures landscapes, people, bare rooms, and offers them up as waste from our excess. “The doors are open,/steps drawn down to the pavement--no bar blocking my way,/no driver...What if the seats are all empty/and I cannot sit?/What if they are all empty/after I occupy them?”
Williams’ eye scours the landscape, eats it up, and the collection begins and ends with a landscape. A “man on an adjacent building,/silhouette cut from the skyline,” which over the course the book haunts the speaker, this desire to “cut out the roof/he stands on...cut out the mountain/in the distance” to wonder what “it means to touch,” and by end of the cycle, the end of the collection the landscape rises up once again, “rough edges of a church’s cornerstone/or the guilty side/of a prison wall” remains to be discovered, “As it should be.” The environment lingers, transcends and enters the speaker, as it does for all of us, if we let it. Which is part of Williams journey here to “Look up to discover/a tiny tear in the cold blue curtain/and struggle the rest of your life/not to pull down the sky.”
Throughout the collection, a unified vision, the poet is giving his gift over to the senses, to the very world, in an act of discovery. To discover what, you may ask? To discover all that feasts before us, the great plate of living in our rich and decadent world of sensation. A cat playing with yarn, a lover or a partner in a photograph, a moth or bird fluttering at the edge of light and flinging its song across the air. These poems are not lamentations, they are poems of focus, and Williams uses short spare lines, for the most part, to mark the territory, and when he breaks from the short, shoe-string lines, he retains the economy, the simplicity. Consider how all of the world’s pornography and lusty nakedness form into one body, one the poet can use, and perhaps us as well, to define the self with. “I concede there is no true nudity left./ I make love dressed in all the world’s lovemaking./The pieces of other bodies combine perfectly/Into my outline.”
One can almost hear Williams’ synapses firing as his sensory neurons catalog what is there, and then with his poet’s eye, ear, and pen, erase the world to bare essentials. And as Williams discovers, one cannot unlearn, or un-discover what is seen, touched, eaten, and loved, “there is no un-/knowing.”
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