Christopher Merrill's collection of prose poems, Necessities, weaves a dystopian tapestry questioning and satirizing Western culture in a surprising and often unnerving whirl of associations. Composed in three sections, the overlapping subplots evoke a compromised world. Whether the images employed are Hollywood cool, or old school tough, Merrill tells humanity’s story, and speaks to us directly.
These prose poems are dense, difficult but rewarding. Merrill has cast himself as writer-as-survivalist, slinging barebone knuckle images against shifting antagonists. He is also a stage designer & director, setting up contrasting motifs, a setting that often evokes and reflects a modern western truth: no matter what you look for, gold, desire, truth, or academic immortality, when you capture it, what have you won?
The first section is composed as a controlled band of language that brings to mind the black armbands Jews wore in Nazi era Europe. The text is dense, wraps around the pages, and tramps through a desperate landscape, reflected in his imagery and language. "We had to act fast: our list was growing longer, our supplies were dwindling and no one knew how to fire a gun." Bears and wolves wander the wilderness, a blacksmith dreams of transfiguration where a "spark from his anvil will ignite another wave of conversions."
In the later two sections, Merrill allows the prose poems to scroll all the way down the page, yet the urgency remains, for food, for jobs, for desire, and for spiritual necessity. The imposing "Great Invisibles" coupled with the hyper-archetypal Pharmacy of God, the Emperor of Necessity, and others, are both agents of change and stagnation; "The Great Invisibles must translate the smoke signals spiraling above the mountain, or else we may mistake the church ruins for railroad tracks." In many ways this is The Waste Land for a post Google world. It is as if Merrill has gathered totems against fear and madness in a wilderness where the old ways might just be the key to surviving the future, "how the tables crumbling in our hands might save us all in the end."
Technically, Necessities, shows off Merrill’s skill as a collage artist, or surrealist. In a single passage Merrill bridges "the drunken ferryman" who "suspended crossings in calm weather," which is both Charon, and a working class schmo cut from Drudge Report headlines, with a downtown where the homeless march and where a cry rises from the financial district to "Sell today or jump tomorrow!" Merrill drops in a "man carrying a rifle into the patent office..." which could be Columbine, Sandy Hook, or Watertown. Are lofty ambitions feel emotionally futile in a world where "Every block has its own radio station," where information comes from everywhere, in a white noise.
Artists often make the choice to cut through the white noise, or like Merrill, pour it on, adding layers and layers of feedback. While turning the volume up to eleven, he is both winking at us, and warning us. "Who was telling the truth?" he asks in the final section, where "everything tastes like the end."
Merrill's Necessities pours forth with an orgy of associations, its grossness a collection of fears, desires, needs, and debaucheries that when you step away from look alot like us, the reader, the double, mon frere.
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