Propagation

Poetry. PROPAGATION's minimalist scoring belies an obsession with the gestural repleteness of discourse, with what poet and linguist Henri Meschonnic called the embodied aptitude of language ("a poem is an activity, not a product"). One central activity of this poem is listening, to language public and private, living and mediated, and to texts we read silently or aloud to one another. A series, the poems in PROPAGATION also test audible vectors by sifting and colliding, graphing and distilling. What emerges is both residue and metamorphosis: a materialist sensing of the complex ecosystems of language and experience. "Laura Elrick's PROPAGATION is incantatory, magical, mischievous, devilish. Its syntax is resistant, fluid, impeded; its lineation outwits givens, decommodifies ideas, modulates stances, transforms terms. The poems are moody—sullen, fanciful, sardonic, meditative, funny, mad. PROPAGATION, in other words, invites multiple readings, but not only because one can voice its polyphonic perspective so variously; it does so, above all, because it is enchanting, wondrous. In the myth, Pandora's box turned out to contain mostly sinister forces and the origins of human woe. Elrick's PROPAGATION acknowledges the presence of this sad panoply, but what emerges most forcefully from this book is the revolutionary power of hope, not as mere promise but as an articulate practice."—Lyn Hejinian