A Complex Sentence

(Paperback)

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Description

• This is Marjories sixth book with Coffee House. Were honored that a poet of her stature and influence is loyal to our press. She is truly an icon of experimental and modernist poetry.
• This collection engages deeply with the challenging legacy of Ezra Pound, particularly his Cantos. Marjories incisive voice and critical mind will be valued by many other writers who are involved in that conversation.
• Marjorie has a devoted, established readership of poets, writers, artists, and thinkers who are eager to read and engage with her work.
• Marjorie is an admired visual artist whose work has been widely exhibited and is in the permanent collections of the Getty Center and the New York Public Library. Her poetry has a deep connection to her visual art.
• Marjorie is a good advocate for her own work. Shes well connected in academia, literary criticism and art criticism circles, and the visual-art world. She will be strategic about getting her book into peoples hands and about creating spaces for engagement around the book. Shes known as a formidable but generous reviewer and loves to invite similar conversations around her own work. Well be pursuing possible events that involve conversation between artists and poets.

Reviews

A Complex Sentenceis an important book in more than one understanding. It is important in its gather from the range of comprehensions and tentative elusions that comprise Marjorie Welishs considerable range of work. It is important in that it stands out as seminal in a context of the large number of contemporary poetry book publications. This has come about from the joyful complexity of an artist with visual acuity and constructivist practice in tow with an exact sense of word choice and recurrence. It is a book of poetry that stands out in its range of attentions to different modes of construction and cohesive in its interconnectivity between each construction, between stanzas between different poems between different visual presentations. There is a clarity in the books musicality and a disruption of clarity in its sensitive juxtapositions. This is Welish at her best and most powerful moments, at moments of loss and gain, at moments of assuredness and in fleets of frailty.Allen Fisher A key imperative in Marjorie Welishs superb new book,A Complex Sentence,is the task of not writing the unsaid, which presumably would mean to write the sayable in the folds of a complex sentence that erases it. Literary spirit guides come along to helpMallarm, Baudelaire, James, Pound, and critics who read them. There may be a ghostly revision of Pounds imagism, a complex in an instant of time, but instead of le mot juste, we have le mot dtourn, diverted as it enters into new semiotic fields and explodes.A Complex Sentenceis, in addition, a meditation on the bookits materiality (pages, margins, indexes, parchment, epigraphs, sentences)and its cultural role as a document. Welishs sentences are complex, grammatically and narratively; they break the spine, as it were, of the books monumentality. In the interstices of writing and saying lies the supplement to meaning, what we read between the lines or what the linescenter margined or flush leftarrange as a new structure of understanding. This is a wild and compelling book.Michael Davidson In Pervasive Spacing, one of several key signature (as in a musical composition and guide to binding pages) poems inA Complex Sentence,Marjorie Welish pauses her restless pencil (instrument of inscription and erasure) to assert this axiomatic one-liner: Scale: she was larger than the room in which she found herself. So too Welish, a practitioner of conceptual writing long before the phrase entered the zeitgeist of contemporary American poetry. Her procedural writing, la Mac Low et al., exceeds normative critical and poetic categories.A Complex Sentenceis the latest instantiation of Welishs relentless pursuit and demonstration of her deliberate, delimited, and far-reaching conceptual imagination. More forcefully than ever before, she subjects found and original texts to a panoply of formal constraints. Roaming across the vistas of Western writingCicero, Epictetus, Edmund Burke, William Strode, Ezra Pound, Bertolt Brecht, William Carlos Williams, and Nathaniel Mackey all make cameo appearancesWelish cuts and pastes texts into frames of intertextuality, disseminating critical glosses, free-floating quotations, and judgments that, though grounded in a commitment to the primacy of aesthetics, are unafraid of political, social, and cultural affirmations and rebuttals. Welishs wide-ranging metapoems excavate the generative assumptions underlying the production and translatability of verbal, plastic, and musical languages.A Complex Sentencestrips bare the book, canvas, drawing board, and score, jettisoning their accumulated histories in order to resituate them within the domains of languages as denaturalized artifacts. Moreover, media per se is reduced to so many permutations of spacing, rendering temporality and, by implication, aesthetic readability as effects, per Derrida, of diffrance. Encoding her writing as both normative spacing and non-spacing markings (diacritics being a prime example of the latter), Welish treats morphemes as both analog and digital codes mapped onto materials that are anything but neutral. Displacing semantics with syntactics, foregrounding the syntagmatic over the paradigmatic, Welish reminds her readers of the structural, formal, and, above all, cultural values that constrain all meaning-making, artistic or not. For these reasons and more, the title of this book must be read simultaneously as a dialecticsadjective-noun, adjective-verb, noun-verbwithout resolution, three dyads orbiting one another in the dance of an intellect with few peers.Tyrone Williams Praise for Marjorie Welish: [Welishs] writing is marked by the legacies of multiple modernisms and by sly misprisions and recursions, an obsession with logical forms that flip abruptly into their shadow selves. BOMB Welishs poetry, like [Thelonious] Monks music, is a montage of moving parts in which youd be wise to expect the unexpected. . . . Welish is sharp about the muddle that is almost everyones daily lot. Hyperallergic Welishs poems do for language what great abstract paintings do for paint. No: A Journal of the Arts Welishs diction is relentlessly, maddeningly, dazzlingly abstract. . . . The result is a cerebral music that offers, for those willing to spend real time, a commensurate reward. Kirkus Wrenching, obdurate music. There may be no known correspondences for Marjorie Welishs mind. The poems neither describe nor situate but compose and construct. The procedures are odd but the materials quite embodied. . . . Shes a little bit scary. C. D. Wright [Marjorie Welishs work] has both sensuality and really dazzling conceptual rigor. Culture Industry For Welish, as with the Alice Notley of Descent of Alette, cordoned off words and phrases imply a poised and thoughtful consciousness, caught in the midst of intellective and amusing animations of things and thought. Publishers Weekly Ferocious, sometimes hilarious and always provocative. . . . No one has ever written like Marjorie Welish. Poetry Project Newsletter Welishs usual practice is not to trust language, which makes her work bumpy, real, alive. . . . A poet of the insistent now, Welish is sensitive to the chora; let her get wind of a chaoid and shes off. Lana Turner

Author Bio

A Complex Sentence, the sixth book of poems by Marjorie Welish to be published by Coffee House Press, received fellowship support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and St. Edmunds College, University of Cambridge. For her arts and critical practice, she has received a Fulbright Senior Scholarship, which has taken her to the University of Frankfurt and to the Edinburgh College of Art. Papers delivered on her arts practices at a conference at the University of Pennsylvania are compiled in Of the Diagram: The Work of Marjorie Welish. Signifying Art: Essays on Art after 1960 is a book of her art criticism. A Work, and . . ., in which she is interviewed by Lilly Wei, is the most extensive catalogue of her art.