|
|
|
|
|
|
Garrett Kalleberg
|
Some Mantic Daemons, Futurepoem, New York, NY 2002
With only a chapbook and two modestly sized full collections to his credit, Garrett Kalleberg already seems on the way to establishing a unique presence among the more idiosyncratic voices in contemporary poetry. “Write words” he observes in a poem that derives its impetus from—among other sources—the cold but exacting language of computer operating systems, “and this other stuff happens.” This other stuff, in Kalleberg’s case, is a dense synthesis of textual echoes—from procedural manuals to spiritual reverie—that achieve a compelling if unstable focus when channeled through the poet’s nearly obsessive state of hyperconsciousness.... It takes time—and no small degree of collaboration—to catch Kalleberg’s feverishly mantic drift, accept his abridgements and turnarounds, his rattling metaphorical contraptions... and nuanced continuities, and learn to immerse oneself in this admitted “theater of tricks.” But there is no denying the gravity of its intent or the brilliance of its invention.
—Boston Review
Spellbinding....
—Fence Magazine
A prophetic ferocity joins visceral appetite in Garrett Kalleberg’s powerful new collection; spirit and matter couple to spawn a ravishing anxiety, “a beautiful disaster.” As if language were a skin wrapped around the world’s body, which ruptures and spills its will to be named. For those who wish to go where poetry is rendered as a limitless limit, fretted with knowings and unknowings and their generative inquisitions. Once again, the life of the mind finds its avatar.
—Ann Lauterbach
You better look out for poet Garrett Kalleberg and his Some Mantic Daemons, a Futurepoem book. Kalleberg has a micro-tele-scopic lens that can see the smallest possible 3-D space and with just a click can adjust to see the entire universe over all time. Kalleberg sees the feet of protozoa and then (click) a worm and then (click) a world-sized force in the universe and then (click) imminence itself, larger than the universe. Kalleberg uses the most down-and-dirty science, religion, psychology, mathematics and metaphysics—from Molech to Bataille to those gross little worm-feet—as a way to investigate existence. This kind of sight leads to a desperate, ecstatic awareness that everything is real and nothing is true and also the opposite. Some Mantic Daemons is downright joyful in its sharp, ecstatic rage.
—Poetry Project Newsletter
Some Mantic Daemons is a deft, inventive work, fraught with linguistic pleasure. Drawing variously from the rhetoric of science, religion, psychology, and metaphysics, Kalleberg investigates the place where proof and belief overlap in a logical moiré—“And all along, a familiar / pattern, until strangely / this looks like my own home.” Displaced by the impossibility of the Singular, these poems move like bare nerves through “a medium in which the absolutes oscillate,” to take root in countless specific meanings and instances of being.
—Heather Ramsdell Some Mantic Daemons can be ordered direct from Futurepoem, from Small Press Distribution, or from Amazon.
* * *
from Relata & Anti-relata: 4. Execution Errors
Write until breakpoint.
Then execute trace.
There is a syntax error in line 2. This error can be corrected.
There is a logical error in line 3. This error
when an unintended output is produced
as for example the grid coordinates lock in
on the wrong house.
and a bug is dead
in the bug.
Write words
and this other stuff happens.
An exit status of zero indicates success;
any other exit status indicates failure. Failure
does not necessarily indicate that the process
failed altogether to accomplish its task.
and water is
dead in the water.
Write entrance (gate not given).
Write structure (hierarch not given).
Write structure (situation unchanged).
Write out (transcendence not allowed).
and like accountants
incrementally, they
are dead
in the accountants.
I am written into a house with
infinite rooms, this is my dream, I move
from room to room, make account of each
path, portal or entrance, when in
passing through I turn to see
where I’ve been and see I’ve
left behind another
iteration of myself. I’m using a
new algorithm, this is my dream: make a branch
out of dead leaves, begin a new
process in uncorrupted
memory, fork a new stream
through the gates of heaven into the field
of numbers. This is my dream: One, two, three,...
Where’s number four, Timaeus? where’s the four-
dimensional web or lattice, the text
which counts everyone their name not
an empty container. The other of
the other is a relation
and all things are relata,
in this world
there is another world identical
to it, just as inside every one of us
there is another
and the one is dead
in the one.
In everything, the one
irreducible
execution, logic
or syntax
error. A critical irony, as when we
find ourselves on a path
we did not ask for, along an arc
we cannot correct within
a trajectory we cannot prevent
once the perception is initiated
once the beam of the eye passes through the gate of the lens
once the gate opens and the percussive shock
blows apart the lock.
Once I thought I lost you
inside an event loop, and (same dream)
stepped through every
line of text but there was too much
recursion, I had to
Turn Back
Caution Possible Dust Clouds
Warning Fog Conditions May Exist
Warning Gusty Winds May Exist
but existence was emptied out in garbage collection
and the process continued
to represent itself
a test subject.
But what if it is the wrong self?
in itself, for itself, of itself—
to wit, leave one flaw in, as proof
of process, but what if
it’s the wrong one? all along this path one
crashed and one burned
and one’s parts were flagged
into statistically innumerable remunerations.
* * *
|