nano poems

Monica Mody reviews SS Prasad's nano poems here, and has this to say:

All this is whimsical and delightful and diverting, and yet. Too neat too thing-in-itself too circumspect. Will Prasad’s poetry participate in radical projects of the kind its avant-garde fathers and mothers have? Will it, can it, tap into the shadowiness of code: the ubiquitous “hidden presence” in our world? According to lit. theorist N. Katherine Hayles, “the unconscious of language”? Will it party with its own technological context (isn’t a silicon chip integrated with a poem a hybrid of chip and poem—of reality and dream—of present and future? And how does the chip help the poem become more poem? And how does the poem help the chip become more chip?)?

I wish they would hallucinate more. I wish they would tell me something disturbing about the world. Especially because Prasad brings Zurita into the picture by citing his sky poems, I wish these nanotexts would destroy their nano-faces while looking at the mirror. In 1982 in New York, Chilean poet Raul Zurita was trying to realize a “utopia of the limit-less” (Nelly Richard’s description of CADA’s art actions), a space that went beyond every rule. His ‘page’ exceeded the Chilean dictatorship, his text was additionally an event, and was in no case classifiable as one genre or the other, or frame-able by the dictatorship’s cultural system. His audience was the (viewing/flying) public, and his art was open to his audience.

Prasad's poems sound intriguing in themselves, but this post is really to store the links to Zurita's works. Thanks, Monica*!



*I hope some day soon to post about Monica's chapbook, Travel & Risk.