A’S VISUALITY by Anne Gorrick

In Anne Gorrick’s richly-faceted collection A’s Visuality, found texts are held up to the light and transformed into energies that can’t be contained by convention: “Origin and then form conforms to our interest.” This is the work of a highly-engaged intelligence, and Gorrick has made her own system by moving through the world with the given that this, too, is poetry. Here, it is color— not darkness— that surrounds us. What a beautiful place she has made.

—Carolyn Guinzio

In her fourth book, Anne Gorrick explores words related to painting: phrases from art criticism and the names of paint colors. In the first section, FOLIOs, we see an unusual transformation: Writing about painting turns into writing about people (which suggests that writing about people could turn into writing about painting). In the second section, Chromatic Sweep, we enter a realm of pure abstraction, the names of colors. Colors. Gorrick, also a visual artist, shows us how much can be done with the name of a color, how many words can grow from that single seed, how many images, how many statements, how many narratives. Does every color imply all the rest, a world of colors? They do here, in “R&F Reds” and other poems:

Red truth. It calls. It satisfies.

When a red situation looks like putty

When she is thin as a blue color and exits

These violent forms of announcement

a pink greenhouse as if you were angry

—Michael Ruby

Some poems are written slant. They surfaced because their poets didn’t have an idea they imposed on the poem to develop. They surfaced because the poets respected the raw material — words — enough to get out of the way to let the words speak for themselves. When the approach works, language becomes poetry by, in part, transcending the limits of the poets’ conscious imaginations. Such has resulted from Anne Gorrick’s A’s Visuality which presents a section of poems translated from prior positionings as visual art and a second section of poems taking off from the found language of a website’s description of paint colors. The first section, Folios, is rife with surfaced wisdom: “a map / as small as / astronauts” where guidance (map) is not the astronaut’s limits (knowledge) but the astronauts’ task (and desire) to explore or expand the limits of what’s known. In the second section Chromatic Sweep, never has color become so palpable (at times even edible or radioactive): “when black and white mix, there is a lower sound” or “red play back our own choking.” Gorrick trusted the words (“No editorial / preoccupied with”) and their reciprocation are lush poems that thoughtfully invite.

—Eileen Tabios

Anne Gorrick is the author of: I-Formation (Book 2) (Shearsman Books, Bristol, UK,2012), I-Formation (Book 1) (Shearsman, 2010), and Kyotologic (Shearsman, 2008). She has also co-edited (with Sam Truitt) In|Filtration: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry from the Hudson River Valley (Station Hill Press, Barrytown, NY, forthcoming in 2015). She has collaborated with artist Cynthia Winika to produce a limited edition artists’ book called “Swans, the ice,” she said with grants through the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, NY, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has also collaborated on large textual and/or visual projects with John Bloomberg-Rissman and Scott Helmes. She curates the reading series, Cadmium Text ( www.cadmiumtextseries.blogspot.com ) and co-curates (with Lynn Behrendt), the electronic journal Peep/Show at www.peepshowpoetry.blogspot.com Her visual art can be seen at: www.theropedanceraccompaniesherself.blogspot.com

Book Information:

· Paperback: 120 pages

· Binding: Perfect-Bound

· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books] 

· ISBN: 978-1-60964-182-5

$16

A’s Visuality by Anne Gorri… by Geoffrey Gatza