The push and pull that holds tension taught, the lightness caught by the heavy hand that moves fluidly, the same and the different of what was and what will be, these are the things that cause the cracks that are created to overflow with infinite possibilities, possibilities that fill the work of Randee Silv and leave us in a state of wonderment. There is an excruciating beauty in the density of matter that soars beyond its meaning. Silv, in her latest book of wordslabs, Nextness, has achieved a wonderful and intriguing balance that transcends the realm of prose poetry with its painterly usage of form. She has achieved an equilibrium all of her own, somewhere between the writings of Fernando Pessoa and the paintings of Nicolas de Staël, which holds the audience tight while allowing them an outburst of emotional exploration that weaves wildly on a narrow road.
From the first wordslab where “suddenly savored surges artfully flop,” we are forced to change our perspective, and once we have adapted we must be willing to change it quickly and calmly again whenever Silv asks it of us, while “lookouts perch on detectible interference.” This technique forces us into a maze of tempo where words take on different measures and breaths. This is a very particular aspect of Silv’s writing that holds an incredible musicality within it. We must listen closely to the changing of the breeze to hear the coming of the storm:
Circadian stormings rummage through craving whims mid to halfway. The event, the same event wipes trivial bellows from memory. Yours. Mine. Erratic. Akin. It just can’t be this and then that and that then. Coincidences noted. Recorded henceforth. Lone motifs muse over ditching.
It is in this seeming chaos that control is established in the creation of an original form of literature which plunges into the realms of surreal, psychologically contained, distortion that reverberates off of the walls shattering the sky outside. It is a realm far beyond the realm of pure surrealism, closer to the dream weave of Pessoa on a trip to Boco do Inferno with Aleister Crowley while a merry melody plays in the background.
Randee Silv constructs effortlessly in these realms, lacking fear and filled with marvelous words that leap language from page to page landing in an outer realm that we keep within us. Her wordslabs emerge in the thick impasto that sinks our thoughts into her world, for Silv is a writer of deeper universals that are too often left to the side of the road, unacknowledged. It is the artist’s duty to capture the
Rehearsals of squatting. Of hauling. Amplified. Cursed. Vice versa … Rolling and rolling. Hardly a lapse. Hardly a breath. Locked stares rival replacements. Silhouettes coated with red marrow revert to a rising current. Encores. There always are. Too many forevers you can’t pierce. Violent, violet, it doesn’t seem to matter.
In Nextness Silv rushes off after all of the eclectic shadows finely formed in the mind unafraid of the forevers that can’t be pierced, for she is aware that it is the undulations of solid things that are their true essence. As the painter Nicolas de Staël said:
We never paint what we see or think we see. We paint the thousand vibrations of the blow we felt or will feel, the same and different. A gesture, a weight. Everything burning slow?
Silv, in Nextness, is the poet painting the slow burning vibrations.
Nextness, by Randee Silv. Ridgewood, Queens, NY: Arteidolia Press, March 2023. 92 pages. $12.00, paper.
John Greiner is a writer and visual artist living in New York City. He was educated at the New School for Social Research. Greiner’s work has appeared in Antiphon, Sand Journal, Survision, Sein und Werden, Empty Mirror, Sensitive Skin, Unarmed, Street Value, and numerous other magazines. His books of poetry include In An Attic Palace Beneath a Slaughtered Sky (Arteidolia Press), Circuit (Whiskey City Press), Turnstile Burlesque (Crisis Chronicles Press), and Bodega Roses (Good Cop/Bad Cop Press). His collaborative work with photographer Carrie Crow has appeared at the Tate Liverpool, the Queens Museum, and in galleries in New York, Los Angeles, Venice, Paris, Berlin, and Hamburg.
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Heavy Feather Review 