Madison Morrison's Web / Sentence of the Gods / A

A

A is the culmination of both LUNA and SOLUNA. Sleep is a “preparatory” book, in the sense that Cicero prepares for his memory exercises, then executes them. In his first book MM’s poems seem executed almost according to plan. One situates oneself to begin. In A one resituates oneself and turns to the rest of ARES. Unlike Sleep and A, the middle books of SOLUNA exist in a constructed space through which the author guides an “unprepared” reader. With A we pause before arriving at Revolution and thereby completing the first “sentence” within the Sentence. A relates to the books that precede it by emptying out their content. Whereas SOLUNA represents a giant version of Sleep, adumbrating the larger work’s content (as do the opening sections of Vergil, Dante, Spenser and Milton), A is important to the rest of the Sentence in quite a different way. These Dada-like poems make one feel that no “work” has been done (though careful inspection, or comparison with sources, proves otherwise). As a meditation on the particular they remind us of MM’s Particular and Universal. For despite their actual dates, places and people, the poems of A are also mysteriously universal. Aristotle’s exclusion of actuality as a subject for poetry is here answered by Morrison’s deliberate inclusion. In this important book the document becomes a poem, the poem a document.

...the most compelling post-literary writer of our times, Madison Morrison (Constantin Severin)

The full text of A

Escapade ’74-’75 in Spanish