MOTES
by Craig Dworkin
Craig Dworkin's "Motes" imitates a form created by Bob Grenier in A Day at the Beach and Sentences. As Grenier says in the "Afterword" - "What’s wrong with our Community of Poets, such that each next 'new one' has to be so studiously/stylistically ('New'), Idiosyncratic…?" The wonder of the form is how Dworkin inquires into the relationship of title and content as in the conditional
WOODS
thick carpet of leaves would be so
good for slipping if you’re a deer
Or his oblique review of the Iraq War
DARFUR
Hens
Dworkin helps reposition us on the planet near here and over there. The poems are minimal but fully reentrant, that is, going at them again and again does not repeat.
Craig Dworkin's Motes is an unexpected delight of sparse poems that glitter, provoke, and beg for completeness. These pieces show Dworkin’s impressive range as he travels seamlessly into the reshaping of literary minimalism. Even though many of his conceptual works have echoed minimalist ideals, Motes shifts into a more distilled frame, where both author and reader slide over a tiny handful of words only to arrive at other ends of the world: "BRICK / Buick." Each parcel is as hard and unstable as the gravel under our feet. - Robert Fitterman
In Motes, Craig Dworkin rejects the Thumbelina umbra of koan or apothegm for a minority smaller than scale of focus. If the book turns telegram hefty classics of philosophy and literature (some merely suggestive of their hautes sources), its verbal quarks quirkily sidestep essence for sidelong banter and bathos (viz. "REMEMBERING LAST TIME"), as well as playfully hooke and skewer better-known modernist micrograffiti (e.g. "PARIS TRAIN STATION"). Motes"s formidable, multi-literate wordplay—working aurality as hard as it does reference, invoking traditions from haiku to Saroyan to serialism to Bob Brown"s "readies"—reveals just how many angles may needlingly co-hab a pointillistic verse, the duckings a rabbit may take. - Judith Goldman