Source Codes (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Wheeler, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1876857064 ISBN 13: 9781876857066

Publisher: Salt Publishing, 2001

Synopsis

Source Codes is a collection about how we represent the world to ourselves and to each other in an era when the images and words we receive are often generated and received without being marked by even a trace of author or consumer. The poems are linked one to the next only by the words that begin and end each; otherwise, there is no stylistic or (on a specific level) thematic connection. They function, then as a “miscellany,” an approximation of the paradoxical finitude in the rush of information and images we believe we experience, hour by hour.

The poems and images are not titled except by numbers, by which the reader navigates a key to their sources in the table of contents.

“In the fast flow of capital, we need slow space,” and “Information is dark, not light,” the Dutch design group, NL.Design, writes, and in similar spirit, Source Codes is not neutral in intent. Its appendices – HTML code framed by typescript and longhand drafts of poems from this book and poems from the author’s first book, Bag ‘o’ Diamonds – attempt to highlight the idiosyncratic imprint of an individual in the drafting of the HTML. Intended, likewise, is the loss of some authorial romance in the typescript poems and handwritten notes without their losing that quality of like imprint.

Many of the individual poems and images seem to treat a bridge – between the homogenous plethora emitting from the fast flow of capital and the individual gesture from within “slow space” – skeptically, and gravely. In this sense, too, it is not a neutral book.

About this title

About the Author

Susan Wheeler is the author of six books of poetry, most recently Meme from the University of Iowa Press which is short-listed for the National Book Award, and Assorted Poems, and a novel, Record Palace. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Witter Bynner Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she teaches at Princeton University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Five

The thinnest meal on the slightest isle
Sustains but poorly. So: the file
Of men and women, mile and mile,

In consult with the wizened bat.
Plumes and boas’re where it’s at―
She won’t remember saying that.

If hunger takes them to the coast,
They find a spectacle to toast.
Or several of their peers to roast.

Those that make it to the south
Are lucky to live thumb to mouth.
They might prefer the Catamount

Where greenish mountains freeze the nuts.
Though scavenging is an art that’s bust
The ravenous can be beauty sluts.

Those lucky few who do adduce
The food that keeps them from the noose
Will crave on, too. Produce, produce.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt Publishing
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1876857064
• ISBN 13: 9781876857066
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120