Review: Heller Levinson’s Alluring LURE, John Olson

 

Lure

Black Widow Press, 2022

 

        Imagine entering a loft space, say in lower Manhattan, that is empty of furniture, but filled with a number of randomly arranged objects: a car engine hanging from the ceiling on a chain, a carrousel, a bunch of balloons, a stuffed coyote, a vase or orchids, a cockatoo, a huge map of Budapest, a Civil War era cannon, a nude female mannequin holding a polka-dot umbrella, and so on. How are these things related, other than the space they occupy? There’s no immediate context that ties these objects together. You might assume it’s an artist’s studio, but what kind of art are they making? Everyone will have a different story. Everyone will weave their own web of silky postulation. The creative urge will be aroused. And even though there’s no answer or rational explanation for any of this, it’s still intriguing. Something in you has been aroused. It gets the juices going. And that’s what’s wonderful about collage. And this is the lure: the allure of the lure is in its catalytic spark, the way it triggers a reaction in the associative brilliance of the unconscious. Levinson’s Lure, as much of his writing, operates on a similar principle.

There’s always a feeling of space in Levinson’s writing, not just structurally or the way the lines are arranged on the page, but psychologically, in the freedom it offers. The openness of the language induces a state of uncertainty and confusion, a little like being on a blind date. At first, you feel awkward. You don’t know what to say. But if the date goes well, a random name or event might pop up and break the ice and get the conversation going. Trying to find a language to describe Levinson’s language is a challenge, partly because it runs contrary to all the norms of modern linguistics, but also because there’s no obvious message or mood, no evident narrative.

The human mind is most at ease in a sentence with all its working parts in order, riding along smoothly, guided by prepositions, connected by conjunctions, hurled forward by predicates, with a well-upholstered syntax to lean into while the various evocations, connotations, denotations, imputations and implications provide a terrain upon which the mind can do its business. Thinking is hard. Perception comes a little more easily, but it’s tricky. That’s why language was invented. This worried Socrates, who believed that this luxury, when it became written, would corrupt the mind with its hallucinatory power and erosive convenience. He wasn’t wrong. That’s why reading has always struck me as a bit decadent. The French symbolists took this to an extreme, creating an intricate machinery of perfumed stars and pale naked bleeding wings out of nothing but void and a glass of absinthe, a bit like the Federal reserve pumping money of the air.

If this sounds like conjuration, it is. Writing is essentially a magic act, legerdemain, doves or endless scarves flying out of a sleeve or pocket, voluptuous women sawed in two. Levinson takes us backstage to see how things work, how the illusions are achieved. He’s a strange kind of magician. He wants us to see that the real magic is in our own spirits, our own brains, our own capacity to invent, to defy the constrictions – or constructions - of physical reality.

The writing is mostly asyntactic; prepositions, conjunctions, adverbs, and all the other grammatical cogs and lubricants that orient our relationship to a sentence are used with scrupulous spareness. Nouns proliferate. The effect is, at first, a little jarring. You’re on your own. Torn down are the scaffolding and pulleys of rhetoric. In its place are stacks of lumber and sacks of cement. Where do you start? How are these things meant to be assembled? Not to worry. The blueprint is already embedded in the brain, in the temporal lobe, just behind the ear.

Take “Gyration,” on page 62. “Gyration” begins with a quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s Eureka: “We require something like a mental gyration on the heel. We need so rapid a revolution of all things about the central point of sight, that, while the minutiae vanish altogether even the more conspicuous objects become blended into one.”

The sense of urgency here and its proposed formula for experiencing the quantum, non-linear universe surrounding us, is an appropriate lure.

The first line reads: “seersight astral lyre fever kinetic threadout torque cycle boost.” Wow. A lot to take in, I know. My immediate sensation is one of teeming, words teeming, ideas teeming, substantives teeming, morphemes teeming, everything teeming and streaming and gleaming and dreaming and beaming. Sections of the line can be read variously as, “seersight astral lyre,” an object I can picture so strongly a narrative emerges of a prophet and his astral lyre playing the music of the spheres. Or: “lyre fever.” I’ll bet that feels weird. Or: “kinetic threadout torque,” something that sounds a bit like a software term, or aeronautical adventure. “cycle boost.” I know what that is: that’s the thing you use to get your rocket into space when the gravity is heavy, your boosters are pidgeonholed in semantic undergrowth and your pants are down and the monsters are coming. That’s when you need a cycle boost.

And this is just the first line.

The next line reads: “pre-allocational fitness loop centripetal urge skin-in.” Skin-in? What’s a skin-in? Is that anything like skinny-dipping? Prepuce? A happening involving skin? Let’s get together and have a skin-in. I need a skin-in. I don’t know what a skin-in is, I just know I need one.

Things calm down a bit in the third line: “fringe hazard.” I know this one from personal experience, and so give it a personal spin, a brisk gyration that will send the minutiae spinning into space and the cosmic axis to bring us in closer to the hub, the nucleus, the core, and away from the fringe, where the banners are bananas and the hazards are hazardous. 

And so progress tends to be slow as I linger on these lines and let the words soak in.

The last line of “Gyration” is “Eureka.” Though actually it’s not, as the word is split into “Eur” and “Eka,” which is how I read it, before I went “eureka!” Eureka is, of course, the title of Poe’s book-length prose poem, as well as a sudden triumphant discovery. Which is pretty much how I feel as I linger among the lines in Levinson’s Lure, ingesting it slowly, so I don’t get too dizzy. 

To order copies of Heller Levinson's Lure, via Black Widow Press, click here.

John Olson (born August 23, 1947 in Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American poet and novelist. Olson has lived for many years in Seattle, Washington. He has published nine collections of poetry and three novels, including Souls of Wind, nominated for the 2008 Believer Book Award. In 2004, Seattle’s weekly newspaper, The Stranger, for whom he has written occasional essays, gave Olson one of its annual “genius awards. His writing notebooks have been exhibited at the University of Washington... Olson’s prose poetry has been reviewed in print and online poetry magazines. The poet Philip Lamantia said that Olson was “extraordinary…the greatest prose poetry [i’ve] ever read.” And Clayton Eshleman said “he is writing the most outlandish, strange, and inventive prose poetry ever in the history of the prose poem.”