Vernon Frazer’s concrete poetry collection “Nemo Under the League” recalls Jules Verne’s underwater sea exploration journey in its title. Like Captain Nemo, Frazer’s poems probe lesser-explored and lesser-mapped areas: aesthetics and the subconscious. Black, white, and grey text, text boxes, lines and shapes appear on the page with the focus more on the aesthetic effect of each composition than on the literal meaning of the words.
The phrases and their arrangement on the page may seem random at first glance. However, there’s usually a directionality to pieces, such as “Blocking the Inevitable” which guides viewers’ eyes to the right, and “Reflection Locked in Reflection,” which follows a diagonal or elliptical path to suggest light bouncing off a mirror.
Sometimes the images evoke clip art, as in “Desire After the Elms,” or comic books, traffic lights, or even soup cans, as in “Career Moves.” Or even art deco motifs, as in “Birthing an Ungiven Given.” The text will occasionally relate to the title or presumed theme of the poem (such as “hordes of insufficient data” in “Finding a Reaction” and “overblown deduction guides tax the patience excessively” in “In Charge of What Follows”) but tangentially, creating the effect of a composition inspired by the idea rather than the linear development of a thought.
At times, while reading, I speculated on what colors and shades Frazer would choose had he decided to incorporate colors. Sometimes my mind suggested possible shades of deep blue, or vivid orange, or light green. The monochromatic feel works, though, to focus attention on the words themselves as the artwork rather than splashy colorful shapes.
In some pieces, “Flayed Nerve Endings Frayed” and “Reeling Toward the Reel” text itself forms into oval egg shapes or curlicues. Elsewhere, words appear in mirror images of themselves, vertically, diagonally, penetrated by arrows. Words become not just representatives of images or ideas, but as images and design implements themselves, while remaining readable.
The very last poem in Frazer’s collection, “The Transverse Clatter Balcony,” ends with text cascading down to the end of the lower right of the page. It reads “the last word … cast overboard … definition matter … soaked … in the lumbago sea with Carthage.” Words and meaning are not impermeable or permanent here, but forms of matter subject to the weathering of time, nature and history.
I recently came across Dr. Leonard Shlain’s The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, in which the cultural anthropologist argues that the development of abstract, linear, alphabet-focused language rewired human brains and changed ancient societies. These changes brought about modern technologies but also fostered war, competition and hierarchy, religious extremism, legalism, and the subjugation of women and the natural world. As an author himself, Dr. Shlain advocates, not for the eradication of books and alphabets, but for greater balance between holistic, image-focused understanding and reductionist, linear ways of making meaning.
Vernon Frazer’s Nemo Under the League represents an effort at re-calibrating that societal balance by integrating words and images inextricably. It’s worth a read, or a perusal!
How do you match up the words you use to their backgrounds? Is there a pattern, or do you choose what feels right each time?
It seems different each time, but I probably work with several patterns that I’ve acquired from doing the work.
Even in these pieces, which involve composition, improvisation always plays a role at some point, directing me to choose what, basically, feels right at the time I’m writing it. During improvisational thinking, more elaborate plans do emerge: I can see a full page design or pattern of several pages at times.
What makes a word interesting to you? Sound, shape, length?
Sound is probably the foremost. Sometimes I feel like a jazz musician whose instrument is language. Generally, when I have difficulty finding the right phrase, I choose the one that sounds the most musical to my ears. It almost always turns out to be the best choice. Sometimes working with the shape of a letter or word leads to a phrase, a verse or a visual pattern.
Would you ever work in color? What inspired you to choose a black, white, and gray color scheme?
My equipment and the economics. My old color printer used an ink cartridge for every page I printed and the cost of printing a color book would make the sale price too high. Over the years, technology changed many things, as we all know. Ten or fifteen years ago, I talked about trying to do this work in color but my life didn’t make it a priority. When I joined the C22 Poetry Collective a few years ago, their aggressive experimentation led me to try it. So, I wrote a color book called SIGHTING I did that’s online, but not yet officially published. It’s officially coming out May 7.
When words occur to you, how do you decide whether to put them into a concrete poem or free verse?
More my mood in the moment, I’d say. When I feel I’m starting to stagnate, I’m more likely to do a concrete poem or a multimedia video to relieve my dissatisfaction. Those are the most demanding, after all. Sometimes I write textual poems because I don’t want to meet a more demanding challenge. Nothing is entirely easy, but some days I want to work in a different way, say, strictly with text and either a projective or left-margin pattern. Each method plays a role in my life.
Do you have any other writers or artists who have inspired or influenced you? Anyone whose work you find especially interesting?
I have many influences and hope I’ve made something of my own from all that I’ve learned. Jack Kerouac started me as a writer at 15. William Burroughs and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 shaped my prose style. Until age 36, I aspired to be a novelist. But Charles Olson was an early influence at 15 and a major influence on my poetry until about 1988, when my style changed considerably. Peter Ganick introduced me to language and visual poetry. I absorbed many writers he published. My writing began to reflect the experimental work bassist Bertram Turetzky exposed me to in the mid-60s, when I studied bass with him. Peter’s publications revived those interests. Then, Steve McCaffery and bp Nichol influenced my work around 2002. I’ve read and absorbed many others; I was a literary omnivore.
‘The Colour Purple is a treasure trove of racially and ethnically diverse backdrop of a protagonist’s double discrimination; Celie is a Black American gendered quester everywoman flustered and crestfallen into the quagmires of precarious predicament, tumultuous turmoil, herculean struggle and existentialist debacle surmounting the perils and animadversions of adversities and hindrances through the epistolary genre fiction corresponding between God and lately her blood relation Nettie.
Alice Walker, after all, surrealistically and poetically limelights the rhetorical statements foreshadowing Celie’s bildungsroman as implied in the newfound revelation of a transcendentalist triumphalism emerging as a gendered crusader evangelizing and divinizing heavenly celestial indoctrination: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear skies, dear people, dear everything.” Evolving herself as a veteran victor of Amazonian spirited independent beingness and body-polity corporeality identity consciousness personifies the struggles and tribulations of survivalism and existentialism from the ghettoization and otherization of stalwart patriarchal masculinity hegemonic misogyny of father Alfonso and husband Mr. ______ or Mr. Albert. Celie radically transforms herself as a womanist of colour in critiquing the viciousness and wretchedness of domestic abuse, sexual exploitation, marital rape, tormetns and tortures of widowhood and dowry, incessant painstaking manual labour of the barnyard farmwork, libidinization and fetishization of powerlessness and non-beingness.
As a civil rights era suffragette activist and feminist movement advocate the Southerner African American novelist Alice Walker foretells chronicles of epistolary sagas in the voice of iron-willed, impulsive, resolute, maverick, obdurate and curmudgeon feminine countenances such as Shug Avery, Celie, Nettie, Sofia and Mary Agnes that relegates and condescends veteran masculine figures into deconstructionist colloquial vernaculars of being ‘mad captor’ and ‘beastly dog’. Quintessentially quiltmaking craftsmanship of the peasantry trade embellishes the prospects of female empowerment although the framed meta-narrative allegorically symbolizes lioness spirited Black Womens’ resurrectionist redemptive emergence. Racism, sexism, collourism, ethnic cleansing, racial apartheid and so forth intertwines story-telling motifs and themes.
Alice Walker’s ‘The Colour Purple’ is a feminist bildungsroman epistolary chronicle of women’s fictional life writing that navigates an odyssey of stories and poetry such as the relationship between men and women and the relationship between parents and children. The canonical womens fictional novel spotlights the human condition: loss of innocence, quest for individuality, the nature of human suffering and the triumph of the human spirit. Furthermore Alice Walker’s rhetorical statements illuminates captivating enchantment to the tastes and fashions of contemporary modern readers: “I’m committed to exploring the oppressions, the insanities, the loyalties and triumphs of black women.”
Albert Johnson’s racist patriarchal misogyny implores imperative hierarchical zeitgeist of power, dominance and control through teachings and preachings to the heirloom Harpo. Harpo harnesses the spirit of antifeminism by downcasting and dehumanizing behavioral etiquettes with his wife, Sofia as substantiated by these dialectics: “I’m getting tired of Harpo. All he think about since us getting married is how to make me mind. He don’t want a wife, he want a dog.” Notwithstanding companionship amity blossoms into fosterage of loving partnership between the foiled duo couple Samuel and Nettie being entrusted with the spirit of equality. Equanimity and egalitarianism is further advanced by the progression of the womens libertarian social justice and freedom for emancipation movement in the artisanal craftsmanship of quiltmaking. Quintessentially Smithsonian depiction of crucifixion symbolizes the historic legacy of anonymous black women more than a century trademark, Celie’s entrepreneurial proprietorship in Memphis towards financial independence of the heroic protagonist.
In ‘The Colour Purple’ iron-willed and obdurate declarative: “I make myself wood. I say to myself Celie you are a tree” symbolically metamorphoses towards enlightening transcendence as emerging victor cator of the destructive and dehumanizing microcosm. Celie disgruntled oppression and objectification through these unflinching and unwavering declarations. Moreover, the womanist fictioneer projects Celie’s alienation and estrangement through personality. Womanist of Colour, Walker furthermore crafts the farewell valedictorian quoteworthy speech as epiphanic emergence of transcendentalist triumphalism: a song of glory, the revelation of newfound harmony between the heroine and the universe within and without:
The Fourth of July Celebration is both festive and jubilant since Nettier’s husband, Samuel and Celie’s long-lost children reunites: “White people are busy celebrating they independence from England July 4th, say Harpo, so most black folks don’t have to work. Us can spend the day celebrating each other.” All the divisions between people which plagued and tormented the characters during the epistolary fable have concluded in comical relief.
The epistolary womanist fiction chronicles the harrowing survivor of dysfunctional family household; Celie’s existentialist emergence as a bildungsroman emancipatory voice of Black woman through formulation of letter correspondence between God and later to her sister Nettie. Parallel to these events of the plotline, Alice Walker foreshadows curmudgeon relationship conflicts amongst Mr. ____ or Mr. Albert’s daredevil and sexist son Harpo and his soulmate, Sofia, as a formidable, amazon-like woman who dramatizes the plight of the female in rebellion. Being a woman’s rights’ movement advocate and liberations struggle emancipator, Walker highlights racial undercurrents of American society visa-vis the polarized binaries between black-white male/female consciousness and/or beingness. Celie is the object of male gaze who underscores nothingness and powerlessness; being undermined by despotic whims and idiosyncratic desires of the patriarchal houselord Mr_____or Mr. Albert. Despite these tumultuous turmoils Celie’s association with the libertarian Sofia and Shug ushers doors into the world of agency, autonomy, self-individuality and self-fulfillment.
Celie discovers newfound identity and female selfhood corresponding with the community of women: Avery Shug, Nettie, Sofia and Mary Agnes, thus radicalizing liberty and freedom from the captivity and enslavement of patriarchal dominance and/or male brutality and/or conservative Chrisitian orthodoxy. Both infantilism and maternity bond emerges following episodic erotic orgasmic relationship between Celie and Shug: “And God love all them feelings” salvages spiritualist quest merging with archaic, preoedipal, prephallic and preverbal fantasy desire fulfillment and/or ideal ego formations during the mirror stage. Mary Agnes as the alter ego Doppelganger reincarnate of Celie; janitor or warden’s daughter escapes brutal subjection of the oppressive tyrant father within the post traumatic torment of the resultant limpid, disfigured robes, heels gone missing from her shoes, repudiates derogatory names of “Squeak”; ultimately these victors transcends enduring oppressions by bolstering powers over men with daggering denunciation.
Sewing or weavings evolves as quintessentially women’s transformative powers that transplants renewal and regeneration in puritanical patriarchs: “Now us sit sewing and talking and smoking our pipes” symbolizes eradication of gender and class status quos, thus expediting gendered racial egalitarianism of matrifocality within the community of kinship network. Walker (1982) used quiltmaking as a metaphor of bridging and mending differences and ameliorating interpersonal dynamics fostered among the brethrenship; thus quiltmaking facilitates a metaphor of subversion to conventional and parochial gender roles and stereotypes. Despite dysfunctional family dynamics, characters reconcile to each other as encapsulated in Walker’s words: “Committed to survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female.”
After all, Alice Walker’s ‘The Colour Purple’ is the penultimate testament to critique the survival of African American community as genealogical isolates and /or natally alienated beings; the epistolary fiction furthermore reiterates ‘sisterhood as a tactic of survival and springboard to freedom’ . “My whole life is [there]…they are all [there], my hopes and fears, my joys and sorrows, my loves and hates.” Alice Walker’s Corrine is the harbinger for the spectrum of creative possibilities embodied by language and sewing, clothworking and letterwriting, quilt-making and correspondence.
“A needle and not a razor in my hand” ——Celie’s comrade Shug Avery bolstering of creative and productive choice rather than a vengeful, destructive choice; Shug furthermore fosters empowerment for Celi’s rebirth, renewal, regeneration, resurrection, reincarnation, redemption and new life through Easter Sunday family holiday excursion. Mystical moments of spiritual promptings coincided herein “going to church, singing in the choir, feeding the preacher and all like that.”
Alice Walker’s womanist prose declares the very essence of commitment to the survival and wholeness of entire people, male and female. The womanist novelist epitomizes herself as the feminist of colour in love(ing) the spirit and love(ing) herself. Natural scenery of the sublime and the beautiful awakens Walker’s heroines to the sense of intimate interconnectedness of all life. Wily Shug’s ministrations regains the possession of letters by Nettie from infamous and malicious Mr______/ Despite World War II torpedo of Nettie and her family; nonetheless Celie’s reunion with her children from fostered parentage reunites at the novel’s conclusion thus culminating in the novel’s denouement following nineteenth century Victorian bildungsroman as “a Black Jane Eyre.”
Tyrants, desports, captors, conspirators, oppressors, suppressors and tormentors of patriarchal stalwartness radically reconciled as redeemed figures through gender role reversals. Mr ______ sewing, house-keeping, home-making and collection of sea-shells pontificates the substantive reconciliation and renewal. The apocalyptic vision of the novel is offered by the resolution which establishes a peaceful kingdom by anthropogenic questers in seeking for love and justice.
Black folkloric indigeneity ballads of heritage and culture is in fact contemporary African-American writers access to their racial heritage, not only as a content of struggles for freedom, liberty, justice, emancipation, egalitarianism and equality but also as a form of dialectical experience, practice and self.
From these discussions Alice Walker’s ‘The Colour Purple’ popularizes Victorian bildungsroman as a sitcom of the black American diaspora by sadomasochism of the masculine stalwart legions of patriarchy and misogyny.
