Abstract

What if red ran out? is concerned with meaning formation in language and through association; with the possible role of poetry vis à vis political ideology; and with love, which, like poetry, is a reckless clamour in what Camus calls the "unreasonable silence of the world" ( The Myth of Sisyphus ). This collection of poems indirectly addresses, or rather inhabits, formal restrictions and liberties, as well as those of the elegiac mode. Eros and Thanatos are inevitably present, but they are here within a contemporary and occasionally humorous cultural context. What if red ran out? questions absence, implying that it is not an absolute state but that the evocation of absence alters memory; it expands and iconises it into a collage. Lyric-narrative poetry particularly relies on associative metaphor, attempting to circumvent the inherent circularity of language and disrupting the reliable linearity of meaning. Wittgenstein fusses that "language gets its way of meaning from what it means from the world" ( Philosophical Occasions ); association complicates that relationship, resulting in elliptical syntax, manipulating space and time into other ways of meaning the world, and issuing invitations to apparently incompatible themes or images. Each of the three sections of What if red ran out? summons a predominant idea: language, nature and urban nature, and love. On the whole, however, the collection is preoccupied with interrogation, with undermining the fixity and finality of home--- what if this weren't the end but only a footnote to some other abstraction?