StarCat/CatStar

In the subsequent section, “Wrack Lariat” Heller proclaims the
thesis of his audacious undertaking: "[It] is meant to suggest the Artistic
Mission. A mission that is compelled to reject all that is stale, handed down
- habituated ... intolerant of falsehoods, of the trivially redundant, of the
Uninspired Quotidian." He goes onto state, in a footnote of sorts: "The
authentic artist ... is committed to injecting freshness/new vigor into
Art..."
Heller excels at his own mission, to say the least. The "Wrack Lariat"
chapter features poems that concentrate on several artists, mostly visual -
Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso - and one musical (Joan Mitchell), all of whom
he apparently feels infused "freshness" into art.
In "did Picasso strum?" he inquires whether Picasso actually played
the guitar or merely mimicked it in his paintings: "What happened is he
played the guitar - Visually. Compositionally. He eye-strummed, retinally
fingered, optic-nerved."
In the proceeding "The Dot Soliloquies," all verse was inspired by an
artist friends' dot-laden notebook. The poems are meant, I am assuming, to
serve as the individual "speeches" of various dots.
In, for example, "with dot this circumference," Heller asserts the
raison d'etre of dots: "the ground of being a dot is/round surround/this
round surround/this/bound round surround ground/sound sonic like a
circumferential/dot..." A bit later in the same poem, it is stated that it is a
"soliloquy in dialogue," an oxymoronic qualification if there ever were one.
The penultimate chapter in Heller's epic enterprise is entitled, "Linda
Lynch," which is basically an homage to his collaborator, someone who is
clearly his artistic soulmate, a sort of creative twin who serves as his
visual translator. But in this section, Heller acts as translator, "hinging to"
Linda Lynch's presented drawings, and transforming them into words.
The final chapter, fittingly, is called "Aperture." These poems don't
necessarily take Heller's work into new directions, but they do provide a
large "opening" into which we can peer or fall at will, spying on his process
or taking a brisk walk through the "landscape" of our imagining, since "the
landscape plus what we bring to the landscape becomes our point of view."
After all, he cautions us, "Language achieves landscape both
combinatorially and singularly..."
And this, really, is what Wrack Lariat is all about: Language as
landscape. Heller creates landscape through language not just through
how the words appear on the page, aesthetically - in jagged, frenzied lines,
in tidy prose pieces, or in hybrids of zooming lines and neatly cultivated
prose - but in how he curates and arranges words to fit with each other,
like a puzzle constructed by MC Escher, where everything simultaneously
does and doesn't make sense.
Wrack Lariat is the very definition of "controlled chaos," and Heller
Levinson is a word-Cubist.