Publishers
Weekly
Excerpting from poetic, video and photographic work from
over 12 years, this largish, elegantly designed book is a
virtual encyclopedia of artistic techniques mostly
operating within the traditions of Dada and collage (Kurt
Schwitters looms heavily), Fluxus and early digital art
(much of it created with Ataris), right through Language
poetry, but creating a gendered, polylingual,
image-enhanced reality all its own. In the epistolary
dialogue with Lyn Hejinian that prefaces the book, Tardos
explains her approach as being one of uncertainty:
"Maybe it's a question of creating a condition of
not knowing what one is about to do. Or should I say it
takes enormous discipline and control to surrender
control." Reflecting her nomadic European roots,
Tardos also conveys a more poignant concern that her
operations between media, not settling on one genre such
as "poetry," may strand her in a
"liminal" zone between art forms, though not
outside of "art." Yet the poems of "The
Tree Grille" have a lithe, but meaty, quality, their
Dada impertinences countered by a stable, never tepid
rhythmic base, resembling in this way the work of
Tardos's partner and frequent collaborator Jackson Mac
Low, who appears in several of the digitally enhanced
images throughout the book. "Mayg-shem Fish" is
a jaunty imaginary chronicle of a Tardos-and-Mac Low
performance that provides a touching window on their
meeting, while the footnotes to "Four Plus One
K" provide an irreverent counterbalance to the
sequence's center-stage word-voyages: "Dictionary
sailboat refers to the practice of going sailing inside a
dictionary."
Fans of Tardos' previous books, including the terrific
based Uxudo, will discover a versifying wordsmith they
hadn't anticipated, one with notes of formal grace and a
sense of cross-media camaraderie that expands bandwidths
all around.
Marjorie Perloff
Brussel sprout brutality
Dictionary venison
European blunder clock
Beggary.
Who but Anne Tardos could come up with a new condition
called "brussel sprout brutality," defined in
the Note below the poem as "another shameful
tradition among people who despise that vegetable"?
Who else would substitute "blunder clock" for
"blunderbuss" as a kind of "european"
or think of "venison" as something to be
located in the dictionary? In her marvelous new
collection, Tardos plays with every possible
verbal/visual/musical relationship: she invents
narratives, records "real" events (as in the
case of 9-11 and her recent bout with surgery), and can
work magic with the relationship of word to image, word
to musical score, with multilingualism, and with the
tension between high art and "ordinary"
signage. The Dik-dik's Solitude is astonishingly
varied and continuously inventive. It is a book that
teaches the reader to understand the pleasure of the
text.
Such pleasure as this unique book provides is all too rare. The meld of play, the sights and sounds, the wit of congruent edges, places to go, things to see, always each its own insistent possibility... The sound of the dear dik-dik invites! If you listen, you'll hear. If you don't, you won't.