1 August 2004. Here's another of my pieces for Score Reviews. I finished it 24 October 1986, but don't know which Score Reviews it became.

The screening procedure has several virtues. One is that it acts often as what I call an impedimentation. That's a "mistake" which interrupts a reader's flow' to startle him more fully alert and caringly slow. In Byrum's 'pieces this happens at the spaces between each word's letters and where lines break of in the middle of a word, or even a syllable.

The screening also acts as what I call a disconcealment: a typographical re-arrangement of a text which allows other texts and near-texts to come into view. The result is increased richness. A good example is the following:

S I N E W
A V E S I
N E W A V
E S I N E
W A V E S

It took me more than one run through the poem, and through vague thoughts about the sinew of avenues and a beach where waves wash in, to find "sine waves." The way words for sine waves in this piece imitate the repetition of actual sine ,waves in so many physical occurences and thus produce a visual onomatopoeia was enough to make me like the poem. But those words do more than just form a visual onomatopoeia. The way they abruptly come out of hiding like actual sine waves and other underlying natural regularities showing themselves to scientific insight raises the poem to a metaphor for scientific discovery. And the connotations added by the work's disconcealed words enlarge it, too--sinewaves as the sinew of reality, for instance. Acting like the "sane wives" I also (much later) found in the poem, holding the family of existence together. The poem, in short, is a first-rate one.

Byrum makes use of another device which is almost of the importance to his pieces that his "screening" is, the putting of individual words asyntactically into lists whose members share no readily apparent mutual quality. This, one of the more common devices of the newer poetics, frees each word to most mean its whole self rather than one narrow context-determined aspect of itself. It also acts as an impedimentation.

A good example of the device occurs in a poem consisting of the following words: "these/ blank/ forms/ river/ lives." The list, one of Byrum's more syntactically conventional, just about makes a sentence--indeed, one read would use "river" as a verb; that would result in, among others, the idea of blank (bureaucratic) forms washing lives through life like a river washing flotsam downstream. From another angle the five words make a haiku in which two images jut out of each other, that of tedious, very dead, blank forms, and that of a river which--by contrast--lives. And one can make that logical by infering an office worker looking up from his forms and seeing a river out the window (through, perhaps, a window screen).

So, "lives" lives as both noun and verb. "River" serves as a verb and a noun--and as an adjective, too. modifying "lives." In short, the ideas and images the piece sets off are almost confusingly many. but with a little placid flowing with the poem. one should get an impressive feel of life versus non-life. the inanimate versus the animate.

The piece has an auditory component, too--"river," for example, is all the more living because it moves through two syllables in a collection of monosyllabic words. The "visual meter" manifested by all the words in the piece's being the same length should be noted, too.

Later in SCREENS Byrum puts down more complicated variations of screened material. One piece is ten by ten and its letters are aligned in different ways; it turns out that the ones conventionally aligned spell one thing; intervening ones which are slanted to the right spell something else. and so forth. The resulting message combines veins of leaves, high-pedantry of a philological bent, and joking; and all kinds of parallels are set up--the veining of leaves and the conflation of information. for instance. And the pattern compels the mind to travel into and through analogies, not merely observe them. At the same time, it metaphors the mixed-up simultaneity of reality--which is also stranded with meaning. in an orderly. unifying way. The whole thing might also be, as the text at the end suggests. a "multiple parallax joke." In any event, it is a fascinating and rewarding piece.

Almost all the works in Byrum's book are as potentially discoveryful as the ones I've so far discussed. There are 31 pages of them, almost every page's contents breathing as a work complete in itself. Some pages combine in a sequence, though, and almost all the poems refer back and forth to each other, not only because of their common patterns--some repeat words, for example. So the book is unarguably a book as well as a collection.

It is also unarguably a delightful collection of captured music.