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El Golpe Chileño

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Julien Poirier

October 2010

Sima Rabinowitz

Is the title page a subversive example of “golpe chileño” or a mistake: Peter Lorre Goes Buggy. A Biography. by Cem Çoker and issued by Gneiss Press (“on the dusty road to hits”)? According to Ugly Duckling Presse (from book publicity on the website) and a brief introduction in the book itself, golpe chileño is a form of street crime in Barcelona. (Spain’s major cities were, at one time, notorious for the many types of thievery perpetrated on tourists in the streets). So, perhaps this, too, is a trick—look over here (maybe you’ll think the book is in Spanish by the cover); no, look over here (this is a book about that odd classic movie actor, Peter Lorre). Gottcha!

Is the title page a subversive example of “golpe chileño” or a mistake: Peter Lorre Goes Buggy. A Biography. by Cem Çoker and issued by Gneiss Press (“on the dusty road to hits”)? According to Ugly Duckling Presse (from book publicity on the website) and a brief introduction in the book itself, golpe chileño is a form of street crime in Barcelona. (Spain’s major cities were, at one time, notorious for the many types of thievery perpetrated on tourists in the streets). So, perhaps this, too, is a trick—look over here (maybe you’ll think the book is in Spanish by the cover); no, look over here (this is a book about that odd classic movie actor, Peter Lorre). Gottcha!

Wait, look over here! The book is, of course, neither about street crime in Barcelona nor Peter Lorre. And it is not in Spanish. This is one big, happily messy, and—in a surprising way—very personal book of writings in a variety of configurations on the page, poems, prose poems, prose, drawings, photographs, illustrations, and graphics laid out in a variety of fonts and formations on large broad pages. The visual components range from the nearly elegant (a finely etched drawing of playing cards) to grown-up boy comic goofy (the “googly gang” predominates), deliberately weird, sometimes silly, sometimes perturbing. The poems treat a variety of themes, including the poet’s travels and places he has lived (New York); his relationship to poetry; the way artists see the world (the opening poem is “Degas 1, Degas 2”: “notice the brightness / of your life”); the poet’s friends (his colleagues at Ugly Duckling Presse, of which he is a co-founder); and a variety of related musings. There are poems in a series (“My Distant Relations”); and a short book in verse (“The Berkeley Book of the Dead”); a short cross-genre story (“Silent Films on Rainy Nights”); and a short memoir-style work “The Stolen Universe.”

While a lot of unconventional, cross and multi-genre, and hybrid work tends toward the disembodied and—often, as a result, impersonal—Poirier’s work is rather unusually personal. In a note at the bottom of a page, he shares his artistic process: “Here’s how I played magic tricks on my poems: With dice, typewriter, index cards, a piece of purple velvet. My main source (I was working with a lot of them back then) was A Pattern Language, a fat book about city planning with chapters like.” And here the note ends. In another note he tells us: “I wrote this poem and named it after a spice in my parents’ kitchen, which was under construction.” (I assume he means the kitchen was under construction, not the spice, but with Poirier, one never knows.)

In other notes he tells us where he was living when he composed a particular poem, or with whom he was associating. A long note at the back of the book explains these pieces’ lengthy publication history (the work dates from 1992-2010). I like the way the poet describes influences and works from which he has borrowed material: “‘Uncollected Introductions’ catches glimpses of poems by Greta Goetz and by Charles Plymell, tabbed in italics.” (Poirier’s titles are especially clever, “Uncollected Introductions,” among them).

As you might imagine, the work is quirky, strange, and provocative. There are moments of lyric insight, gritty description, casual dialogue, a sort of surreal philosophical pondering, pure image, pure story, and comic relief. Whatever you think of this work, you’ll certainly never be bored. So, I’ll conclude by quoting the poet: “Enjoy the flight.” And watch out for all those tricks.

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