Mind Words

These short poems play on people and places, and the life of a young Jewish boy, who must leave Paris for New York. As the title defines, these poems are about words thought, lived and imagined. They remember a poet’s life. Serge Gavronsky sets out to revise and reimagine a number of literary genres-the novel, memoir, autobiography, detective fiction, the hospital narrative, the long poem, the short monologic lyric-while in the process inventing several altogether new genres, modes, and hybrids: the ＂poemnovel,＂ ＂an infiltration of words,＂ ＂poems within a poem,＂ a ＂book of secrets,＂ ＂words in memory,＂ ＂mind words.＂ Employing a potent arsenal of Imagist, Objectivist, and Surrealist techniques sieved through stiff shots of Continental philosophy, Gavronsky effects what might be the most serious and sustained overhaul of the possibilities of literary production since the Révolution Surréaliste of the 1920’s.

＂Mind words＂ are exactly what this long poem is comprised of: words sheerly of mind, pure imageless intellection spiraling in an intense interrogation of what it is to remember, altogether. After a few pages of the obligatory air raid sirens, hiding under the table, docking in Manhattan, etc., the writing recounts no memories whatsoever: instead, it describes in excruciating detail the immediate act of the mind as it thinks through the mechanics of memory in an ongoing account of remembering as it occurs, framed by a simultaneous interrogation of its happenstance, of what happens to it as it appears or is constructed and how that coincides with and inflects the act of writing as it goes on. And then how does dream operate in concert with all of this? What does it mean to ＂relive＂ something, and how does this zombie-like living again what is dead alter and distort through the very act of that ＂reliving,＂ and then once again through the recording of it all? In his phenomenological existential memoir, Gavronsky explores this vertiginous spiral of mental consideration for some one hundred and forty pages in a literary tour de force of concentration and attention the likes of which has never be seen, written, or read: Memory Words By themselves Glaring O where Have All of them Gone A memory Replaces Places Themselves Spelling Who then Can they Catch Language will Do it Out of space There the sublime Shows my name The last fifteen pages of Mind Words then abruptly break from this singular linear stalactite of linguistic flow as the text spills across and down the page into broken bits of sentences, unrelated words, names of random places, and chunks of gnomic phrases, to end in a classic Gavronsky Loony Toons flourish.