All the Tricks of Language

With All the Tricks of Language, Marc Vincenz has indeed mastered all the tricks: lyric, rhetorical, metaphoric, ’the tinkle of irony, ’ drama, comedy-pages filled with people starry as themselves, meeting here on the other side of history as well as this side: ’the world intertwined with the unworld’, ’an ocean of unimaginable secrets.’ All the Tricks of Language is fertile and carnivalesque, grabbing your attention from the very start. Vincenz writes like no one else, vitally original with, perhaps Stevens, Pound, Kafka, and Calvino in the background, along with a handful of Language poets.

Words and phrases bubble up from a magma, forming a molted coherence, a dynamic structure, a natural order. The meaning Vincenz creates is as far from prose reduction as possible, making for ’a provision of epiphanies’. Language itself is a realm, where narrative digs in and picks up. People float up and fade, rise elsewhere. Indeed, ’if we were following all the rules of scripture, by now all would be dead.’ Instead, all is very much alive. The scripture created is deeply ironic while engaged at the same time. Irony creates continuity, new meanings and forms to carry them, a kind of Hegelian dialectic: ’there’s more to the story than that.’

The mind, for example, in the poem, ＂In a History of Half-light,＂ works in the quotidian, translating, transforming, thus making it more of itself. This is a dynamic, gnomic world, a full-bodied manifesto: ’Everything which is transforming/will continue.’ I am convinced from the beginning, and, ’follow the carrot in [in the poet’s] hand’. The only stick there is, in the manner of the Zen master, is a sharp tap to the side of the head: Wake up!

A deeply impressive, engaging, supremely original work of art.

-Brian Swann