Critical Review of Visuals

Posted on April 10, 2014 by helmsjl

     Jody Smiling, an author for The Rumpus website, writes a short review for Pethybridge’s Striven that includes excerpts from an interview and analyses of the various features of the poems. She talks about the purely visual qualities of the book, and draws attention to the function of the black pages. In the interview she quotes from Pethybridge talks about how the pages serve to function like a “ ‘Renaissance printer’s tradition, like ‘pouring one out’ a show of respect, honor and grief for the departed by wasting a (scarce) resource, the point is exactly the excessive waste — a sign of love in that waste.” Smiling analyzes the pages in terms of a visual and emotional confrontation. The reader experiences a “deadening effect” of repetition. She states that the effect is heavy and mimics the darkness that one might be challenged with during depression. Another visual that she addresses is the fold out pages. Smiling likens this to a more traditional aspect of a centerfold; the unfolding action creates a sense of “anticipation, voyeurism, and distanced intimacy”. Pethybridge, she states, mimics these aspects by objectifying the bridge into a visual fold out, while also being reproving.  In his final section, Fathom-line, the poem is also represented visually. She writes that the line of the poem joins the pages together and has the same purpose that a true nautical fathom line has. It poetically “join[s] all points having the same depth to expose the ocean’s floor,” to expose the connection of grief.

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One Response to Critical Review of Visuals

  1. Marco Frey says:
    April 10, 2014 at 11:56 pm

    Exploring the visuals of Pethybridge, Smiling makes some interesting connections. I really like hearing Pethybridge talk about the Rennaissance painter’s tradition–I never thought about painting or any art in that manner: using a scarce resource to commemorate someone no longer with us. Ah, it’s so primal. This human being has become individual elements again, without breath. And yet, fragile and needy humans we will gladly sacrifice hard-won pigment sourced from all kind animals, plants, and minerals to write your name. It is such an integral part of what it means to be human.

    Starting with the cover, for me the black and red is a classic combination to get us thinking about death (void) and the act of dying (pain), black being void, red being pain. Red is the limit towards death–that which we cannot be gotten around. In German, there’s a word for that: it’s called Unüberganglichkeit. Un-over-gotten-quality. Although German is my mother tongue, I got this tidbit of wisdom through Nox–another visual book of poems about a dead brother. So, red is the act of dying, the human part, the pain, the emotions. Black is something unhuman, something humans cannot use their brains to understand. The cover of Striven influenced the way I sat with the book–weighing it, handling it, unfolding it. It’s the same way we can only talk circles around death.

    I’ll say a few things about the black pages that was my experience. I thought, especially turning the page, that a black page made looking backwards at the book an erasure. That is, looking to the left at a black page seemed to erase my memory of the poem I had just read. Or perhaps, made me aware that I tend to easily forget poems I just read. And that makes me think about death. Also, I think of Mark Rothko’s paintings whenever I see a vertical rectangle of a single color. He was a minimalist, and his work is famously featured in a contemporary church called the Rothko Chapel in which there is nothing but concrete and his paintings hung around the walls. There are cement rectangles on the floor, large and solid benches. The idea here, again, trying to get closer to the limit with our contemplation. The idea of a limit comes from Calculus, and you’ll notice, Pethybridge seems to use it for a lot of meanings, including the closeness we get to understanding death, but never actually understanding it. However, the close we get, the more we learn about what it means to be human, and to begin to answer the fundamental question: what do we do with our lives?

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