Slash and Burn
by Charles Potts and Robert McNealy
$400.00
Blue Begonia Press
Slash and Burn
This volume contains 36 poems By Charles Potts and 32 photographic and painted images by Robert McNealy. The title, obviously, is from the farming practice which while clearing land for culture, agri, that is, eventually destroys it. The picture of a human brain on the cover is evocative of Ginsberg's "The best minds of my generation..." So the tone is set.
Slash and Burn is the collaborative work of two consummate artists: Charles Potts, poet, publisher, linguist, historian, and analyst of the social, and economic forces shaping the new international culture; Robert McNealy, painter, photographer, draftsman, and organizer of objects and vision. His work is known in Asia and Europe as well as the Western Hemisphere. As one would expect, this combination does not miss.
From the beginning page in the orange and black "The Pledge Of A Grievance," Potts' acerbic wit is evident. It is not idle humor, however. It penetrates the head and heart of our culture. Potts had already established himself as a foremost critic, in verse, of our global culture with, Across the North Pacific, Slough Press, 2002. The scope, here too, is wide, from the acutely personal to the super national, as in:
Grounded Gravity Simultaneously Holds me down Props me up Walked, locked, upright Into this relationship Meaning Nothing to the earth and Everything to me. or: "They, the People" by Adorno, for Martin Marriott and Rick Beaty Only a communist could write such a phrase, Party of one Hoping to sit near a window With his back to something More protective than the door Through which trouble in the form of Heraclitan flux walks Actually flows in on two entirely other feet If not ignorant outrightly hostile To his solitary caloric uptake unentitled lunch.
The dedication reads, "To Whom It May Concern," an apt dedication since it concerns all of us. For whom does it speak? Tom Clark, in his new semi biography of Ed Dorn says Dorn's world was a "World of Difference." Presumably this would apply to Potts and McNealy and all those like minded. But who is different? The power world through its media, including the book world, as in Potts' poem addresses "They, the People." This book addresses, "We The People," collective America in its entirety. We the people are sold the fraudulent notion that it is we who are different by the seemingly indifferent power elite, and are persuaded out of our sense of commonality. The power elite is not indifferent in either sense of the word. It is not neutral or disinterested, nor is it the opposite of different. We The People are the core of this culture, it is the few who manufacture the mass mind who are different. The ordinary American working stiff is deluded into thinking that he and the few in charge are the same, that they both float in some great chummy mainstream together, and that people who see the world as it is, like Potts, McNealy, Dorn, and Veblen are "different."
When money talks It lies.
Potts' poesy is varied, with couplets, quatrains, stanzas and lines of various lengths. What is consistent is content, an unfailingly acute expression of what he knows. He is telling us what his and our world is. It is not the world of a "different" crank. It is our world and he puts it out there for us to see. His is not an academic poesy with pretty lines that say nothing. He writes in "Potts Meter" and if you find his foot along the way, sock it, sandal it, and strew it with flowers. He will never become the US Government's Poet Laureate.
McNealy's images, grainy reproductions of his photographs and painted renditions of skulls fit the sense of the poems which go from sweeping panoramas of a world order to the mundane crushing of a bug on a windshield. The photographs frequently focus on part of an image, that part which would ordinarily be thought of as unimportant, different from what the art journals would select for us to see. McNealy's sensitive eye pays strict attention to the ordinary and transforms it into the realm of the exceptional. The images are not mere illustrations of the poems. Each page is conceived as design with the images and the printed words of the text forming an intriguing visual unit. It's art.
This is a beautiful volume, well designed and put together. It is a pleasure to hold it and turn the pages, then put it in your lap, lean back in your chair and contemplate it. What more can a book be?