Slipstream Poetics: A Review of Jeff Latosik's Dreampad

 

Cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling was the first to use the term slipstream to describe “a kind of writing which simply makes you feel very strange; the way that living in the twentieth century makes you feel, if you are a person with a certain sensibility.” Jeff Latosik’s latest collection, Dreampad, harvests slipstream poetics for the 21^st century, with infusions of the real and the surreal alongside the hyperreal[i], a Photostream-of-consciousness stemming from the seductively oneiric impact of being in a world hooked on the Internet, a world where mind itself, always mysterious and intangible, is now even more so, given it’s largely housed in an almost hallucinatory computational cloud.

The title of Latosik’s first full collection, Tiny, Frantic, Stronger, had the nightmarish quality of elegizing, with seeming admiration, the cockroaches who are ostensibly stronger than we are; his second book, Safely Home Pacific Western, was, as Allison LaSorda points out, “a unique take on a travelogue”; and in Dreampad, Latosik’s moving away somewhat from the nomadic restlessness of his previous effort. Not only does he appear to have made the safe trip home, he’s continued to figure out how to further map a myriad of paths for making good things out of the ambient ephemera of the slipstream of memory and the cross-feeds of our day-to-day lives. The trajectory of Latosik’s work appears to be that of a career poet who’s just getting started, and so far there’s been a consistently enriched momentum in his poetics, leading up to Dreampad, which is arguably his strongest book yet. Split into four sections, Dreampad is framed between two poems with the same title as the book itself, like the opening and closing scenes of a movie looping back on each other. But what is a Dreampad? On the one hand, it’s a kind of musical “magic pillow,” namely, an actual product designed to help people sleep; just check out their website to find out about this “Sleep technology hidden in a pillow.” There’s some ironic distancing in the fact that this magic pillow is a gimmicky product name, although not entirely so as the ambient music it emits ties in to deeper poetic concerns we’ll return to in a moment. But wait, there’s more.

In his quest for a concept of home, Latosik’s speaker passes from the house of childhood memory to the cosmos, from the immediate earthy realm to the far reaches of space.

A dreampad is also an ideal home, a dream pad. In an interview with James Lindsay, Latosik says, “I was thinking of home-buying a lot as I wrote Dreampad, and I liked that there was this carry over connotation of “dream home” in the title.” As our sense of place is digitally layered by the rapid changes brought about by the warp and woof of technology, as well as by time itself, our being at home in the world may be ruptured by the present moment’s uncannily dreamlike nature. In his discussion with Lindsay, though, Latosik explicitly avoids doomsday scenarios:

I think there’s a danger to miss out on a full range of human experience by thinking too negatively about the world—be that technology or other cases.

As Gaston Bachelard argues in A Poetics of Space, poets have always been in search of a home: “For our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word.” Latosik, too, in his quest for a concept of home, passes from the house of childhood memory to the cosmos, from the immediate earthy realm to the far reaches of space, as the speaker in the book’s opening poem, “Dreampad,” muses:

I’ve got a salamander hidden in my hand. I want to make a commune for the part-pond things   but when I look again it’s just a smear of red like I’ve wrenched down a nebula.

This progression is strange, as we slip from what seems like the concrete memory of the speaker’s having an amphibian in his grasp, to its sudden metamorphosis into a nebula or interstellar dust cloud. Yet this is how memory works, isn’t it? Memories come when we don’t expect them, and merge into other flickers of consciousness, as if we are in a murkily lucid dream. The reference to the nebula demonstrates a committed interest in science present in all of Latosik’s work, going back to Tiny, Frantic, Stronger (2010) for which he won the Trillium Award; in its opening lines, the speaker refers to the “Devonian fluke,” the proposed theory by which air-breathing fish made their way onto land.

... it’s as if Latosik has a kind of metaphysical device that enables him to turn the strategically disruptive noise or static within the poetic transmission up or down at will, thereby producing a satisfying spectrum of poems ranging from clear to opaque.

Part of the difficulty of Latosik’s writing is that at times the interplay of references across his work can leave the reader feeling lost, as a number of reviewers have pointed out. As we can see above, digging up a reference on the 1st page of his first book can help us grapple with the first page of his third book eight years later. To such charges, however, it’s helpful to consult Donato Mancini’s You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence. Mancini argues that readers should undertake the challenging detective work of reading books like Dreampad. He dismantles the assumption that “the poet does all the construction work, after which the reader just walks on in—provided, naturally, that the gates of the House of Language are not locked.” While highly accessible work can make for great poetry, all poetry need not fit this mould. Mancini cites a number of acclaimed writers who use difficult postmodern strategies, among them Lisa Robertson, Erín Moure, Christian Bök, Steve McCaffery, and M. NourbeSe Philip. That is to say, the gates of the House of Language are not locked, for as readers we can choose to unlock them, if we’re not just willing but eager to participate actively in the poem’s construction; in doing so, we rise to the challenge of becoming co-creators. So, yes, Latosik’s work can be obscure, as LaSorda suggests in her review of Safely Home Pacific Western:

Latosik’s voice can be cryptic at times, which extends to entire poems; often though, the simplification of a line or phrase would improve overall clarity.

But I see Latosik’s willingness to risk wagering a degree of crypticness as a strength. Unfortunately, although some readers seeking rapid access may turn away, the work is richer in its breadth and ambition for its hermetic underpinnings. In my own case, as I’ve spent time probing its puzzles, there’s no doubt the investment enriched my reading. For instance, the cosmic fluke that theoretically led to all life is also that which makes the quirky wonders of aleatory writing possible, like the manifold flukes of Latosik’s lines feeding into each other across multiple books. This cryptic, nebulous quality is related to the fact that there’s no stopping the permutations of chance, just as Stephan Mallarmé proposed in his celebrated line “un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard.” If the poet embraces chance, as Latosik does in his use of remixing, loops, and sampling, while language may seem to hide or retreat into itself, uncanny coherence comes through the decoherence. This isn’t easy, yet, as the speaker advises us in “Oath of an Unaffiliated Boy Scout” you should aim “To live, for as long as you can, in the difficulty.” Latosik’s use of chance is akin to what Jim Johnstone referred to in a review of Karen Solie’s work as “jump cuts” or “moving quickly between images”. While some of Latosik’s work proceeds in recognizably linear fashion, much of it jumps around. And while the methods don’t appear to be conceptual in nature or to fanatically follow John Cage’s insistence on only employing chance operations, it’s evident that the jumps that cut into the work use elements of chance to some degree. In order not to misrepresent the work, though, possessed as it is of broad stylistic range, it must be pointed out that many of the poems in Dreampad are quite clear in fact, grounded in such things as their love for the guitar and baseball and the everyday concerns of living in Toronto, with its gentrification and raccoons. Nevertheless, it’s as if Latosik has a kind of metaphysical device that enables him to turn the strategically disruptive noise or static within the poetic transmission up or down at will, thereby producing a satisfying spectrum of poems ranging from clear to opaque. What would such a device look like? A Dreampad of course, which makes its appearance in the opening lines of the book: “It’s this calendar I’ve dislodged and I am playing / like a simple music grid controller.” Linear time’s lodged into the predictability of a calendar, whereas musical time can be played “like a simple music grid controller.” Music involves layering over time and memory: “I gather up some days / and make a living beat to layer over.” Such music is used to refine a layered dream with a kind of oneiric musical machine, “Hence, a trick I like to do. I make all that isn’t / come to in a half-life of being dreamed...” With echoes of Ondaatje’s “There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do,” the Dreampad is also a tool for cutting up time and consciousness and “remixing” it, in the process causing “all that isn’t” to come into being, which is the act of poiesis itself. Yet the Dreampad doesn’t bring these beings to full reality, but only to the “half-life” of the dream, like organic-techno amphibians poised between reality and the virtual, or digital immigrants coming into the Internet age via the cosmic fluke of its invention. The Internet itself is like the Dreampad, a churning “recyclopedia”—to use Harryette Mullen’s phrase—for every time we click on something, we roll the die, chance taking us forward to wherever we’re going to end up. Being from one of the last generations that grew up offline, Latosik offers the take of a digital immigrant carrying the consciousness of the pre-Internet age into the future. In “The Internet,” he writes:

I first heard about it in a Burger King. Its aims seemed as elusive as the stock ticker or why some people stayed in marriages.

There’s something fitting and yet ironic about the speaker’s first having heard about the Internet in a Burger King, given the restaurant’s globalizing ubiquity, and the Internet’s creation of global technopolises of semi-simulated living. The poem explores how our capacity to sense time and space have changed as we’ve become an extension of this medium, with lines like “Weeks disappeared as if dragged into a bin,” or “It wasn’t a place, but you could go there.” This spatial-temporal shift has had a distinct impact on our physical being, “the body, / pixelated, bare, with the feeling you were overseeing it, / moving along the conveyor belt of ads.” It’s strange to think about the Internet having aims; now it’s as if it has always been there, even though the way it operates is as arcane for most of us as a stock ticker, or for that matter, as the elusiveness of understanding emotions and marriages. As we’re digitally disembodied, taking in an excess of other bodies in pixelated form via the screen, we’re also absorbed by an unceasing barrage of advertising and automation.

... Latosik probes the boundaries between poetics and metaphysics.

Paul Virilio warned against the disorienting speed of technology back in the mid-nineties in Open Sky when he noted, “there exists an unnoticed phenomenon of pollution of the world’s dimensions that I propose to call dromospheric—from dromos, a race, running.” Through his ambient poetics, Latosik appears to be proposing the idea of slowing down as an antidote to the dromospheric. As Latosik explained in an interview,

Dreampad is an homage to ambient music, a genre that does not foreground any particular melody, talent, or personality. To me ambient music is like this long, slow flattening out of melody into just noise, a swerving away from the human musical element and towards “things as they are”—pure sound. It’s the hit song being stretched out beyond recognition, slowed   down, the way poems can feel sometimes—a slowing down of conscious experience.

Perhaps part of being at home in the world—that is, finding a place to lodge one’s mind and body— includes being at home in language. This requires taking the time to consider the sentence, in particular the poetic line, which has the capaciousness to render what’s happening to us in a way that a mere tweet or status update cannot. At times, though, it’s best to have a sense of humour about this quest for home, as in the innovative anaphora propelling the last lines of the blank verse villanelle “I’ve Been Baron Munchhausen,” where the speaker proclaims:

Whenever I’m braced against the quicksand or the ocean or the audit, ready to tae-bo alligators if it all defies my druthers, I can hold myself up with all the lifelines I no longer have and say, without any sadness, none of my dream homes wanted me.

But how does ambient music connect to the Dreampad? In “Letter to Kyle Bobby Dunn,” a missive to the Canadian composer of ambient music, while pondering a piece the speaker’s listened to countless times, he wonders:

I’ve counted the few tones it is so many times an endlessness has opened, and I’m wondering how a life in listening led to this: drone, ambient, minimal core.

Reducing auditory stimuli to minimal tones reduces one’s speed, and tonal simplicity cuts away the auditory superfluity that causes the brain to race:

If you pare back any song to a constituent tune, what lingers when the counter-point and contra-puntal flicker back is a seemingness of presence. Like a soul, just what was there the whole time, really, and so it’s no stretch then to say it’s always been, a transparency or purity of being.

There’s a Rilkean profundity here that warrants close reading, especially as this passage is a good example of how Latosik probes the boundaries between poetics and metaphysics. So, to pare back is to cut away or reduce elements of a song to the tune on which it’s based, to effectively slow down the dialectical aspect of musical thinking, such that the auditory clutter of a more rapid counterpoint / contrapuntal movement reveals a flicker of something. Of what? Not a presence per se, but only what seems to be present, albeit not purely absent either. This is not a soul, but like a soul, a flicker, a kind of solar seed of something both past and present. Once noticeable, this soul-like flicker is a pure transparency, the immanence of a receding presence, an almost absent presence, or the sort of thing poets have always been chasing, in their pursuit of a musical house for being. The slipstream strangeness of Dreampad is evident throughout the book, and most explicitly in “The Good,” where Latosik writes,

... We have to postulate a fiction. I could follow what is real down to its furnaces. But I do see you out somewhere that Google Maps won’t guess the driving time to accurately. Somebody’s limbs are being switched off like lights in a room that’s being left. It’s almost empty now except the last light whose glare has now turned to soft candle glow at night. You’re there.

The speaker supposes the existence of a fiction—counter to the real—which must be related to the form or ideal of the good, accessible, according to Plato, only through philosophical reasoning. Despite the speaker postulating a fiction, there’s a willingness to pursue reality into the furnaces, with Dante-esque undertones. This is reminiscent of the wonderful lines from “I Don’t Want to Kill It, I Just Want it to Live,” where the speaker pays homage to the poet Robert Hayden’s searing poem “Those Winter Sundays”: “Banked fires have blazed for me / often when there’s no fire anywhere. / That’s one thing a poem can do.” All dreaming aside, there’s something so real about Hayden’s poem, infused as it is with such a puncturing epiphany that it burns right off the page / screen. As we move back and forth from poem to poem, pursuing the intellectualized game of its evasive methods, we slip, too. And that’s ok. Suddenly we’ve slipped again, and we’re in some Bladerunnerish scenario, with “somebody’s limbs being switched off,” while in the clause “I do see you,” we can assume the “you” is the good, still eluding Google Maps. Is this the real, or being itself, evading its pursuit by technology? In any case, the geospatial reckoning of “You’re there” is so offputting because we’re so disoriented by this point about what’s there, or whether we’re even there at all. In the interstices of being neither here nor there, we may segue from the “You’re there” of “The Good” in the 3rd section of the book to “You are here” in the fourth section’s “On the General Being of Lostness,” the whole text of which is up at www.poetryfoundation.org:

Lostness is the You Are Here, the red star that the mall map linked to GPS. As if you’d stared into your nowhere like a sun and photoreceptors compensated with a point.

Though the GPS may systematize your global position, you may still be lost in physical space, just as you may get lost in your memories, or in well-woven but meaningfully scrambled poems. Because you’re lost, you stare into no space at all, your photoreceptors flooded with sunlight, the compensation of a point, a red star on a map. There are many kinds of lostness in this eminently re-readable poem, though the conclusion stands out:

... It wouldn’t be wrong to say that lostness is always there on the lip of everything, like lichen or a bomb. There is a loving lostness that if you look deep into, you see a great balance beam that everything that was, or is, or that may be, is standing on.

While the book relies heavily on memory, it has a certain remoteness to it, a refusal to transparently emote too close to the surface; here, though, there’s an unmistakable tenderness, yet not without the threat of violence, and still impersonal. If everything has a lip, the world speaks; as it speaks, it does so through the generation of vegetation, through the lichen, but also the destruction of the bomb. Despite Google Maps, and all our devices and apps, we may still be lost, although in this lostness we may become found, or at least we may find a way of being lost that is loving, that seeks a creative destruction of deep looking, no doubt akin to slow listening; at that point, between the “You’re there” and “You’re here,” there is something like Aristotle’s golden mean, the “balance beam” bringing past, present, and future into alignment, giving us a ground to stand on, a sense of rootedness in the world, a dream pad, wherever or whenever we happen to be.

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ENDNOTES [i] “Hyperreality, in semiotics and postmodernism, is an inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced postmodern societies. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which what is real and what is fiction are seamlessly blended together so that there is no clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.”—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperreality