Martin Nakell

Martin Nakell takes us on a fascinating journey.... And in this journey Nakell makes us see things we have never seen before: 'without this desert everyone would die of thirst.... R]eminiscent of some of the best compositions by Philip Glass....the poem's...passages impart the sensation of negative space; they vanish into meaning.

Within each word the world is sufficient Within each word there is an emotion a passion That is the neutral territory of language Whether the emotion is blocked Or liberated Touching on an extensive range of subjects, Unnamed: The Emotions, is a collection of poems which engage an extensive range of sensations - each poem aware of its desire to "express" emotions, while aware of the impossibility of naming, of capturing those emotions, of holding them still long enough to observe them. Instead, the writing, and then the reading, of these poems is an emotional experience itself, one in turn that can't be captured. In "Rain: A Disquisition," for example, the poet, using forms of repetition, attempts to exhaust the emotions that rain evokes in us, from "That rain which is eternity's eternal ice" to "that rain in which friendship becomes eternally silent" to "that rain which forced sight to the limit of the objective world" to "that rain which we listen to, lying inside, all night, all day, appeased." Each poem comes to the realization that emotion, like language, is inexhaustible, that it goes on almost without us, almost, but not quite, that its "unnamability," which at first may seem frustrating or frightening or even melancholy, is its beauty, its strength, its importance.

IS Several forms of language - poetry, prose, dialogue, essay, opera - take shape in Is. Once we use language with imagination, the definitions/constrictions of traditional form fall away. All writing = all writing. The Chaos Theory of Literary Composition puts it this way: art is energy. To achieve chaos, which releases energy, the writer subjects the writing to heat {in the Chaos Theory of physics, that heat is literal, i.e. fire), i.e., passion, intuition, defamilarization, disruption of syntax, style, genre, spontaneity, the unreal, the unexpected, etc. etc. etc. That state of chaos reveals new form, that chaos opens fissures along which the energy travels and along which the reader engages that energy. IS, putatively the passive verb, includes in it all that is, all the energy we, as artists, bring to the work. Yet, IS, as what we call the passive verb, is a fiction. Like zero in mathematics, the "is" in our work, in the title to this book, isness, does not exist in the real world, but it functions to make everything else work. There is no object - no noun - no thing - that does nothing, that is not an action. Action = energy. Art is energy. The title IS references this nothing which is not, and this - every word - every world - every thing which is, the action inherent in being, including the heat that creates chaos that reveals new form.