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Home arrow Poetry Reviews arrow Organic Furniture Cellar: Works on Paper, 2002-2004
Organic Furniture Cellar: Works on Paper, 2002-2004 
Written by anthrasula   
Tuesday, 14 November 2006
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Organic Furniture Cellar: Works on Paper, 2002-2004
By: Jessica Smith ISBN: 0977997502 Buy Now and support The Small Press Exchange
Publisher: Outside Voices Format: Paperback
http://www.outsidevoices.org/">Visit their website Pages: 96

Jessica Smith's first book takes on big issues, such as how to write about the place where you live with all its distractions, beauties, and limitations intact. And she writes out of these questions a beautifully fragmented series of page-aware poems.

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anthrasula
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Tuesday, 14 November 2006
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At its best, Smith’s poetry functions on three interrelated levels simultaneously. From a distance, her poems are attractive abstractions. Up close, her fragments of words and images are provoking and striking. But only when the reader engages the text and seeks to connect its disparate elements, does a narrative emerge. Through this evolution, a process that can not be summed up in the linear sentence, Smith successfully disrupts and then refocuses our perception of familiar images; forcing us to reconsider how we interpret textual information and how we look at poetry.

I don’t have a problem with an overriding structure guiding an artist’s work, but in Smith’s case, her agenda is sometimes in conflict with the philosophical structure of accepting that her poems work outside the assumed relationship between logic and syntax.

In Organic Furniture Cellar, the words exist on the page in no discernible order which is not to say they have no connection to one another, only that the connection exists in the same manner by which we approach a work of art, be it sculpture or canvas—simultaneously—perceiving it both as whole and made up of constituent elements, whether form, colour, texture, et al.

Of course, this is exactly how Smith wants us to perceive the work, perceiving meaning as fast as the eye dances from word to word rather than by the prescribed grammar that sentences, punctuation, et al. force us into. Like a gallery patron, our examination is not meant to have a particular start or finish to it and meaning is to be derived from the “tracks” that our eyes leave behind.

As Joyelle McSweeney points out, Smith asserts that even if her reader "should encounter only nonsense, the labyrinth of fragmented words itself becomes meaningful (if only because taking a certain path will lead to nonsense, thus warning the reader to choose a different one)."

McSweeney asks: “Why this prohibition on nonsense?” This is where Smith’s agenda conflicts with this philosophy.

In order to distance herself from poets like Apollinaire (whose work Smith cites in her preface) who practiced a form of concrete poetry that existed in a “calligraphic conceptual space” wherein poems operated as little more than ideograms, Smith posits that the poems of Organic Furniture Cellar function outside the assumed relationship between logic and syntax—they, in effect, become plastic.

But in a few instance in this book the poems exhibit a tension (particularly those in the Topology movement) between form and subject that Smith—when she’s at her best (Card Catolog, for example)—masterfully avoids.

This illustrates Smith’s indebtedness to the Surrealists of the 1930s, the influence of Cubists, Constructivists, Dadaists and Surrealists who made their presence powerfully felt in the Mexican Muralists, Madison Avenue advertising design, and eventually MTV—as far away from Smith’s poems as one can imagine.

What we are left with though is one ambitious first book. One that is ultimately successful. For Smith wants nothing less than to force us to reconsider how we interpret textual information and how we look at poetry.

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