Alexander Dickow: Caramboles Book Release

"Caramboles" are "Collisions" in English--
so here are some "Caracolls"--

Cars in "collision" and "coller" ("glued" in French--hence "collage")--

Collions as form of "Caramboles collees"--"glued collisions"--
glued collisions--a contradictory meeting of the colliding and the gluing together
at once fragmenting, "crashing" "sounds" of two cars and two languages colliding--and fragmenting, "colles"--glued back together again to form, not the return of Humpty Dumpty, nor the Resurrection and Repair, the Restoration of Calm and the Rightful Return of Property of the Originals to their owners--

but instead--to glue--coller-- the collisions together to form a new Poetic collanguage--
a coll-langue
a dialectical movement of collisions which produces not a synthesis but a richochet (carom) of caramboles--

Caramboles of cars caroming off the collisions of collage and montage--a Caromcollage of Carambolages producing effects such as those known as "Carmontages des Carcollages"--and in caroming among these find themselves giving off sparks of illumination sounding like speaking in Carlangages and Montongues des Colleslanguages

(meanwhile, those worthy stalwarts, "owners," of the Carcollangues-the proper propriateres improperly appropriating the properties of forked tongues, broken English,fractured French---now themselves all "mixed up" in a melee melange of "langage de l'engagement"--colliding and collant with each other's ham fisted assaults on each other's mouths, trying to cram caroms down each other's throats, each one not at all cutting off the speaking in two tongues but instead provoking the "mix" of a third which emerges from among larynxs and so astounds them both that they do indeed "Voix off"--
as Alex calls his blog--

"Who is the third that walks beside us?"
as the poem says, inspiring Burroughs' and Gysin's The Third Mind--
which Alex Dickow has turned into two languages "colliding/collant"--
like those
cars one drives and crashes into others with for, indeed!-- "Caramaboles" at fairs in France--
ay Carumba!

and provoking the quantumontage caracollanguage caromambling and scrambling
of a new poetic language, a third that
"collelaborates" . . .
to create out of fragments the "langue collee"--the glued together language, the glued tongue--
the tongued collision, the car crash of languages--the tongued cars colliding--
the wild child driving the play car straight into another car and seeing the richochet effects
as the poet creates collisions and "picks up the pieces" of the "picking up on the sounds of the tongues in collision"--
and among rioochet effects is playing also with Caroms (blliards)--the Caroms of bent sounds, smashed syllables and overturned letters--
"behind the 8 ball"--"dead man's curve"--
in the festivities of the feast days, les fetes faites des Caroms pour la Carnival des Caramboles--
les effets des faits qui font les sons
des carambollages, caramcollages, car collages colliding in caromontongues--
and then, what of this "car"--which in French "turns into" "because"--
car--"be cause" and "effects--

Dear Friends and Fellow Poets,

My first full-length book, Caramboles, is now available! The book is a bilingual French/English poetry collection: you can find links to reviews and a book presentation after this message.

If you live in France, you can find it in Parisian bookstores such as Tschann, Gibert Joseph or the Fnac des Halles. To save on shipping, you can also order it in the US, by telephone or email from BookPeople of Moscow, Idaho:

http://www.bookpeople.net/OrderForm.htm

Alternatively, you can order it from the following websites:

http://www.placedeslibraires.fr/dlivre.php?ALIS=14b9989859b9651369b4f5ba3bafe203&gencod=9782915978377&rid=11
http://www.lelibraire.com/din/tit.php?Id=60090
http://livre.fnac.com/a2457591/Alexander-Dickow-Caramboles?Mn=-1&Mu=-13&Ra=-1&To=0&Nu=2&Fr=0

If you have difficulty ordering the book, please get in touch with me.

Thanks for your time, attention and support, and feel free to tell me about your reading experience!

Amicalement,

Alexander Dickow
alexdickow9@yahoo.com


REVIEWS:
Jean-Claude Pinson - English translation of the review available at http://www.alexdickow.net/blog/article/115/caramboles-reviewed-on-sitaudis-compte-rendu-de-caramboles-sur-sitaudis
- French original at http://www.sitaudis.com/Parutions/caramboles-d-alexander-dickow.php

Tristan Hordé - Review in French at http://poezibao.typepad.com/poezibao/2008/09/caramboles-de-a.html

PRESENTATION:
Argol Editions
www.argol-editions.fr

Alexander Dickow
Caramboles
"L'Estran" Collection
ISBN : 978-2-915978-37-7
134 pages
Price : 17 €

"The most cockeyed, twitching, wobbliest gait eventually becomes so ungainly, so weirdly lopsided that it dances. This book would rather linger in the confines, if it can, wherever the one becomes the other. I assault the French language, my second; I clutter it with l'on-lit and qu'on-con, unthinkable infractions, maim it with impossible malaprops. I torment and overthrow my other second language, English; I embrace every solecism, bludgeon with blunders every ear within eyeshot; I merrily reduce the English language to a frenzied shuffle. Or else I unhinge language, dislocate it, as though I were a gnome in a museum tilting picture-frames for a good laugh, just enough to discompose the patrons. Aficionados object; campaigns are launched against the crooked: the virtuous demand redress." A.D.

Alexander Dickow, an American poet and translator, was born in 1979. He lives in New Jersey. A student of French literature, he travelled to France in 2003-2004 to study in Nantes, where he completed a French degree in literature. He is currently pursuing dissertation research devoted to 20th-Century French poetry. He has published poems in French and American journals. Caramboles is his first book.

(a non-review;--if something is a non re view--then it is a view?--"the play as it stands?" "upon review"--)

Alex Dickow's work is in a time honored and weathered vein (if not weather vane or --vain--, for why may not the weather be "weather vain?"--)--that is, the cracked and colliding line/s of poets who work with two languages, not as separate entities, but as intimacies inhabiting the same writer--and "coming to life" in a way like spontaneous combustion --which the poet then uses to from this free form flow of colliding sounds and syllables, fragments and echo effects, sonar bounces and radar blips--

these intimately inhabited poets create not translations, but alternate forms of "bridging the gaps" between languages, often by simply--treating the gaps themselves not as the terrifying empty space of Pascal's vision, nor as those abysses which so frightened Baudelaire, but like Poe's Maelstroms and Vortexes, into which "ms in a bottle," are tossed, later to emerge as the strange languages written into the rocks as labyrinthine letters in which persons could walk--as In "Pym,"-and which Robert Smithson thought of as "Proto-Earth Works-art criticism"---or to be "found hidden in plain sight" as in "The Purloined Letter"--
or, in Moby Dick, those strange inscriptions on Queequeg's coffin which bears Ishmael, the lone survivor bearing with him his tale--

thus the gaps are not "filled in" but become spaces in which the "Caramboles" carom--and create these ricochets, not only as a "playful language playing on the doubled meanings of words"--and not only on the doubling of bi-lingual punning--
but as something other, "after effects" "picked up by the listening to the "dying sounds of the collision" and as well the finding of the "after effects" of the debris scattered by the collision--

a combining of sounds and "objects" of language--syllables, letters, bits and pieces of "phrases" and "lines"

It is also an investigation of what translation is, if the poet is approaching both languages not as those professionally "known in toto" so to speak--but incompletely, often enough inchoately--languages which are both as Alex calls them "second languages"--
and in this area one hopes that there will be ever increasingly such kinds of poetry--from all parts of the world--
As Alex works simultaneously in French and English, that is, as languages and sounds in continual change and flow-- there is a poet such as Aryanil Mukherjee, who moves his Bengali poems into American English via the journey through the British English with which he grew up in India--
this is a traveling not across the distance of space and time alone, but through SOUND and also through the visual relationships of the different orders of arrangements of the words used in different languages which share the same alphabet or script--and for a writer like Aryanil, the traveling visually from the Bengali to the British-associated forms of letters and words, typographies--to the quite different ones of the American tongue in all its variations--

one travels along the way in this kind of poetry not "back and forth" or even "between" languages, nor even as the kind of bi-lingual; punning often done, but in a completely different way, one indeed making use of ricochets, caroms, after effects, echoes, the over heard and the under tones of languages which murmur simultaneously in the poet's ear--
this work as it is being done by Alex, Aryanil and many poets around the world, is greatly exciting to me, for it's a way that makes use of the gaps, of the "incompleteness" of "mastery" of the poet over one or two or more languages which they use all together--rather than keeping them in separate compartments, Walled off from each other and ghettoized--imprisoned--

this form of writing is done, for all its incompleteness, (in the eyes and ears of the poets themselves)--and its admission of its own "non-authority" status--with an openness to what is resonating in the moment from the sounds just pronounced, heard, seen, read--and those present in the present--and those sounds which seem already to be emanating also from the future, from the "next words to come along--in the sentence, in the poem, in the line, in fact in the very next syllable to be heard--"

and it is in this openness, not of "open form" or by the use of "experimental writing exercises"--but as a listening and seeing--with al these "times" of the poetry itself as it moves from the moment just a moment ago to this moment to the moment that is the very next one--that the language of the poetry remains truly alive, as yet unknown -=-always calling, just ahead--just a bit further along--while the poet is listening not only to those cries from the future, but is still hearing intently the aft effects and ricochet effects, the bips and bops of sonar and radar--that are expanding s they recede into the past--and also expanding as one moves into them in the future
And at the same --the balancing act of attention and notation in the present itself so crowded already with the sounds of right now, this very instant--

i think in this way, a poet like Alex and Aryanil are finding what really are new languages as they move in the making of these poems moving among the sounds and notations of languages which the poets know very well, and at the same time still feel as children in at times--or as simply travelers who have dispensed with maps as already out of date even if made in the morning on which one set off--

This is a tremendously exciting form of poetry to read--and one sees from the poet's statements--to write also--

for it is poetry of the expansion of the ranges of hearing in a poem--with a poem--and traveling with and in and beside a poem--
to places just down the street--as unknown yet as anyplace on the moon--when one is traveling via this listening--and hearing things once thought common and always the same and now revealed a continual flowing of difference--
For "The basis of art is change in the universe" as Basho wrote--