Jeffrey Side: Carrier
of the Seed
(ebook available from Blazevox).
Carrier of the Seed by Jeffrey
Side is a new e-book published by BlazeVox, a US publisher of 'post-avant
poetries and fictions'.
Set up by Geoffrey Gatza as a 'refuge' from mainstream poetry,
the bulk of its output is available free and easily accessible at
the click of a mouse.
Those who read this poem by Jeffrey Side will quickly become aware that
they have embarked on an incredible odyssey through layers of space and
time and into the darker recesses of the self. Under the duress of voyage
the language of the 'narrative' appears on occasions on the
verge of disintegration, recovering, like its protagonist (the lyrical 'I'),
to proceed defiant to the poem's termination, which in turns offers
no conclusion, only the acceptance of a recurring fate and the eternal
nature of its hauntings.
I brought my
love a ring
to wear upon
her manipulate for
a token of
our own true
worship and to
remember me when
she returns no
more to be
parted when I'm
with you around
The 'seed' with which the lyrical 'I' is burdened
surpasses the role of physical progenitor to the extent that the
'I' is also the sire of future knowledge and culture; he is the connection
between past and future—the junction between generations. His purpose is
to roam across geographical, historical, cultural and psychological
space empirically alert, seeking out new linguistics to encapsulate his
experiences of the flux and vor tices of overlapping realities. Further,
in order to individualise and avoid the banalities of repetition, a new
linguistic is sought to express one of literature's ancient preoccupations
and the theme of many texts.
. . . terminology of specifics
or perlue for
you know my
love was kind
and cruel but
the judge sentenced
her anyway so
the entrance down
hope eteld his
find well etso
omnin this or
are kwa dright
all day and
night I fight
for light while
you were with
my mistress . . .
The theme 'Carrier . . .' predicates, its age-old reality,
is that of love and betrayal; this is recounted both in the voice
of the poet and in voices of others whose experiences, though different
in circumstance, in essence equate, thus are articulate of emotions which
replicate through layers of time and space. No matter whose voice is being
listened to here, the 'she' that is talked of stubbornly, ironically endures
even though '. . . nothing/ ever lasts . . . '.
. . . the same like
the image of
love around say
450 BC when
you jilted me
behind the tent . . .
The poem opens with:
You made Pandora
visit me from
her disruptions across
the sea her
mane was stretched
like Cyprus-flow
and her mind
was as smooth
as causation at
a time I
had reached my
most content . . .
The act of betrayal occurs at this instant of supreme 'content',
and in its wake the reason and necessity for the journey—the disruption
of order and the quest for understanding. Thus the 'I' becomes
nomad seeking, in the wasteland of desertion, ultimate purgation and the
reinvention of self. Like an unjustly tagged prisoner, he is condemned
to wear the mark of his 'punishment'—the seed (another
seed) of betrayal—and a constant reminder of 'her' that
will impinge on all thought and experience long after the m oment of 'crime',
marking the 'I' forever as its 'guilty' victim.
. . . I love her
in my heart
and this can
never be torn
away by the
daughters of memory
who formed a
colony of themselves . . .
So all the way through to the poem's conclusion, with its implied
continuation, the reader will have embarked down an extraordinary route
of languages, registers and vocabularies, which function to arrest, surprise
and disrupt, languages that flow together, collide and cut across each
other's current like a plaited waterway. In turn, this flow has been
enriched by the assimilation of artefacts from different generations of
writers; these deepen the work interlacing it with echoes and experiences
from different times and cultures. The integration of so many disparate
elements into one cogent construct is the poem's triumph.
Text copyright © John Couth,
2008. All quotations are copyright © Jeffrey Side, 2007.
