MiPOesias Magazine

FRANCOIS LUONG

Reveling in White Noise

Aaron Belz, Plausible Worlds. Observable Books, 2005. 30 pages, paper. $8.00

With Plausible Worlds, his first chapbook, Aaron Belz offers us a poetry of exhilaration and exuberance where the self is drowned in a flood of pop cultural referents fading as quickly as a television commercial or a movie trailer. Following William Carlos Williams’s dictum that poetry should be about “those things which lie under the direct scrutiny of the senses, close to the nose,” Belz fearlessly embraces postmodern phenomena like vacuous celebrity or spam mail.

Williams is one of the poets Belz pays homage to by lampooning his poem “This Is Just to Say” in “In Memory of William Carlos Williams”:

Thank you for siphoning out
the water standing in the dip in my yard
after such a heavy rain, Lisa.

It was confusing to walk out there
with the magnolias so bushy, and flowering,
and my sneakers squishing like octopi.

The method is reminiscent of the OuLiPo exercise known as “S+7” without the mathematical rigor, or of Kenneth Koch’s “Variation on a Theme by William Carlos Williams,” but the effect remains the same. Belz tries to defamiliarize the reader from the text while instilling a certain sense of playfulness.

Another OuLiPo-like experiment is the poem “Five Beginnings of Jokes,” where Belz substitute the agent of five common jokes for “the elk, deer, chipmunks, coyote, sea stars, orca whale, sea lions, newt, weasel, and many different kinds of birds.” The effect is quite absurd, but like any good absurdist literature, the poem uncovers the prejudice inherent to all jokes.

It would be easy to dismiss Belz as just a silly comic poet, the way Kenneth Koch often is. But like Koch, Belz pushes the absurdity of social situations to an extreme to undermine preconceived notions about the self and perception. In “Reinventing the Wheel,” Belz addresses ethical concerns and the danger in totalizing the Other. After trying to “reinvent the wheel,” the speaker of the poem tries to “reinvent you” which turns out to be a “mistake,” leaving him to be reinvented himself into “A pensive, slightly overweight woman / With a knack for arcane geography.” Belz never abandons his whimsical tone, but what emerges is a feeling of melancholy, asking “Will we be happy as our new selves?” Because of the totalizing relationship of the speaker to the Other, his being-in-the-world remains unfulfilled.

Ultimately, Belz writes about how technology affects the way we live. As in Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise, the television becomes an interlocutor in an asymmetrical conversation, subjecting the speaker to a “topographical air assault.” The release does not come from “plausible worlds,” but from the Other.

Aaron Belz lives in St. Louis, where he curates Readings @ The Schlafly Tap Room and teaches English at SLU. His work has been published recently in Knock, Court Green, The Bedside Guide to No Tell Motel, McSweeney's, and Boston Review, and will soon appear in Painted Bride Quarterly and Unpleasant Events Schedule. For more about Aaron, please visit belz.net or myspace.com/orthodontist.

Francois Luong was born in France, but now lives in Houston, where he received his Bachelor's Degree in English and studied under Tony Hoagland. Previous work has appeared in Pebble Lake Review.