Susan Wheeler

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Biographical note:  Susan Wheeler’s books include, Bag ‘o’ Diamonds (University of Georgia Press) and Smokes. Her awards include fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her work has appeared in the Scribner anthology Best American Poetry, The Paris Review, New American Writing, Talisman and The New Yorker. She lives in New York City.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781876857066
ISBN-10:  1876857064
ISBN-13:  9781876857066
Author:  Susan Wheeler
Title:  Source Codes
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Jan-01
Extent:  120pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  7 mm
Weight:  180 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 7.95
Price:  USD 12.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Source Codes is a collection about how we represent the world to ourselves and to each other in an era when the images and words we receive are often generated and received without being marked by even a trace of author or consumer. The poems are linked one to the next only by the words that begin and end each; otherwise, there is no stylistic or (on a specific level) thematic connection. They function, then as a “miscellany,” an approximation of the paradoxical finitude in the rush of information and images we believe we experience, hour by hour.

The poems and images are not titled except by numbers, by which the reader navigates a key to their sources in the table of contents.

“In the fast flow of capital, we need slow space,” and “Information is dark, not light,” the Dutch design group, NL.Design, writes, and in similar spirit, Source Codes is not neutral in intent. Its appendices – HTML code framed by typescript and longhand drafts of poems from this book and poems from the author’s first book, Bag ‘o’ Diamonds – attempt to highlight the idiosyncratic imprint of an individual in the drafting of the HTML. Intended, likewise, is the loss of some authorial romance in the typescript poems and handwritten notes without their losing that quality of like imprint.

Many of the individual poems and images seem to treat a bridge – between the homogenous plethora emitting from the fast flow of capital and the individual gesture from within “slow space” – skeptically, and gravely. In this sense, too, it is not a neutral book.

Table of contents:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-one
Twenty-two
Twenty-three
Twenty-four
Twenty-five
Twenty-six
Twenty-seven
Twenty-eight
Twenty-nine
Thirty
Thirty-one
Thirty-two
Thirty-three
Thirty-four
Thirty-five
Thirty-six
Thirty-seven
Thirty-eight
Thirty-nine
Forty
Forty-one
Forty-two
Forty-three
Forty-four
Forty-five
Forty-six
Forty-seven
Forty-eight
Forty-nine
Appendix I
Appendix II
Appendix III

View excerpt as PDF:

Click here to view a sample (224 KB)

Excerpt from book:  

Five

The thinnest meal on the slightest isle
Sustains but poorly. So: the file
Of men and women, mile and mile,

In consult with the wizened bat.
Plumes and boas’re where it’s at—
She won’t remember saying that.

If hunger takes them to the coast,
They find a spectacle to toast.
Or several of their peers to roast.

Those that make it to the south
Are lucky to live thumb to mouth.
They might prefer the Catamount

Where greenish mountains freeze the nuts.
Though scavenging is an art that’s bust
The ravenous can be beauty sluts.

Those lucky few who do adduce
The food that keeps them from the noose
Will crave on, too. Produce, produce.

Review quote:  Despite high-tech concerns and quips that place her within the interests of Charles Bernstein in his loopy “Nude Formalist” mode, Wheeler’s “sources” in this third book seem equally drawn from the allusive grand style of the Bishop/Lowell/Berryman line. Formally dazzling and spiritually unforgiving, this is an important, limit-testing book.

Publishers Weekly

Review quote:  Part of the project of Wheeler’s book is to turn the type itself into object (a thing which always happens, of course, but it is not always part of the awareness of the poet) which is read separately, perhaps, from the language … and this is part of the larger project of contemporary poetry generally, to return attention to the … extensivity of language into space, into physical therefore delicate and dangerous and temporary existence.

Bin Ramke
American Letters and Commentary #13

Review quote:  Wheeler skirts along the troubled borders where virtual reality and Robert Lowell’s Maine lobster town vie for our central geographic tropes, and where the “self” is invariably a node in a cluster of rhizomatic meanings or enmeshed in an aging, none-too-pretty (but lyrical) body. In any case, Source Codes is one of the few books of poetry that truly synthesizes, even exhausts, the range of techniques that the 20th century provided for American lyric verse.

Brian Kim Stefans
www.alienated.com

Review quote:  Perhaps Louis Zukofsky’s paradign of poetry as “lower limit speech” and “upper limit music” described the best of Wheeler’s poetry, as it hears the “lower limit” mechanics of culture sing, and carries meaning outside of logical—or even describable—argument. This seems to be the unifying element in all of Wheeler’s poetry, this desire to state things while being unable to trust things long enough to have a saying hold. And perhaps then, more positively, moving through this skepticism to a place where saying, again, can be possible.

John Gallaher
Chicago Review