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Essays, Manifestos, Statements, Speeches, Maxims, Epistles, Diaristic Jottings, Narratives, Natural histories, Poems, Plays, Performances, Ramblings, Revelations, and all such ephemera as may appear necessary to bring society into a slight tremolo of confusion and fright at least.

Theoretical Objects

Nick Piombino

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In Theoretical Objects American poet Nick Piombino explores—through manifestos, talks, sayings, speeches, and autobiographical-like pieces—form and meaning, how through the very process of writing, of speaking, meaning is made real. And in that sense, Piombino's theosomethingry is turned into object, the idea becomes something tangible and immediate, a sculpture made up of the tangle of words. Seldom has process and meaning been so closely connected as in this wonderful collection: "This poem describes the poet's feelings about the poems of a close friend. Beginning with an evocation of sounds of streams and rivers which can be heard but not seen, the poet declares that the friend now 'refuses to dirty his hands even in flowing water.' A flower which flits by in a 'blur of yellow and green' becomes the starting place of a melancholy description of the passing nature of all things, even friendships."

As in the works of Gertrude Stein, Piombino transforms thought into the poetic process by means of a conceptual metamorphosis. Associative links are tracked across the ordinary bounds of experience, then captured as they cluster into the "theoretical objects," unique configurations of written expression crystallized beyond the frozen forms of literary obsolescence: "Theories are dreams we learn to believe/To counter the empty truths/Which leave us cold."