antimatter

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

We are told on the back cover of antimatter that its poems “are
declamatory, politicized, experimental, occasionally concrete, recited,
chanted, stuttered, and sung.” A CD of all the poems performed by
Hazelton is included, so readers (or listeners) can check this
advertising out for themselves. What they aren’t, for this
reader/listener, are very poetic. Even when I agree with the political
views expressed, as in “they come” or “lethal injection,” for
example, I still find that most of the works come across as prose broken
into lines. Hazelton has chosen, I believe, to not write lyric,
perceptually engaging poems. There are few, if any, images, except for
the politicized and banal ones that he has taken from the common
airwaves and that he uses with a fairly usual irony.

As for the performances, on the whole, Hazelton speaks or whispers his
pieces, not getting too carried away even with the extended words or the
stutterings. He does declaim, but quietly. Nevertheless, these pieces do
display themselves as performance poems, rather than poems to be read on
the page. Their failure as sharply etched poems becomes clear when
Hazelton quotes two famous lines from Marvell’s “To His Coy
Mistress,” which sing with a rhythm not to be found anywhere else in
antimatter.

Some readers will find the concrete poems and performance pieces, like
“wordwork” and “product,” full of exciting possibilities;
Hazelton’s own performance of them strikes me as too gentle.
Nevertheless, they do demonstrate a sense of how repetition and chant
can engage the ear and eye. At their best, these pieces suggest such
possibilities, but mostly they show us what we already know.