Panopticon

Martin Singleton was a poet living in Toronto.

Steve McCaffery is best known as an experimental poet. Panopticon is his first full-length prose work. It is an unsettling book, with coherence definitely coincidental. Thus, such apparatus as film commentary, dichotic listening channels, and multiple screens come into play. The effect on the reader is somewhat like looking through a kaleidoscope while under the influence of some hallucinogen.

It’s all good fun, of course, if one likes this sort of thing. About forty years ago, Kenneth Patchen did much the same sort of thing with The Journal of Albion Moonlight. However, Patchen was a poet, and he believed both in the value of his art and in the importance of the values that art transmitted.