Like the halves of the god-severed wholes in Aristophanes’ Symposium fable, image and word wander the world in search of one another. Each time a pair meets, it reunites in its own way. Reunited in Blake, the images show what the words say. In Helen Ivory’s Hear What the Moon Told Me, the images recontextualize the words. In Robin Tomen’s You Would Say That, the words become the images. In Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, the images haunt the words. In Keene and Stackhouse, Seismosis, the words and images collide like tectonic plates. In Debra Di Blasi’s Skin of the Sun, the words and images create an interference pattern. And so on.
Geoffrey Gatza’s Self Geofferential confines itself to no single mode of word/image relationship. It includes numerous freestanding sans-text images, beginning with a mixed-media collage called “Boogie-Woogie” that covers a two-page spread immediately after the first title page, and continuing through the ink-on-paper “Lemonade Cat” near the end of the book. It includes images that incorporate text, from the title and half-title pages through “Like Lilacs blooming in my heart” mid-book and a photograph of “Geoff’s work table” at the very end. Many of these images (such as “Geoff’s work table”) compose their text in children’s colorful plastic magnetic letters. It includes “visual poems,” such as one with sky-blue letters on a sea-green background, reading “SORRY, WE’RE HAVING TROUBLE LOADING THIS COLLAGE. LEARN MORE.” And it includes juxtaposed images and poems that speak to one another, as for example, early in the book, a collage of an apple, followed by a poem entitled “Disappointment Apples.”
No doubt finer-grained distinctions would create more categories for a description, but the point is the plethora. Words and images abound, and intermingle dynamically, with the result that the parts (the poems and images) are as eclectic and energetic as the wholes (the unions of image and text) and indeed as the whole (the book). This plethora — the abundance and energy and variety of words and images — manifests as what is at once a poetic principle (a formative influence in the making of the work) and a poetic ideal (a valuation fulfilled by the made work): Gatza’s book is “polymorphously obverse,” always showing a new face.
The polymorphous obversity appears, in one way, as poems pitched to a varied readership. The first poem, for example, narrates in the first person a forty-year attempt to create a dessert of French-fried apple sticks (from the poem itself we learn that Gatza worked as a chef for that whole time). Only an older adult reader could deeply identify with the situation of disappointment and failure in a decades-long life’s work, can feel, not only think, the strength of emotion in lines such as these:
Under the unity of naming
I hoped to bridge that gap, but
The hungry spirit of time
looks truth in the eyes.
By contrast, “All the Story by Heart” addresses itself to a “you” young enough to look forward to days when “your grandmother / Will read you a bedtime story,” and to have a favorite bedtime story, Little Red Riding Hood. The poem culminates in a set of complexities imputed by a speaker to the “you”:
It’s not every day you discover your grandmother is actually a wolf
Dressed up as your grandmother who reads to you about a wolf pretending
To be a grandmother. And if that is right, it means your mother is a wolf
As well. And maybe, just maybe, you are a wolf too.
The imputation creates further complexities of the adult speaker/child protagonist variety, as in Elizabeth Bishop’s “First Death in Nova Scotia,” say, or Theodore Roethke’s “Child on Top of a Greenhouse,” in which the reader is given access to both perspectives, adult and child, at once and as one. Within the poem, grandmother and wolf morph into one another in a child-pleasing, adult-intriguing way, one that invites a further layer of complexity. The fiction of the poem, that a grandmother is reading a bedtime story to her granddaughter, invites performative replication. In the poem, the grandmother “acts out all the parts,” and when she “reads the scary part of the wolf, / ‘All the better to eat you up!’ she pounces on you and gives / you a big hug and kisses your face for longer than is necessary.” Which invites any real grandmother reading the poem to her real granddaughter to really hug and kiss her. And invites me, a reader who is not a grandmother and never was a granddaughter, to imagine both the characters-in-the-poem hugs-and-kisses and the readers-of-the-poem hugs-and-kisses. And so on. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E-aware textual play, maybe, but more importantly hugs and kisses abounding to the naïf of readers.
The same polymorphous obversity that shapes the poems of Self Geofferential informs its images as well, and the “Art attributions in order of appearance” appendix at book’s end gives a way to gesture at it. Several works get “descriptions of one’s own” (there is a “Bottle poem and text,” a “Paint on Paper,” an “Ink on Paper” or two, and a “Photograph”) but almost all are given as “Mixed Media Collage,” a catch-all term for polymorphous obversity as artistic medium.
The last image before the list of “Art attributions” shows the surface of “Geoff’s work table” with colored plastic letters arranged on it to spell out “LIKE A BANANA I KEEP MY MOUTH SHUT.” The image/text calls back to the book’s title page, on which the title, the author’s name, and a ripeness-freckled, very yellow banana geofferentiate themselves from a monotone gray background. Maybe it’s true that Geoffrey Gatza did keep his mouth shut, but what’s truer is that he kept his book open.
H. L. Hix’s recent books include a novel, The Death of H. L. Hix; a hybrid work, Say It Into My Mouth; a “testamentary” related to gun violence, American Outrage; and a poetry collection, Beckoned Back by Hell-Bent Blackbirds. He professes philosophy and creative writing at a university in “one of those square states,” and lives approximately a mile from the 12-story dormitory that is the tallest building in the entire state.