Poetry New York

Words begin to gush out of Toscano’s mouth like a waterfall as his tempo picks up, but even then his speech is unfaltering, with each word pronounced deliberately and precisely. The poem is Subject Line Subscribe (Society), and he navigates the dangerous rapids with apparent ease, then turns the flow of words to molasses for a second before transubstantiating his voice back into a torrent, a maelstrom.  But throughout the poems from To Leveling Swerve the quality is always fluid, unlike the newer poems that are more like a gentle breeze.  He is a master of speech. Reading the poem from the page its obvious there is an intended musical quality to it, what Pound calls melopoeia, but the poems don’t really come alive until you hear him breathe vitality into them as his tongue ricochets across his palette.  But what do the poems mean? 

To say that Toscano is more concerned with melopoeia than with logopoeia doesn’t necessarily mean his poems are devoid of meaning.  Take for example the evolution of his POD, a generic Thing that undergoes the fluctuations of a commodity in demand, out of demand, its discovery, its spin-offs, its overabundance, being taken for granted, its rediscovery, etc. His meaning should be obvious in today’s culture.  Toscano’s language reflects our own ethos of a laptop/wireless/disposable/free-market/subsidized/outsourced/accumulation-of-history-into-today’s-marketable-product age.  I think it will be interesting to observe Toscano’s work in the future, to see if it has been prophetic in anyway, or if it gains in relevance or becomes dated.