Poetry New York

    Ezra Pound put it best in his ABC of Reading when he wrote, For those who read only English, I have done what I can, and the same should go for those who go to only English language poetry readings. If you are indeed one of the many people that limit yourself to English only performances maybe reading or hearing Rodrigo Toscano's poetry which uses the all too familiar computer language will convince you to believe that you aren't as hopeless as Pound thinks you are. When it comes to fusing several different "languages" together, Rodrigo Toscano knows no limits and amalgamates a powerful rush of sounds and languages. He creates a melodic cyberspace out of his techie poet presence where neologisms mixed with slang make his poetry mesmerizing to hear and surprisingly, easy to follow, if you can keep up with his rapid pace. Toscano read several poems from his book To Leveling Swerve (Krupskaya 2004) at the Bowery Poetry Club where he made the stage his template and created a dynamic presentation of innovative poetry utilizing techniques of melopoeia, phanopoeia, and logopoeia. His first piece, Subject Line Subscribe (Society) discusses the ever-changing technology market. He takes us through the cycles of having a pod, then getting a new pod, and how we become podfull, then podless, and having to be poddy trained upon obtaining a new pod. The repetition of the word mulling and pod makes one really think about how many of us limit our daily interactions to only technology-based mediums. His poem Relay Alpha, Bravo, Charlie juxtaposes politics and education. He addresses the issues of communism and sectarians and how easy it is to dance around such subjects. He criticizes just how much education can blur our senses of reality and proposes this question; swing-dancing the most remotest thing to communism are we? As Barbara Guest says in her book, Forces of Imagination, a poem should set out to delimit the work of art, so that it appears to have no beginning and no end, so that it overruns the boundaries of the poem on the page. Toscano’s poetry takes the audience on the voyage beyond the page. His words spill off the stage and make us think more than just the art of poetry and form but the substance of the words within. The third piece, Sublunary Markings of Autumn (In) uses the analogy of the "spork" to implement the collision of industry and cultures within our society. Toscano integrates Spanish, Latin, English slang, and German as he weaves in and out of different cultures to address how this hybrid of spoon and fork came to be: ...between two Super Developments / moments in human industry, human culture fanning out from the basins of East Central Africa.... He finishes this poem with two words, one real, another a neologism and when broken apart is incredibly thought provoking: Secular Almsgiving. Toscano’s poetry is dense and introduces new ways of looking at the world; some are challenging, yet nonetheless deserving of your utmost attention.