In this inventive collection of poems, McCutcheon engages in sophisticated literary play and deploys the Surrealist practices of juxtaposition, cut-up, and defamiliarization. Moving from eroticism to the macabre and from transformative quotation to the individual idiom, Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them explores intertextuality in poetry by challenging the cultural tradition of seeing quotation as derivative.
A brilliant, crazy, deliciously carnivalesque romp through the surreal landscape of our times.
Di Brandt, author of Glitter and Fall
Imagine if you will Louis Dudek or George Bowering as madly modernist poetry DJs, whipping up the crowd with remix shifts that keep the beats just ahead of everyone on the dance floor. In his innovative debut collection, Mark McCutcheon spins a melange of blues, pop, R&B, hip hop, even some dark heavy metal, in a wild mixtape of literary forms, imbedded quotations, and other voices.
Douglas Barbour, author of Listen. If
About the Author
Mark A. McCutcheon is professor of literary studies at Athabasca University. His scholarly publications include articles on such subjects as Canadian popular culture, Frankenstein adaptations, and copyright policy in English Studies in Canada, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, Continuum, and Popular Music, among other scholarly journals and books. Mark has also published poetry and short fiction in literary magazines like EVENT, Existere, Carousel, and subTerrain. Originally from Toronto, Mark lives in Edmonton. His scholarly blog is academicalism.wordpress.com and he’s on Twitter as @sonicfiction.
Table of Contents
- Shadows the words
- Three votive candles
- Fifty more
- Here is where was
- Second of the night
- No family one pictures
- Grand parenthesis
- Where the area code ends
- Found and lost
- Take forever just a minute
- A sound outside the house
- A pantoum to smash pandas
- Anthropocene obscene as orange
- Room for one more
- The leaf is not the line
- Why the blue whale risked its neck
- Mab and Burke
- L’âme de l’homme est fait du papier
- Voyager 2, thinking, types things
- Lunar sonata
- Baby Bee explains Jupiter’s Great Red Spot
- Whose eyes are shut in every photo
- Heaven help the roses
- Forgive me Cathy for
- Ever
- The lineaments
- New patriot love
- You and you kiss the knife moon
- Grosvenor Road
- Shape your eyes by shutting them
- The space of one paragraph
- Was I asleep?
- The Pit of Carkoon
- Raver in the bathroom
- Like opening your refrigerator door
- This time the subway
- Speeches for Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at The Base of a Crucifixion
- Nightmares in the university’s ruins
- Stranger music
- Ecstasy, Euphrasia
- In Gwen MacEwen Park
- Cash paradise
- Moon of a far planet
- Fuseli in Peru
- Notes
- Acknowledgements and publication credits
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.