Book of the Week: Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them

In this inventive collection of poems, Mark A. 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. McCutcheon’s work is largely inspired by Northrop Frye’s argument that “poetry can only be made out of other poems.” In a post for 49^th Shelf, McCutcheon elaborates on some key Canadian sources for the current collection. He follows this up with a tour through the non-Canadian inspiration for The Hub.

McCutcheon draws on poetry, but also other forms of writing, including music. To accompany your reading, he has created a delightful music mix that sequences songs in the order in which their excerpts appear in the book.

These poems not only draw attention to the methods of creating poetry, they address some of the most pressing and complex issues of our modern world. “A sound outside the house,” “A pantoum to smash pandas,” and “Nightmares in the university’s ruins” touch on anxiety and anxiety disorders while “Anthropocene obscene as orange,” “Heaven help the roses,” and “Moon of a far planet” wrestle with the ecological crisis. Tied in with these themes are poems that exude a sense of someone who perceives reality as something unstable and often quite treacherous, something that can turn on a dime. This alienation and estranged subjectivity is particularly evident in “Three votive candles,” “Shape your eyes by shutting them,” and “Was I asleep?” Di Brandt calls this work “a brilliant, crazy, deliciously carnivalesque romp through the surreal landscape of our times.” Our worlds, both our ecological earth and our private individual spheres, are being threatened and as the apocalypse becomes more possible, McCutcheon’s poetry offers some sympathy, a kind of impish commiseration.

You can download Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them for free on our website.