Notes on Non Existence

by Ric Carfagna. A Sinfonia Press Publication. PO Box 385, Petersham, MA 01366. 2001.

Book Review by Michael Basinski

Notes on Non Existence- the 1st Bifurcation by Ric Carfagna. A Sinfonia Press Publication. PO Box 385, Petersham, MA 01366. 2001. 44 pages. $5.00. Notes on Non Existence - Second Segue by Ric Carfagna. A Sinfonia Press Publication. PO Box 385, Petersham, MA 01366. 2001. 48 pages. $5.00.

In a recent letter Ric Carfagna defined himself as a radically obscure poet. Obscurity is a barnacle all poets know as the voice of the gods. But radical also, I found interesting. Ric Carfagna’s projects are radical, that is radical as in the roots of poetry and radical also in that they’re aggressively other than - well all - of the workshop grandmother’s apron and North American gray squirrel poetry that populates the plates of the majority of soft, tender and obviously unexperimental or Somenex poetic ears. A massive rolling of multisylabic word strings seek a form of non-existence In Ric Carfagna’s poems. Non existence as not existing, me thinks, in the gas stations or classrooms flung across the world. But not in non-existence but IN that place other, that other being place where only exists the Poetic Ace of the heart of meaning. I wanted to find some string that meant nothing but could not and only could find endless meaning. My bookmark flipped about onto floor like some mad seal so I opened my text again - somewhere-anywhere-: “immolation to nether-regions/ linking/ theoreticals/ within world/ where no progression is possible. / to render/ a nascent ontology/ using a door to return to the (internal/ locality.” But what I was looking for, which seemed a defining movement (one of many and there are many) anyway that moment being: “events transpired without descriptions.” I mean there are many more… “numbered in the satiation of forgetting/ the terminal mass/ miming the discord/ of alternant geometries.”