And Now for Something Completely Confurreal: A New Poetry Movement?
Sometimes, a poetry book arrives that defies coherence even for the most ardent fans of experimental literature. An assortment of nouns, verbs, and adjectives colliding with one another, unexpected line breaks and the deterioration of meaning in unexpected places—these are very much defining qualities in Jon Riccio’s Agoreography, a seemingly impenetrable fortress for Riccio’s own dazzling and maddening war against the tired tropes and cliches of the expected canon of thought and writing. How does one fight this war, one may ask? By creating an entirely new poetic movement, of course: the Confurreal. A portmanteau of Confessional Surrealism, Riccio emphasizes this new movement can illuminate more profound areas of the self through the belief that the “jaggeder the experience, the more it belongs in a poem.”
This self-proclaimed jaggedness does cause a strain within some of the language-stretching in these poems, with some verses bordering on the unintelligible, but the push against conventional narrative here does lend more visceral potency to the form each new poem takes, creating through the bizarreness some truly evocative imagery, as witnessed in “My Handwashing Explained,” where Riccio states, “Leeches, boil the vanity” or “what good is a diphthong to a hammer?” in “Introducing the Confurreal.” These delectable segments couple wonderfully with the festering of malady and sickness and topsy-turvy language-play that seem to actively obfuscate and manage what the reader can chisel out of the concrete stanzas. Riccio is less interested in the story the readers will take from each new segment, and instead, emphasizes the chaotic energy of the stanzas through the unconscious reactions each reader may have to the work as a whole new poetic genre.
It makes sense, then, the poems of this new form that ring clearest and that are most directly in conversation with the reader are those that speak to Riccio’s own struggles with OCD, agoraphobia, and germaphobia, all compounded by how these strands deign to meet or unify (and they often do not). The repetitive nature of some of the poems’ content emulates OCD (perhaps most prominently on “The Vermont Test”)—the need to repeat cycles, movements, even thoughts, until scrubbed clean, tying to the continuous thread of germaphobia, a sense of sterility and detoxification (“The Area Code for ESP”). “Foible” is more prose than poetry, delineating some of the most direct confessions about the narrator’s OCD than in other pieces of the collection, its clarity stark amid the surrealism.
The talk of phobias and OCD next to sequential images of radioactive images, germs, microbes mixing with fluids and vaguely sexual language become, unexpectedly, an astute maneuvering by Riccio to allow his passages that speak of same-sex attraction as perceived contagion or infectious malady to also shine (“The Poet as Fluidphobe,” “World Traveler,” “Spokes/Synthesis”). Riccio’s life as a classical violist becomes a sneakily crucial key for meaning-unraveling in this collection as well, even getting its own centerpiece place with “Bach Fugue State.” Meanwhile, the entire book is split into two parts via an intermission.
It is from these poems in the collection that the reader will gain the most meaning and satisfaction from within the admittedly still-difficult verses. It becomes very clear by the end that the Confurreal is very likely the closest Riccio has come to visualizing the nature of his mind, and that it is okay for the reader to not get what is happening, for that may very well be the truth for Riccio himself. The experience is the thing, not the lesson tidying it at the end.
The active defiance of reason and tangibility in this collection seems like a call not to simple subversion but to cast the realest light on the trauma of continuing to survive the incomprehensibilities caused by OCD, agoraphobia, or any other legion of conditions and contagion that afflicts people daily.
In this way, Riccio’s Agoreography is valiantly triumphant, asking the reader to engage in difficult and complicated language and form-play as a way to emulate his own wrangling with his mind and its inherent complexities. Perhaps this is not a collection that all will enjoy, but it stands as a genuinely fresh window into a mind’s possibilities, possibilities that could take flight if one could craft a new way to write it down.
Whatever the case: take these pages in slowly, but take them all in.
Jon Riccio’s Agoreography is available for reading in UAF’s very own Rasmuson Library.