G.C. Waldrep and "Battery Smith-Guthrie"

"Battery Smith-Guthrie" (link to Google Book; the poem can be read in its entirety in the preview)

I just finished reading the better part of G.C. Waldrep's Disclamor, and I gotta be honest, it's a little intimidating to try and approach it with a critical eye. This collection of postmodern poetry, published in 2007, is loosely focused around a series of 9 "battery" poems, written by Waldrep on-location while visiting military batteries along the coast of California. I was assigned the piece "Battery Smith-Guthrie" to look at for my English class, but it's my first time attempting to review anything even vaguely postmodern - so bear with me...

The poem begins with references to the Miwok, a group of Native Americans indigenous to Northern California. The culture of the Miwok is similar to that of many other Native American in regards to its focus on mythology: animal and human spirits are the basis for their religion, and in the poem a story featuring Coyote, the Miwok ancestor and creator God, is intertwined with segments of Waldrep's own poetry and samplings of graffiti present on the battery itself.

I really like the way Waldrep draws attention to the power of images in "Battery Smith-Guthrie." In the second stanza, he says "The purpose of images / is to attract other images..." and later states "Like attracts like. "One" is never large enough, nor "two."." This is followed with a stanza demonstrating his claims in action: the verbal images of graffiti on the battery, written in all caps in the context of the poem, have grown over time, attracting others' additions. This presentation of the montage of verbal imagery as graffiti on the batteries is a theme evident in all the poems in this cycle: for me, it's Waldrep's way of demonstrating the power of words and images and how they in turn can attract the images of others.

Waldrep also shows the power that physical images of words can have in the actual form of his poetry: many of the collection's poems use a non-traditional layout, and I find this to be a very important aspect of them as pieces of artwork and literature. My friend John over at The Poetry Party hits on this with a little pseudo-scientific experiment on removal/editing of form in a "battery" poem, and I find that taking away Waldrep's spacings and line breaks somehow detracts from the actual pieces (albeit in a way that I can't really make tangible or fully describe if asked to). Maybe that fact, in and of itself, proves my point about the form's importance: it defies logical (analytical) explanation, and is a testament to the visceral power images can have.