Andy Warhol Under the Microscope and Imagination of Megan Volpert, December 6, 2011
By Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) –
Megan Volpert has the gift. She is well known in some circles for her work as a poet and a critic from Chicago who has successfully transplanted to Atlanta. According to the package insert she is ‘rooted in confessionalism and surrealism, her work has a strong interest in the performative and is also influenced by second-generation New York School poetry. Volpert is a theory junky and cannot resist rock and roll.’ This bit of background is supplied by the publisher Sibling Rivalry Press – that ever-amazing source of creativity that seems to blossom more with each published volume.
SONICS IN WARHOLIA is much like a dream sequence in which Volpert channels Andy Warhol, places situations in his presence (or lack of) to challenge his responses were he not dead, and has conversations (often one way) with Warhol testing his capacity for creativity and for the acts of absurdity he performed. There are intriguing diatribes about Truman Capote, questioning how Warhol would have responded to that other fascinating creature, mediations on acts of sexual gratification, on lists of phone numbers and their owners, on suicides and deaths and the assault on Warhol (GSW to chest) – all written in an enthralling style Volpert compares to the technique of listening to old tapes that have to be turned over to hear the continuation.
This is poetry of a unique form, free-associated, rambling, yet succinct in phrases and in picture making. Reading Volpert is not unlike sitting in an empty dark room, the only light being on shards of mirror dangling in a chandelier like fashion from the ceiling, each mirror finding a face or a toupee or a costume that was Warhol – the ingredient Volpert arranges for us into an image of a man the poet flashes back at us, and we discover part of ourselves in the mélange. Her writing is tasty, pithy, and erudite. Sample, from her mediation on Truman Capote: ‘This is hundreds of miles away from New Orleans or Monroeville. This is gone from Truman’s blanky on display in the Old Courthouse, long removed from Harper Lee’s precocious little friend who could read at age five, well past pasty outcasts hungering to escape into a Mardi Gras whose mirage of unspoiled plumage they imagine in their closet cased youth, when graveyards held less death and more sexy mystery.’
Megan Volpert conjures Andy Warhol and in her rituals she so exquisitely shares we discover Warhol anew – and wonder who deserves that 15 minutes of fame more – Warhol or Volpert. She is just that good! Grady Harp, December 11
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