Stanley Nelson explodes poetic form. In The Brooklyn Book of the Dead, he breaks up his lines, putting space between the words, and spreading them all over the page. The words seem to be moving away from each other, like galaxies in an expanding universe. Then, in the Edges of Sound, he breaks up the words themselves, putting space between the syllables. Now, in PreSocratic Points, his most recent work, he goes even further: now he’s breaking up syllables, and isolating single letters by themselves. He splits words with a surgical precision, he’s in complete control, and yet the overall effect is one of total freedom. The text has blown up, and bits and pieces of it are flying away from each other.

There are many ways to read Edges of Sound. I like to put the words back together in my mind—though Nelson says this is not really necessary—because when the broken pieces come back together, the words are rejuvenated; they have a freshness, an intensity they wouldn't otherwise have had. When the words come back together in your mind, you experience them differently, without any doubt. To every action, there is an equal but opposite reaction. The more space Nelson puts between the parts of a word, the more they seem to be drawn together by a mutual attraction. An electric spark leaps over the blank space between the words, lighting them up. The words glow with a new life.

This is the most radical opening up of poetic form since Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Stanley Nelson is one of those defining figures, one of those who defines an age, not only for his contemporaries, but for posterity. It’s been a privilege to know this poet’s work, and I’m grateful for every word he’s written. Thank you, Stanley Nelson, for being the poet that you are.

— Guy Gauthier, author of  Ego Fatigue
and Water & Earth

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