An Element of Blank: Cynie Cory Reviews TENSION : RUPTURE by Cutter Streeby and Michael Haight
Tension : Rupture is a hybrid collaboration of poems and paintings by Cutter Streeby and Michael Haight whose borders dissolve into liminalities. The performance is often hypnotic and dreamlike, an Aurora Borealis whose shapes and colors shift across the page. Tension : Rupture asks the reader to participate in the interstitial spaces where the drama of the poem/paintings unfold. Here, the reader becomes the third collaborator as she deep dives into the re/construction of history. This mindscape is precisely where memory and self (identity) are interrogated. The triumph of Tension : Rupture is also its subject: performance.
As a title, Tension : Rupture, behaves as a poem within a poem, in the sense that it both reveals and mirrors the collection’s form and content; specifically, its dramatic unfolding and ambiguity. Its architectonics create an impending action. If we look more closely, we see a gathering of moments between the action of undoing and the undoing itself. (Think pin pulled from a grenade.) The juxtaposition of its discordant words is set to discharge. It is the space around the colon that charges the moment. The colon is the force that propels a thought or word forward. “Tension” is disrupted by white space which halts the action that the colon creates. Time elasticates. This is a profound moment of violence. The title further subverts our expectations by creating the action of holding together that which is falling apart.
When Hamlet is poised to say his soliloquy(s) the audience is compelled to listen because we sense that 1) he will reveal a point of action that will further the plot and/or 2) that he will reveal himself. Shakespeare complicates this dramatic structure by inviting the audience to eavesdrop (participate) on Hamlet’s soliloquy(s) thereby creating the unexpected interlocutor. We are compelled to listen to the Dane’s inner workings because they are both inner and workings. This is similarly so in the Streeby/Haight book where private also meets public. Hamlet’s words reveal, in real time, the intimate action of self-interrogation as does the interface of Streeby and Haight’s collision.
The shared liminalities reveal both the violence of the collision of text and self/alterity and in exploring/excavating this history. We may think of this book as a poetics of trauma as we may also see Hamlet as a play of trauma. Yet in Hamlet, one may argue, there is no redemption. Here, in this intertextual world of unmerciful searching for identity, one has the sense that Streeby wishes he could circumvent words altogether – one feels and sees the pressure placed on meaning – because words do not “say to say”: they do not and cannot alone tell the truth. In their tireless pursuit of truth telling, Streeby and Haight use the page not so much as canvas but as twilight, where the gaps between light and dark and between memory and imagination are places of ruin and revelation.
