The Inkblot Record

The careful tonal variations of Farrell's Thimking of You were followed by 1999's Last Instance, a magnificent book of prose poems honing in on linguistic aggregations and displacements of all sorts via wry wit and skewed observations of the social-psychological crossroads of capital. This third book takes a step further into involuntary I-driven collusion, using Rorschach tests to show that the visual imagination, fetishized by psychoanalysis as a royal road to the unconscious, is more socially than pathologically produced. Meticulously culling (and perhaps editing) actual subject responses from a variety of medical texts, Farrell arranges them alphabetically and simply lets them do their work without further interference. The result is astonishing: in the same way that the subjects create what they see from ambiguous images, so do readers of this book conjure the subjects themselves, calibrating similarities and differences among responses. Yet as the sheer number of descriptions begins to pile up, the images themselves seem to come into view, and the subjects begin to amalgamate in an imaginative implosion: ""An existential crab. An explosive center, forms floating around the calm after the storm.... An underwater tea scene. An unreal carnival-like Halloween party, shoes like cloven hoofs, bodies bent. An x-ray of alimentary canal, double heart, spinal column and feces. An x-ray of somebody's spinal cord. And a butterfly."" The strange tensions of the subjects, and the blank abyss of the implied interlocutors, further add to the spooky beauty, while the zeitgeists of the eras in which the tests were conducted (Farrell lists his sources, ranging from the 1940s to the 1980s) also come through clearly, with a particular emphasis on scientific discourse as a source of cultural authority. As with Kenneth Goldsmith's No. 111 and Jackson Mac Low's aleatory work, it is the simultaneity of all these strands that makes this unparagraphed, beautifully printed and bound text a poem, one whose meanings and sound plays are impossible to exhaust. (Dec.)