THE TRILOGY
"...(the) unnatural wedding between shadow and reflection, between the "he" and the "she" of a quietly shimmering exploration. Unsettling word-images in a landscape created by the spirit of the Anti-Oedipus. A desperate love story in a magical space of amazing conjunctions. Following in the traditions and legacies of the surrealists, this is a collection of prose poems celebrating both love and conspiracy, eroticism and revolt in the ferment of a dialectical forge."
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"...each object fashioned by dreams and stalked by jewelers and daughters in black, and hung from the rafters like a feverish embrace that goes on forever..."
"This is excellent, J. Karl. Way to go!" -Michael Benedikt 2006
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"The echoes of the European surrealists, their legacies, live on in this book. Through J Karl Bogartte's language of fire, the alchemical transformation from word to image is vouchsafed; a displacement of being where "the wolf ... is your envoy in another structure of being". The gift to the reader is the elastic mutation of insight from these amazing dream fragments."
-Matt Hill 2009
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"A very unusual blend of self-reflexive abstraction and synesthetic lyricism... the imagery is gothic- and surrealist-inspired but never in a predictable way."
-Michel Delville 2010
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"This is the kind of work that incites and sustains the Imagination."
-Andrew Joron 2010
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"...I bought Luminous Weapons some time ago and read it cover to cover then individual passages over a number of weeks/I have to say its quite a brilliant text well ahead of the swarm of words that clutter up the airwaves/The enigmatic form takes time to resonate with and the various refrains of verbal aesthetics gradually seep into the neural pathways with all the vibrant textures of an imagination of potent sensibility/"Fire is breath walking in its sleep...mystery is only a breath away"/Each sentence can be apprehended as a singularity or as a partial movement towards fragments constructing a innate connection with the text as totality of prose/There are so many, many intriguing images such as "Light is an ill timed scorpion" and "You are as invisible as a night left hanging"/The distance that separates the machinery of longing is to be found in every page and the desire to be seduced by the words almost hallucinatory/I am still reading and uncovering and excavating yr wonderful metaphors and visions/There are bursting stars and showers of meteors that illuminate the mind and maintain a continuity of movement from one page to the next/Your systems of meaning define the depths of our sensations within a state of jouissance that is as exciting as it is unique/Enough said/I have this book on my bedside table along with Paul Eluard and Rene Char and it matches their poetics and at times eclipses them..."
-Lee Kwo 2010
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from The Interview:
“... My sense, overall while reading these books, of mysterious occurrences, even of crimes taking place, or having taken place. There is the urgency of secret rendezvous’ and immoral trysts – secret meetings in the middle of the night. Yet, what is striking, is that there is no real sense of good or evil. These conditions of concrete morality are missing, and what remains is a vague transparency, a compelling evolution of moving towards transparency, of the individual, of identity... and of wondering where you were in all this, in this space of another almost mythical landscape. Your images are not localized, and definitely lacking the specific and mundane, but enhance the intimate interactions of who I feel are the main protagonists, or lovers, in a constant state of flux, of an endless parting and reuniting, almost to the point of obsession, or exhaustion. Yet, so much occurs around them, regardless of their presence together, or apart...”
“As a trilogy, they work together very clearly; there are subtle changes in evolution, use of language, but the general themes and repetitions unify them – the dance between shadow and reflection, between light and dark, and primarily between He and She... The three books read as one, so entwined they appear to be. There is so clearly a love story and, as you mentioned earlier, the alchemical wedding, the coniunctio.”
"This is most likely the most sustained, the most important body of prose poems wrtten in the 21st century. As a whole, and there are over a thousand poems here, there is little to compare them to. They are cryptic and mysterious, but never abstract; extremely poetic and even beautifully written, but often of a violent nature, delicately administered. Every poem is a revolt against almost everything; Bogartte stresses his anti-myth, and anti-eternal return, anti-oedipal stance, stressing absolute purity, yet fully unmoral position. Everything is as it seems, yet offering only the veil which aches to be torn away..."
"However, he is almost modest when asked: I had felt that these were very subtle poems, fragments, very calm impressions of all those sudden images that passed quickly through my psyche, in the form of sentences. Yes, very subtle images, almost removed from passionate observance. There was passion without being passionate, fire without flames, the delicate sensuality without sex, a calm that seemed to resist any kind of delirium... A purity of intimacy that was neither moral nor immoral, an innocence. But, of course, rumors and innuendos of every kind surrounded these books, over which I had no control..."
-Arthur Koenig 2009
In this place there is a fear of fading, and under these leaves there is the mint of insomnia, when it becomes unstable and brilliant and passes through walls littered with feathers and promiscuous daughters with beautiful voices.
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Lovers are more dangerous even than murderers. An engaging kiss between assassins, a sweet-tasting poison...
Selections and Drafts from the Trilogy:
Available on Amazon - Lulu.com
Green Integer Project for Innovative Poetry