By Sara Hailstone
Dissonance Engine by David Dowker is a complex and intriguing book of poetry. The text is divided into four separate sections: 1) Time-Sensitive Material; 2) Chronotope, or Sorrow’s Echo; 3) Glossation; and 4) Orders of Multitudes. Dissonance Engine exists as an intersection between the physical body, language, machination of living, and life’s software programming of behaviour and social constructs. Understood as a “literary Necker cube,” the reader can view life from various two-dimensional cube-faces. Essentially, life in 3D shifts continuously and is not what it appears to be. Amongst this shifting, the reader can slowly glean a way of being: otherworldliness layered with engine and cog, and an ethereal ghostly fabric.
My reading of the text fluctuates between orienting to various schematics and matrices, to striving to find meaning of what Dowker is communicating with the mechanics of his text and message. What human meaning of existing can be extrapolated or achieved in facing the complexity of our lives and bodies functioning as engines of dissonance? Perhaps I can attempt, with this review, to move the conversation along into further acknowledging the meanings that are applied to this complexity and layered contemplation of the human condition.
David Dowker is the author of three other texts as well as having been the editor of The Alterran Poetry Assemblage from 1996 to 2004. The titles and dates of his texts include Machine Language (2010); Virtualis: Topologies of the Unreal, co-written with Christine Stewart (2013); and Mantis (2018). He was born in Kingston, Ontario but lives in Toronto. I did locate two readings of his poetry that Dowker has done on YouTube and highly recommend viewing these clips to access the tone and breadth of his poetic style.
Overall, Dissonance Engine functions as individual components in a machine that make up a whole—these components being the individual parts of the body and sensorial perception, schematics and societal structures, as well as an exploration of the actual mechanics of poetry. Poetics exist autonomously and as abstraction. The body exists as “a mobile eternity,” and a “ghostly double/ inscrutable as/ the encoded night.” In trying to achieve understanding, we wrestle with “the exhausted vault/ of the poetic.” I want, as a reader, to apply this discourse and structure of semantics to thinking and to languages that present in ways that Western society doesn’t primarily orient within. I wonder how an encounter with the engine of dissonance would result thereafter?
I pulled from the text that crouching amidst the cogs of a machine is a general human “eeriness,” or darkness that we try to avoid, smooth over, or repress in the crux of the human living experience. This darkness is encased inside the horror of failing muses, unoriginal and vain existences of imitation and superficial distraction. “The smoothness of the delusion is not an occasion for celebration,” Dowker writes. Further, we, as a human species, do not want “otherness” or “justification,” in our complicated situations. We suffer, quietly and within our ongoing daily life grind, “besotted with multiplicity and within us eeriness.” Despite our shadowed recesses, “our stubborn poetries seek like-minded reveries.” And, in trying to be perfect, or striving to deny our darkness, we become controlled by our “own system of devotion.” Yes, there is complexity of being and functioning; maybe the obstruction of dissonance would be released and pulled through, like a decalcified pineal gland, secreting, pooling, and flowing naturally through rock beds of being. As free as not knowing fully which way the wind will turn. In accepting the dissonance engine do we then briefly feel some harmony?
Contemplating Dowker’s multilayered creation inspires me to imagine the text further, extending beyond the parameters of the machine or block of book to witness ideas and philosophies unfold in real time with a character able to take on the structure of Dowker’s language. With the body as the “Necker Cube,” and the text hinged to a lifeline, how can we witness this body in motion, living and trying to be alive?
Thank you to Book*hug Press for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!