Smote, Or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You In Front Of A Print By Bridget Riley by Eley Williams, 2015
The magic trick:
Non-traditional text alignment and presentation to demonstrate the narrator’s chaotic thoughts while considering the possibilities of a kiss
Happy Valentine’s Day to you.
We close our week of love stories with the very romantic “Smote, Or When I Find I Cannot Kiss You In Front Of A Print By Bridget Riley.”
It’s possibly a work of genius, so dense with knowledge and references. You may be like me and just sit back marveling at the intelligence being demonstrated.
But aside of that, it’s also just a very nice love story. Our narrator is consumed with desire and nervous energy as the moment arises for a kiss in the art gallery. The story puts us directly inside the narrator’s mind, and the text does a great job of recreating the wild train of thought. We get clipped phrases. We get multiple line breaks separating thoughts vertically across the page. And, centrally, we get a long run-on sentence that goes for more than a page of scattershot thoughts and images.
Great stuff.
And that’s quite a trick on Williams’s part.
The selection:
it’s sugar cubes and squares of basalt in a line, monochrome shapes aligned as teeth in a first taste of treacle-toffee, a sucker punch that crazy-paves the direct route, I stand here having steeled myself when I would will every word be cursive and supple and tender but now I find all my letters strung out with rigid symmetry, bending, tined as the strongest parts of my spine finding the spin of optic tic-shout unframing itself beyond your ear, behind your ear, [THIS IS ALREADY RATHER EMBARRASING], how could you frame such a thing, I mean a painting, or a print?, that has thumbed such a black hole into the wall just by being nailed there, I can see something in the painting rolling along a wall as though a maw (that is ‘maw’ spelt M-A-W not A-M-O-R-E, if you were asking, …
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