Alogon:  Early Poems 1969-1981
by Richard Milazzo.

First edition paperback:  May 2007.
112 pages, with a black and white photograph of the author on the frontispiece, and a preface by the author.
9 x 6.5 in., printed, sewn and bound in Tokyo, Japan.
ISBN:  978-4-902663-00-6.
Published by Tokyo Publishing House, Tokyo, Japan, 2007.

RETAIL PRICE: $60.00 (includes postage and handling)

Alogon (against all reason or logic) was a book slated to be published by Out of London Press in 1980.  A year later, the author stopped writing verse.  It was not until some twenty-six years later that an opportunity arose to publish them in Japan.  Containing all of the earliest works that survived, he decided to add the subtitle Early Poems 1969-1981.  Now they are all assembled here, “the ones that got pulled from the fire, for whatever reason, and the mask, and all else, gone, except for the faint scent of the sideshow still in the air.”

The influences clearly visible in Alogon are Mallarmé, Celan, early Modernist painting, and the Language writing of the author’s generation.  When he returned to writing poetry in 1993, after a hiatus of twelve years, with the long poem “The Man in a Plain White T-Shirt” (in Le Violon d’Ingres), he defiantly rejected Language writing, feeling that its original avant-garde impulse had become academic, and that it had always been over-intellectualized and too ideological for his tastes.  Without abandoning the role abstraction might play in writing, he returned to the semantic and human values of story-telling in poetry, even adopting (and adapting) in a highly deformed or skeletal (posthumous) manner the sonnet form.  To the intellectual sorrows of Wittgenstein would be added the still more poignant ones of Anna Akhmatova.

But we can see, even in Alogon, early signs of these tendencies in the formal adoption of two- and three-line stanzaic units, thematic strains of chance playing themselves out against generalized suggestive narrativity, and an overall appreciation for human frailty.  Among these frailties the author counted the desire to communicate, not only within the intensive formal boundaries of the lyric but within the seemingly more comprehensive or boundless epic form.  Where the short form of the lyric (never less than 3 stanzas of 4-lines each or 12 lines per poem) lent itself to writing in hotel rooms, abstract residues of the epic form reflected his ongoing travels around the world.  We would see the formal consequences of these realities in Le Violon d’Ingres, Hotel of the Heart, and subsequent volumes.