MISTAKE

Caketrain Press Competition ::: selected by Rosmarie Waldrop

MISTAKE ::: Meredith stricker

"We find ourselves at the threshold of the illegible, the beginning of revelation... If these pages have, like Orpheus, been torn apart by grief’s passion, then they, too, like Orpheus, come to us still singing.

"mistake is a brilliant book about reading, particularly about reading events that could be construed as accident or chance. Evolution, environmental disaster: are they error or fate or choice? Stricker ingeniously poses this question through typography and design—themselves forms fabulously open to accident—presenting us with poetic texts whose rough surfaces ‘will not be smoothed out’ in favor of easy answers.

 – Brian Teare

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author statement

mistake pays attention to accidents, overprints, flaws, the discarded, the unwanted, cast-off. It is indebted to Freud’s theory of “parapraxis” or “slips and mistakes”, “contaminations and substitutions”, also Darwin’s metaphor of the “tangled bank”, the work of John Cage, Agnès Varda’s film The Gleaners, Walter Benjamin’s Archives, Gustaf Sobin’s Luminous Debris and readings of the Orphic Hymns.

I wanted to include accidental, overprinted poems that arose from mistakes in printing on the wrong side of scratch paper. These poems have also been soaked through with grief and mourning, asking whether death itself should not be forgiven and brought into “solidarity with living things”.

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more about mistake

"In mistake, Stricker embraces a variety of shapes through which to defy certainty. The conditions of "infinite plasticity" in the artist's work demonstrates the teeming, dynamic, and interconnected relationships between body, mind, text, and land ... Stricker reminds us that with all the constraints of the embodied and mortal being, the spirit stretches out with possibility."

– Deborah Poe, Jacket 2, on mistake  

"mistake sings and stutters a loss in form (or species). Through slips, alignments and contractions, unbound residues return from away—the non-place where we had thoughtlessly cast and abandoned them...In this gorgeous and wide-reaching ensemble, Stricker confronts the uncanny, embracing word flux in order to parse proper nouns. What’s left? A pithy sense-trace of dreams condensed within soul books; leaves rustling, watching, falling from trees. The sound of bees swarming.”

  – Maria McVarish

 In mistake, Meredith Stricker invents a type of poetic valorization system where accidents, waste, and everything ‘unmarketable’ are transformed into tender and precarious verse, showing, forcefully, the poem’s power to redeem and renew. This is a book for our uncertain and often convoluted time, a map of the whole works, detritus and all, because, as she writes, ‘no other Eden waits for us.’ Stricker is a poet who rejects nothing, writes with clarity, devotion, and verve—‘shards of meat carried off / still singing’—engaging formally with life to reveal its vital substance.”

- Denise Newman