
Eliot Cardinaux, Quiet Labor, The Bodily Press, 2024, $17.00
Eliot Cardinaux, Toy Elegy, The Bodily Press, 2024, $17.00
Eliot Cardinaux, This Music from Another Room, The Bodily Press, 2024, $20.00
Eliot Cardinaux, Blue Flowers for Michael Palmer, The Bodily Press, 2024, $10.00
Eliot Cardinaux, Rope of Sand, The Bodily Press, 2024, $10.00
Eliot Cardinaux, piano, Gary Fieldman, percussion, Pavane, CD & digital, The Bodily Press, 2022, $10.00
Eliot Cardinaux, piano, Gary Fieldman, percussion, Imminence, CD & digital, 2024, $10.00
Carrying the Fire: Eliot Cardinaux‘s Poetry and Music
Review by Michael Londra
Poetry is arson. Language is fire. If Heidegger’s apothegm “language is the house of being” is true, poets are felons, born to burn where they live. Certainly, from the first, fire was filched. Early hominins stole flame, siphoning off fortuitous wildfires, or looting a neighbor’s campfire. Perhaps this was the primordial tribal memory, elevated into the allegory of Prometheus, the Titan who burgled Zeus’s brazier, gifting fire to help humans found civilization. Hesiod’s long poem Theogony—the earliest known written version of the legend—is the starting point for my argument that fire and larceny and poetry continually interact. As related by Herodotus, stealing fire from the mythic homeland of the phoenix, the ancient Greeks decided to swipe the entire alphabetic script of the Phoenicians. Using this appropriated writing system, Hesiod may be considered the original Prometheus, shoplifting a phoenix alphabet to ignite illiterate Greece, shaping Western culture through a modernizing act of arson. Repurposing Freud’s idea that art is spawned from the primeval crime of incest, Bachelard’s The Psychoanalysis of Fire argues that a better theory of poetic imagination emphasizes primal pyromania: “the Prometheus complex is the Oedipus complex of the intellect.” Poets are Prometheans; their inheritance, fire.
Poet and musician Eliot Cardinaux is a practitioner of poetry as an arsonist’s medium. Merging stylish technique, psychological acuity, wide-ranging erudition, sly erotics, and deep emotional empathy, Cardinaux provides ample evidence that fire moves like a poem does—destabilizing identity, disordering meaning, reconstituting perception:
that language needs dis-
rupting & care from without.
Rupture & bleed. (“Mile Seventeen,” RS).
Quiet Labor (QL), Toy Elegy (TE), and This Music from Another Room (TM), an interpenetrating triptych of new poetry collections, along with recent chapbooks Blue Flowers for Michael Palmer (BF) and Rope of Sand (RS)—not to mention Pavane and Imminence, two CDs with percussionist Gary Fieldman—prove that where there is smoke, there is poetry: “I light a candle in my mouth” (“Post,” QL)” catalyzes into:
A question of ash
& art
A fire
toward something else
What other than this (“Safe Passage,” QL).
Cardinaux’s poems and music are “ash & art,” incarnating the way ash is art. From the ashes of his poetry—“I wash the smoke off my hands” (“Birthday,” TM)—rises the phoenix art of his music: “English / the burning bridge” (“Choke,” TE) voyages toward:
A field on fire
lighting up the walnut-inside
of my head (“Memento Mori,” TE);
where singing is singeing:
Book
laid open, empty, burning
in newness. (“Coming on the Nørrebrogade,” TM).
Cardinaux imbues his burning books with an erotic, satin-finish allure alchemizing poetry into a living object. Sexuality percolates: “How raw I feel / & filthy hot” (“I Am Wondering, TM); “A ferocious, sexual green / smudge on the day’s lens” (“Mile Fifteen,” RS). But pleasure is staged with pain:
To suffer, ecstatic &
shrill with lament. My
heart laid open on a foreign
beach, & yours
in its bunker of amber. (“Mile Four,” RS);
transmuting inspiration into a tactile act:
Other than love,
there are these instruments,
the light of a blank page,
the scribble of material
felt by the hands (“Year House,” TM).
Cardinaux’s enigmatic stanzas hijack the heart. Cardinaux’s achingly voluptuous, brooding tone, along with the beguiling handmade textures of his finely-tuned details, provokes compulsive granular analysis. Eye-catching couplets proliferate: “Cloud of resistance / dragging hypnosis behind you” (“Well-Coded Futures,” TE). Snaking the curves of Cardinaux’s Amalfi Coast, you admire the picturesque beauty of the ride, and the striking revelation that lurks at the end:
Tomorrow I will sit & think
of those rolling hills, & soon
be there, not here, I hope, with
a vague uncertainty, as you lie
in bed with a fever I also have(“A Landscape Photograph,” TM);
and:
Long have we been here
Our sameness hurts the rose of winter
The ruts grow deep enough to sow
the ruined road
Beneath the undercutting
gaze of sleep
the bone unfurls (“The Splitting World,” TE)
Born in Ohio, raised in Dayton and Geneva, Switzerland, then studying poetry with Ruth Lepson at New England Conservatory, and later Peter Gizzi and Ocean Vuong at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, as well as jazz composition and improvisation in New York, Boston, and Europe, Cardinaux mines images similarly to his distinguished arsonist mentors, raiding personal experience to ignite his craft and illuminate the sacred inner void, out of which anguished songs and visions unspool:
The memory a drawer
in a dream
Its contents obscured by
mischief
Seeds of rosehip
A plot from its shadow
severed
Hurtful itch (“Narratives of the Strata,” QL).
Just as words are made of other words, and one fire is an extension of another, Osip Mandelstam is Quiet Labor’s sparking firestarter: “What has held out against oxidation / and adulteration, burns like feminine silver, / and quiet labor silvers the iron plow / and the poet’s voice.” Cardinaux carries a torch for Mandelstam:
Like Mandelstam
I know to kiss
time’s troubled,
ancient nodding head (“100 New Year’s Days,” TM).
Channeling Mandelstam, a legacy of fire feeds into Cardinaux’s blistered traumas: “Where we are going // depends on who we are / & the we is terrible” (“Sometimes,” BF). Eking toward unfinished transcendence—a poet’s Künstlerroman in song and quarter-tone sorrow—Cardinaux’s dialectic ultimately reifies into an ironic stalemate with the world. Any irony, however, is evacuated of cynicism, preserving hope: “To witness / all the ugly beauty in this / world. Take satisfaction / from my peace of mind” (“Coming on the Nørrebrogade,” TM).
Fire dances for Cardinaux like poetry, a fusion of opposites: “That the outside is in, & the inside out, / & so, below, the depths are also lighted (“Duet,” TM). Fire alters the self-consistency of whatever it meets, while remaining the same. Cardinaux’s desire persists, never wavering, perennially pure. Fortified by this purity, Cardinaux enters the tricky shadow spaces between words: “I have come to the same / land. To work / in the dark again” (“Mile Twenty-Three,” RS). Opacity orients Cardinaux’s sensorium to what the French call “appel du vide,” or fixation with the terrifying, contradicting the void at the center of being: “In darkness / heavy with light I hear / a melody” (“Refuge,” TM) made by “the sad, lonely / absent creature at the heart of all / conversation” (“Le Mystère,” BF). Here Cardinaux enacts Marianne Moore’s “The cure for loneliness is solitude,” a valence that confers “The gift of isolation” (“Exile,” TM), an “essential solitude / to scribble a few lines” (“Power,” TM). Paradoxically, “Grief is a portal / to visit the world” (“Frail Instruments,” TM), allowing him to “relish a moment / alone with my hurt” (“Coming on the Nørrebrogade, TM”).
Cardinaux’s Blakean caliper reckons with this abyss: “we walk in the acoustics / between us” (“To Begin With,” QL), in order to measure “the legato braid / of a double loss” (“Modern,” TM), and reflect on “The glossary of wounds / left blank” (“Extant Elegy,” QL). Cardinaux is loyal to his sacred void: “I’ll only write / what needs / forgetting” (“Admission,” TE).
Cardinaux challenges commonly accepted ideas of poetic space, enlivening moribund tropes that normally anchor a standard approach to building a poem, refitting the page with a taut temporal lyric network derived primarily from the notion of alienation as a universal condition. Alienation is the hole in things that allows reality to emerge: “A tear along the horizon / reveals the horizon” (“The Same Blank Shore,” TE). Absence unfixes equilibrium, yet prompts you to dance. Lack is not just sorrow, but the motor of desire, giving you bird-like flight:
To enter the room
unfixed and dancing
splay my song
at you
homing
to your absence
like a migrant bird (“Post,” QL)
Not coincidentally, Cardinaux’s pluralized surname is French for “cardinals,” and these poems are filled with birds. Nature is his practicum: “Their footprints / scattered language / in the snow” (“Birds,” TE); and: “A bird in the hand / & the book in the bush” (“Mile Fifteen,” RS). If “you stop. & listen to the / sound of the birds” (“I Hear You,” TE), miracles happen:
It took the right words to hear
the bird singing in your chest
A transparent song to say
I love you (“Small Grace,” TM).
Poet-cardinals are at home in the air, nesting upon high branches. Sheathed in bark, Cardinaux’s trees are armored flame: “Under the birch tree, an abyss lights up” (“To Learn a Little Happiness, TM”), providing solace: “So many similarities / between us / the crow & the kestrel” (“The Size of Sadness,” TE). Dignified arsonist co-conspirators,
Trees, too
have the right to remain
silent
That one
standing alone in a field,
a criminal
(“Notes from Bird Lake, TM”);
Yet trees also represent wisdom: “I can think of many answers / But why does the birch / know everything? (“Distance,” TM). The birch knows everything because fire is knowledge, an incarnated Promethean signifier of information exchange, a process of circulation consonant with Deleuze’s idea of the time-image. Cardinaux arranges his verse flows like successive movie stills in Chris Marker’s La Jetée:
The dawn fury of tenements
(can you call them trees)
A long row of them crowded
with waking birds
I too am stranded
in the way of their cries
Skirting the edges
of barred horizon
Their outline illuminates
the dull face of the early sun
Delight
(it’s too clear for memory) (“Narratives of the Strata, QL”).
Cardinaux’s Deleuzian time-images are silvery, introspective surfaces reminiscent of forties noir, Ozu, or Antonioni: a sangfroid of liquid shadows-and-smoke metaphysics. Wielding the blank page like a cinematographer’s eye loop, Cardinaux writes with a camera lens: “A cinematic scrawl / tapers out over grief / & fetter” (“Mile Fifteen,” RS). Inner landscapes are scrupulously mapped over the phenomenological world, where a plane trip plaits what’s inside and outside into the same in-flight movie, an interlacing dialectic of desire:
For a moment the sky is beneath me
Beautiful in that it can’t be
Any other than abyss the unfeeling hurtle
Of sound in the engine of grief encased
In a box of shadow somehow providing
Enough static to power its churning
Thoughtpractice living from day to day
Inside of you look how it breathes out
The deep earth reversing gravity (“Part Ways”)
Cardinaux nimbly maneuvers opposed directions at once: “Nightly, the wind / blows backwards” (“Coming on the Nørrebrogade,”TM); “October turns the hillside / pale / & backwards green” (“Here,” TE). These lines affirm life by enshrining subjective truth over dogma, animating Malraux’s dictum, recapitulated by Deleuze: “Art is the only thing that resists death.” Cardinaux’s surrealistic lines are Deleuzian rhizomes, dethroning society’s reality delusion as just another ideology:
A murderer twists the knife
in his victim’s belly
& out of her mouth
spring forth the artificial
flowers of inheritance (“Narratives of the Strata,” QL)
“Narratives of the Strata” pulses orchestrally in twelve sections. Cardinaux’s music and poetry share one grammar:
… I think of
the drum, a pen, the pen,
a drum, & the drum,
a raised hair. (“Distance,” TM).
Appropriately, the term in German for symphonic movement—“Satz”—translates as “sentence.” Ash & art’s interchangeable drum & pen is a reciprocal tag-team of nomad pneumatics transferring a shared linguistic torch: Theogony to Baudelaire to Charles Bernstein to Talking Heads. Indeed, “Burning Down the House,” superb riposte to Heidegger, retroactively colludes with the lèse-majesté of arsonist poetry.
Cardinaux’s albums Pavane and Imminence testify to this common idiom. Piano and laptop keyboard are the same—lines of poetry are piano runs. Fieldman and Cardinaux, influenced by the twentieth century’s avant-garde, seem like partisans of Fire Music, Tom Surgal’s 2021 documentary enshrining free jazz with Arnold Schoenberg. Cardinaux adopts Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics, adroitly aligning with percussionist Gary Fieldman’s irregular instruments: wooden egg shakers, scrap metal tubing, sugar packets, zither, water filled mason jar, metal garden tools. Airtight but not airless, Pavane is a beautifully constructed edifice, eleven tracks of precisely calibrated emotion exquisitely platforming Cardinaux’s sublime craft of stonecutter’s seamwork. Given that “pavane” refers to a sixteenth century court dance, Cardinaux reflects the strict control of the pavane’s slow duple rhythms with his own discreet use of reprise. “The Dark Chorale” and “The Rocks Below,” in particular, are sound paintings exhibiting twisty, moody blends of dissonant sonic clusters, felicitous cascades of angular motivic block chord melodies. Fieldman’s accompanying chiaroscuro shadings compliment and complicate Cardinaux’s shimmering late-night Bill Evans piano colorations.
Imminence deepens Cardinaux’s discordant endeavors. Think Monk: Thelonious’s “Teo” lends its name to one solo Fieldman track. With a numinous touch of whirling jouissance, infused with rambunctious amphetamine joy, Cardinaux searchingly probes the undertow of Fieldman’s muscular drum patterns, a propulsive gallop driving “Imminence,” “Red-Nosed Man on a Bicycle,” and “Majesty & Countermajesty.”
Cardinaux’s “Seam (for Paul Celan)” is a resonant cake-batter vocal, churning despair until it becomes hymn-like. Echoes of Prometheus reverberate in “Threnody for The Splitting World” and “Threnody for a Piece of Thread,” since the Greek root threnodia means “lament.” Threads of lamentation suture Cardinaux’s ash & art into un-songs, like Toy Elegy’s “& the song goes on unsinging everything:”
After Friday’s patina opened
the book to a page that burnt
at the speed of all features of reality
decaying around the order of songs
Cardinaux cannot stop un-singing. To this end, he directs us in Toy Elegy’s and This Music From Another Room’s endnotes to Patrick Pritchett’s “How to Write Poetry after Auschwitz: The Burnt Book of Michael Palmer” (Make It Broken: Towards a Poetics of Late Modernism, Black Square Editions, 2025). Importing Adorno and Blanchot to explicate the Burnt Book as a “messianic interruption of meaning,” Pritchett notes Palmer “draws heavily on Jewish textual tropes of negation,” and “speaks to the post-Holocaust crisis of representation without succumbing to the pieties that mar much poetry of engagement.” Cardinaux secularizes Palmer’s “Talmudic trope” in Toy Elegy, unyoking the Burnt Book from religious context, a procedure endorsed by Blanchot’s insistence on writing as self-erasure. Proper “literature” for Blanchot replicates the shattering encounter with the “disaster” of confronting the unspeakable or unknowable, and must therefore “disappear” in the act of composition, as if burned up. Under the poet’s igneous stylus, the Burnt Book is the objective correlative for poetry as arson.
Palmer is Cardinaux’s namesake for Blue Flowers for Michael Palmer. Ash & art here comes full circle: “The weight of a ring no longer there / on my finger” (“Admission” TE) signals Palmeresque forgetting and Blanchot-style deletion. Voids are undeletable. You can try and fill the “gap / of dystopia between us,” (“Mile Eleven,” RS) with a poem, but the substance that is in the loss is also in the love, and, in turn, the poem: “Your voice’s absence // speaking its own name,” (“Paulownias,” BF). Likewise, Mark Scroggins, dedicatee of Rope of Sand, is the source of this title, having thus described Cardinaux’s poetry. Brilliantly, each contribution in Rope of Sand commemorates a new mile, like an odometer—fire poetry meets fire jazz:
Another long string of words,
a rope of sand, leading
to waking, out of dream.
A precipice. Try not, then
to change it. Let it
change me. I am changed. (“Mile Zero,” RS)
As in Pavane’s dance of two, Cardinaux cultivates a camaraderie of mourning: “This beautiful woman is singing her songs / in the park to no one” (“Supersonic Vibration, TM), regaling us in “L’Oursin” (TM): “What we see is…what we could not hold onto long enough to forget.” Poor musicians—“A man exits the station wearing his bare guitar” (“Peter Pan,” TM)—face alienation alongside poets: “Another language / spoken around us” (“Poetry,” TM). Cardinaux might be characterizing social media’s toxic positivity and capitalism’s zombie consumer economy, two incomprehensible foreign tongues to poets. Cardinaux is a living Burnt Book, human invisible ink disappearing in the act of witness.
But there is plenty of humor in Cardinaux as well, a poet “Playing footsie with vertigo” (“Angel Song,” TM). What isn’t funny is the impact of cigarettes. This Music’s introduction, “American Feelings,” reveals that Cardinaux, in recovery, sober for three years, but still struggles with nicotine addiction. Having left the U.S. to live with a partner in Denmark, shortly thereafter he’s kicked out: “stranded in a foreign country with no place to live:”
Have you heard of a place
to live? I hear I’ve been
so sweet. But how
many steps away
from this or into it?
Things will make sense, you
fumble around in the dark
for long enough (“Coming on the Nørrebrogade”).
Blaming this calamity on his smoking habit, Cardinaux glosses his former partner’s grievance: “Cigarettes, only an excuse.” Cardinaux’s cigarette-dependence operates as a sort of anti-muse: “A single smoke, essential / solitude; to scribble a few lines” (“Power,” TM).
William Burroughs called humans “addiction machines,” suffering from a “word virus.” Like smoking, poetry is an addiction. Cardinaux predecessor Paul Auster is pertinent (his Winter Journal gets a shout-out), since he was a famous cigar aficionado. His 1995 film Blue in the Face, co-directed with Wayne Wang, has Jim Jarmusch expound: “Cigarettes are sorta like a reminder of your mortality in a way. Each puff is like a passing moment, a passing thought. You smoke, smoke disappears. It reminds you that to live is also to die somehow.” Inhaling kills; inner arson. Every cigarette is a poem, fire music burning you alive. A Burnt Book, X-ing you out, Blanchot-style. Blanchot’s Burnt Book désastre never stops being unwritten for Cardinaux. It is a vision of the apocalypse, as epitomized by Cormac McCarthy in The Road. At the end, a dying father voyaging a blasted world, post-catastrophe, offers last words to his young son: “You have to carry the fire.” It is the task of every poet to do so as well. We carry Eliot Cardinaux’s fire because of burning lines like these from Quiet Labor’s “Rumors:”
if only you could hear
these knives of air
crushing hard song
into sugar
Michael Londra’s poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in The Arts Fuse, Asian Review of Books, Blue Mountain Review, and Fortnightly Review, among others. He contributed six essays and the introduction to New Studies in Delmore Schwartz, coming soon from MadHat Press; and is the author of the forthcoming Delmore & Lou: A Novel of Delmore Schwartz and Lou Reed. He lives in Manhattan.
Poet and musician Eliot Cardinaux is a practitioner of poetry as an arsonist’s medium. Merging stylish technique, psychological acuity, wide-ranging erudition, sly erotics, and deep emotional empathy, Cardinaux provides ample evidence that fire moves like a poem does—destabilizing identity, disordering meaning, reconstituting perception:
that language needs dis-
rupting & care from without.
Rupture & bleed. (“Mile Seventeen,” RS).
Quiet Labor (QL), Toy Elegy (TE), and This Music from Another Room (TM), an interpenetrating triptych of new poetry collections, along with recent chapbooks Blue Flowers for Michael Palmer (BF) and Rope of Sand (RS)—not to mention Pavane and Imminence, two CDs with percussionist Gary Fieldman—prove that where there is smoke, there is poetry: “I light a candle in my mouth” (“Post,” QL)” catalyzes into:
A question of ash
& art
A fire
toward something else
What other than this (“Safe Passage,” QL).
Cardinaux’s poems and music are “ash & art,” incarnating the way ash is art. From the ashes of his poetry—“I wash the smoke off my hands” (“Birthday,” TM)—rises the phoenix art of his music: “English / the burning bridge” (“Choke,” TE) voyages toward:
A field on fire
lighting up the walnut-inside
of my head (“Memento Mori,” TE);
where singing is singeing:
Book
laid open, empty, burning
in newness. (“Coming on the Nørrebrogade,” TM).
Cardinaux imbues his burning books with an erotic, satin-finish allure alchemizing poetry into a living object. Sexuality percolates: “How raw I feel / & filthy hot” (“I Am Wondering, TM); “A ferocious, sexual green / smudge on the day’s lens” (“Mile Fifteen,” RS). But pleasure is staged with pain:
To suffer, ecstatic &
shrill with lament. My
heart laid open on a foreign
beach, & yours
in its bunker of amber. (“Mile Four,” RS);
transmuting inspiration into a tactile act:
Other than love,
there are these instruments,
the light of a blank page,
the scribble of material
felt by the hands (“Year House,” TM).
Cardinaux’s enigmatic stanzas hijack the heart. Cardinaux’s achingly voluptuous, brooding tone, along with the beguiling handmade textures of his finely-tuned details, provokes compulsive granular analysis. Eye-catching couplets proliferate: “Cloud of resistance / dragging hypnosis behind you” (“Well-Coded Futures,” TE). Snaking the curves of Cardinaux’s Amalfi Coast, you admire the picturesque beauty of the ride, and the striking revelation that lurks at the end:
Tomorrow I will sit & think
of those rolling hills, & soon
be there, not here, I hope, with
a vague uncertainty, as you lie
in bed with a fever I also have(“A Landscape Photograph,” TM);
and:
Long have we been here
Our sameness hurts the rose of winter
The ruts grow deep enough to sow
the ruined road
Beneath the undercutting
gaze of sleep
the bone unfurls (“The Splitting World,” TE)
Born in Ohio, raised in Dayton and Geneva, Switzerland, then studying poetry with Ruth Lepson at New England Conservatory, and later Peter Gizzi and Ocean Vuong at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, as well as jazz composition and improvisation in New York, Boston, and Europe, Cardinaux mines images similarly to his distinguished arsonist mentors, raiding personal experience to ignite his craft and illuminate the sacred inner void, out of which anguished songs and visions unspool:
The memory a drawer
in a dream
Its contents obscured by
mischief
Seeds of rosehip
A plot from its shadow
severed
Hurtful itch (“Narratives of the Strata,” QL).
Just as words are made of other words, and one fire is an extension of another, Osip Mandelstam is Quiet Labor’s sparking firestarter: “What has held out against oxidation / and adulteration, burns like feminine silver, / and quiet labor silvers the iron plow / and the poet’s voice.” Cardinaux carries a torch for Mandelstam:
Like Mandelstam
I know to kiss
time’s troubled,
ancient nodding head (“100 New Year’s Days,” TM).
Channeling Mandelstam, a legacy of fire feeds into Cardinaux’s blistered traumas: “Where we are going // depends on who we are / & the we is terrible” (“Sometimes,” BF). Eking toward unfinished transcendence—a poet’s Künstlerroman in song and quarter-tone sorrow—Cardinaux’s dialectic ultimately reifies into an ironic stalemate with the world. Any irony, however, is evacuated of cynicism, preserving hope: “To witness / all the ugly beauty in this / world. Take satisfaction / from my peace of mind” (“Coming on the Nørrebrogade,” TM).
Fire dances for Cardinaux like poetry, a fusion of opposites: “That the outside is in, & the inside out, / & so, below, the depths are also lighted (“Duet,” TM). Fire alters the self-consistency of whatever it meets, while remaining the same. Cardinaux’s desire persists, never wavering, perennially pure. Fortified by this purity, Cardinaux enters the tricky shadow spaces between words: “I have come to the same / land. To work / in the dark again” (“Mile Twenty-Three,” RS). Opacity orients Cardinaux’s sensorium to what the French call “appel du vide,” or fixation with the terrifying, contradicting the void at the center of being: “In darkness / heavy with light I hear / a melody” (“Refuge,” TM) made by “the sad, lonely / absent creature at the heart of all / conversation” (“Le Mystère,” BF). Here Cardinaux enacts Marianne Moore’s “The cure for loneliness is solitude,” a valence that confers “The gift of isolation” (“Exile,” TM), an “essential solitude / to scribble a few lines” (“Power,” TM). Paradoxically, “Grief is a portal / to visit the world” (“Frail Instruments,” TM), allowing him to “relish a moment / alone with my hurt” (“Coming on the Nørrebrogade, TM”).
Cardinaux’s Blakean caliper reckons with this abyss: “we walk in the acoustics / between us” (“To Begin With,” QL), in order to measure “the legato braid / of a double loss” (“Modern,” TM), and reflect on “The glossary of wounds / left blank” (“Extant Elegy,” QL). Cardinaux is loyal to his sacred void: “I’ll only write / what needs / forgetting” (“Admission,” TE).
Cardinaux challenges commonly accepted ideas of poetic space, enlivening moribund tropes that normally anchor a standard approach to building a poem, refitting the page with a taut temporal lyric network derived primarily from the notion of alienation as a universal condition. Alienation is the hole in things that allows reality to emerge: “A tear along the horizon / reveals the horizon” (“The Same Blank Shore,” TE). Absence unfixes equilibrium, yet prompts you to dance. Lack is not just sorrow, but the motor of desire, giving you bird-like flight:
To enter the room
unfixed and dancing
splay my song
at you
homing
to your absence
like a migrant bird (“Post,” QL)
Not coincidentally, Cardinaux’s pluralized surname is French for “cardinals,” and these poems are filled with birds. Nature is his practicum: “Their footprints / scattered language / in the snow” (“Birds,” TE); and: “A bird in the hand / & the book in the bush” (“Mile Fifteen,” RS). If “you stop. & listen to the / sound of the birds” (“I Hear You,” TE), miracles happen:
It took the right words to hear
the bird singing in your chest
A transparent song to say
I love you (“Small Grace,” TM).
Poet-cardinals are at home in the air, nesting upon high branches. Sheathed in bark, Cardinaux’s trees are armored flame: “Under the birch tree, an abyss lights up” (“To Learn a Little Happiness, TM”), providing solace: “So many similarities / between us / the crow & the kestrel” (“The Size of Sadness,” TE). Dignified arsonist co-conspirators,
Trees, too
have the right to remain
silent
That one
standing alone in a field,
a criminal
(“Notes from Bird Lake, TM”);
Yet trees also represent wisdom: “I can think of many answers / But why does the birch / know everything? (“Distance,” TM). The birch knows everything because fire is knowledge, an incarnated Promethean signifier of information exchange, a process of circulation consonant with Deleuze’s idea of the time-image. Cardinaux arranges his verse flows like successive movie stills in Chris Marker’s La Jetée:
The dawn fury of tenements
(can you call them trees)
A long row of them crowded
with waking birds
I too am stranded
in the way of their cries
Skirting the edges
of barred horizon
Their outline illuminates
the dull face of the early sun
Delight
(it’s too clear for memory) (“Narratives of the Strata, QL”).
Cardinaux’s Deleuzian time-images are silvery, introspective surfaces reminiscent of forties noir, Ozu, or Antonioni: a sangfroid of liquid shadows-and-smoke metaphysics. Wielding the blank page like a cinematographer’s eye loop, Cardinaux writes with a camera lens: “A cinematic scrawl / tapers out over grief / & fetter” (“Mile Fifteen,” RS). Inner landscapes are scrupulously mapped over the phenomenological world, where a plane trip plaits what’s inside and outside into the same in-flight movie, an interlacing dialectic of desire:
For a moment the sky is beneath me
Beautiful in that it can’t be
Any other than abyss the unfeeling hurtle
Of sound in the engine of grief encased
In a box of shadow somehow providing
Enough static to power its churning
Thoughtpractice living from day to day
Inside of you look how it breathes out
The deep earth reversing gravity (“Part Ways”)
Cardinaux nimbly maneuvers opposed directions at once: “Nightly, the wind / blows backwards” (“Coming on the Nørrebrogade,”TM); “October turns the hillside / pale / & backwards green” (“Here,” TE). These lines affirm life by enshrining subjective truth over dogma, animating Malraux’s dictum, recapitulated by Deleuze: “Art is the only thing that resists death.” Cardinaux’s surrealistic lines are Deleuzian rhizomes, dethroning society’s reality delusion as just another ideology:
A murderer twists the knife
in his victim’s belly
& out of her mouth
spring forth the artificial
flowers of inheritance (“Narratives of the Strata,” QL)
“Narratives of the Strata” pulses orchestrally in twelve sections. Cardinaux’s music and poetry share one grammar:
… I think of
the drum, a pen, the pen,
a drum, & the drum,
a raised hair. (“Distance,” TM).
Appropriately, the term in German for symphonic movement—“Satz”—translates as “sentence.” Ash & art’s interchangeable drum & pen is a reciprocal tag-team of nomad pneumatics transferring a shared linguistic torch: Theogony to Baudelaire to Charles Bernstein to Talking Heads. Indeed, “Burning Down the House,” superb riposte to Heidegger, retroactively colludes with the lèse-majesté of arsonist poetry.
Cardinaux’s albums Pavane and Imminence testify to this common idiom. Piano and laptop keyboard are the same—lines of poetry are piano runs. Fieldman and Cardinaux, influenced by the twentieth century’s avant-garde, seem like partisans of Fire Music, Tom Surgal’s 2021 documentary enshrining free jazz with Arnold Schoenberg. Cardinaux adopts Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics, adroitly aligning with percussionist Gary Fieldman’s irregular instruments: wooden egg shakers, scrap metal tubing, sugar packets, zither, water filled mason jar, metal garden tools. Airtight but not airless, Pavane is a beautifully constructed edifice, eleven tracks of precisely calibrated emotion exquisitely platforming Cardinaux’s sublime craft of stonecutter’s seamwork. Given that “pavane” refers to a sixteenth century court dance, Cardinaux reflects the strict control of the pavane’s slow duple rhythms with his own discreet use of reprise. “The Dark Chorale” and “The Rocks Below,” in particular, are sound paintings exhibiting twisty, moody blends of dissonant sonic clusters, felicitous cascades of angular motivic block chord melodies. Fieldman’s accompanying chiaroscuro shadings compliment and complicate Cardinaux’s shimmering late-night Bill Evans piano colorations.
Imminence deepens Cardinaux’s discordant endeavors. Think Monk: Thelonious’s “Teo” lends its name to one solo Fieldman track. With a numinous touch of whirling jouissance, infused with rambunctious amphetamine joy, Cardinaux searchingly probes the undertow of Fieldman’s muscular drum patterns, a propulsive gallop driving “Imminence,” “Red-Nosed Man on a Bicycle,” and “Majesty & Countermajesty.”
Cardinaux’s “Seam (for Paul Celan)” is a resonant cake-batter vocal, churning despair until it becomes hymn-like. Echoes of Prometheus reverberate in “Threnody for The Splitting World” and “Threnody for a Piece of Thread,” since the Greek root threnodia means “lament.” Threads of lamentation suture Cardinaux’s ash & art into un-songs, like Toy Elegy’s “& the song goes on unsinging everything:”
After Friday’s patina opened
the book to a page that burnt
at the speed of all features of reality
decaying around the order of songs
Cardinaux cannot stop un-singing. To this end, he directs us in Toy Elegy’s and This Music From Another Room’s endnotes to Patrick Pritchett’s “How to Write Poetry after Auschwitz: The Burnt Book of Michael Palmer” (Make It Broken: Towards a Poetics of Late Modernism, Black Square Editions, 2025). Importing Adorno and Blanchot to explicate the Burnt Book as a “messianic interruption of meaning,” Pritchett notes Palmer “draws heavily on Jewish textual tropes of negation,” and “speaks to the post-Holocaust crisis of representation without succumbing to the pieties that mar much poetry of engagement.” Cardinaux secularizes Palmer’s “Talmudic trope” in Toy Elegy, unyoking the Burnt Book from religious context, a procedure endorsed by Blanchot’s insistence on writing as self-erasure. Proper “literature” for Blanchot replicates the shattering encounter with the “disaster” of confronting the unspeakable or unknowable, and must therefore “disappear” in the act of composition, as if burned up. Under the poet’s igneous stylus, the Burnt Book is the objective correlative for poetry as arson.
Palmer is Cardinaux’s namesake for Blue Flowers for Michael Palmer. Ash & art here comes full circle: “The weight of a ring no longer there / on my finger” (“Admission” TE) signals Palmeresque forgetting and Blanchot-style deletion. Voids are undeletable. You can try and fill the “gap / of dystopia between us,” (“Mile Eleven,” RS) with a poem, but the substance that is in the loss is also in the love, and, in turn, the poem: “Your voice’s absence // speaking its own name,” (“Paulownias,” BF). Likewise, Mark Scroggins, dedicatee of Rope of Sand, is the source of this title, having thus described Cardinaux’s poetry. Brilliantly, each contribution in Rope of Sand commemorates a new mile, like an odometer—fire poetry meets fire jazz:
Another long string of words,
a rope of sand, leading
to waking, out of dream.
A precipice. Try not, then
to change it. Let it
change me. I am changed. (“Mile Zero,” RS)
As in Pavane’s dance of two, Cardinaux cultivates a camaraderie of mourning: “This beautiful woman is singing her songs / in the park to no one” (“Supersonic Vibration, TM), regaling us in “L’Oursin” (TM): “What we see is…what we could not hold onto long enough to forget.” Poor musicians—“A man exits the station wearing his bare guitar” (“Peter Pan,” TM)—face alienation alongside poets: “Another language / spoken around us” (“Poetry,” TM). Cardinaux might be characterizing social media’s toxic positivity and capitalism’s zombie consumer economy, two incomprehensible foreign tongues to poets. Cardinaux is a living Burnt Book, human invisible ink disappearing in the act of witness.
But there is plenty of humor in Cardinaux as well, a poet “Playing footsie with vertigo” (“Angel Song,” TM). What isn’t funny is the impact of cigarettes. This Music’s introduction, “American Feelings,” reveals that Cardinaux, in recovery, sober for three years, but still struggles with nicotine addiction. Having left the U.S. to live with a partner in Denmark, shortly thereafter he’s kicked out: “stranded in a foreign country with no place to live:”
Have you heard of a place
to live? I hear I’ve been
so sweet. But how
many steps away
from this or into it?
Things will make sense, you
fumble around in the dark
for long enough (“Coming on the Nørrebrogade”).
Blaming this calamity on his smoking habit, Cardinaux glosses his former partner’s grievance: “Cigarettes, only an excuse.” Cardinaux’s cigarette-dependence operates as a sort of anti-muse: “A single smoke, essential / solitude; to scribble a few lines” (“Power,” TM).
William Burroughs called humans “addiction machines,” suffering from a “word virus.” Like smoking, poetry is an addiction. Cardinaux predecessor Paul Auster is pertinent (his Winter Journal gets a shout-out), since he was a famous cigar aficionado. His 1995 film Blue in the Face, co-directed with Wayne Wang, has Jim Jarmusch expound: “Cigarettes are sorta like a reminder of your mortality in a way. Each puff is like a passing moment, a passing thought. You smoke, smoke disappears. It reminds you that to live is also to die somehow.” Inhaling kills; inner arson. Every cigarette is a poem, fire music burning you alive. A Burnt Book, X-ing you out, Blanchot-style. Blanchot’s Burnt Book désastre never stops being unwritten for Cardinaux. It is a vision of the apocalypse, as epitomized by Cormac McCarthy in The Road. At the end, a dying father voyaging a blasted world, post-catastrophe, offers last words to his young son: “You have to carry the fire.” It is the task of every poet to do so as well. We carry Eliot Cardinaux’s fire because of burning lines like these from Quiet Labor’s “Rumors:”
if only you could hear
these knives of air
crushing hard song
into sugar
Michael Londra’s poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in The Arts Fuse, Asian Review of Books, Blue Mountain Review, and Fortnightly Review, among others. He contributed six essays and the introduction to New Studies in Delmore Schwartz, coming soon from MadHat Press; and is the author of the forthcoming Delmore & Lou: A Novel of Delmore Schwartz and Lou Reed. He lives in Manhattan.