Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them

In this inventive collection of poems, McCutcheon engages in sophisticated literary play and deploys the Surrealist practices of juxtaposition, cut-up, and defamiliarization. Moving from eroticism to the macabre and from transformative quotation to the individual idiom, Shape Your Eyes by Shutting Them explores intertextuality in poetry by challenging the cultural tradition of seeing quotation as derivative.

A brilliant, crazy, deliciously carnivalesque romp through the surreal landscape of our times.

Di Brandt, author of Glitter and Fall

Imagine if you will Louis Dudek or George Bowering as madly modernist poetry DJs, whipping up the crowd with remix shifts that keep the beats just ahead of everyone on the dance floor. In his innovative debut collection, Mark McCutcheon spins a melange of blues, pop, R&B, hip hop, even some dark heavy metal, in a wild mixtape of literary forms, imbedded quotations, and other voices.

Douglas Barbour, author of Listen. If

About the Author

Mark A. McCutcheon is professor of literary studies at Athabasca University. His scholarly publications include articles on such subjects as Canadian popular culture, Frankenstein adaptations, and copyright policy in English Studies in Canada, Digital Studies/Le champ numérique, Continuum, and Popular Music, among other scholarly journals and books. Mark has also published poetry and short fiction in literary magazines like EVENT, Existere, Carousel, and subTerrain. Originally from Toronto, Mark lives in Edmonton. His scholarly blog is academicalism.wordpress.com and he’s on Twitter as @sonicfiction.

Table of Contents

1. Shadows the words
2. Three votive candles
3. Fifty more
4. Here is where was
5. Second of the night
6. No family one pictures
7. Grand parenthesis
8. Where the area code ends
9. Found and lost
10. Take forever just a minute
11. A sound outside the house
12. A pantoum to smash pandas
13. Anthropocene obscene as orange
14. Room for one more
15. The leaf is not the line
16. Why the blue whale risked its neck
17. Mab and Burke
18. L’âme de l’homme est fait du papier
19. Voyager 2, thinking, types things
20. Lunar sonata
21. Baby Bee explains Jupiter’s Great Red Spot
22. Whose eyes are shut in every photo
23. Heaven help the roses
24. Forgive me Cathy for
25. Ever
26. The lineaments
27. New patriot love
28. You and you kiss the knife moon
29. Grosvenor Road
30. Shape your eyes by shutting them
31. The space of one paragraph
32. Was I asleep?
33. The Pit of Carkoon
34. Raver in the bathroom
35. Like opening your refrigerator door
36. This time the subway
37. Speeches for Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for Figures at The Base of a Crucifixion
38. Nightmares in the university’s ruins
39. Stranger music
40. Ecstasy, Euphrasia
41. In Gwen MacEwen Park
42. Cash paradise
43. Moon of a far planet
44. Fuseli in Peru
45. Notes
46. Acknowledgements and publication credits

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). It may be reproduced for non-commercial purposes, provided that the original author is credited.