In line with the Ultraist neo-plasticity of the poetic form, I came across a book that made me think about the way in which modern comic books and graphic novels have fed their formalist breaking of the textual walls back into normalized literature and prose. The Confessor, written sometime in the late 1980s, has more in kin with Thomas Pynchon or William S Burroughs cut-ups, in which a kind of textual arcology combines with economic genre fiction to create a symbolist, science fiction dystopia. I have read some texts close to this kind of New Weird, but new weird is more often than not formulaic dreamscapes with some quasi-moralist backdrop. The virtual world in all its glories, but the same old story. Like Marshall McLuhan said, the medium is the message... something poets know more than authors, more often than not. Like Burroughs The Electronic Revolution, and the dense variety and hyper-structures of Thomas Pynchons Gravitys Rainbow, texts like The Confessor break up language into a physical technology. Comic books and Graphic Novels, since they have become somewhat of an economic genre of their own, have only helped to show how broken text has become since the early days when Jorge Luis Borges, Guillermo de Torre, Juan Larrea, Gerardo Diego and Vicente Huidobro first took on the assault of modernist technology with the weaponry of poetic form.
