Nemo under the League

At first glance, these poems look like somewhat archaic newspaper ad layouts, but there’s much more going on here. These “SNEAKY MESSAGES MEANDER” through “CORTICAL TEMPLATES” – visual poems as fields for the eye/mind to wander in non-linear ways, as if these were paintings full of delights for the eye. Frazer has, in the past, used his poetry as scores for vocal performance, and accompanied himself with his double bass in free improv style, effectively fusing vocal, instrumental, and visual score as multi-media art.

The energetic variety of fonts, shapes, positionings, and interspersed text make each page an artwork to contemplate in which the reader is free to choose the direction of reading. Frazer’s highly visual web of words and phrases encourages the construction of multiple meanings and narratives, all of which make these poems endlessly fascinating.

Graphics include the use of parentheses connected by dashes or juxtaposed with forward slashes, arrows, or parallel lines. Dashed lines connect, outline, and often curve with texts flowing on top, perhaps preceded and/or followed by directive arrows. Vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines of texts can be grouped by angulated reading, or they can breakup/intermingle due to arrows or gradations of tone, font, and size. Texts are inside contrasting shapes or purposefully mirrored. The use of cylinders, blocks, triangles, ovals, rectangles, and pentagons are carefully considered compositional elements carrying bold headliner text in poetic phrasing. Smaller font groups of more traditionally set poetic texts often sit at angles to retain movement; and though whispered in our ears, Frazer’s words are always sonically energizing.

Poems in the book begin with “Hanging Loose”and “Cold Wave”, and finish with the book’s title piece - “Nemo under the League”. There is a forceful flow to all these poems and some references to fish, the weather, and forces of nature; but nautical terminology is most pervasive in the title poem at the end of the book. A theme is suggested by the title “Nemo under the League”. There’s a hint of a contemporary connection to the Disney film about Nemo the lost fish, but primarily it’s a literary connection to the novel “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea” by Jules Verne, published in 1873. Captain Nemo is a primary character in the novel, and “nemo” is Latin for "nobody”. Frazer’s poetry at its best delves into the subterranean waters of the subconscious, where he writes “the last word cast overboard/ definition matter soaked/ in the lumbago sea with Carthage”.

—C. Mehrl Bennett and John M. Bennett