Finely Tuned Static

Poetry. Art. FINELY TUNED STATIC by Charles Borkhuis, with paintings by John McCluskey, is a distinctively braided venture: a series of calls and responses between word and image that pairs poet Charles Borkhuis' glyphic, micro- narratives with painter John McCluskey's collaged, abstract surfaces constructed from vinyl paint, torn paper and board and represented in FINELY TUNED STATIC in 12 full- color plates. Charles Borkhuis, author of nine books of poetry and a playwright, engages with painter John McCluskey's scissored abstractions as mirrored planes that calls out the splinters that poetry makes of a tale. The resultant collaboration is a dyad consisting of centrifugal impulses arrayed in language along the torn shards of McCluskey's colors and form: The "...crimson field trembling." Borkhuis declares early on and "the sentence broken off at the lip" which puts the reader/viewer on alert that this is syntax of another order. Its inscribed articulation has arisen so as to "listen for your voice in the static." What proceeds from their discourse is not a set of parallel codes but an exchange of "song of the scissors...across the jagged chasm." The poem observes "tremulous detail" within ".a wound in the pigment." FINELY TUNED STATIC offers a dynamic force and counterforce of evinced vocabularies, each rearing towards a truth, a "body held together by a thousand cuts."