Dream Rim Instructions by Tina Darragh (1999)

Dream Rim Instructions
Tina Darragh
Drogue Press
(c)1999

48 page chapbook brought out by Drogue Press. It's a signed copy. I got to know Ms. Darragh by attending a rare reading by two other LANGUAGE poets: Bruce Andrew and P. Inman a couple of years ago in Georgetown at Bridge Street Books. This book came out the year I first "logged on": 1999. She was talking about "cyberdreams" and Cyborg language and I had quite independently come to the notion that it wouldn't take long for there to be "Cylish" (cyber english).

While researching the SOUP anthology which may/may not ever come about, I got to meet and talk a few times with Ms. Darragh and found her to be warm and quite generous with her time and resources. Her involvement with Some of Us Press came later on in the existence of the Press and, as with all things SOUP, through Michael Lally. She helped to work on some of the last releases of the Press and still lives in the DC area. She works at Georgetown (the university) in fact. What I appreciated about this particular work is the visuality of it. She has experimented with image. While some of the poems in this collection are fairly straight forward, others are visual chaos. (stop making sense) Very much, in some way, to the work of Susan Howe who also "plays about" with collaged text and stolen lines, twisted to a point only she fully appreciates. Even Ms. Darragh's notes at the end are entitled "Annotated Bibliography" and deal exclusively with this one book and it's text. I am very much talent with it. It foreshadowing nearly 20 years of writing "in the future tense" as writing in the computer age truly is. It's thought-provoking and challenging at the same time. After all, she is considered one of the founders of LANGUAGE poetry herself for a reason!

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