The Brooklyn Rail

A Book in Which to Burrow

In the interim period between the publication of Chris Campanioni’s Windows 85 (Roof Books, 2024) and his second poetry collection, Rolling Windows (Roof Books, 2026), punctuated by the appearance of three additional books (VHS, from CLASH Books; north by north/west, from West Virginia University Press; and Drift Net, from Lever Press), I prepared myself to engage with his poetry through a series of encounters at diners, coffee shops, and cash-only Chinatown haunts. As I read Campanioni’s growing body of work, I maintained a latent journal of thoughts on his world; such annotations, like the ones that follow, are now grist for this new milling:

Note how the poems, when recited, resist singular narration. To read Windows 85 aloud is to invite the mouth to error; among the points this book probes, then, is mediation, the problem of it. The formal and performative conditions in which glitch might emerge. Consider the craft behind Campanioni’s shimmering networks of words and images, which seem to both threaten and eagerly await de- and reterritorialization.

Moreover, I reflected further on his work in dialogue with a spate of independent art documentary films I saw at theaters in New York City. These process-oriented pictures, which include Bogancloch (dir. Ben Rivers, 2024), Afternoons of Solitude (dir. Albert Serra, 2024), Collective Monologue (dir. Jessica Sarah Rinland, 2024), and The Seasons (dir. Maureen Fazendeiro, 2025), present steady focus on singular characters at work. Rivers shows a hermit cooking food and bathing in the wintry forests of Aberdeenshire, while Serra follows a Spanish toreador as he squeezes into his flashy jumpsuit, rides with his entourage to and from matches, and kills bull after bull in the arena to unceasing cheers. Rinland shadows Argentine zookeepers at work caring for flamingos, monkeys, and turtles, and Fazendeiro weaves the labors of contemporary Portuguese agricultural workers with historical accounts of the prehistoric dolmens that dot the green countryside. These films-cum-essays recall other, similarly lyrical forms of documentary, like Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I (2000), in which the auteur focuses her gaze on rural and urban practices of productive salvage while reflecting on the poetics of reuse that go into her own work. But Campanioni, in Rolling Windows and beyond, inverts the paradigm. For him, the poem is not merely a visual medium, but a filmic medium. As he writes, he traces the threads of creative labor that go into his work. In his sequences of words, we are to see the labor of movement, and to be moved by his craft.

Trans-/Trance

Campanioni’s poems reveal his interest in writing across media. He writes of his desire to transcribe, translate, and transpose his immediate reality into the written moment. In “maybe she’s born with it,” the collection’s opening poem, he recalls a “Dream of a cameraperson entering the frame to install a second camera on top of the first; a second camera,” which, he continues, “has prior access to the discoveries of the first & is free to arrange them into bits of celluloid appropriate for every use. Repeat: for every use, & for everyone to use.” The work of the poems (and the poet) is to take those discrete moments and abstract them into an endearing and challenging form. Campanioni employs an organic shunting between short, staccato stanzas and longer prose digressions. For him, the poem is a vehicle of thought rather than a standardized form; what is important is not what happens, but how “what happens” happens on the page. (It helps here to think of film editing.) The camera and cameraperson (further disembodied as “the eye”) are seeing machines. “Our methodology,” he remarks, is “clocklike transcription / seeking to transfer the common texture / of digital words & their printed kin.”

Another flutter of trans/-cription/-lation/-position in “a mouth (that can’t be)”: “what you’re witnessing is a video being copied to a vhs tape, that tape being digitized, & then that digitized video being copied onto the tape again (the process is repeated a total of sixteen times).” And, in “hypothesis of the leather jacket”: “Since meaning is revealed if & when the words are copied out, since to author is to transfer, since to transfer requires a witness to consecrate the text; drama of being alive or of becoming living.” I remind the reader of everyday situations: taking photographs of photographs; filming the live security camera footage in the doorway of the pharmacy or at the self-checkout kiosk; taking the words of people passing by on the sidewalk and twisting them, figuring them in terms more familiar, or more useful, toward one’s intended ends. Campanioni, donning a technician’s hat, affirms the above in the poems “l’eclisse” and “the juxtaposition of foam”: “I want to remind myself (by repeating it here) that to author is to transfer; to move words and images around”; “I write words by clicking, photographing sensations as I alight upon them in my viewfinder.” Seeing, in short, is believing.

“In the Grip of Composition”

The how and where of writing. A litany of ideas, phrases, fragments scrawled on index cards and hotel stationary, the margins of books, and the digital pages of the Notes app. Missives written on planes, trains, and automobiles, dictated by voice while walking down the street. A metaphysics of jot. The point is to be perceptive and (slyly) receptive to one’s surroundings. The titular poem of Rolling Windows is of a flavor familiar to readers of Campanioni’s notebook-inflected adaptations, A and B and Also Nothing (Otis Books, 2020; Unbound Edition, 2023), and the more recent north by north/west: the poem, written in iterative “versions,” is put together as time allows, between conference presentations, on subway rides, or at the fourth boulangerie of the day. The telling mode, in version 14.0: “I flesh / out exposition vague / archives & indiscriminate / commentary.” Marking oscillations between poetry and prose, Campanioni sublimates to observation and what sorts of doings acts of seeing enable.

The joy of reading Campanioni’s poems is amplified in part by my familiarity of (and with) his person: nuggets of ideas he drops in vibrating lines become points of person/-ality I see in my engagement with him. He notes, in “restored late renaissance oil,” that,

Because I want to inventory the things I’ve misplaced—objects & spaces & the people & feelings inside them—I draw us a map of all their possible whereabouts. When does the improvised soundtrack I’ve made to accompany this geographic sketch jell into the poem, into the dulcet gelatin of poetry? We grant our objects names but forget that they, too, have their own memories.

The mind-melting squeeze of writing one thing into another: a digest of various theories of poetics. The poem, in Campanioni’s hands, becomes a space for sketching out a creative/intellectual method. (Writing as tumescence: an intimacy meted out in conversely jagged and languid lines.) My own affinity for what the assemblage artist Lonnie Holley calls “junk, trash, garbage, and debris” is parsed out in Campanioni’s own words. A method to the madness in “delay to penetrate (notes on trash)”:

I like to think of the moment my trash mingles with my distant neighbors’, each of our traces strangers to each other & ourselves. there, under cover of dawn, we gather in our decrepitude, in our tendency to rot, in our desires to be absorbed, for our identities to be flattened, for our selves to disintegrate.

The point being to connect despite it all. Physical intimacy met with glee. And writing and reading gleefully. Writes Campanioni: “there is never a poem. still less is there / a poem about something. there is only / a desire to be always both / writing & written, to be in the grip / of composition.” As technological advances further displace the writer (as occupation, inclination), Campanioni’s promulgation of compositional joy is more than just a parlor trick. Rather, it is a means by which to see the world with new eyes, to at once teach and be taught. Henry David Thoreau, another observational maverick, writes of the spoils that accompany one’s dogged pursuit of self-fulfillment, of suitable being in the world: “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.” With Rolling Windows, Chris Campanioni solidifies his place as a writer of, in, and with the world. His work, ceaselessly articulated, has much more to give us.