Joe Rosenblatt

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Of Frogs, Music, Words and Sound in Poetry

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Last Updated August 6, 2024.

Visual poetry takes many forms, from the formal to the whimsical….

Joe Rosenblatt's Doctor Anaconda's Solar Fun Club only barely fits into the medium—barely, because the work is sneaking out of poetry and into drawing. Here, Rosenblatt's famous felines and froggy friends emerge in a visual garden of schizoid doodles, in which the pen seems to be possessed of a will all its own…. [Here, as in Loosely Tied Hands,] it is the drawings, announced as visual poems, that are the most specific description of this odd world….

The story line is a bit beyond me, but it doesn't matter. The frolicking lifestyle of Dr. Anaconda's cat Esther, the aquatic close-ups of Dr. Anaconda's fantastic frog-spawning brain, the intricate references to psychoanalysis and the strange garden of delights which is Rosenblatt's own frothy mossy giggly snakey mousey froggy earthy Canadian mind—all these make this book the delectable tangle it is, of fantasy, philosophy and fun.

A. A. Bronson, "Of Frogs, Music, Words and Sound in Poetry," in The Globe and Mail, Toronto, March 10, 1979, p. 41.∗

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