THE RHIZOMATIC: A SPATIAL FORM IN CONTEMPORARY ROMANIAN POETRY

: Using geocritical methods and exploring the spatiality of texts, this study aims to demonstrate that the rhizomatic, the well-known Deleuzian concept, constitutes one of the spatial forms in contemporary Romanian poetry. In this sense, rhizomatic poetics transgress unitary semantics through interferences, disorders and (constantly rearranged) connections of forms and images to ultimately signal new perceptions of reality. As global meanings are pulverized, within some networks that capitalize mainly on the trace and the semantic transgressivity, these poetics end up generating a continuous reassembly of real elements, akin to a system which, through juxtaposition, multiplicity and nomadism, creates its own formal and affective space.

intended to apprehend their work spatially, in a moment of time, rather than as a sequence (Frank 225).
In other words, the spatial form: refers to the ways that the formal characteristic of works of modern or postmodern literature register a distinct spatiality from or in addition to the temporality of narrative.
For example, by establishing a simultaneity of events through the use of juxtaposition or back-and-forth cross-cutting, a narrative may elude its temporal progression and mark its spatiality (Tally Jr. 159).
Given these characteristics, the concept of spatial form can be transferred to the analysis of rhizomatic poetry written by several Romanian authors, as it relies, in a formal sense, on the idea of juxtaposition, multiplicity and nomadism of images and meanings, akin to a "system that produces its own space" (Davidson 39). Because I look at the power cords and I don't touch them, so that snow won't fall on them.

In his poetry book
A stream of snow that would melt, disappearing without traces, not very far away. Here, almost, in another world. Which I also entered into a little when I applied to college and the college was wrong (Văsieș 9). 1 However, the installation, which in art induces a unique perception of space-time (not only in the formalist sense of estrangement or defamiliarization), by staging objects and narratives, has its equivalent in this type of poetic installation, network or connection of spatial and affective elements, which make up, in a fractal sense, new versions of reality.
Each poem is constructed through a mise en abyme of existential fragments, which come to contain and multiply each other, depending on how light "crosses" the space of memory and perception -and this is essentially the spectral, poetic installation.
Such a perspective on reality, with a strong defamiliarization effect, is achieved through procedures that describe the rhizomatic nature of the poems, at the level of the construction of hybrid meanings and images. Alex Văsieș opts, for example, for a nonlinear composition, in which the text is constantly cracked, either by cuts meant to delay its structural coherence or by the gradual decoupling of the poem from its emotional and semantic background. In other words, the poetry in Installation avoids global meanings at all costs, as these would make it a prisoner of a strictly thematic interpretation. On the contrary, the author often evokes a state, an existential sequence, or a pivotal image, only to "betray" it later as the poetic discourse takes on an unprecedented, unpredictable turn (as in "Pastorala Alemană" [German Pastoral] (2014), the author inaugurated a poetic language capable of mapping infra-real and heterotopic territories (Foucault 1988), located at the intersection of poetry and photography. In fact, due to her predilection for structural and stylistic hybridizations, the author practically foreshadowed the rhizomatic constructions that are involved in many current Romanian poetics. The volume Sputnik în grădină [Sputnik in the Garden] (2020), continues this type of affective mapping and stratifies, through photo-poetic configurations, an acute spatial experience, developed on several semantic and visual planes.
Consisting of three parts suggestively entitled "Spații verzi" [Green Spaces], "Vară verde-albastră" [Green-Blue Summer] and "Playlist de toamnă" [Autumn Playlist], the volume captures, in a pluriperspective and polyphonic manner, the relationship between nature, objects and the "human form" (Eftimie 23). Gabi Eftimie attempts, especially in her "environmental" poems, to visualize what D. H. Lawrence would call "the spirit of place" and theorists in geocriticism "the sense of place", meaning the images and cognitive-affective representations released by a certain space/place or a specific geography (Alexander). The result is a spatial assemblage with a profound sensory transgression (or even synesthesic transgression), through which we witness the reconstruction of meanings and geographical images that, excellently anchored from a photographic standpoint, are able to defamiliarize an entire cultural universe. First of all, we can identify a sort of poetic impressionism (Monet himself is evoked at one point), visible in the way the author explores and describes the sensations caused by certain "microphenomena" (especially natural). It is worth mentioning here the transgressions at the level of perception (rhizomatic anyway) and the spatial frames reproduced according to the projection of light or the superimposed perspectives (in the poem bănuiesc lacul [i suspect the lake]). Thus, spectral, immersive spaces, created by multifocalization, predominate in the volume, in which a posthuman or, on the contrary, mythological sensibility is actualized (as in "pădurea cu troli" [the forest with trolls], "fragi" [strawberries], "supă săpun mîntuire" [salvation soap soup]). Not infrequently, the author relies on the construction of spectacular ecosystems, which circumscribe the human in an evanescent way, or on a stroll in the "green spaces" (Eftmie 17), of the simulacrum type, of the city.
Along with the visualization of polymorphic representations, infra-real phenomena are explored depending on the movement of light and multifocal frames/objects (see "microfenomene observate acasă" [microphenomena observed at home]). All this is transposed by the impersonalization of the poetic voice, which is, paradoxically, tender-glacial, given "at a minimum" (Eftimie 29), being sometimes a correlative of simulated landscapes, touched by a non-affective light: "When did we begin to seem so strange in natural light?/ Since when are we no longer part of the human species?" (Eftimie 24). On the other hand, the technique of "molding" the traces left by bodies, objects and phenomena defines for this volume, reflecting the specific spectrality of these poetic cartographies: The coldness of the things around is so exact, no unforgiving, so that when I pull myself out of the landscape, I will leave a mold in the air, a void in a human for (Eftimie 23); From the train, something like a sun dissolved in the air, fog carried by the wind like a veil, limbs still heavy, graceless after the winter, I leave a mold in the seat's sponginess (Eftimie 15). 4 In addition to the cartographic reading and writing of (micro) phenomena with strong emotional impact, another semantic plan of the volume is provided by sci-fi registers, in which the "machinery of nature" (Eftimie 25) and the cosmos become performative spaces, interfering with the digital. Immersion into the posthuman is thus inevitable: classic/fixed identities are erased, and a new sensitivity, of the android type, originates (see "roboto mono"). A special note is, in this sense, that of the ecocritical dimensions of the volume, in which the junction between nature (as energetic space), the human and technology is rendered heterotopically, as an assembly of organic and inorganic textures (see "fluturi în paranteză" [butterflies in parentheses], "pădure portocalie" [orange forest], "se vede soarele prin mine" [the sun can be seen through me]). To these is added photographic performativity (see "beau din același pahar cu un bondar" [drinking from the same glass with a bumblebee]), reverberated by a silent and quasi-descriptive voice, in constant contrast with the sound-organic landscapes (see "simt cu muzica iar" [i feel with music again]). In fact, the entire volume is marked by constant ambiguity, as the naturalness of the landscapes and their digital, photographic simulation (see "piscine fumegînde" [smoking pools], "tehnofosile" [technofossils]) seem to be, on a discursive and visual level, interchangeable, an aspect that proves once again the unusual rhizomatic structure of these space assemblies.
Beyond the stylistic complexity presupposed by such a stratified and multifocused cartography, Gabi Eftimie's volume proposes a real aesthetic adventure, which we can define, in Michel de Certeau's terms, as a "spatial practice" (Certeau). Not only do the actual texts manage to create a state of continuous immersion in a hypersensory environment, but also the photographs (belonging to Rick Bakker, Cecilia Tofterö and the author) ingeniously integrated in the volume, where the "thirdspace" of the aesthetic experience is created, in which, according to Edward Soja, "subjectivity and objectivity, the abstract and the concrete, the real and the imagined, the knowable and the unimaginable, the repetitive and the differential, structure and agency, mind and body, consciousness and the unconscious" (Soja 56-57) intertwine.
A rhizomatic poetics also articulated in a posthumanist sense is that created by Mihók Tamás. In the volume Biocharia. Ritual ecolatru ["Biochiara: Ecolatric Ritual"] (2020), the author maps, in an ecopoetic and ecocritical approach, syncretic, human (in)organic territories, instrumenting spatial perceptions of an assembly type and using a variety of registers (from calophilic and hermetic style to a non-background affectivity of poems) meant to decouple the global meanings from a politics of representation dominated by egocentric or (auto)biographical perspectives. Thus, Mihók Tamás's poems manage to create an ontologically significant area for the non-hierarchical relationship between human, animal, vegetable, and the inorganic. By virtue of the trans-and posthumanist cartography made by the author, Biochiara: Ecolatric Ritual explores a more-than-human world (Bristow 2015 Such rhizomatic texts are able, finally, to stratigraphically map the geospace, filtered through the lens of a silent and scattered biography. In the volume Alwarda (2020), written by Ruxandra Novac, the transition from a poetic-manifesto is apparent, sanguine and funereal in its socio-identity representations (through verses already famous such as "seen in the dogged sunset light/ Bucharest seems a dead rat," 6 from the volume ecograffiti (Novac, ecograffiti 14), to a poetics of spectrality, of perceptual diffusion, of postmodern flâneurism (through an acute radiography of globality), but also of a materialism that constantly anchors states in physical and objective processes: On the edge of America, the brain numbed by water, like in a safe car, the safest car in the world, the most heavily armored, that is, simply sealed, I don't know how to say, that's how it should be, cold, crushing, something to keep you intact, pulsing Language swallowing itself (ie physically, not French philology, physically, with clenched teeth and no saliva) Games that are not done. Unorthodox reactions. The problem of puberty. Unknown maps. Modes which are lost. All that is, and that which does not work (Novac, Alwarda 56). 8 Whether we are talking about the diffuse conjunction between real, virtual and imagination (reflected in many poems), about the critique of capitalism through scenarios of non-belonging, alienation and outraged intimacy, about the condition of women in a chaotic world (themes that subtly accompany the texts, starting with the motifs of Levenkron and Thompson) -such aspects are transposed by the author through compositions that become telling precisely through the mixture of registers meant to outline a unique "cognitive mapping" of global space. Such mapping facilitates precisely "a situational representation on the part of the individual subject to that vaster and properly unrepresentable totality which is the ensemble of society's structures as a whole" (Jameson 51).
Through an approach that involves, in turn, the idea of hybrid, stratigraphic and "polichronic" globalization (Westphal xiv), Svetlana Cârstean explores, in the volume sînt alta [I am another] (2020), a geography of identity mapped in a palimpsest and performative sense, starting from various interstitial projections (of being between worlds and of permanently transgressing them), meant to mobilize an entire confessional rhetoric. At a thematic level, the author juxtaposes several cultural spaces, focused by their contradictory dynamism, which is the basis of itineraries and cognitive and affective maps, able to defamiliarize images of non-belonging, anxiety and fear.
Definitive for these poems that update the famous Rimbaldian Je est un autre is precisely the process of deterritorialization and ontological defamiliarization, illustrated by the initiatory route from Romania to Tel Aviv, as a source of hybrid selfreconstruction. It is a reconstruction visualized by numerous lines of flight meant to mark a performative act, in which the identity and its traces can no longer be circumscribed in the essentialist way, but only as a polymorphic, heterotopic and participatory projection: You are under my effect.
You are the effect itself.
You are in danger of hearing my voice.
If you reach for the text.
You are in danger of touching my hair.
You have come so close (Cârstean 79); This is not a love story.
You are like him.
You are him in this story.
She is another.

I am another (Cârstean 72). 9
On the other hand, the author often conceives her poetry as a political act of "archiving" and confessing trauma/anxiety, without resorting to excessively solipsistic or metaphorizing rhetoric. In the mirror of these performative scenarios of identity and socio-cultural angst, one of the mottos of the volume should be read, namely that from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland: "how do you know I'm mad? said Alice. You must be, said the Cat, or you wouldn't have come here." Like Wonderland, which is chaotically and entropically liberated by the schizophrenic characters that populate it, the worlds mapped by Svetlana Cârstean are on the verge of ontological collapse, either by blurring the erotic horizon of utopia (gradually internalized as chimera and disillusionment) or by the impossibility of intelligible self-reading, either by opening another horizon, that of dystopia imposed by fear and war: "The enemy looks at you unexpectedly through the window.// The enemy is born in the middle of the greatest love, like a nervous lamb on a patch of straw in the middle of the field" (Cârstean 58). 10 So, located in the interstitial area of these overlapping worlds, the poetic voice of another is forced to assume the condition of its identity, to the impact with a Wonderland reconfigured in a socio-political sense: at the end of the day madness is the only good thing you have your only property that no one can take from you a corner stone with which you break all the windows on either side of the road while heading home (Cârstean 31). 11 In the volume Civilizații [Civilizations] (2020), the poetic cartography proposed by Olga Ștefan reflects a mixture of everyday and autobiographical frames, body language, interpreted memories and dreams, object focus, chromatics and social textures (often by exploring conformity and taboos), all under the control of an epic verve.
in you -to which so many cling.
to stay here, to reinvent and what was the color to pass (Ștefan 10). 12 Telling is, in this sense, the way in which the poet maps the environment of immersion in neurosis, failure and disappointment, simultaneously activating the utopian "machines" of desire and solarity, an aspect meant to distance her style from a noir tradition so fertile in Romanian literature. In other words, Olga Ștefan overcomes the convulsive and self-worshiping language regarding trauma, opting for a spectacular and diverse socio-corporeal iconography, in which ecstasy and despair, nightmare and daydreaming, cohesion and chaos, redundancy, and the unusual converge in a heterotopic sense. It is worth mentioning here the linguistic diversity specific to this poem that dynamites the cliché and proposes a real semantic and imagistic adventure, as evidenced by the unpredictable nature of identity narratives. In fact, in the case of Civilizations we can mention a pseudo-biographical poetry, in the sense that personal history is simultaneously erased and rewritten, real and projected in virtual, authenticated and "played", as a construct of (self)subversive memory, shouting only in interstices or through the cleavage of symbolic-existential registers you hoped to be the queen of the ball. What are they and what do Olga Ștefan's Civilizations really mean? The answer contains an ambivalent dimension. The idea of "civilization", therefore of integration and assumption of socio-cultural norms, the hypostases of "civilized woman," constrained and subjected to institutional mechanisms, of "civilized child," built by the same mechanisms, of "civilized" girlfriend and poet, which does not deviate from the perspectives already imposed on love and poetry -such aspects are directly or allusively problematized by the author. This first type of "civilization" corresponds, in the Deleuzian sense, to a striated space, orderly and annihilating, thus a deeply hierarchical and strategic space, numerous poems radiographing the dystopian "aura" of today's society: In fact, Anastasia Gavrilovici's poetry contains a strong ideological dimension, manifested in the mixture of registers that verbalize dramas and social traumas. In this sense, the author uses a whole poetic arsenal of subversion and opposition, which she molds over the new sensibilities and representations of "post-sincerity." In the logic of this aesthetic of synthesis, revolt is combined with distance and detachment, viscerality with the epidermis, the organic with digital and artificial effusion. And the perimeter of this interference is the "thirdspace" of poetry, reflecting real and imagined geographies (see poems about Berlin and Istanbul), socio-cultural assemblies in an anti-capitalist spirit (see the poems "Chestionar" or "Natural Born It's not depression, not even a little, not even by mistake, even though I have a Camembert heart and, stuck in it, the flag of a Habsburg capital to which I never want to return (Gavrilovici 15); "In the middle of the night the music of the mineral water in the glass stops together with the music of the digestive processes the tectonic plates in your head have stopped colliding at this hour it is finally quiet (Gavrilovici 38); "Bodies are touchscreens in which the mosquitoes of carbonized instinct struggle (Gavrilovici 43). 16 It is, thus, a geography of the body, fragmentary and self-topographically configured, at the intersection of memory, space, perspectives and textures of materiality, to the point where the world created by the author becomes a transgressive location, in which emotional movements and counter-movements, positions of vulnerability and existential collapse are performed in an unusual way, but as are moments when a certain splendor still hovers over the (post)human environment.
Through an approach aimed at the analysis of space in literature, I have shown, therefore, that rhizomatic forms are specific to the textuality of current Romanian poetry. However, in the future it is necessary to map poetry in space, meant to clarify the way in which social geographies, in the sense of Henri Lefebvre (1991), have stylistically and ideologically shaped different poetic forms in Romania in recent decades. For example, the identification of spatial practices, representations of space and representational spaces (defined by Lefebvre as a trialectics of social space), which generated poetic discourses in Romanian post-communism, it could overcome the thematic and generational critique, which is often in a methodological impasse.