Monday, January 01, 2024

already been sideswiped









Cold front



this shivering caravan

                            reeks of rum,

shadows smear an atlas

                    on a pillowcase


 
         idly silhouetting a rabbit

           on the masonite wall,

    iced-over scraps

on the laminex splashback
 


grey nomad buys clairol -

              the future looks bright
 


o        only a cold front 
 


                      is oblivion dark ?
 


come here for a moment,

                         sit and regard,

    gape at the landscape

                        we’ll never inhabit
 


en plein air

          is so much a sinkhole,

nowhere so zen

                   as some other place
 


who changed ‘the proposal’

                   into ‘the dream’ ?

I never said 

     ‘I’m living the plan’
 


I’ve already been sideswiped

                   and I was here last
 


my cup’s white interior

              tarnished by tannin,

  readers of teacups

                  expended by tea bags
 


such a dreamy hiatus

                    o       only a cold front
 


copying a trance

            is too difficult to do,

   sun on shut eye -

            deep eggy red orange
 


but pocket some wisdom

              when winter arrives

the grey sheen of sleet

              will cleanse us like windex



(By the Australian poet Pam Brown, b. 1948. One of five of her poems on the Lyrikline site; you can hear her read it too.  https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/cold-front-10619 .)

pillowcase: specified, instead of "pillow", to make us envisage its rumpled surface; like the rest of the small caravan (the bed near the sink) it has a lived-in quality. This occupant has been living the dream for a while. The sun that smears the shadows and invites the rabbit silhouette must be low on the horizon. With some hesitation I think this is an early morning poem, not long after sunrise.

masonite: a brand of hardboard (made by the Mason method, patented 1898). The surface is smooth, the back indented with a lattice pattern.

laminex splashback: Laminex are an Australian manufacturer of laminates, e.g. for kitchen bench tops and splashbacks. The one in this caravan needs a good wipe.

clairol: makers of Nice 'n' Easy and other types of hair dye. Rather to my surprise I couldn't find that Clairol have ever deployed "the future looks bright" as an advertising slogan.

o         only a cold front : the small "o" is like an anti-ejaculation: not surprise, not drama, but the deeper bodily response always stirred by weather events

is oblivion dark? : the poem begins to open out, with a thought that evidently picks up from "the future looks bright", but not in an obvious way.

come here for a moment : Is there really anyone to invite, or is the whole point that there's no-one?

gape at the landscape : reflecting the unhealthy isolation of a home, certainly; whether it's mobile or not. Also, the traveller's rueful wonder at perennially rediscovering that land is a plane, not a line. It can never be experienced in the completist way implied by "inhabit". And it's only by maintained violence that it can be possessed.

expended by tea bags : the poem is making us see something in that stained cup, but the language resists defining it. "Expends" usually applies to a resource (such as energy), and it's quite deranging here.

copying a trance / is too difficult to do: Someone who is actually in a trance is not "doing" anything. Copying a trance, on the other hand, is definitely doing something; and hence its difficulty, the failure is baked in. Though the words are different, I think this is still talking about "living the dream", another contradiction in terms. A dream, by definition, is something dreamt, not something lived.

sun on shut eye : If it wasn't for the "grey nomad", you might suppose our protagonist is a child; making rabbit silhouettes on the wall, remarking the colour of the sun through her eyelids . . . The sense persists of play, of amused wonder, though perhaps also of loneliness and lack of purpose.

windex: brand of glass cleaner. The comparison with sleet is openly imperfect, the two forms of imputed cleansing quite different. And cleansing, its desirability and its erasure, is a problematic that's central to this poem.

*

Michael Brennan's 2011 interview with Pam Brown:


I was fascinated by the candid history of her early reading, her discovery of experimental texts and their increasing importance for her. 

*

I got on to Pam Brown via something Lisa Samuels said in a 2020 interview, talking about the work in progress that became Breach (2021):

I had started a formal imitation exercise model for my poetry students and it turned into a book-length poem with very short lines, the kind of line brevity characteristic of the poet Pam Brown, whose style I was setting the students to imitate, though I suppose the Breach lines are closer to Tom Raworth’s in style. I almost never compose in such short lines, and I found the extreme enjambments and lexical parataxis delicious.

Here's an extract from Breach. 


The globe’s a

round thing with

fuzzy coordinates

proliferating

it’s a mirror

look look the

ambulatory

memes

crawl on your skin

each story

draws the attributes of

lent

around the next

box your attempts

you open

two eyes spoon

bowls inside

your headmouth

every hole turns

page blank

tributes

hone on pull

the scrip the

blow-through

hull

whose pheno-

scope

appears

on flags

a Code does

all the buildings

raw

tweaked pharmacy

flut

side walk

flesh in a trance

the shred fabric

closed

the hungry

methadone child

all pre

trans

figured

numb in the arms

chalk wield head

harder

outlines



The term "palilalia" appears in some advertisements of Breach ("performs a vital palilalia of lockdown"). In its medical sense it means "a language disorder characterised by the involuntary repetition of syllables, words and phrases" (Wikipedia).


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Monday, March 20, 2023

Things I wrote in Intercapillary Space, part 2





OK, here's a second tranche of things that I published on Intercapillary Space, or sometimes Stride. Covering approximately April 2007 to August 2009. Part 2 of 4. 


[My Intercapillary Space links: 



Richard Makin:

John Wilkinson:

Donald Ward:

Peter Riley:

Elizabeth Willis:

rob mclennan:

Van Der Graaf Generator:

Colin Falck:

Gunnar Björling:

Denise Riley:

"Athwart":

Pentti Saarikoski:

Anne Campbell:

Lisa Samuels:

Lisa Samuels / Rosanna Warren:

The Many Press:




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Friday, November 19, 2021

Tender Girl notes




Lisa Samuels, Tender Girl: A Novel (Dusie, 2015) 

In my last post about this I suggested that the full title looks very like the title of a poem. I'm rescinding that suggestion. Now I've read it all I do perceive it as fully a novel, in a way that novels by experimental poets sometimes aren't. Albeit an experimental one and recognizably like Tomorrowland and Anti M in many respects. 

The novel concerns Girl, imagined daughter of the copulation between male human and female shark in Les chants de Maldoror (Isidore Ducasse (aka Comte de Lautréamont), published 1868-1869). 

In the novel Girl comes to land, like the Little Mermaid: but for her this is "the land of the father" (p. 12). Nevertheless there's a glancing reference, e.g. in the title of the opening chapter, "The Prince".  She's young but pubescent, the men are already interested. Her interactions with men, with women, with art; the birth of her daughter. 


Lisa Samuels reading the entire novel in a recording by Tim Page from 2019-2020:

http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Samuels.php#tendergirl

Interview with David Spittle (2018) in which Lisa talks at length about some of the background and preoccupations of Tender Girl:

https://www.dspittle.com/post/2018/05/11/light-glyphs-7-lisa-samuels


One of the unexpected things that emerges from the interview is that TG became in part a riposte to the The Awakening (Kate Chopin, 1899, much taught in literature classes) -- "a novel I find deplorable, depressing upon the head of woman whilst presented as some kind of female wake-up narrative." 


Anthony Manu's essay "Narrative Coherence and Postcolonialism in Tomorrowland (2009) and Tender Girl (2015) by Lisa Samuels" (Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings 5.2 (2020)).


"Tender Girl can be interpreted as a text that aims to make it seem possible for a nonfully human person to find a place in the human world where non-humans are objectified and only rationality is truly valued (This evokes posthuman and feminist critiques of patriarchal society)."  


As Lisa points out in the interview, a half-shark half-human is in fact an impossibility. The literal reality of Girl is not the point: we are not in the mode of narrative realism. 

The novel speaks to the recurrent experience of humans who do not feel completely human, at least not as humanity is narrowly defined. Who feel different. Who are indeed judged to be different, by other humans. Who may be judged so for their behaviour, feelings, gender, ethnicity, sexuality . . .

TG verges on fairy tale in respect of its serene counterfactual premise. And across the spectrum it's also about the individual's conflict with society, like 1984. 

By contrast with both these analogies, it strikes me that TG does not render Girl's emotional narrative, in fact does not render emotion, in a straightforward way. In the early part of the book she moves from one man to the next, in scenes that may be graphic or manipulative or abusive but there's little sense of Girl's passion or other emotional responses. It's as if she can't quite understand what's happening, doesn't know what she feels, or doesn't feel what others might. 

As in Tomorrowland, the text often glides out of its premise and Girl is then just a young woman making her way in an urban, educated world, with friends etc.

*

As in other LS texts there is a formal engine. That is, a bundle of features that between them make a sort of hum, defining the distinct character of TG. That includes paragraphing and italics and headings and the accompanying story gloss (think Faerie Queene, Ancient Mariner -- though Coleridge only added his in 1815-16, and some admirers, such as Charles Lamb, disliked them). 

These are all fun, but the most significant aspects of the formal engine occur within the text body itself. E.g. Certain phrases or ideas that recur throughout. 

Little holes for breathing (or similar).

Wetness in general.

Tendrils.

Skin peeling.

Hhhhh (or similar): breathing noises.

Cartilage.

Microchasm.

Yum yum.

awa and ama.

Maybe this is not a formal feature, but the possessive " 's " strikes me as unusually rare ... Well, let's go with that. And it does direct attention to Girl's lack of possessions. Others have things -- such as houses -- (see e.g. the Domestic Man in the passage below): Girl has only her body. 

For Girl, to "have" something is to bring it into closeness with her body. She may eat it or she may breathe with it or have sex with it. In the ocean world she's used to, the limits of body and environment are less stable: things exist to the extent one is immersed in them, with open mouth. 


*

Later, in a stony part of the city, the mazes yielded for a while.
I mean segregating and re-grouping Girl moved in relation with her tribute to the land of the father, she was learning how to walk.
A man with a warm face beckoned her in. It was midnight and she held a cup in her hands and listened to the immigrant deliver his privilege.
His warm hair was full of intention. He held her by the stomach and the rooms were square with wobbly walls, the fluid and colors came out, the hard-to-access insides a feature of the lateral surfaces of flesh squirming, the turns and slate eyes and the bathroom all had logics he would gesture. All the separate parts flung out.

Then his friends came over, wearing his robes and shining. And how thrilling that moment, the plates licked "make sure to get her home," and the sermonette discarded, the little holes for breathing armed.

Hhhh. It was a tall monument so why not leave the smashed glass?

(From Tender Girl, Ch. 1 "The Prince", p. 18. The narrative gloss says "Girl walks at night, smelling human talk. A man pulls her in".)



Quelle est cette armée de monstres marins qui fend les flots avec vitesse? Ils sont six; leurs nageoires sont vigoureuses, et s'ouvrent un passage, à travers les vagues soulevées. De tous ces êtres humains, qui remuent les quatre membres dans ce continent peu ferme, les requins ne font bientôt qu'une omelette sans œufs, et se la partagent d'après la loi du plus fort. Le sang se mêle aux eaux, et les eaux se mêlent au sang. Leurs yeux féroces éclairent suffisamment la scène du carnage ... Mais, quel est encore ce tumulte des eaux, là-bas, à l'horizon? On dirait une trombe qui s'approche. Quels coups de rame! J'aperçois ce que c'est. Une énorme femelle de requin vient prendre part au pâté de foie de canard, et manger du bouilli froid. Elle est furieuse; car, elle arrive affamée. Une lutte s'engage entre elle et les requins, pour se disputer les quelques membres palpitants qui flottent par-ci, par-là, sans rien dire, sur la surface de la crème rouge. A droite, à gauche, elle lance des coups de dent qui engendrent des blessures mortelles. Mais, trois requins vivants l'entourent encore, et elle est obligée de tourner en tous sens, pour déjouer leurs manœuvres. Avec une émotion croissante, inconnue jusqu'alors, le spectateur, placé sur le rivage, suit cette bataille navale d'un nouveau genre. Il a les yeux fixés sur cette courageuse femelle de requin, aux dents si fortes. Il n'hésite plus, il épaule son fusil, et, avec son adresse habituelle, il loge sa deuxième balle dans l'ouïe d'un des requins, au moment où il se montrait au-dessus d'une vague. Restent deux requins qui n'en témoignent qu'un acharnement plus grand. Du haut du rocher, l'homme à la salive saumâtre, se jette à la mer, et nage vers le tapis agréablement coloré, en tenant à la main ce couteau d'acier qui ne l'abandonne jamais. Désormais, chaque requin a affaire à un ennemi. Il s'avance vers son adversaire fatigué, et, prenant son temps, lui enfonce dans le ventre sa lame aiguë. La citadelle mobile se débarrasse facilement du dernier adversaire ... Se trouvent en présence le nageur et la femelle de requin, sauvée par lui. Ils se regardèrent entre les yeux pendant quelques minutes: et chacun s'étonna de trouver tant de férocité dans les regards de l'autre. Ils tournent en rond en nageant, ne se perdent pas de vue, et se disent à part soi: «Je me suis trompé jusqu'ici; en voilà un qui est plus méchant.» Alors, d'un commun accord, entre deux eaux, ils glissèrent l'un vers l'autre, avec une admiration mutuelle, la femelle de requin écartant l'eau de ses nageoires, Maldoror battant l'onde avec ses bras: et retinrent leur souffle, dans une vénération profonde, chacun désireux de contempler, pour la première fois, son portrait vivant. Arrivés à trois mètres de distance, sans faire aucun effort, ils tombèrent brusquement l'un contre l'autre, comme deux aimants, et s'embrassèrent avec dignité et reconnaissance, dans, une étreinte aussi tendre que celle d'un frère ou d'une sœur. Les désirs charnels suivirent de près cette démonstration d'amitié. Deux cuisses nerveuses se collèrent étroitement à la peau visqueuse du monstre, comme deux sangsues; et, les bras et les nageoires entrelacés autour du corps de l'objet aimé qu'ils entourèrent avec amour, tandis que leurs gorges et leurs poitrines ne faisaient bientôt plus qu'une masse glauque aux exhalaisons de goëmon; au milieu de la tempête qui continuait de sévir; à la lueur des éclairs; ayant pour lit d'hyménée la vague écumeuse, emportés par un courant sous-marin comme dans un berceau, et roulant sur eux-mêmes, vers les profondeurs de l'abîme, ils se réunirent dans un accouplement long, chaste et hideux!... Enfin, je venais de trouver quelqu'un qui me ressemblât!... Désormais, je n'étais plus seul dans la vie!... Elle avait les mêmes idées que moi!... J'étais en face de mon premier amour!


What is this army of sea monsters that cut through the waves with speed? They are six; their fins are vigorous, and open a passage, through the uplifted waves. Of all the human beings, who move their four limbs in this not very firm continent, the sharks soon make only an omelette without eggs, and share it according to the law of the strongest. The blood mixes with the waters, and the waters mix with the blood. Their fierce eyes sufficiently illuminate the scene of the carnage ... But what is this tumult of the waters over there on the horizon? It looks like a waterspout approaching. What strokes of the oar! I see what it is. A huge female shark comes to take part in the duck liver pate, and to eat cold porridge. She is furious; because she arrives hungry. A fight begins between her and the sharks, to compete for the few throbbing members that float here and there, without saying anything, on the surface of red cream. To right and to left she snaps with her teeth, inflicting fatal injuries. But three living sharks still surround her, and she is forced to turn in all directions, to foil their maneuvers. With growing emotion, hitherto unknown, the spectator, placed on the shore, follows this naval battle of a new kind. His eyes are fixed on this brave female shark, with such strong teeth. He no longer hesitates, he shoulders his rifle, and, with his usual skill, he lodges his second bullet in the ear of one of the sharks, just as he appeared above a wave. There remain two sharks which only testify to a greater relentlessness. From the top of the rock, the man with the brackish saliva throws himself into the sea, and swims towards the pleasantly colored carpet, holding in his hand the steel knife he never abandons. Now every shark has to deal with an enemy. He advances towards his tired adversary, and, taking his time, thrusts his sharp blade into his belly. The mobile citadel can easily get rid of the last opponent ... The swimmer and the female shark he has saved are left together. They looked each other in the eyes for a few moments: and each was astonished to find so much ferocity in the looks of the other. They go swimming around in circles, not losing sight of each other, and say to themselves: “I have deceived myself up to now; here is one who is still more evil." So, by mutual agreement, between two waters, they slid towards each other, with mutual admiration, the female shark spreading the water with her fins, Maldoror beating the wave with her arms: and held back their breath, in deep veneration, each eager to contemplate, for the first time, his living portrait. Arrived at three meters distance, without making any effort, they suddenly fell against each other, like two magnets, and embraced with dignity and gratitude, in an embrace as tender as that of a brother or sister. Carnal desires closely followed this demonstration of friendship. Two sinewy thighs stuck tightly to the monster's slimy skin, like two leeches; and, the arms and the fins entwined around the body of the beloved object which they surrounded with love, while their throats and their bosoms soon became but a glaucous mass with the exhalations of seaweed; in the midst of the storm that continued to rage; in the light of lightning; having the foaming wave for their mating bed, carried by an underwater current as in a cradle, and rolling on themselves, towards the depths of the abyss, they united in a long coupling, chaste and hideous !. .. Finally, I had found someone who resembled me! ... Henceforth I was no longer alone in life! ... She had the same ideas as me! ... I was before my first love!


From Les Chants de Maldoror, Chant deuxième. (Translation mainly by Google Translate.) The second half of this passage is the epigraph of Tender Girl. Girl has quite a strong family resemblance to her father Maldoror, e.g. in his lack of human empathy and quest to understand himself; as well as to her shark mother. Given the supposed moral status of her parents, is Tender Girl in dialogue with the idea of original sin? 



The youngsters came tumbling up the steps, the quadroon following at the respectful distance which they required her to observe. Mrs. Pontellier made them carry her paints and things into the house. She sought to detain them for a little talk and some pleasantry. But they were greatly in earnest. They had only come to investigate the contents of the bonbon box. They accepted without murmuring what she chose to give them, each holding out two chubby hands scoop-like, in the vain hope that they might be filled; and then away they went.

The sun was low in the west, and the breeze soft and languorous that came up from the south, charged with the seductive odor of the sea. Children freshly befurbelowed, were gathering for their games under the oaks. Their voices were high and penetrating.

Madame Ratignolle folded her sewing, placing thimble, scissors, and thread all neatly together in the roll, which she pinned securely. She complained of faintness. Mrs. Pontellier flew for the cologne water and a fan. She bathed Madame Ratignolle’s face with cologne, while Robert plied the fan with unnecessary vigor.

The spell was soon over, and Mrs. Pontellier could not help wondering if there were not a little imagination responsible for its origin, for the rose tint had never faded from her friend’s face.

She stood watching the fair woman walk down the long line of galleries with the grace and majesty which queens are sometimes supposed to possess. Her little ones ran to meet her. Two of them clung about her white skirts, the third she took from its nurse and with a thousand endearments bore it along in her own fond, encircling arms. Though, as everybody well knew, the doctor had forbidden her to lift so much as a pin!

“Are you going bathing?” asked Robert of Mrs. Pontellier. It was not so much a question as a reminder.

“Oh, no,” she answered, with a tone of indecision. “I’m tired; I think not.” Her glance wandered from his face away toward the Gulf, whose sonorous murmur reached her like a loving but imperative entreaty.

“Oh, come!” he insisted. “You mustn’t miss your bath. Come on. The water must be delicious; it will not hurt you. Come.”

He reached up for her big, rough straw hat that hung on a peg outside the door, and put it on her head. They descended the steps, and walked away together toward the beach. The sun was low in the west and the breeze was soft and warm.

VI

 

Edna Pontellier could not have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert, she should in the first place have declined, and in the second place have followed in obedience to one of the two contradictory impulses which impelled her.

A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her,—the light which, showing the way, forbids it.

At that early period it served but to bewilder her. It moved her to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to the shadowy anguish which had overcome her the midnight when she had abandoned herself to tears.

In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her.





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Monday, August 02, 2021

One paragraph

 



INFLUENCE
"The racket, man, America's tongue stuck to your mouth!"
Having only each other coming home and throwing off your coat of 
mail, stoking the millennial fire with your little drum hum valley path he
sang moana Havana heaven cabana -- in the cool nights an evocation of the
moss-grown throttle perched on the equally quantified balustrade. 
"It's a great apartment." Such party language ruptures the glistening
talents Girl's identified and throws her odd ideas on the floor by drink;
she giggles, she absorbs, she has her tassels straightened for the rest of
the week she is mollified.


The first paragraph of Chapter 4 [Trash] of Lisa Samuels' Tender Girl (Dusie, 2015). 

The full title is Tender Girl: A Novel. In a strange kind of way it strikes me as the title of a poem. 

However that may be, I found that when I copied this out, I felt the need to retain the same line breaks as the original. Maybe I noticed that in the printed book the lines are left-justified but not full justified. Also, the paragraph is really three traditional-novel paragraphs jammed together, without spaces between. 

Well, Tender Girl is a story, of sorts. Lisa skirted story in earlier books like Tomorrowland and Anti M. Here she's circling a bit nearer, but not much. At the foot of each page there's a one-line commentary on what's going on (kind of like those side-legends in the Ancient Mariner). The commentary is useful but playful. For this paragraph, the commentary is GIRL RESOLVES SOUNDS AS MUSIC. As you can see, it picks up only one strand of what's happening. 

Girl (the book's shark-human heroine) is moving between various men companions. The book recounts a search for language. But that's enough for now. This post is content to be taken aback by the prospect of these two hundred pages, the intricate artistry of the text. 


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Sunday, March 21, 2021

immesurable divisions?

Anemone nemorosa. Frome, 19 March 2021.

When we poetry readers move between different poems, there's a kind of leakage across our readings, they're not insulated. I came from thinking about Sir John Davies' 1599 poem Nosce Teipsum, a philosophical account of the soul, and my questions about the distinctness of personal identity seemed to proceed uninterrupted into the dramatically modern turbulence of what I picked up next:  


Place :
                Is a
   dis-place-meant
                    in the means of

location
                A singlular
               locale [isn't/it?]

                                                    Are numbers of years spent
                                                    to account for :
               [opt out
               or into :]
                                         immesurable
                                                        divisions ?
That which is rent from one

In this movement

separrejeuvenation
a cultural-linguistic
                                                   promise
                                                   name     home
                                                   plane     schlept car
                                                   shipped to walk
                                                   stop
                                                                                      --and then
locate the "exile" in "reconciliation"
of frontiers and calculable numbers
of words available in each of her tongues
un-cross-stitched from what one was / is          

the average
trans-     
               stamp thumped on a block of papers
               declares her                        Hearing
                                                                          is in
                                           a quieter tone:       this
place of all echoes
                                           the palimpsestic
                                           singular


This is the beginning of the first of a group of five poems by Jennifer K. Dick in the anthology women: poetry: migration ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (theenk Books, 2017). My thoughts still ran on Sir John Davies' soul: is it both single and singular, or does it only appear single by being singular ("singlular")? Or single by virtue of appearing to be only in one place; but are places meaningfully distinct from the soul's perspective? 

But tonight I read the poem more as about migration, about humans in different places. (Jennifer K. Dick was born in Iowa and lives in Mulhouse (France).)

But still, there's a questioning of singleness and demarcation that's deeply ingrained in this text. Words aren't just words, they are activated words. They are constantly being marked as quotations, italicized, capitalized, parenthesized, question-marked, energetically spaced across the line, creatively misspelled, multilingual, and conversing with each other by meaning (meant, means), rhyming (meant, spent, rent) or partial repetition (schlept, shipped; exile, reconcile). Stop jogging my elbow while I'm trying to read! That's what I imagine a traditional reader protesting (and I still have that traditional reader buried inside somewhere). This writing interrupts the flow, it asks us how the word reached us, about intention and control. It says that words conceal as well as reveal. That, after all, reality is outside the words, we might need to look past them and not just through them. 

The quotations are from a book by Erín Mouré, so Jennifer's poems are building on a practice that´s already inclined to multivocality and multilingualism. Like when we build two towers of bricks and then try to put one on top of the other. It courts a collapse of what separates one from another or inside from outside. Which is a recurrent image in her poems. As here in the fourth poem,  

the lost, regurgitated sandstorm
grit on windowless windowsill

a poem that considers ruined buildings and Alzheimers and "wherein our particulars vanish..". 

Or

Sure, you left the newspaper articles, fragments of
windows to be replaced, the beige sawdust coating the blackened
broken cement, the shattered café front.

from What holds the body, in a section that considers explosions as well as balancing on a tightrope (Sourced from here: http://www.dcpoetry.com/anthology/25 ).

Some say that the first fundamental of primitive life was the cell wall. Only when there's separation can life exist, evolve, create. And that's how most of us think, most of the time. To write a poem you start with a new page or empty screen, you paint on a blank canvas, you make dinner when you've wiped down the sides, you begin to build a home by laying down a clean foundation. This is poetry that wonders what's at stake in these ideas of infection and apartheid, and whether we can think it differently. 

There's a good amount of Jennifer's poetry available online, and a good list on her website. Or rather, two lists:

Poems in French: 

*

I'm currently reading the long extract from Enclosure here:

I'm not sure if it's part of ENCLOSURES (2007), or part of Lilith: a novel in fragments (2019), or neither. It's grounded on Ovid's Echo and Narcissus: echoes and reflections and eyes. Here are two extracts:


She is within her                       a repetition,                       a mirror, silvered-over

                             surfacing,                       mirage

leaden,                                     lead,                                     to be leading

                                               Some part or point of
voice bleeding                          over,                                     into paper
                             scratches                against,                     she scrapes

This is like a gasp
                             she says
                                                She wants to say
                                                                                            to be saying


----

A sleight for stored eyes        a staff to unsever her deprived by thankless Athens
In her mind's lyre            in the wind's mire opposed to the twilight of her trial        perceptive
Rail        immediate        redolent        mind her eye or vigilance kept contagion
if this were catching     she should advise he keep a sharp        look heed ahead out the
mischievous signs "o mine tie, thine..." tapered to, knotted        were she but one-sighed or
willowlike a cypress-Cyclops mounting with aramisapians—if time should prove to be
so sure as seeking with half a fly-on-the-wall      peek though the needle      spin
her waifish body suddenly perceived heavily-handed         as a camel's two-thump inability
to pass through eyeing the spire of the storm         screen-hurricane periphery
casting a sheep's, a glad, an open   

---

aramisapians -- transforming Arimaspians, a legendary one-eyed tribe of northern Scythia. 

*

Two poems by Jennifer K. Dick on Jerome Rothenberg's Poems and Poetics blog. "Boundary" and "Timber Hitch" are from an in-progress project called Shelf Break that uses a lot of nautical terms. (Somewhat ironically for an Iowan, as she notes.)

http://poemsandpoetics.blogspot.com/2020/01/jennifer-k-dick-two-new-poems-from.html

Here's section 2 of "Timber Hitch": 

median of misconceptions
misanthropic
mesopelagic tropical
amoebic dysentery
diatribe or troubled
waterways:
spindly motors,
mortar, cracks,
fissures, figments
glint atop the gangway
gate or plate
schlepped up on
deck the
chained the
hauled the
cratered cargo
hold
ruinporn ornamentation
a lapsus
“next to baroque mermaids”                                DA, 58
Neptune
narwhale
Nebuchadnezzar 


["DA, 58" references a quote from a translation of Demosthenes Agrafiotis.]

*

But now those mermaids and the troubled Mmms of that opening are drifting this post and me off to another kind of mermaid, another melting of separation, the half-shark half-human Girl of Lisa Samuels' Tender Girl (Dusie, 2015). This current debate about definition and singleness has many aspects and many contributors.  

In the following extract Girl has found some books/barques.

Having decided, Girl moved there. She was clawed in time with barque masks. She collects herself for a while, herself several damp examples leaning on the pulpit by the end of the rented hall, and she would give them up next time she felt herself leaving town. But the hall was comforting, it was renewable and unlikely, her slapping feet from one end to the next. 

The hot wine drunk down her throat. To be alone and yet populated with exemplars was an aim she was learning to adopt alongside books with lists of names, one anchored to the next and the next, one heaving according to time, another according to license or locale, another simple alphabetic comforting. She had these by her strange eating, piece by piece, piled thin. The sniffing of the skins of the books taught her how to think and speak here. 

(Tender Girl, p. 46)


Anemone nemorosa. Frome, 19 March 2021.

Wood Anemone (Anemone nemorosa, Sw: Vitsippa). Throughout most of the British Isles (our only native Anemone). Throughout southern half of Sweden and more sporadically up to Jämtland. It also grows a long way up the Norwegian coast, about as far as Bodø. Anemone = windflower. Nemorosa = of the woods, shady places. 

The Swedish name Vitsippa means White Sippa. "Sippa" is a Swedish flower-name given to various attractive Anemone/Hepatica/Pulsatilla species in the Ranunculaceae, and also to the unrelated Dryas octopetala ("Fjällsippa") in the Rosaceae. The others are: 

Blåsippa (Blue Sippa): Hepatica or Liverleaf, Hepatica nobilis. Beloved early spring flower in most of Sweden. Not in British Isles except as garden escape. 
Gulsippa (Yellow Sippa): Yellow Anemone, Anemone ranunculoides. Uncommon from Skåne to Jämtland. Not in British Isles except as rare garden escape.
Tovsippa: (Tuft Sippa) Anemone sylvestris. Big white flowers, rare on Gotland and Öland. Not in British Isles.
Nipsippa: (River-erosion-sandbank Sippa) Pulsatilla patens. Rare in Gotland and Ångermanland. Not in British Isles. It occurs across Russia to Kamschatka and also in NW America (ssp. multifida).
Mosippa (Sand-heath Sippa): Pale Pasqueflower, Pulsatilla vernalis. Uncommon from Skåne to Jämtland. Not in British Isles.
Fältsippa (Field Sippa): Pulsatilla pratensis. Rare in S. and E. Sweden to Uppland. Not in British Isles.
Backsippa (Hill Sippa): Pasqueflower, Pulsatilla vulgaris. Uncommon from Skåne to Uppland, formerly more common. Uncommon in S. England, mostly Cotswolds/Chilterns.
Fjällsippa (Mountain Sippa): Mountain Avens, Dryas octopetala. Local in the fells, Jämtland and north. Very local in northern British Isles (e.g. the Burren, N. Wales, Scotland). 

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Sunday, August 30, 2020

been houses

 

Fragmenting cloud. Frome, 20 August 2020.



5 ≈ Sentimental Education


I step inland
been houses
all look fact.

                            The                              calculated
                                                     wooden
              solitude                                   mythology was my thing.

Aptly                very evidently the
lounge around       history
                                                              beckoned
This written vocabulary offended
                                    the time as if
                                                              "differentiation" meant
              first
seventh was ok.
                  Some friends come to a strange circular show to sing
                        Right sides and differently shake the horn.

Dropped out before         exactly stories
               being
   in the field beside collecting leaves, loving doing                    dancing at
Zelda's           to              yes:
                              with us for a gosh.
                                   That fall,                         beck
              before everything over the ridge the golden
                   male               was                         my first poem.


(the opening of "Sentimental Education", from Lisa Samuels' Anti M (Chax Press, 2013).)



Nonetheless, any attempt to explicate the work as a whole according to some "higher order" of meaning, such as narrative or character, is doomed to sophistry, if not overt incoherence. The new sentence is a decidedly contextual object. (from Ron Silliman, "The New Sentence" (1977).)

The writing in Anti M can't be precisely retrofitted to Silliman's "new sentence", but it's pretty close. The new sentence isn't new any more, it has crisscrossed the world for fifty years (and I wonder if it was ever quite as circumscribed as in Silliman's narrative, quite as firmly located in the prose poem and the Bay Area). Nevertheless the new sentence still causes new variations of trouble, and that's the idea.

Anti M isn't a memoir and it would be unrewarding for anyone who's a fan of memoirs to try and read it as one, but nor can the background shapes of memoir be entirely discarded. In the page I've quoted, the bare "education" of the section title bulks large: history, written vocabulary, collecting leaves, the organized singing and dancing, the phrase "Dropped out". By the end of this extract the idea of early stirrings of sentiment is becoming more relevant.

Silliman's insight about "contextual" has two almost contradictory implications. The glass half empty one is that you can't weigh any single sentence until you've absorbed the whole book: and I do feel the pressure of that, I know I have to read it all (more than once, probably). The glass half full implication is that when a page glints, that glint is real. You can even hold it still and inspect it, a bit. 

I'm just going to talk about the first sentence:


I step inland
been houses
all look fact.


It's an arresting one, and very different from what follows it, both in terms of layout and its internally torqued syntax. It's also in the present tense, while the next sentences switch to the past tense. So thinking about that shadow-memoir, you could imagine that behind this sentence lies a bit of baldly functional metatextual commentary, like "I resume my narrative".  I step inland .... away from the coastline of the present, into the past of .... been houses  .... houses of the past, house that have been, or houses where I've been .... . And by similar broad interpretation you could take all look fact as an epistemological remark on the material of our memories, their uniform assertion of factualness disturbed by our occasional discovery that some of our early memories are demonstrably and inexplicably wide of the mark, and by our suspicion of the inherent implausibility in some of the others.

But this is already becoming an unbalanced commentary, over-dignifying the referential aspect of the sentence and clamping down on what Silliman calls "syllogistic movement". And the movement here is intent, isn't it? Even fierce? (Doesn't the reader, seeking to impose a more regular syntax, hear a whisper that the "houses all look fucked"?)

The section "Sentimental Education" ends with another sentence in this same anomalous form: 


This kind of why allows
for holding
fascism so follow.


This one almost rhymes. How fascism grows, what it grazes on. (And between "allows" and "follow" there lurks another acquiescent word, "fallow".) 

These two book-end sentences are unexpected. None of the other eight sections has them. They have hard outlines, and surely they draw attention to the aspects of darkness and frustration in the anti-memoir between. Their tendency, I'm thinking, is to dissolve the separation of adult spheres and children's spheres, to discover a deeper recognition of community across human age-groups. Like, We're all dealing with the same stuff . . .



A ripe fig exciting the local insects. Frome, 20 August 2020. 


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Thursday, September 26, 2019

reglow interim pellet goring glum



the line is moving toward
reaping the january
the experiment in listening
generously come break press

intuitive engineer oh gloss
camel indifference  intellect
gloss glam  touch  entree gear
samantha  fillip  constancy
reglow  interim  pellet goring glum

move on the up
swing  of
jump for it
and there is the other
other in the hidden
beckoned tie

that binds
boundary or orb joy

damage oh sorry sorry
lines rekindle the splash
in texture view of samantha
blandishments

sport the plaid and go  go
join  mark the
space recipient  notion
undertake take take undertake
tie for joke pull-over
splash into a


- - - - - - -


twe    spa    do    sputt    ga
     stra    ti    ti    cor     cor
          spen

into  the  dust  is  a
           cree         tor

into the dust is a

      lee      go      dow

into    the dust is a

                 spree-ton-gen

      one

into the dust is a

        grem

   into  the  three

        time

      spor        tum       gub

               stick-wind     GEE
                             five  


("Casements",  second and fourth pages)

*

This comes from Gale Nelson's Ceteris Paribus (Burning Deck, 2000).

I spent a lot of yesterday brooding on how I might best represent Ceteris paribus, which I've found to be the most elusive of Gale Nelson's poetry books. In the end I've just picked two of the four pages in the poem that I've spent most time with. (In these poems the main structural unit is the page.)


Reading this poetry is a matter of absorbing and looking over and around the text, of standing back and waiting patiently for things to reveal themselves: particles of sound (g-, gl-,  -or -m) and particles of meaning too. For me the poem concerns the economics of capitalism (for example, in its rapid counting and in its repeated exhortations to "take" and to "go")... but that's only another way of saying it concerns the lives of educated westerners at the turn of the century, which I might say about most other poems of the same vintage. (Or maybe it's just another way of saying that every poem I happen to read seems to shine a light on our present preoccupations and sense of crisis.)


I've since discovered that you can read the whole of "Casements" by clicking Peek Inside on the SPD Ceteris Paribus page:

https://www.spdbooks.org/Products/1886224374/ceteris-paribus.aspx

You can also find "Casements" in Issue One of The Germ, along with lots of other poetry from this USA strand of the experimental world: Barbara Guest, Peter Gizzi, Juliana Spahr, Jackson Mac Low and many others whose work I wish I knew much better than I do.

http://durationpress.com/projects/out-of-print-archive/the-germ/


*

The following note, taken  from the SPD site, is presumably GN's own explanation of his book's title:

"CETERIS PARIBUS is a phrase commonly used by economists and means "assuming all other things are held constant." With this phrase, a host of unintended results can be explained away as having been caused by changes in the real world, and the model itself is sustained. As the economy collapses around their ears, the bewildered theorists of the dismal science may claim that were CETERIS PARIBUS only possible, the predicted outcome would have obediently presented itself. In Gale Nelson's poetry, language misbehaves much like the economy. The multiplicity of factors at play on the page—and among pages—keeps the poem from settling anywhere near constancy. Each time order seems just around the corner, variances begin to seep in—and anything becomes possible."

*

Another of the poems is titled "Originary prudence". Somewhat against expectation, the word "originary" actually appears within the text:



The wounds of our ancestors were originary
in that they could not be predicated.

Alternating between stammering yeasts.

     +

When the two vehicles collide, the weight,
speed and intention of impact remain of import.

Jaundiced goal of fifth position.


("Originary prudence", sixth page)


I suppose that focussed my attention on the word. Next day I noticed it again, this time in Lisa Samuels' Gender City (2011).

In this separation and distance we can hardly be called unknown
with our lock-ons and our travesties
with pink frills all abounding

you having laid the architecture perfectly for such routs
hardly screen the piece
by demolition of originary
struts, whilst our arms entwining
reach the ideology we strive for

(Beginning of "Love song: the city")

A casual search on the internet suggests the word tends to appear in a Heideggerian context (e.g. here). I understand it as "that which originates" or "related to origins", but that's a highly uninformed impression.




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Wednesday, August 07, 2019

Depiction



Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth:    (Exodus 20:4)

Judaism and Christianity have had aniconic strands at one time and another but the best known, most lasting and most theorized of these religious traditions is Islamic aniconism. This has been variously understood in different times and places. Typically (e.g. from the Sunni hadith) it proscribes the depiction of human and other sentient creatures, i.e. animals, but not trees or other plants.

The two common theological arguments are 1. Man should avoid the propagation of false objects of worship (i.e. idolatry). 2. Since God alone is the creator of sentient beings, it is impious for man to mimic that creation, as well as futile (because human-created images aren't alive).

In practice, vegetable forms in Islamic religious art, though permitted, have tended to be abstracted: they don't evoke identifiable individuals or species like the photos in this post. The Islamic religious art of arabesques and geometric patterns nurtures a void. "Nothing must stand between man and the invisible presence of God" (Titus Burckhardt).

This thinking has also been extended beyond the visual arts. For don't the same arguments apply to images of the human in literature? Isn't the reader's imagination filled with a mental image of a sentient being, even if he or she isn't literally seen?

Aniconism remains a central theme of most Islamic religious art. But outside the mosque the encroachment of westernization and consumerism into the Islamic world has altered things drastically. All Islamic nations have TV channels. Billboards show enormous photographic images of ordinary well-groomed men and women, as well as national rulers. The Taliban banned cameras, but that was a lone protest.




In western commerce and media, depiction reigns supreme, its usefulness demonstrated beyond dispute.

And yet (perhaps as a direct consequence) depiction in modern western art and literature has for a long time been a matter of anxiety. The theme has been expressed in various ways; I'm not going to rehearse them, but discussions of the Other, the male gaze, objectification, orientalism, blackface, yellowface and much more are all concerned with the ethics of depiction. And in daily life, nearly all of us acknowledge some reserve about e.g. posting photos of children or strangers on social media.

And as with the aniconic theologians, it isn't only about morality but also about futility: is it even possible to depict another human being (still less ourselves) without projecting our own preconceptions, in other words without some element of stereotyping and framing? If a depiction is necessarily a fiction, what can it achieve but to add to the sum of the human world's dishonesties?





   Baroque has made this triangle
   a midland party of reluctant start
          to spilt-out            plethora 'yes it hurt'
and with primordial screws we held our hands out
to be welded to the wheels our ancestors
       paid kisses for (oh my darling
               asps and welts, come further
             don't succor me for bandly
                    I must walk ideas of danger promise)
         the motto of the village whorled
          discreetly in our palms whilst our relations
    build the vertical enclosure STAND RIGHT THERE
beside the shunt.
One might get it all oneself one's body
stretched completely round the tasseled circle
we might call a calling island without
                          VOICE WE RECOGNIZE
       inside the skin
   whose circle gets pried up and wrapped
   in one kid glove to fit him, the voice
     has muffled longer claims
                            THE TREES STING NATURE'S VISIONARY
                   RATTLE DETACHED FROM TYPE
                   FACE SEEMING
           smiling fractious for the team
               crowded at tiny tables
 outside our brains we half-commit
our gleaming scales our univocal
           dominance to feed them

 (Lisa Samuels, from Gender City (2011), section 6: Exodus)

 A couple of pages from one of my favourite contemporary poets. Lisa's style is unique, but this sample illustrates some of the strategies of non-depictive modern poetry, e.g. the pronouns (I, our, we, him, them) resolutely refuse to cohere into recognizable character/location/event, and everything that resembles an outright statement is implicitly in quotes. 







When he entered the miserable room in which they were confined, Dolly and Miss Haredale withdrew in silence to the remotest corner. But Miss Miggs, who was particularly tender of her reputation, immediately fell upon her knees and began to scream very loud, crying, ‘What will become of me!’—‘Where is my Simmuns!’—‘Have mercy, good gentlemen, on my sex’s weaknesses!’—with other doleful lamentations of that nature, which she delivered with great propriety and decorum.

‘Miss, miss,’ whispered Dennis, beckoning to her with his forefinger, ‘come here—I won’t hurt you. Come here, my lamb, will you?’

On hearing this tender epithet, Miss Miggs, who had left off screaming when he opened his lips, and had listened to him attentively, began again, crying: ‘Oh I’m his lamb! He says I’m his lamb! Oh gracious, why wasn’t I born old and ugly! Why was I ever made to be the youngest of six, and all of ‘em dead and in their blessed graves, excepting one married sister, which is settled in Golden Lion Court, number twenty-sivin, second bell-handle on the—!’

‘Don’t I say I an’t a-going to hurt you?’ said Dennis, pointing to a chair. ‘Why miss, what’s the matter?’

‘I don’t know what mayn’t be the matter!’ cried Miss Miggs, clasping her hands distractedly. ‘Anything may be the matter!’

‘But nothing is, I tell you,’ said the hangman. ‘First stop that noise and come and sit down here, will you, chuckey?’

The coaxing tone in which he said these latter words might have failed in its object, if he had not accompanied them with sundry sharp jerks of his thumb over one shoulder, and with divers winks and thrustings of his tongue into his cheek, from which signals the damsel gathered that he sought to speak to her apart, concerning Miss Haredale and Dolly. Her curiosity being very powerful, and her jealousy by no means inactive, she arose, and with a great deal of shivering and starting back, and much muscular action among all the small bones in her throat, gradually approached him.

‘Sit down,’ said the hangman.

Suiting the action to the word, he thrust her rather suddenly and prematurely into a chair, and designing to reassure her by a little harmless jocularity, such as is adapted to please and fascinate the sex, converted his right forefinger into an ideal bradawl or gimlet, and made as though he would screw the same into her side—whereat Miss Miggs shrieked again, and evinced symptoms of faintness.

‘Lovey, my dear,’ whispered Dennis, drawing his chair close to hers. ‘When was your young man here last, eh?’

‘MY young man, good gentleman!’ answered Miggs in a tone of exquisite distress.

‘Ah! Simmuns, you know—him?’ said Dennis.

‘Mine indeed!’ cried Miggs, with a burst of bitterness—and as she said it, she glanced towards Dolly. ‘MINE, good gentleman!’

This was just what Mr Dennis wanted, and expected.

‘Ah!’ he said, looking so soothingly, not to say amorously on Miggs, that she sat, as she afterwards remarked, on pins and needles of the sharpest Whitechapel kind, not knowing what intentions might be suggesting that expression to his features: ‘I was afraid of that. I saw as much myself. It’s her fault. She WILL entice ‘em.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ cried Miggs, folding her hands and looking upwards with a kind of devout blankness, ‘I wouldn’t lay myself out as she does; I wouldn’t be as bold as her; I wouldn’t seem to say to all male creeturs “Come and kiss me”’—and here a shudder quite convulsed her frame—‘for any earthly crowns as might be offered. Worlds,’ Miggs added solemnly, ‘should not reduce me. No. Not if I was Wenis.’

(from Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge Chapter 70).

A sample of Dickens' depiction of Miss Miggs, who lights up the pages of Barnaby Rudge whenever she appears. It's a deeply un-PC portrait, founded on eighteenth-century stereotypes of ugly old maids: embittered, religiose and desperate for sex. The insights are all too crudely effective, the obfuscation covert and manipulative. The depiction is a triumph of selective partiality. Yet such is Miggs' comic vigour that we rejoice as much with her as against her.







Images: photos taken in Laura's garden, 4 August 2019.

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