Carol Ann Duffy: Queen's consort.
Posting one’s poetry or prose (or prose-poetry) online, even if in a very unassuming format and manner, is a far more daunting (because seemingly egoistic?) endeavour than doing the same to one’s non-fiction, almost regardless of what form and register that non-fiction takes. I’m not sure why this should be. Yes; bad poetry is cringeworthy. But so are bad political analyses and, depending on who you are, a bad political analysis can lead to someone getting his/her dick clipped. Perhaps this dichotomy is instead due to the way in which poetry is valourised or made mystical and transcendental. If you see bad poetry, then to cringe is the only response; one doesn’t mount a counter-argument to verse. (And, relatedly, poor non-fiction work is as likely to make us red-faced in anger as it is in shame).
Nevertheless, I have decided to, over the coming week or so, place some of my (prose-)poetry here alongside the kind of non-fiction which I’m already “offering”.
First, though, I’d like to, by way of introduction, discuss the way that I came to poetry as a form. This will involve joining some cod literary criticism to some self-regarding biography; so feel free to skip if you so desire. But perhaps, in one sense, this might be, for literary scholars, a useful piece of Reader Response in action: do my gnarled, prolish fingers pound a sprig of Authenticity? Let’s see!
I didn’t read much poetry until eighteen months or so ago. Before that, I’d mostly confined myself to the stuff I had to read: the short, easily-consumed verse present on school syllabuses and penned by modern luminaries such as our current Laureate, Simon Armitage and Tony Harrison.[1] These poets did, I suppose, disabuse me of my previously-cherished notion that all poetry had to be about An Field or Some Love or The God. (Or all three.) But these poems were, of course, chosen for the curriculum precisely because they could be taught with ease. All had to exhibit features which sixteen year-olds could name & identify, and most also dealt with themes Within our Experience (many were about adolescence/”coming of age”, I seem to remember).[2] I abhor the notion that poetry, or any cultural product, “shouldn’t be analysed”, and abhor the idea that such products “are destroyed if you analyse them” triply so. But I think that this analytical process does need to be one of reflective wrestling, rather than of ten minutes’ breathless pummelling.
One of the Shakespeares: RUBBISH, ACTUALLY.
This is not, I should say, to endorse the smug Kubrickism that institutionalised education actually – aha! – makes us stupider by enforcing engagement with culture in a way that is reductive and unpleasant. I didn’t much enjoy Shakespeare either; but found time to read drama outside of the classroom at that age. Therein lay the problem for poetry: my lunchtimes during Sixth Form were spent on Pinter (his plays, I mean, of course), Ibsen, Brecht, Soyinka, Mike Leigh, Alan Bennett, Jack Rosenthal, John Mortimer, Dennis Potter and John Godber; that is to say, on whatever playscripts our school library had available.[3] For whatever reason, and by whatever process, poetry just wasn’t getting a look-in.
Moving on to university made things worse unsurprisingly, since my reading hours were now spent on scholarly analyses of the middle class’ formation in early modern Finland, etc.. (And that really will kick the voracity out of you.)
So my engagement with poetry came quite by accident, would you believe? I was working as a voluntary archivist at the Brynmoor Jones Library (at the University of Hull), and was given the opportunity to catalogue the files of the British poetry magazine Reality Studios (1978-1988). The material included correspondence between contributors and the editor Ken Edwards, draft typescripts and ACTUAL POETRY ITS ACTUAL SELF.[4] The first poems I came into contact with when opening up these dusty old buff folders were by Allen Fisher. My initial reaction was, essentially: “what the fuck is this???” The orthography, the semantics, the vocabulary, the meters (and their absence), the “themes” (and, etc.) were unlike everything that I have ever seen.
Now, this is of course not really to say anything about the originality of Allen Fisher (or Ken Edwards or Tony Baker or Bill Griffiths). If I had come to the work of these people after an extensive engagement with the Black Mountain poets, the New York School, etc., then of course my response would’ve been more along the lines of, “oh, I see; that sort of thing…” But to go from Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage to the thrusting phalanx of the British Poetry Revival was an Escherian mindfuck. Here were linguistic signifiers arranged in a manner which claimed to be “poetry”. My every instinct as a reader was to repel the question (the “Nietzschean question”, as David Trotter puts it in a contribution to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal) I most wanted to ask: “Who is speaking here?”
So questions went unanswered, but I pieced together the “meaning” of Language poetry by joining Google searches to discovered family resemblances amongst the poetic works I was consigning to historiography. My reaction to langpo echoed George Costanza’s reaction to feeling the fabric of a brassiere for the first time:
“I LIKE THIS.”
Over the past few months, I have begun to express my approval through the only means I really know; pale imitation. This, then, opens up the question of precisely what I liked in “language poetry”; a question which, owing to my aforementioned history as a reader of poetry, must necessarily be rather a-historical and, for want of a better and fear of a more obnoxious term, “lay”.
Externality.
Charles Bernstein: an observant Jew -- nothing escapes his notice.
“Language poetry” is a truncation of the more accurate and verbose expression “language-oriented writing.”[5] It refers both to a loose style of writing and to an institutional network of presses, journals and individuals; this blurring is aided by the prominence within the school of the American magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. This manner of writing is “oriented” towards language in the sense that its semantic concentration is upon the interrelation between pieces of language (and other forms of signification), rather than upon the use of such signifying practices to depict or “create” some external image or “world”.
This is perhaps a slightly cartoonish presentation; but it reflects the concerns of some language-oriented writing in their most polemical mood. The paradigmatic statement of this approach is probably Ron Silliman’s 1979 essay “Disappearance of the World, Appearance of the World.”[6] In the essay, Silliman uses Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism in order to analyze the specificity of langpo: most other varieties of poetry “sell” to the reader some external image, narrative or position; language-oriented writing is concerned only with the relationship between signifying practices. Obviously, this analysis can proceed only by analogy: langpo is no less “alienating” than any other poetics; it can only be less economically exploitative by dint of the way in which its product is distributed.
But it’s clear that what Silliman says has merit strictly as literary criticism. Take the opening lines of Charles Bernstein’s “So really not visit a…”:
So really not visit a remember to strange.
A it’s always finally seems now which ago,
long that by amaze. Guess I thing obvious of kind.[7]
These lines not only “resist” a reading which would interpret them as an attempt at image-conveyance; they positively negate such a reading. Here, it’s important to note that spoken performances, and the recording of these, was essential to the distribution of language-oriented writing. So, at a reading, Bernstein seems to offer us the tantalizing prospect of a clear statement about the activities of a subject (“Yes I think…”); only to “take back” this courtesy in published form, replacing it with the “colourless green thoughts”-esque “Guess I thing obvious of kind.” The word-play, punning and garden-path formulations of langpo create multifarious textual ambiguities; the spoken performance of these ambiguities often serves to add new layers to the semantic confusion.
Bruce Andrews: he's been on the /O'Reilly Factor/.
Ventriloquism
I referred in the “introduction” (or whatever) to language-oriented writing as a type of poetics which encourages us to ask, “Who is speaking here?” Of course, langpo is by no means the only type of writing to employ multiple voices. But language-oriented writing is nevertheless unusual in refusing explicitly to define or name any of these voices, and to deploy, in some cases, as many voices as clauses.
This is nowhere more true than in the work of Bruce Andrews, and nowhere is the tactic mobilised to more entertaining effect than in his collection I Don’t Have any Paper, so Shut up (or, Social Romanticism). Consider these first-person formulations taken more-or-less-at-random (i.e. not at all at random) from that work:
I’m a sketchy ditch.
Don’t let the sleazy ambience put you off / I’m a wheelchair!
I was listless and had vomit in my hair / I think these critics are all mental cases.
I want to have national responsibilities.
I was an anal virgin until last night. [8]
Andrews does not “mean” this, in the sense that he is not seriously declaring his status as a sketchy ditch or a wheelchair. The status of his anal virginity must, at the moment of publication, remain an open (hurr) question. But neither does he wish to arrogate these statements and positions to “characters”; identifiable and discrete theatre masks which he switches between at breakneck celerity. Rather, the topic of focus is (as always, at least in some indirect sense, in langpo) these precise discursive atoms.
Of course, some qualifications must be made here. When Andrews, a stridently leftist Professor of Political Theory, informs us that “I am not, nor have I ever been, an anti-Communist”, this is, perhaps, all “him”: he really does think this.[9] That’s not a problem in itself: no author is an elutriated agenda-free subject capable of sitting above (“outside”?) the discourses with which he engages. But, if anything, the first-person plural formulations of this sort (“We like to sit around our California townhouses and criticise Black street culture from a literary point of view”) are more annoying, since they invite the audience member either to become part of the in-group chuckle (the line quoted gets Andrews by far his biggest laugh in the reading I have heard), or else out him/her-self as the kind of person who does in fact sit around, etc..[10]
Vernacular
Ron Silliman: blogger & Marx-botherer.
As is probably clear from the above extracts, langpo (and Andrews in particular) is not exactly essentialist about what can be considered “poetic language”. It would be wrong, I think, to say that those involved with language-oriented writing “love” the vernacular. When Andrews places before us the notion that “you can really become yourself with money”, it is clear that he does not “love” this idea; or, at least, he does not only love it.
Instead, I think that Andrews is recognising the Chomskean principle that ideology grows best in vernacular; i.e. it is precisely when these notions do not explicitly mark themselves out as “political”, instead being smuggled into the no-frills language of the everyday, that they are at their most puissant.
Andrews is not the only poet associated with language-oriented writing to make extensive use of the vernacular. In Charles Bernstein’s “Matters of Policy”, the “kids splintering like glass jets against shadows of tropical taxis” are joined to each other by a nexus of prosaic chidings (“he really had”; “I should be sorry”; “I know I have complained”; “quit nudging!”) and thus take their place alongside the newspaper-reading narrator, desirous of “another sip of [his] Pepsi-Cola”, and “the men chatting about those dreary affaires de la monde they seem to find so interesting”; the last being the only cluster so base as to engage in overt politicking.[11]
Bernstein employs a similar tactic in the later “Dysraphism”, a poem comprising several “seams” (or, more accurately, mis-seamings); amongst these a quaint picture of American family life observed through the kaleidoscopic lens of langpo (“A good example of this is / Dad pins puck”; “Ma always fixes it just like I like it”). The final reference to such relationships comes as Bernstein sadly concedes that “I know how you feel, Joe: nobody likes to admit his girl is that smart.” Immediately, the familiarity of this sentiment is “made strange” by a characteristic jumbling once Bernstein reconsiders: “I feel how you know, Joe, like nobody to smart that girl is his admit.”[12]
Différance
Jacques Derrida: unerasable.
In a review of Bernstein’s 1987 collection The Sophist, Paul Auster comments that Bernstein has “reintroduced the spirit of polemic into the world of American poetry.”[13] Indeed. The spirit of polemic: its contours, its register, its vocabulary, and so on. In readings of the volume’s opening poem, “The Simply”, Bernstein is at no point more spirited than in his delivery of the following lines:
“…Why not, under a sway so profoundly
gentle as this, give the act a credence that, in
other light, seemed to demand disapprobiation [sic], the
account of which, at odd measures, might even be
taken if the alarm first not sounds that, painstakingly
no more the proviso than encampment, only to force full
well the recondite consideration that what is by such
confrontation supposed to later allow is just
what by such deference, accommodation to vitiate, would
be then available?…”[14]
With the voice of Demosthenes, Bernstein piles up comma on top of comma, reducing each previously-foregrounded clause to subordination or contingency with a flick of his wrist; the “meaning” of this vast run-on sentence simultaneously produced in aggregation of, and passed like a parcel between, signifiers, until finally the music stops (Bernstein’s “deference, accommodation to vitiate” is expended) and we are reminded to our surprise that this cluster of tendentious fragments was in fact being promulgated in the interrogative mood? This is a man who, for want of a more analytical sentiment, has read his Derrida.
This kind of process is by no means unique to Bernstein. Language-oriented writing, with its focus upon the interrelation of signifiers, its punning and use of unclear referents, is constantly forcing readers into new readings, not just between poems or reading sessions, but as a normative and continuous aspect of readership. It is unsurprising that the one polemical statement which Bernstein does seem absolutely serious about and insistent upon is his assertion that “the world deals with negation and contradiction and does not assert any single scheme.”[15]
Intentionality
Jackson Mac Low: unintentional.
All of these writing strategies make Barthesian attempts to chip away at the notion that any text can convey a singular, privileged meaning; that meaning “intended” by the author during composition. But no authorial practice can negate this notion quite as easily as the proactive and explicit deferral of intentionality by the writer.
This practice, like all of those I talk about here, is by no means exclusive to language-oriented writing. Perhaps the most eccentric and challenging example of non-intentional poetics can be gleaned from the somniloquies – recorded segments of sleeptalk – produced by Dion McGregor. When approaching this material it of course makes no sense to ask “what is the intended meaning here?” Discussion of extracted meanings can only begin once this question is put aside: “Hier ist nur ‘Warum’”.[16]
Non- or semi-intentionality (“determinism” as Jackson Mac Low has called it) does not take this form in language-oriented writing; but it takes many others. In the first edition of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal, Bernadette Mayer listed the following amongst her collection of writing “Experiments”:
“Get a group of words (make a list or select at random); then form these words (only) into a piece of writing – whatever the words allow. Let them demand their own form, and/or: Use certain words in a set way, like, the same word in every line, or in a certain place in ever paragraph, etc.. Design words.”[17]
This was a common means for language-oriented writers when producing semi-intentional or deterministic work. Perhaps the most concentrated example is Clark Coolidge’s collection The So, in which all poems consist only of prepositions, conjunctions, articles, nouns and pronouns.[18] Taking this a step further, in his “I and The”, Bernstein reproduces the one hundred words most commonly used in conversations between psychiatrists and their patients (according to a sociologist’s survey). The words are presented in order of frequency; three to a line; three lines to a stanza.[19] If McGregor’s sleeptalking is the “other” peak of non-intentionality, then how different our two summits look.
But Mac Low was (he passed away in 2004) perhaps the “language” figure most associated with non-intentionality. He added a futurist twist, employing computerised algorithms to select stretches of language from “seed”, or source, texts. In an especially successful example, collected as HSCH, Mac Low combined language from the works of Lewis Carroll, Gertrude Stein, Gerard Manley Hopkins and the philosopher (and his former mentor) Charles Hartshorne. Mac Low is more “intentional” than others; adding “helping words” (prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns); deleting some language that is less helpful; altering proper names; and freely combining the selected language.[20] Yet, in a sense, Mac Low is most prey to his source texts. As he said, he formed the selected language into “sentential structures”, often fixating upon certain semantic fields so as to create a sense of theme. “Feeling Down, Clementi Felt Imposed Upon from Every Direction” from HSCH takes this further, as Mac Low appends to it an extremely suggestive epigraph: Lloyd Biggle’s remark that “democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny.” The timing of the composition (2003) and Mac Low’s anarchist politics suggest strongly that this work is, in some sense, about the Second Gulf War. Much of the material within the poem is not directly suited to this reading (we learn, for example, that “Clementi shamelessly declared compunction at the slaughter of fishes”); but much of it decidedly is. In any case, the reader or listener is searching for clues about meaning not “at the margins” but “in the seams”; that is to say, not in precise formulations, but in the way that formulations are stitched together into more substantive linguistic behaviour.[21]
In an interview with Bernstein, Mac Low declared his interest in “experimental poetry in the fullest sense of that term.” What he means, I think, is poetry that is not merely concerned to declare its own merits (its novelty and its transgressive properties); but instead acknowledges (and delights in) its speculative character, its status as procession rather than product, etc..
I have tried to take some of this on board in my own “work”. That’s what I’m saying.
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[1] There was Shakespeare too, of course.
[2] This is maybe a little unfair to Harrison, who I did enjoy. He’s at least political.
[3] And also on Italo Calvino, Leo Tolstoy and the complete Flying Circus scripts, I seem to remember. Incidentally, is this the first time that Jack Rosenthal and Bertolt Brecht have been mentioned as basically much-of-a-muchness?
[4] Precisely what is contained can be established by visiting the Reality Studios entry in the University of Hull Archives catalogue WHAT I DONE. [Useless, post facto note: link fixed.]
[5] Not to say that a number of poets don’t gladly accept the term “language poetry” (or the “third way” of “language writing”), but I have heard the prominent langpo author and editor Bruce Andrews argue in favour of the longer and more expansive term and also claim that this was the “original” expression. I prefer the phrase “language-oriented writing” because it cuts off at the pass any tiresome critical suggestion that writers associated with “language poetry” believe themselves to be the first writers to compose pieces with an eye (or ear) primarily attuned to the interrelation of signifiers.
[6] Ron Silliman, “Disappearance of the World, Appearance of the World” in Charles Bernstein and Bruce Andrews ed., The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), pp. 121-132. [Reprint].
[7] Charles Bernstein, “So really not visit a…” in Controlling Interests (New York : Roof Books, 1980), pp. 37-8.
[8] Andrews, I Don’t Have any Paper, so Shut up (or, Social Romanticism), (Los Angeles : Sun & Moon Press, 1992), pp. 16; 114; 187; 188; 210; . My familiarity with the poems comes mostly from readings of various parts located at Andrews’ PennSound page.
[9] Ibid, p. 280.
[10] Ibid, p. 96. You’ll need to hear the reading of the relevant section (entitled “Gestalt Me Out”) in order to verify my laughter claim, obviously.
[11] Bernstein, “Matters of Policy” in Controlling Interests, p. 1.
[12] Charles Bernstein, “Dysraphism” in The Sophist, (Cambridge : Salt Publishing, 2004), p. 40.
[13] The snippet is quoted on the jacket of ibid., and is reproduced on the relevant page at Salt Publishing’s website.
[14] Bernstein, “The Simply” in ibid., p. 5.
[15] Ibid., p. 6.
[16] Questions about the authenticity of McGregor’s “work” abound. I do not think they are very important for the consideration of McGregor’s work as poetics. It is enough that the somniloquies denude the possibility of such material existing.
[17] Bernadette Mayer, “Experiments” in Bernstein and Andrews ed., L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, p. 80.
[18] Clark Coolidge, The So: Poems 1966, (New York : Adventures in Poetry, 1971).
[19] Bernstein, “I and The” in The Sophist, pp. 53-78.
[20] Incidentally, the stanza lengths of the ten poems are determined by famous number sequences (primes, the Fibonacci, etc.) My précis of Mac Low’s method0logy draws on his own descriptions of it as given in an interview with Bernstein for “Linebreak”, and in his introduction to a group of readings from HSCH archived at PennSound.
[21] Unfortunately, I do not know where a text for “Feeling down…” can be obtained. My familiarity comes via this reading at PennSound. [Note: clicking the link will begin the download of an MP3 file.] Incidentally, I’m pretty sure that the title given at PennSound (“… Impost… “) is incorrect, judging by Mac Low’s own delivery.
