However Introduced to the Soles; by Nic Macias, Nick Laight, and Niall Quinn, 1995
The methods by which philologically-oriented critics such as myself write descriptions of texts break down when faced with texts which offer no handholds for reason. That is to say, the unknown element, which always makes up half of any interesting poem, obstinately retains its status, foregrounded in a way which makes it sheer excitement for someone who is not scared of uncertainty.
The boundary between excitement and anxiety is uncertain, and study of it forces us to invoke a theory of art based essentially on social suggestion. Faced with an expanse of uninterpretable, shimmering, material, the qualities we attribute to it, and to our experience of it, derive from contextual cues. This suggestibility is arrested by explicit reasoned discourse, and indeed reason is there partly to get rid of suggestibility. Turning down the channel of referential, carefully qualified, exactly interpretable, dimensioned language automatically turns up the other channel, of undifferentiated feeling, sensitive to texture, mood, and to overall configuration, weak on an internal time sense. These texts offer us a great freedom from effort, since the discursive line isn't there; while they present us with the effort of managing our own self-referentiality, of gliding through the unstructured curves of excitement without getting tired of ourselves. We don't have to remember much, but we have to react a lot. Moving through unnamed situations throws attention onto the rules by which we identify situations and switch on reactions to them. Perhaps we can only find spontaneity by going through decontextualisation.
Non-representational poetry is not truly giving control to language, because its similarities to movements in art like music, film, and painting are so cogent. Rather, it foregrounds suggestibility, collusion, and the transmission of mood.
It is interesting to compare this self-referentiality with that of the conventional Anglo-Welsh poem, which is "about ourselves being us", which succeeds by being identical with every other Anglo-Welsh poem, and where the emotions are as hard to find as the beer inside a full bottle of beer. Here, the decision whether to identify is fixed by being tied to preset signs disguising its arbitrary nature, and the possibility of remaking identifications the whole time. Functions to do with group belonging are more central to poetry than the depiction of objects.
The first sign I got of all this was a flier, sometime in 1995, with an excited quote from Iain Sinclair, and the catch-phrase avant-garde punk. Such phrases are important in a context where mood is dominant over reference; this one is important if it signals constructs of high energy which are assertively detached from the conceptual art of the period 1968-75, and of its implicit "shared conversation", with its flavours of the bucolic alongside the obsolete tragic narrative of Marxist apocalyptic. I also think of dance music, not because of any measurable commonality, but because the new syntax of dance music, with its rejection of the notion of the song, of a psychological realism tying the music to an implied central character, of the familiar sound envelopes of traditional instruments with their learnt psychological values, along with a driving energy foreign to the traditional avant garde, is emotionally similar to However Introduced to the Soles. The "landscape" around the book might be a Chemical Brothers record. In such games, the element of choice is foregrounded: the aesthetic element is more advanced than in poems which depict a situation. Of course, the artwork is itself a situation, in which the acts of choice, and of making rules, add up to a picture, however blurred, of someone acting. Whether that situation is "confined" or "free" depends on the someone's internal state, their competence and self-confidence.
Fragments of "unrealisable" language are rapidly identified by some agent in the brain as not matching either existing models of reality or the verbal context around it, but they "fly" until that point. And, a large number of very short durations add up to a long duration. These poets use language like glass in a stained glass window, many coloured fragments in geometrically precise forms carefully fitted to each other. The relation between the pieces and the overall design is fictive, bizarre, and spontaneous.
Extracting daffodils, fat seek form us
up the on, infeet all mother,
He from threw, thoroughbred daughters
big allies.
denial eyes tears, through born formed
earth the screaming, the Gold & Green,
evolved & friends furnished.
(Nick Macias, from a pamphlet even more obscure than Soles, and a poem called "Big Daddies, Back to Front Allies, Black, Red, Gold & Green"). Perhaps we could call this "pseudo-situational writing"; or perhaps it is a "true" description of a bizarre situation.
I eventually found out that the three poets were quite close to each other, and had a shared background in a writers' group in Pontypridd. My disbelief at finding avant garde writers in Wales was satisfied by finding out that two of them are English and one Irish. This is probably not a useful way of talking about the poetry; if we refer to the book, where none of the poems has the author's name attached to it, we can see how much time we could waste by banally tracing origins and ownership. How much more relevant to wear this material, slide across it, bounce around inside it, pour paint over it.
Once the rules of meaning have been taken out, the language is governed by dozens of decentralised rules, propagating across the sensitized surface like vegetation across a pond.
Form the future,
Forge a frank frontier,
Drive to develop,
Direct disclosure,
Input, kindle kin,
Aspire join just,
Dialectic express,
Eternal elysium,
Combine, enter entire
(Nick Macias, from 'Gracious Global Glory')
The procedures involved are garish, barbaric, geometrical, decorative, rippling. This poem is based on phonetic echoing and a certain syllable count, as well as mysterious lines of meaning. The link between one word and the next is vegetable rather than logical. We can see that restricting shapes to the human figure disqualifies a huge set of other possibilities for developing the line: discarding representation as a principle in language opens up an analogously vast set of newly possible relationships. Indeed, a point in the first set becomes a whole dimension in the latter set. The vastness of the uncoded set then acquires an emotional value of optimism, potentiality, fearlessness, fleetness of foot, wide-eyed alertness.
Laight is more attuned to visual poetry and graphic design, and Macias is a more "situational" writer, who presents family melodramas with an unusual perspective which "squashes" them and makes it appear as if they have no outside. Quinn also writes about virtual situations, although the relationship between the situation and the poem is loose. Graphic design uses a kind of "overall" scanning, where we ignore details; the cognitive ability being invoked is one which scans an entire room, and finds it secure, welcoming, exciting, loud, etc., while (temporarily) ignoring individual shapes and specific verbal contexts. These poems are exceptionally strong at the overall, affective-configurational, level, rather than at the local level.
The location of the self-referential is a key question for contemporary poetry. The zone where the poet is free, and where we feel free, is the most desired point. If this is so, realist reference to the physical or economic world is a slowing influence on poetry. Yet, the essential nature of a game is to have rules: improvisation is easier if the calculations are partly defined at the outset. Even if the experiences within a poem are "true", given substance by their correspondence to a reality, which has already dispersed, my decision to read the poem is self-referential and within some uncertain boundaries my reactions to the experience-poem are arbitrarily decided by me, and afterwards become a "reality". The procedures around temporarily entering someone else's personality are singularly interesting; it is more rewarding to reflect on this free act than to recognise parts of reality or to take in facts. Leaving aside the incitements of fashion and chic, foregrounding these procedures is liberating, exciting, and maturing. The act of self-referential confirmation is circular, but that is not the same as nothing happening: the perimeter of a circle has a length greater than zero. The more we free the visible frame of structures, the more attention can be given to acts of perception and choice.
It's perfectly true that eliminating the physical world from the text as far as possible was fashionable among up to date students of literature in 1995. The fact that it was an object of contention gave it an extra value, like blue paint in the Middle Ages when it was rare and hard to find. Being fought for focusses attention on a trait, while also drawing a line between the "in", and the "out", who don't know what's fashionable. The situation we are being thrown into is perhaps that of a studio in an art school, where some students are pursuing personal projects and others are energetically competing to seize the collective object of stylistic desire, which is an object of envy, and which can only be acquired by acclamation, that is as a result of daring and going beyond. This is mutual excitement, contrasting with memory and introspection. The "blank" surface of the non-representational work is meaningful inside an intimate group, where reflexive control of speech or visual display is taken for granted. It evokes this situation where self-expression is instantly understood: a supremely desirable situation, it would seem to anyone in a different situation. Being so competitive implies that you are highly socialised, and this implies sophistication, in the form of freedom from psychological traumas and inhibitions. Being chic demonstrates some quite vital abilities. At the same time, the fact that suspending "purposeful" functions within the work of art is an accepted form of competition tells us that the poetry is not completely free— my guess about its operation is not completely wild.
Leaving aside shiny slogans like "avant garde punk", "the Aberystwyth sound" "the Noumena phenomenon", and "floor-filling abstraction", Soles has left an indelible trace on the nineties as a solace for weary editors, a genuinely desirable artefact among so many writers struggling with worn-out ideas or with moral exhaustion. It was bold, energetic, sophisticated, uncompromised, fully realised, unfamiliar, and truly curious about the incalculable ocean of possible linguistic relations.