Out of Everywhere: linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America and the UK (ed. Maggie O'Sullivan, Reality Street, 1996)
"Human Nature is the same in all reasonable Creatures; and whatever falls in with it, will meet with admirers amongst Readers of all Qualities and Conditions." -Addison
"Go on Iggy, entertain me." -anon.
The covert ambience of the collection is of postgraduate projects at the elite universities; where the poetry itself is insipid, this inexplicit flavour comes out into centre stage, and dominates the atmosphere; it is the concealed motive of the unmotivated. To be allowed to write in this way marks you out as a high-flier in the academic corporation. It is hopeless trying to understand this kind of writing without looking in parallel at the grant applications which accompany it, and which sustain it and are filled by it. The fax has become a status symbol; one hears reports of a particular institutional poet wandering through the corridors of a certain arts college with a fax in their hand, a power object. Look at me, I got a fax. Someone wants me for a gig. The CV —I have at least once received a CV of several pages as a support for poems being sent in to Angel Exhaust—is pure self-aggrandisement; its aggressive thrusting of the Person which is its only referent is dialectically related to the zero-person of non-representational poetry. The undeclared co-authors are the members of panels allocating Foundation money, grants, creative writing fellowships, and so forth. Their values are like a church, ethical and self-denying in aim, but also preferring monumental and classical buildings, resonating with high-prestige projects of the past several thousand years.
There is a class difference between minding-the-kids creative writing jobs and avantgarde creative writing. If you get stuck dealing with bored fifteen-year-olds, you present yourself as friendly, anti-intellectual, fun, anti-authoritarian, disliking books, etc. If you are a "creative writing fellow" faced with supercilious and erudite and ambitious postgraduates, you have to present yourself as controlling access to what is authenticated as the very latest thing, and perfectly indifferent to anything which gives itself away as "out of date". Both approaches are careerist, but for different sources of revenue; the second pays a lot more. There must be a latest thing, because there is a market which wants to consume it. We like to hear about the privileged, not the poor; like to see the splendid treasures of the past, not the mean huts and crocks. We read poetry as a leisure time task, and perhaps it is logical that the poetry itself should display leisure, as the absence of material constraints and problems.
Within the academic milieu, one progresses through taught courses to supervised research to independent original work. Studying the words of others precedes, and is a lower prestige activity than, creating your own statements. Only the best and most diligent students are allowed to proceed to the stage of original unsupervised work. The positional value of these stages affects the way academic poetry is consumed.
The term 'linguistically innovative', clumsy and stumbling though it is, is condensed: it is a signal to a given market, and reassures them that what is on offer conforms to their taste, which is a complex organic thing, adequately internalised by editors in this field, but not described anywhere. Part of its message is that "utterances are being generated which were not permissible within the poetic grammar valid in the recent past"; this is, also, an attack on mainstream poetry, which can claim to offer new social tones, or poetry written by members of social groups which were not writing poetry fifty years ago, but cannot claim innovation in the means of poetry (for example metre, connectivity, logic, ideas of reference, sentence structure). The distinction being advanced is like that between a new film and a new kind of film; between new utterances and a new grammar.
Being innovative is not aesthetically positive; it is a neutral adjective, one would say sub-equipped. The phrase codes for a shared intellectual background of identifications and notions of what is out of date, modern, chic, etc. Even the ability to base your poetry on Gertrude Stein is an indication that you went to a top-flight university where they let the kids study Difficult Modern texts, rather than a mass-production type university where all the set texts Tell A Story and have Sociological Relevance. One of the ways in which elite universities maintain their reputation is by turning to areas of study, especially theory and deconstruction, which only preselected and highly motivated students can follow or understand. One of the hot spots for this kind of performance-based differentiation is the figure of the author: autobiographical poetry, or poetry in which you are given a character to identify with, whose personality or experiences provide the structure into which you fit the bits of information presented in the poems, is for the peasants. The less autobiographical your poetry is, the more acceptable it is to the elite postgraduate English Schools. The economy of prestige instructs that one has to be conformist, in order to pick up the reflected glory of these exalted central sites, but one has to be original, i.e. far from pop culture, to make this signal. It gets argued that the sociological background is invisible inside the texts, which are not about daily life; but human beings are brilliant at organising this kind of social correlation, so the information pervades once you know the background, and you couldn't learn the interpretation rules for this minority poetry (or, possibly, even find the books) without acquiring this background information on the way.
The poets included are: Caroline Bergvall, Paula Claire, Grace Lake, Geraldine Monk, Wendy Mulford, Maggie O'Sullivan, Denise Riley, Fiona Templeton; Rae Armantrout, Nicole Broussard, Tina Darragh, Deanna Ferguson, Kathleen Fraser, Barbara Guest, Carla Harryman, Lyn Hejinian, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Karen McCormack, Bernadette Mayer, Melanie Neilson, Carlyle Reedy, Joan Retallack, Lisa Robertson, Leslie Scalapino, Catriona Strang, Rosmarie Waldrop, Diane Ward, Hannah Weiner, Marjorie Welish. The second group are North American, while I do not have the expertise to separate Canadian (or French Canadian) from US citizens. Unfortunately, the inclusion of thirty different poets precludes aesthetic discussion, only the innovative aspect offers itself to us. Denise Riley complained, during editing, about the phrase; she didn't regard herself as a linguistic innovator and didn't see the value of it. As a brand label, it may be code for "appeals to an intelligent audience", which people are guilty about saying outright.
The Afterword to Out of Everywhere lists, as magazines where this kind of poetry and theoretical writing appears, Active in Airtime, Angel Exhaust, Avec, Big Allis, Five Fingers Review, Fragmente, Object Permanence, Parataxis, Raddle Moon, Ribot and Talisman. This could not be a complete repertory of ideas, because the whole range of ideas animating the conceptual art community, or the academic Left, over the past thirty years, has also poured into this mixing-bowl. A list of 200 books would scarcely be complete. I spent six years editing one of these magazines.
It is quite easy to prove on paper that this kind of poetry cannot work, as the reader cannot read it by interpretation rules which they already have, i.e. which already exist, i.e. are not new, not changeable at the whim of the poet, etc. Such proofs lose their colour when the test of contact with the text proves them wrong. Perhaps this is not surprising; human beings, after all, are fabled for their intelligence, i.e. for a skill detached from concrete situations which provides effective tactics in unfamiliar situations. Human ability to work out rule-based symbolic constructions is incalculably good; mice, too, often escape from cages you would have thought were mouseproof. The theory of "what is incomprehensible" is no easier than the theory of how language refers to reality, or what social structure is, or anything else impossible.
Writing poetry to an aesthetics derived from conjectural theorising is more difficult than writing to an aesthetic based on concrete experiences. A theoretical artist may have to complete, let's say, 25 steps of original thought, and if one of these steps goes wrong, the end result is depressing, puzzling, and incomplete. Out of Everywhere is not exactly free of this.
An anthology like the Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry offers itself to confident generalisations; the poets follow the same rules for constructing poems, and those rules are very little different from the rules for making conversation, for social communication, etc. To describe OofE, one might have to write thirty lengthy essays, one for each contributor. Daniel Dennett remarks that the HIV virus contains more genetic diversity, measured in codons, than the whole order of mammals: avant garde art is like a virus, it shifts to fill all the conceptually available space of diversity, whereas other kinds of art cling to their set structure and define anything else as failure. When someone was reviewing OofE for us, I instructed her not to try to review the thing as a whole: because I didn't believe there was any pattern the parts converged onto, and I thought the reviewer would go mad loyally trying to find one. 99% of the diversity in contemporary poetry is in the avant-garde. A more listable rule-set would be the one "write poetry which is the negative of orthodox poetic rules, which are these"; the these might be like what Charles Cantalupo has evoked as "the more dominant, popular, contemporary award-winning modes of straight, sentimental narrative in a blend of autobiography, dramatic monologue, ruefulness, anecdote and bourgeois objects with a lot of weather in the perspective of either a transparent eye or an intensely made up ethnic and/or sexual version of this fashion". This NOT may be poor in descriptive power; just think of the extent of the possibilities allowed by shunning this kind of poetry. Reviewers generally exploit the redundancy of works of art in order to summarise large numbers of them in a concise and clinching way; experimental art has taken this redundancy as a resource to be spent and used up, so that a clinching description of it might be as long as the book itself. Art in an industrial age tends to be repetitive and reliable; a whole approach to leading one's life, perhaps. Conceptual art removes the stress on reproducing the sensuous illusionist detail, the brush-strokes, to concentrate on the quality of decisions; insisting on the practice of consciousness. Illusionist art flourished in particular societies and places; directed, possibly, by a distrust of fantasy. The abdication from the honest artisanal task of realism brought about, isostatically, a move back to fantasy.
The main influence here is probably Gertrude Stein. A more general comparison would be euphuism, and John Lyly's Euphues; refined people talking refined language where material problems are remote and style in social intercourse has become of pressing concern. A claim sometimes made for the nonreferential is that it is "language generating itself", hence the promotional phrase "language poetry". This is a grave error of theory; you could put a pile of language in a room for a million years, and it wouldn't generate any new utterances. Only humans can utter. The point is more "associational chains developing without drawing on real experience", and of course language is shorn of its main function here. Word associations produce new lines in the manner of "One, two, buckle my shoe", although there is no sense in which "One, two" could generate the phrase "buckle my shoe". Associational patterns run through the poems like a bee blatting around a biscuit-tin. The other main antecedent is Surrealism, and indeed most of the poetry here could be categorized as an offshoot of Surrealism. If we go back to Roger Roughton's poems (in the Penguin Poetry of the Thirties) we find that in their disconnectedness a little verbal world emerges, with its rules defined by the flow within the poem; these verbal worlds, expanded even to volume length, suppply much of OofE. Perhaps you may find that what is so overwhelmingly reminiscent of the 1930s does not feel like a new sensation in 1996.
Heels unmoved in pure opposition drive the snub at various tracks.
Versions equate between patrons and liberty as an omlette of man.
(Deanna Ferguson, from 'Sisters of the Even Jesus')
Great stretches of the book offer a kind of quaintness, like the sayings of someone who has taken LSD for the first time. LSD is popular, and so could this poetry be. An uneducated audience could find it funny, chatty, and d‚gag‚.
Poppy under a young
pepper tree, she thinks.
The Siren always sings
like this. Morbid
glamor of the singular.
Emphasizing correct names
as if making amends.
(Rae Armantrout)
This is pretty, and one could grow fond of it.
As a genre arises or dies, we glimpse the fact that its inner rules are partly arbitrary, but become naturalised as we are exposed to many examples of the style; and that the version of the speaking self presented in a personal genre (autobiography, religious confession, lyric poetry) is also arbitrary and "naturalised", so that when a genre dies we see the central generative code of the artworks suddenly, briefly, emerge into light and, simultaneously, the collapse of a speaking self and of a favoured site of self-consciousness, so that both artificiality and a deeper, wordless, underlying structure become visible and see and speak. The use of conjectural, artificial rule-sets in OofE is a capture of this experience, an attempt to recreate it under controlled conditions. The self cannot simultaneously be authentic and pristine, and subject to conventional, historically unstable, rules; but language is just such a set of rules. The scheme is to make such rule-sets switchable, optional, like the key of a piece of music.
Leaving aside aesthetic assessment, I deplore a certain attempt to turn a single aesthetic into "the modern aesthetic par excellence", or "the only intelligent aesthetic", or "the only prestige object worth competing for". The plurality of superstructures unfounds the judgments even of recipients of major foundation grants. But such an economic context does not prevent a poet from scaling the artistic heights.
Some light may be shed on our subject by going back to earlier veins of American poetry, in particular those described by David Perkins (in A History of Modern Poetry). He says of T.S. Eliot, "The ancestral sense of election and of mission still lingered in such genteel families of New England background, though the sense of election was transposed from the religious to the moral, social and cultural spheres." Again, he describes the Genteel Tradition, especially in the intellectual milieu of Boston and Harvard: "vestigial Puritanism in the form of excessive moral anxiousness and timidity; vestigial Transcendentalism in the form of vague idealism, not much related to actual life; earnest pursuit of 'culture' and a faith in its spiritual or quasi-religious value(.)" No-one who shares these values is unaware that they can be laughed at; and so that poetry benefits from elements of chattiness, playfulness, frivolity, where the child of pious parents liberates herself from ideals and simply has fun. Claiming to be "fun" is important in OofE; but it is infinitely different from pop poetry, or pop culture, and playfulness is a social imperative rather than something natural and uncalculated. Perkins notes, what was true around 1911, "a special deference and attraction to Europe, where 'culture' was thought to have its native home"; this is of course no longer true, but the deference to Modernist icons like Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Theodor Adorno, Charles Olson or John Ashbery is equally unquestioned; such assets form the wealth which distinguishes a whole class. He notes further that the Genteel Style in poetry was "earnest and unequivocal, traditional, abstract, well-bred, inspirational, and meticulous." The transition from being impersonal and uplifted to being anti-autobiographical was painless. If you want to attract foundation money, or NEA money, it is a good idea to present yourself as significant rather than enjoyable; impersonal rather than self-centred; critical rather than sensuous. The easiest way to present yourself as significant is to flaunt links, social, intellectual, formal, with living or dead artists who are established as "significant". The Genteel values which Perkins so ably describes closely resemble the ones to which award panels refer their own actions, not for choosing art for personal gratification, but for authorizing something as worthy and ethical and elevated. However, eighty years do not roll by without a class, or a cultural elite, changing its repertoire.
In a poem which has no autobiographical or representational intent, one responds to the rhythms and textures in a purely aesthetic way. Choice is foregrounded and becomes dominant, a resipiscence perhaps of the personality in a restful, infantile mode; the values of the poem tend to become those of interior design, textures detached from meaning receding away from the urgency of consciousness into the opulent and accommodating blankness of a decor. The evolution of conceptual (and non-representational) art was through a phase of shocking comfortless intransigence into smooth, uncontroversial, gentle, and eventually up-market decorative textures.
The argument of some of the nonrepresentational poets in the USA was that capitalism is obsessed by objects, and so that, by presenting poems which are free of objects, one is criticising object culture and so undermining capitalism. It seems unlikely that this is a threat to share values. The inconsequentiality of the poems is buoyed up by very large amounts of argument, a kind of shell inside which the poems exist, and which is indistinguishable from publicity material that urges you to buy them. It is not argument in the sense that it takes on and responds to the arguments of those who disagree with it. It is not theory in the sense that it is an attempt to provide explanatory models for facts, and to guide empirical investigations. The poems become objects, tradable within the status-seeking status-using status-generating game of applying for monetary awards, being resident artists on MLA courses, teaching creative writing courses, achieving publication, and so forth; their value is guaranteed by the amount of theory supporting their application. Theory is, in this world, mutual sponsorship and endorsement. Only if the value of being endorsed by any individual were equal to the value of being endorsed by John Ashbery, Harold Bloom, Rosalind Krauss, and Helen Vendler, would the "personality" really be out of this game. Money and power are not objects.
The Christian mediaevalist critic C.S. Lewis wrote (with E.M. Tillyard presenting the opposite view), a book called The Personal Heresy, where he attacks the idea that the artist's personality is of central interest in the work of art. The prehistory of the drive for impersonality is in religion, which has been developing a critique of self-esteem, and of the validity of the immediate data of consciousness, for two thousand years. The prehistory of the drive for big, introspective, autobiographical narratives lies in the sinner's confession and the saint's life, and so is also within religion.
The early years of the feminist movement were filled with accounts of life stories, narrated, really, to bring the old life to an end. Narrative as destruction. While these writings or utterances were oriented towards the past, they tended to reproduce the behavioural rules of the male-dominated social order, and this was the guarantee of their realism: the story was authentic so far as it recounted an inauthentic society. Notoriously, the excitement of the story depended on the extremity and blackness of the male crimes which it narrated and exposed; and without which there was no story. With time, attention was bound to turn towards the future liberated state, and the recent to now state of being half-liberated, i.e. conscious but within male-dominated capitalist society. Orientation towards the future demands the surrender of realism, as a literary principle, in favour of conjecture. The multiplicity of the possible futures points the literary work of art towards the status, and the flexibility and rule-basedness, of a game. By writing poetry based on consciously established rules, one is rehearsing for a new form of society in which, as a first step, everyone behaves differently. Simultaneously, one is drawing attention to the existence of buried socially given rules underlying and structuring the experience of art and social behaviour, as a way of uncovering the degree of convention and hence the true dimensions of freedom, and bringing about consciousness as the prelude to a new society.
The transition from a state where I always have to do what other people say to one where everyone always has to do what I say is non-dialectic; a society of millions of people making this transition would be unliberated and might very exactly resemble the one we already live in. The solution is to reduce the self to a background and to foreground the possibility of shifting to a new rule set, which continues to regulate relations between individuals, but creates a new pattern. Nonrepresentational poetry is not about a new rule set, as a science fiction novel might be, but about the characteristics of all rule-sets, the programming of the human faculty for making rule-sets.
Where the text has no wish to attach itself to reality, builds a world of its own within which events unfold, and adopts a playful, non-didactic tone as an encouragement to play inside the text, it may come out like a PG Wodehouse novel. There are unmistakable signs of this in Caroline Bergvall's book Eclat. The heroine apparently leads an Arcadian, unbound existence, as a drone. The phrases camp academicism, avantgarde neoclassicism, and dressing-up game drift up. The proposition is that leisure and freedom from care are, as in the drinking-party of the Symposium, the situation which predisposes one to philosophise. The novels of Aldous Huxley, also based on Plato's dialogues, might be a better comparison. The text evolves in a continous present, as recommended by Gertrude Stein, where there is no notion of character or of consequences; it does not, then "reproduce the values of society", but it does feel like a Wodehouse novel, which is also set in a fantasy world full of inconsequential, leisured people. It can be argued that character shows itself most in the unbound elements of behaviour; for example, more in informal speech than in formal, impersonal, heavily conditioned speech. Non-functional acts-the fluttering of a hand, a laugh, a hairstyle-are underdetermined and therefore contain the elements of freedom, the most relevant to a new society in which, at first, all acts would be uncertain, spontaneous, and hesitant. It is claimed, for example, that fantasy is non-alienated, a protest against alienation, and so the material for a new society, fleetingly glimpsed. The problem here is the underdetermined relationship of fantasy to the mind or to anything else; fantasy does not repay attention because it is produced ad libitum. The issue is whether dense patternedness, informational richness, are to be found in realism, where the artist can tap into the complexity of the universe outside herself, and where events are nuanced and modified by the pressure of dozens of independent processes which they bump into; or in fantasy, where the complexity is that of the brain, and the logic of pattern is unrestrained by the laws of the finite outside world.
There have been debates within the feminist camp about the poetry which is spoken by a big self, recounting autobiography with a pathos, usually, of frustration, painting sensuously rich, realist scenes as aids for emotional identification, presenting the expansion of the self (acquisition of experiences, fulfilment, elimination of limits, etc.), under the ideological aegis that getting in touch with your emotions means having bigger emotions and demanding more from the world, and not criticising yourself in any way. Poets, and editors, readers, or reviewers, who have invested in this form of poetry, are indignant about the kind in OofE, and even deny it the status of feminist. But it doesn't seem plausible that society is a very large array of self-realising selves, or that a life is a picture in which the Transcendental Self is reflected like the mind of God being reflected in the universe. Neither the socialist, nor the Christian, nor the academic strands of feminism have been able to get on with this version of events. As for self-realisation, you can only become what you are not. The choice between the two different styles of poetry is perhaps irrational, merely-aesthetic, and not revealed by verbal justifications.
The freedom from compulsion brought about by shifting the stress onto conscious decisions and away from recurrent surges coming out of the deep self is anti-Romantic. It does suggest that you are going to make some attempt to accommodate to other people, forming attachments to them as much as to your own incalculable moods. The equation that more powerful emotions mean more power may be simply wrong. The shifting of the thing-which-makes-decisions into a more external, partly socialised zone can be a way of reducing anxiety. After all, many people are afraid of repeating the patterns of their childhood and adolescence, or of repeating the emotional patterns of their parents' marriage; a reduction of affect and compulsiveness may bring a huge increase of security, and so of power. The verbalisation process generally is a way of moving emotional processes towards the outside, further away from the blind molten core. Higher affect might mean greater sexual dependence on someone else, or more dominating need for approval by authority, or more extreme guilt. The appeal of a holiday may be precisely that we are under-occupied, calmly scanning a situation which demands little of us. Hasn't there always been a genre of poetry which was conventional, cultivated, and non-autobiographical? and which tranquillized us by presenting emotions as conventional, controllable, leisure activities?
One of the phrases which has drifted out of poststructuralism into literary discourse is decentring. This is used in, among other places, Foucault's Arch‚ologie du savoir, where he is talking about turning the study of texts from history into archaeology. Since the difference between history and archaeology is precisely that the former offers writing, and therefore a set (of letters or hieroglyphs, words, grammar, messages and interpretation rules) which can be read, as if the speaker were addressing you, this is a paradox. How can you retrieve more by retrieving less? If you are presented with a history of science which is largely positive biography about the achievements of Great Men, history as a statue park written by their pupils or even themselves, the only way to advance is, quite clearly, to blank out the heroism and look at the peripheral information within the sources. When Foucault talks about studying ruptures, discontinuities of intellectual history, this is a coded reference to Thomas Kuhn's work on paradigm shifts (the phrase derives from Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions); the phrases about rupture, discontinuity, became buzz-words among avant garde poets. By carrying out a reversal of figure and ground in the act of reading, which incidentally all historians have to do, Foucault isolated the act of identification and pointed out how central it is to the literary process; and perhaps to the socialisation process, where we learn how to behave by passionately identifying with other people and striving to imitate them. To think about what identification is, you have to stop doing it. Decentring in poetry may be partly an imitation of fashions in intellectual history, without justification or artistic intent except to avoid the charge of being na‹ve.
The moment of a paradigm shift proposes two conceptual systems broken, with a bleeding edge, side by side; a perfect didactic moment. Individuals continue; the solution of continuity is in the collective rule-set, not in individuals. Necessarily, the sources of the new system, and the defects which allow the old system to be overset, are in the periphery of awareness, in the ingrained unexamined assumptions. The "archaeology" of texts fails to read them, fails to share their assumptions; treats them as objects and exposes their material nature. Any socialist has to treat the cultural production of the capitalist society he or she lives in as objects, and blank out the vocal and imperious and dominating identification-grammar which is their highly-finished centre; identification and illusion are, however provisionally, identified, as they were by Brecht and his collaborators in the 1920s. Seriality allows comparison. The serial view of the artwork, implied by the phrase "innovative", decentres attention, inscribing the artwork in a series, in which the lines of attention and focus are not given by the artwork, but by the series and its constructor or curator; it is the material technique which evolves, something not part of the message; the shift of attention to technique defocusses the ideological and emotional message. Perhaps all people have the same feelings; the improvement of the work of art is then won by attention to other elements of the ensemble, facets perhaps of its material nature. Fluency in the reversal of centre:periphery (or figure:ground, or personality:objects) relationships is demanded throughout OofE, where the code becomes the message and the speaking subject becomes an element in the array of technique.
The appeal of the sequence or project has to do with grant applications. You don't get a grant for work you've already done, but you have to propose a concrete programme to the panel, or they will have no basis for saying yes. The solution is a project, an open-ended set of traces which possesses an external description, more or less bankable. The project allows more work to be created more or less as you need it, or as editors and event organisers call for it, while overtly displaying your managerial control and denying your market status as an employee. The implied freedom from autobiographical compulsions demonstrates that you are an educated artist who has self-control. The ability to plan a year ahead suggests that you have mastery of time; something everyone can admire. This Apollonian balance also defines the artist's relationship to the seriality enshrined in the word innovation; decay and discontinuity are built into the artwork, but in a managed form. There is a certain relationship between the text of a publicity handout; the text of an arts grant application; and the set of external rules by which a "conceptual" "project" text is composed. The project is didactic; at its inception, it offers to gather information about a formal possibility; the artist teaches themselves how to write following a rule set, and at the end the audience learns what the combinatory possibilities of that virtual world are. This didactic potential makes the vital link between writing and teaching creative writing, a necessary source of income. Words like exploration, experiment, investigation, possibilities, mapping, point to an envy of science or scholarship; they replace the dirty-words creation and expression.
The sequence might resemble an exercise for a muscle set, where repetition and lack of function (except the autotelic one of the exercise itself) are useful qualities. But this is a notoriously didactic situation.
Newness is not an aesthetic category; what was new in 1996 will not have lost its appeal by the time this book is published. What was new in 1396 still retains an appeal. Renouncing autobiography has been called distancing yourself from your own impulses. The link with an excess of ethical drive, of selfdenial, as we say, was suggested above. Perhaps the most successful writer is the one who is most at home with themselves; the different impulses (of fantasy, conjecture, memory, denial, identification, dissimilation, imitation, appropriation, ornamentation) not cancelling each other out, but co-existing to permit an equable flow of variation within the work of art. Containing opposites, an internal movement, captures a virtual time within the work of art, which repeats and is independent of external time; the artist's rhythm is not mere seriality. Conflict can provide the complexity within the work of art, the dialectic, but also destroy it, leaving something polarised and homogeneous as its exhausted product. The poems here which have most life and movement are perhaps those least directly specified by theory.
The drive of poets or consumers searching for non-personal poetry is almost frightening, and only to be compared with the rage and frustration of a poet who, while realising that there is someone across the room who can give them engagements and so needs to be cultivated, finds that the person they are talking to refuses to stop and so blocks their rightful progress. For them this is aesthetic sophistication, for others it seems like upward mobility. Poets with other aesthetics simply go ignored and unread; a kind of tunnel vision about what is "not important". Being certain about what is going to become the latest segment of the progressing history of Western art brings a wonderful sense of security and conformity; suddenly you know what your examiner is looking for, and you can achieve status just by applying the rules. It's like deciding that mentioning Derrida all the time proves you are intelligent, or that wearing T-shirts by BLIP guarantees you are stylish and cool. Shunning any mention of your background and personal life could also come from entry into a new social setting where everyone else has high expectations, they seem to be more sophisticated than you, and you are ashamed of where you come from. You want to feel you belong; you feel other people are very observant. Well, I just did mention Derrida so obviously I am intelligent and up to date.
When I first saw Westerns, I don't recall anyone handing out programme notes to say that "the rules of the Western are these, and what you have to watch is this". No, we worked out the rules by watching the films. If I had this ability when I was seven years old, I presumably still have it, and so can work out the inner rules of speculative poetry. Bulk of material to work on is necessary, though, to resolve ambiguities and confirm hypotheses, and this is another reason for "project" writing, putting the new grammar through its paces.
When Kathleen Fraser writes
the wing is not static but frayed, fettered, furling and stoney
its feathers cut as if from tissue or stiffened cheesecloth
condensed in preparation for years of stagework
attached to its historic tendons; more elaborate
than the expensive ribcage, grieving, stressed, yet
marked midway along the breastbone with grains of light
(...)
Its
likeness consists of strength, atonality, pigment, emptiness and
shafts partly hollow I put my mouth just at the opening where
a steel edge gives way to an angle from which light emerges
along its soft narrow barbs If the wing had a voice it would
open through a shaft I am not of that feather
(from: 'Wing')
the object shifts continually from being real to being imaginary; we watch it evolve and simultaneously have the feeling that the space is one where it is safe and approved to create our own fantasy objects; and realise that many of the "real" objects which populate our life-world are imaginary objects which have deteriorated and rusted into place, lumps of alienated subjectivity.