But what really got me going was my mother's giving me The Oxford Book of English Verse, for my fourteenth birthday I think it was. I mean, my first take was that poetry was English, and I lived on an island. I mean, both ways, as that made where I lived an island away from where the poetry was, and also that poetry itself was an isolation, one I was ready to get lost in. So, that it was English was perfect. English Poetry, Oxford. That was where I wanted to be. A little Jude-like. Not in the book exactly, but there with it anyway. But someday why not, to be in the book, that would be nice. But also I mean I knew immediately I was, or wanted to be, always in that company. Or I always had been and never had realized it. I can believe that way in being born. A born poet. Isn't that just what any of us wants? To be a born poet.
(Stephen Rodefer, interviewed in Talking Poetry, 1987).
How responsible of Iain Sinclair to make a great satirical clamour in the introduction to his anthology Conductors of Chaos. With good sense and taste, he has contrived to make the editorial task seem like picking a bunch of weeds off an M4 lay-by at rush-hour. 'No, child, you do not want to be born into that pissed-on thistledown company'. Besides, there is such an aura of the dead about collections, it is difficult to remain of robust cheer when asked to list the contemporary poets one likes to read. I am glad, on those occasions, that my mind goes blank. The Angel Exhaust previous new poets, four years ago, were asked which contemporary poets interested them most. Many provided lists of names, as would the publication of a self-elected genealogy secure the natural right of a superior existence of one's poems. So much attentiveness to that heavy-breathing of spectres with-poem: Who's Who. Tim Fletcher, for example, as if personal inclination requires educated guesses, wrote: "Contemporary poets of most interest to me are probably Bernstein, Coolidge, Mottram, Fisher and Prynne". How artfully ponderous. Not exactly your casual picked florilegium, is it? These poets represent in that order, the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the New York School, the London group, the University of Universities, and the Cambridge School. We are charmed with the stiff arrangement in cellophane. Simon Smith, as a new poet four years ago, refers to a corps of poets: "J.H. Prynne, Geoffrey Hill, Peter Riley, Roy Fisher, John Seed, Kelvin Corcoran, J.D. Taylor. My main criterion for nominating these is the fact their whole corpus interests and draws me; most of my contemporaries have yet to produce a large enough body of work." 'Their whole corpus', which denotes, usually, an individual life-work's melancholic completion, here conjures up the love-labouring male Gestalt. The emphasis is on labour, indeed. When John Wilkinson, on the one hand, delineates as subject of Denise Riley's Stair-Spirit "the politics of narcissism", it may be inferred that her poetry is situated permanently at the pool-side and will come to nothing. On the other, discoursing forth in his review of J.H. Prynne's Not-You on Robert Creeley's elaboration to the theory of "primacy of breath" of Charles Olson who is "Prynne's early mentor", it is implied that his poetry has an admired provenance and will be of certain influence. But what modest means the commentator, himself a poet, shows in his reading of the seemingly 'personal' work, and how lavishly he demonstrates effort on the 'taxing' abstract one. The underlying credo comprises nicely between individual application and genetic disposition via the XY chromosome: through 'serious' labour, this is how new poets are evidently born.
How large must a corpus be before it measures the cabinet in which the curator will place it?
The Stanford University Libraries, which holds Stephen Rodefer's papers and assorted audio-visual material in its Department of Special Collections, lists as current size of the collection, 15 feet. This public property has been thoroughly catalogued. Thus, in box 1, folder 22, may be found outgoing personal correspondence to Steve Benson, in box 2, folder 6, to Andrew Crozier, in box 3 folder 5, to 'Rod Mingham' (odd, how the cataloguer's mistransliteration evokes the precious object), whilst box 25 contains "PhD materials" on Robert Creeley, amongst boxes 24 - 31 of "Rodefer manuscripts". Box 32, folder 17, contains address books from 1959 -1992. The audio-visual material comprises of, for example, in box 34, a home movie "shot by Rodefer's father", 'Baseball' (c. 1940) and in box 41 "'Steve's Villon' nd; side B, 'My Stuff', unidentified jazz recording (cass.)".
[insert quotation trans. Villon: couple of lines from poem on 'my will']
The ephemera, separated from the person, have become analytical material with which to draw up the anatomy of wider cultural processes. The discursive contents of the collection would, after typographical corrections, enable nuanced scholarship of the poetry 'schools' metonymically identified by Fletcher. The collection is a longer term investment toward sustaining the natural resources of the biographical industry. It is a collection of future lost effects that reveals, by noted absence of no-one identifiable to whom it belonged, in all its humanist abstraction, 'the person'.
You appeared, so refreshingly, out of the blue.
Stephen Rodefer moved from the United States to England in 1992 to take up his appointment as the annual Judith E. Wilson Fellow for Poetry at the University of Cambridge. He then divided his time between Cambridge, New York, and Paris, and it is Paris where he is now lives and works. His most recent pamphlets are published by Cambridge-based small presses, Erasers (1994) by Equipage, and Answer to Dr Agathon (1996) by Poetical Histories, the latter poem included in its entirety in Iain Sinclair's anthology Conductors of Chaos (1996). There are also two related poems, 'Arabesque at the Bar', published in Parataxis 8/9, 1996, and Mon Canard, in a photocopied limited edition, a section of which was also published in Angel Exhaust 14, 1996. This group of work, qua subject, refers to Rodefer's itenerancy at Cambridge, and these I would like to write on.
I met him before I read him. Somehow, I went to his classes, unofficially, but invited. Stephen did not have the academic gingerliness with poetry. With words, we had imaginative freedom, like that friend of Arthur Symons who wrote: "'Porphyry' seemed to me a marvellous substance as a boy of twelve when I read of it in Keats, and I imagine that Keats himself would have been surprised, had he lived long enough to walk to St. Thomas's Hospital over the new London Bridge, when told that he was treading a granite that was porphyritic." Yes, language is a marvellous substance. And there were new syntactical constructions too, Stephen showed us in Gertrude Stein's poetry, and I saw, from his own Four Lectures how the repeated Subject-phrase Verb Object-phrase construction (without winding subclauses), had the effect of base-level steadiness, across which meanings tore about without a collision damage warranty. Later, I would come to see how that syntactical structure reflects the way urban space on Manhattan is constructed (and why Henry James was so fond of Central Park) on the street grid-system. Fiona Templeton taught me about that.
Stephen's classes were difficult to me. I had managed to read a little poetry, before. Tristia. Ovid's little nest-egg.
'A resurgence' as they say. The old
Laurels wagging with the new: Selah!
Thus laudable the trodden bone thus
Unanswerable the knack of tongues.
The 'pincers' applied, the torque, the gags deliberate. Geoffrey Hill's. It made me feel sick. A person whose concept of freedom came from reading, surreptitiously, the banned ANC Freedom Charter, will know of the repercussive effects of vers libre. A person who, at the age of fourteen, is requested to remove a little satirical verse on school from her English composition exercise book, 'for her own good', will wonder why the authorities would wish to harm a defenceless adolescent. She did not need to be 'staggeringly gifted' to figure out that citing the Soweto riots protest anthem connected her poem to a powerful collective spirit, which she had been told to fear and despise. She, as a poet, would be treated like them. You had a stack of poetry magazines in your clothes cupboard. We must not refer to them in public. No incendiary device, no plan of action, no shaky film, though a poem may seem as any of these, would have impressed on me more, than did the ban on certain literary Ïuvres, the reality of police violence under the state of emergency.
I was silent. So he, Stephen, gave me his copy of Frank O'Hara's Selected Poems. After reading a little of it, in my room, I closed it. It was brilliant, long lines of spirited transfusion, for example on, and this was shocking, shopping for books as a present. Official segregation, boycotted zones, free zones under surveillance had once determined my public space. Shopping was a nightmare from which I was still trying to wake up. In the shock, I forgot my forgetting. I wandered about purposefully not reading O'Hara until I knew I would be able to appreciate the lines "in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine/for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do/think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or/ Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les N_gres/ of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine/ after practically going to sleep with quandariness."
Stephen, with that sense of timing only excellent improvisers have, gave me good books, looks and advice, repeatedly. A poet in a batik wrap-around and painted finger-nails, dressed for the Hockney pool-side. You have to be very lucky, to be a foundling he comes across.
II
'They (and especially Oxford) were the breeding places of peculiar class of parasites, who called themselves cultivated people; they were indeed cynical enough, as the so-called educated classes of the day generally were; but they affected an exaggeration of cynicism in order that they might be thought knowing and worldly-wise. The rich middle classes (they had no relation with the working classes) treated them with the kind of contemptuous toleration with which a mediaeval baron treated his jester; though it must be said that they were by no means so pleasant as the old jesters were, being, in fact, the bores of society. They were laughed at, despised - and paid. Which last was what they aimed at.'
Dear me! thought I, how apt history is to reverse contemporary judgements. Surely only the worst of them were as bad as that. But I must admit they were mostly prigs, and that they were commercial. I said aloud, though more to myself than to Hammond, 'Well, how could they be better than the age that made them?'
'True,' he said, 'but their pretensions were higher.'
(William Morris, News from Nowhere, 1890)
Replete with haphazardly placed symbolism, the pastoral embroidery on the cover Erasers, taken from the first edition of Edith Sitwell's historical monograph, Fanfare for Elizabeth (1946) , though hardly like William Morris' stylised floral designs, ought to warn us-and some interpretative nous is required-into enquiring how Cambridge, the scene of the poem's historicised romance of 'you and I', is represented by an American raconteur whose cap-bells knell as he weaves the "vision and memory of an independent village".
Such chicanery
or thread
of pastoral
will spread
with callousness-
to recoup
the feminine
ninetees while
worlds burn like pages
signed or singed
by two
o'clock oil.
My reading will be plain and plainer for a little while. I have selected, at random, the quotation above from the poem as a stylistic example. The form, a three-step line deployed throughout this long poem, by its cogent emphasis on left-to-right reading, supports discursive momentum, yet at the same time, through its textually wide spacing, full advantage of visually apprehended line-specific phrasing, emphases on enjambments, images, lettrist devices, and coinciding line and sentence end-positions, is also taken. The apparent coherency of the dramatic monologue is thus interpunctuated with conspicuous phrases or similes ("worlds burn like pages"), turns, through enjambment, into its wry witticisms (singed/by two/o'clock oil) and, by the apparent force of its stately persuasion, passes over the oblique as a matter of fact.
As we have seen, poetic forms, in Stephen Rodefer's work, do not appear ex nihilio, indeed, in this text already fraught with allusion, it carries, in itself, intertextual allusiveness. The three-step line was created by William Carlos Williams as "the American Idiom". I should, as a scholar, call it that, or "the variable foot", rather than calling it a three-step line, or, in idiolect, Waltz Americaine. Yet to me, the objective of William's experimentation with measure (toward a formalised vers libre) is less significant that the result whose dynamic principles I have described above. William's own sustained practice of the form, the wonderful Journey to Love (1955), dedicated to his wife, operates on such dynamic principles too, though Rodefer uses the enjambment, and its resulting syntactical splicing, with more determination. Besides, it is a little misleading to call it "the American Idiom", as the form, to my knowledge, has not taken up generally by contemporary American poets, and by O'Hara once or twice.
Even so, in view of Erasers' enscenation of love in a historically, academically, architecturally, poetically, pastorally, and socially overdetermined scene, Cambridge, the irony of the formal name of the form of the poem, "the American Idiom", may come into play. Recalling its etymological derivation from the Greek 'idiomatos' , 'private property', or 'idiooma', 'to make one's own', we quickly arrive at the conclusion: The American Idiom on Cambridge. That's the literary take on it, neatly reversing the early American colonists' writing enterprise: the faux pastoral was, apparently, a genre with which financial backing for the new settlement was attracted.
Logically, does the quotation from the poem imply that the pastoral, as poetic genre, will become increasingly popular amongst poets on the make in order to purchase, through loopholes, into the decade's dominant ideology of 'the feminine', whilst other imaginative domains are either underwritten or destroyed, not, as is momentarily recalled, by two parties either entering into or dissolving contractual rights and obligations, but, via idiomatic allusion, by the solitary, writing over-worker? Such logic should be bracketed as operating exclusively at that point in the domain of the writing, and then, as the title suggests, erased, whilst certain binary oppositions, for example, aesthetic law/social law, single/couple, spaces/times, may permute the poem entire.
Erasers is overtly an elegiac love poem, addressed by an 'I' to an absent 'you'. That it concerns a finished relationship is simply denoted by verb tenses: the past tense is used when referring to 'you' in direct relation to 'I', but the 'you' is also referred to in the active future tense. The poem's emotional register ranges from stoic grandeur: "We know in time's delta/these things/become unimportant", to self-ironising poignancy: "I am so/ happy in a bar/ full of people/especially those/ who could benefit most/ from the history to be offered". Whilst such a tonal range provides the long poem with psychological integrity, again, we should eschew an interpretation solely based on discursive, logical patterns. "Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you", writes O'Hara. What we should look into is the manner in which poetic devices negate the parting established by the subjective voice: the dialectic between form and content.
Love is a theoretical mystery. Yet we proceed from that phenomenon which may be familiar to lovers: an over-inflation of the each other's powers, erotic, social, mental, which aura has come to light due to, and is increased exponentially by, becoming a couple. In Eraser's modern parlance:
As I write this
in the middle
(thank god for breaks)
of the King's bar
the Royal TV Society
is dressed
for evening.
Could they produce
more than US? Is Antony
Day Lewis here
and Juliet
Binoche, to fail the only
screen test of
their lives? You were
always the
neufest pont
and I am
A Pauline celantro
spanned for walkers.
Did I
make you
laugh?
You know.
I do.
The 'erotic electricity', or aura, between film-actors, intensified and circumscribed by the protocols of film production itself, is appropriated, yet also regarded as slight in comparison to the aura of "US". This kind of "US", produced in writing, as it may be so in social practice, by inside jokes, 'mutual' flattery, promising silences, in short, a display of intimacy, is vulnerable, as the comparison with film-actors fails the aura test. Immediately the reader scrutinises close-up. Some fancy bridge-work in the laugh, she may be inclined to observe. Yet the suggestion that the distant example, famous lovers, is important to the performativity of lovers, is interesting. Leading on from the conflation 'Antony Day Lewis' (and recalling that Rodefer wrote a play called A&C;: An Idyl in One Act (1982) for the San Francisco-based Poets Theater), we see that the same motif appears in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra itself:
Where souls do couch on flowers, we'll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze:
Dido, and her Aeneas, shall want troops
And all the haunt be ours.
There is irony in Antony's reference to Dido and Anaeas, and yet, through quoting the literary example, he is seen to presume that the inter-linked fate of the lovers will surpass even a glorious precedence. Thus, we recognise that Antony's hubris is conditional on being a lover, rather than his profession, but also that being a couple is conditional upon establishing it through the gaze of others.
Although the subjective voice in Erasers articulates loss, the desire for sanctified coupledom is, in a literary sense, fulfilled. Lovers ("you and I") become the royal 'We', through exemplary precedent and social ratification. I think it must have been J.G. Frazer who pointed out that amongst some English villages it was the custom, during wedding celebrations, to call the bride and groom 'Queen' and 'King'. They are denoted as the representatives of the personal and material domains which are to be joined, and also, as a legitimised couple, are deemed to possess an exalted status. Lovers turn into the (re)productive unit. In Erasers, great play is made with royal nouns and pronouns. The voice of a courting Yankee makes flattering sport with, for example, the names of Colleges and the rituals of its academic communities, rituals that have, over the centuries, gained in copy-catted mystique what has been lost in function. 'You' is the symbolic Queen of the reference set [[[King's] Cambridge] England]. King's College, where the 'scene' is made, is given a glamorous feudal cast: the references to names of persons, some names in disguise as common nouns, become, in the poem's scheme, the Queen's imagined spurned suitors, 'advisors', nice-looking peasants, background and so forth. The nom-de-clef particulars of this reference set could be ephemeral: those that know, know better than to make it matter, and to those that don't, it never mattered anyway. As Tara Palmer-Tomkinson says: 'If they can't have an Alexander McQueen, let them have a Stephen Rodefer'. The 'I', not quite so statically regal as the 'you', has, inter alia, the allusive literary domains [[A&C;] [The American Idiom] [Elizabethan poets] etc]. The joint spheres of 'you' and 'I' generate a witty, leavened intertextuality, the bridal masque for a mourning subjective voice. The ghostly template, Journey to Love, too, projects that poem's subject, long-term marriage, as Eraser's haunt. Needless to say, ideologically, the poem reinforces and celebrates the traditional primacy of the legitimised heterosexual couple, to the point where its references to homoeroticism are of the satirically banal kind.
The recurring device of the interlinked initials, as well as the liberal use of personal names, indicate that there is a relationship between the personae in the poem and living persons, one of them Stephen Rodefer. As the subjective voice, which sets the scene, has taken hostage a living person, the 'you', we are left pretty much with the Romantic 'you' (female muse) and 'I' (male poet) construction. The point that the muse/poet coupling, in itself, may be a gendered working method is almost obfuscated:
Forgive me
I know
dogslife
when I see it
and the cur
or bitch
must have work
or her and his
trade will perish-
yours too
empowered now
to erase
and invent
memory and history
with the best of them.
The 'forgive me' seems to anticipate the work's unacceptability to feminist ethics. I cannot describe a Romantic working practice, so I shall raid some insights from Iain Sinclair: "He risks everything. He aims at possession. Knowing, he feels able to subvert the tyranny of facts, and damn himself in the process. He honours by exploitation. 'I will have fame'. He wants it, the whole curse: the poem that is true only to itself. Nothing else will do. Fuck the consequences. The poet has a dual responsibility: to give himself over entirely to his work, and to stage-manage a career." In other words, returning to the point made earlier on Shakespeare's Antony, the profession, being a poet, may, after all, have elicited more hubris than being a lover. And here, interestingly, the sop to she whom the poet has honoured, in the 'feminine ninetees', is that, unlike the silent muses, she too is now 'empowered', presumably through the early feminist campaigns for women's access to institutions of learning, to have a competitive ('with the best of them') career as poet, historian, writer. Pygmalion insinuations operate too. Rather than considering the teflon-merit of the poet's arguments, one could assess, if a certain modus operandi is the underlying impetus for the work, whether that work will then become as critically outmoded, as fey, as that of 'the smiths', 'the weaver' and 'the shepherd'. The discourse of erasing, of 'burning pages', of 'sere', is psychologically motivated by an all-consuming passion that fears nothing as much as the extinction of itself. Yet it refers also to the practical travails of writing the subjectivity of desire, which, as desire itself does not, must be made to last as an aesthetic work. The writing dares fall headlong into such bespoke commensurations as: 'With you the dimensions/of my fingers/were equal/to the waist/of womanhood'. Over-ruling that hand, one enquires, 'You have evoked Yeats as a precedent, a poet who is supposedly mindful of his muse Maud Gonne. Your writing construes its own subjectivity in reference to the exemplary lives of poets, not so much reminiscent of a trade, as a cult of the personality. The trade will perish, without work. So you have invoked Eros to do the work for you. Are you with the best of them?'
'The hour-glass figure burns in my hand. As passionate intensity cannot be measured, I am with the worst.'
Although history is apt to reverse contemporary judgements, the integrity of Erasers is what it simply will not relinquish. I am reminded of the 'Lyric Suite', or rather, the film version. Alban Berg, who had become enamoured of Hanna Fuchs-Robettin, asked one of his pupils to act as messenger-boy, for the composer was married and residing in early twentieth-century Vienna, where public telephones had not yet been installed. The pupil, who proclaimed his willingness to do so, was later to observe in a letter to Berg's wife, Helene, by then widowed, in a tone polite society tolerates only in German philosophers:
da_ er [Berg] H.F. weit mehr liebte, um die 'Lyrische Suite' schreiben zu k_nnen, als da_ er die 'Lyrische Suite' um die Liebe willen schrieb.
If it was meant to comfort, it was also cold. Yet Adorno was technically correct in pointing to this ambivalence, as the 'Lyric Suite' has an unusual structural feature. The composition gives emphasis to the notes A B (B-flat) and H (B-natural) FŸŸthe lovers' initialsŸŸin spite of the strictures of the twelve-tone system developed by Berg's early mentor Sch_nberg. The notes A B and H F mark common property- reminiscent of domestic silverware decorated with double initials, a customary betrothal gift-whilst the oblique musical quotation, without the accompanying words "Du bist mein eigen, mein eigen" from Zemlinsky's (!) 'Lyric Symphony' indicate a future already marked out not to be possessed. And, as in Tristan and Isolde-indeed, the opening bars of that opera are quoted in the sixth movement-the King's law is transgressed: a Romantic written secret code contra the egalitarian propriety of the Sch_nbergian twelve-tone structure.
Classic. That leads me on to the next pamphlet, Answer to Doctor Agathon (Poetical Histories No 34, 1996), reprinted in Conductors of Chaos. It may be described, in the first instance, as a satirical polemic. The template for Answer to Doctor Agathon is Frank O'Hara's poem 'Answer to Voznesenksy & Evtushenko'. Compare, for example, O'Hara's opening gambit "We are tired of your tiresome imitations of Mayakovsky/we are tired/of your dreary tourist ideas of our Negro selves" with: "We are tired of your socage rates/and your tiresome imitation of intellectual property./We are tired of your dreary sough of Vergilian fortitude." [Andrew would you insert a few lines re. who these Russians poets are].
As with 'Answer to Voznesenky & Evtushenko', the polemical drift of Answer to Dr Agathon is difficult to follow without knowledge of the details of the events. This is the rhetorical strategy. Written from the assumption that the basis of the contretemps is public knowledge, that there had been an initial offensive which elicited the oratorical combat, it proceeds magnificently, if obscurely, to sweep the floor with a person whose "bossie blowsiness is ceremoniously pumped", who lords it over "the gang of fortunate seekers of knowledge/sex memory and a rumour". Just on style alone it is worth reading:
And we are sure you will be elected ASAP
by your secret constituency and so
a toast! to Sylvie!
I should have quoted the entire stanza up to the abbreviation (itself sneering knowingly at the haste with which trumped-up elections are pushed through) to substantiate the thought that never has the exclamation mark denoted such ironic clenched teeth. The poem's control of tone through precise textual styling is, to me, a most interesting subject to study, but then, the classical allusions off-set by the academic scenario, Cambridge, are all too reminiscent of Yeats's poem 'The Scholars'. As a reminder, its last four lines are:
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?
Yeats is ironically wry in conjuring up the risky bon-viveur amidst intellectual conformism. Yes, such lust for life is frowned upon. This is precisely why Catullus is 'theirs', in the sense that their collective scholarly research and translation, have made everyone, as it were, aware of the spirit of Catullus. Not that everyone could read Catullus, then. Virginia Woolf often addressed the issue of women's exclusion from studying the Classics as part of a formal education.
Answer to Dr Agathon is not anti-intellectual satire, far from it. Its reference sphere reinforces, through retrospective reward, the value of cultural capital. For example, the reader is not expected to establish "the root of fascination and fascism", the reader is expected to 'get' the reference to 19th-century German philology as disciplined knowledge. One either 'gets' it or not. Clearly, the more one gets straight-off, the more the poem flatters one's mastery over its reference sphere. Yet the person who is most likely to get most of it, is its addressee, the reviled Dr Agathon. The poem queries who controls the (re)production of knowledge and to whose common purpose. The extended metaphor of the "cell", in Answer Dr Agathon, refers to the bee-hive, an industrious academic community, with Dr Agathon as its 'Queen Bee', who has the "young guardians of the secret", all in a "cell-like trance". The allusions to fascism make it, rhetorically speaking, plain that it should be regarded as a reactionary, indoctrinating, and even persecutory organisation. Of course, via the reference to Dreyfus, there is "another cell" too, a prison, or a clandestine group that elides the control of the academic grasp. The insinuations, the buzz of the bee-dance, tells us that illicit knowledge, the truth, is promisingly stored in the poem's "transparent cells of the local". As an example, so we all know what we are talking about, I will release the obscured social history in:
and political economies declare it inappropriate
for a ballerina to wear a tutu in the Common Room
of seigniority even in a painting-
de-accessioned to the cellar
with the wine, caved into an appreciable maturity when
the blooms swaddle in a nest of keys
The obfuscation of economic interests, within the academic world, is one of its necessary hypocrisies. The 'painting' was removed from the Senior Common Room at King's College, after one of the fellows complained of it. The consensus was that the representation of 'a ballerina' and the male figure depicted as watching her, objectified women. The slightest art historical knowledge will immediately see through that gesture of 'feminist sympathy'. The poster sketch, by Vanessa Bell, is known as the 'Keynes Keynes' for it is a portrait of the ballerina Lydia Lopokova and her husband, J. Maynard Keynes. The dance historian Richard Buckle describes the picture as "representing Lydia in a white tutu curtseying before a curtain, from behind which her husband, in evening dress, peers forth apprehensively". His 1955 interpretation is that "the great man" is portrayed "as a sort of clownish stage-door Johnnie". Vanessa Bell's portrait thus comments far more satirically on the 'male gaze', through its inclusion of a gazing male figure, than its detractors could appreciate or allow for. As it is not a valuable work, not say, a Degas, its provenance or its display is not much cared for. It is "de-accessioned to the cellar", a little poetic licence so the reference "with the wine" can come into play. Chateau Mouton Rothschild is a claret famous for its artists' labels. The 1993 label, by Balthus, had to be substituted for another for the American market, because the US custom & excise authorities objected to it on moral grounds. It is a representation of a naked young child, a girl, with the compositional emphasis on her nakedness. Clearly, a good investment for its rarity value, but, as Rodefer ironically points out, the label will not reach "an appreciable maturity". "Hubris _ber alles", Barton Biggs, Morgan Stanley's chief strategist, comments, "bullish positions are taken in the academic sector of the market. Now don't get too intoxicated on what you buy."
The miasma of trivia, which the sensible will waft away lightly, had to be released to see the point. Nothing is more reductive to thought than the thought of sex. Answer to Dr Agathon's ideological model of 'academic bee-hive' reflects that of undemocratic societies where officially censored knowledge is circulated through the rumour, and where an investigative response to "the rumour" is vital, also, though to a different purpose, to the oppressor itself. In the socio-political sense, the oppressed are an abstract class of people, never an individual person. In the poem, a white heterosexual male identity is established as representative of the 'oppressed'. To my knowledge, this class of person is not oppressed and certainly not in Cambridge. Thus, in Answer to Dr Agathon, another Queen Bee is at work too, the individual who recruits the innocent by persuading them that freedom is a right which others exclusively (so that one can be truly free) are responsible for maintaining. The honey-tongued one, through emotive references to 'fascism', to which, in these spheres, civilised people are conditioned to respond with spontaneous opposition, has indicated that others have not worked enough on behalf of his psycho-sexual liberty. Only the Queen Bee, therefore, can be free. And the secret in all this to-do? The trade secret is that the buzz, in democracy, is something to trade on. As a satirist, Iain Sinclair does it openly, and whilst critiquing contemporary society through the pointed detail, there is always a clear sense, because of his very openness, that the society operates on democratic principles. Let him release what he sees fit.
Finally, speaking of trance-like accomplices, Stephen Rodefer's latest pamphlet, Mon Canard (New Years' Day, 1995), was first published by the author himself. Some of these poems were also published in the previous issue of Angel Exhaust. Mon Canard's template is a conceptual artwork by the French artist, Annette Messenger. People 'invent' names for their nearest and dearest, such as, in French, 'mon canard'. Her artwork featured a list of sociologically collected terms of endearments, some in common use, some idiosyncratic. Read with the cultural practice which Messenger imaginatively illuminated, in mind, Mon Canard's sixty-two stanzas, of fourteen lines each, is a list of terms of endearment, that shows off, on a Tannh_userian scale, the pathos of amorous silliness. A sample:
my wet groom, ma will you, will of my willow, my mer
ry, my obscene tent, my veil, my scrim, my arabes
que of Nicolas Poussin, my Jerusalem, my sachem, my
cheap necklace priceless and ignorant, my sanscrit,
my camel driver, my brokering straw, my giant major
ette, light of my loins, liger of my lamp .....
Believe you me, initially it does seem as if it goes on as long as your average Wagner opera. Where 'ordinary' people, manage one, and if they are particularly inventive, maybe two, pet names, with the mastersinger all count is lost. Song to Venus, then. The object of desire is repeatedly defined in relation to the subjective ego through the use of the possessive pronoun 'my', yet increasingly escapes all sense of the definable. The underlying concept is not so difficult to grasp: the woman means everything to the poet. Or, the desired one is constructed through a series of different signifiers, which her being, romantically, eludes, whilst the subjective voice, articulating the record of her manifold dear properties in relation to him, indexes his own being possessed. As one reads on, that enraptured patience of the erotically obsessed starts unhinging, for the poignancy is, that the more the possessive pronoun is repeated, the less it seems related to the signified. These poems are entirely comprised of clauses, many only adjective-noun phrases, and whilst some words, clauses, even lines are striking ('my man, my word, my warden, my world, my weird com/mission'), Mon Canard is one verb short of a sentence. The copula, perhaps. The links can be sound or semantically associative, in the quotation above, the references are Orientalesque. The fourteen line grouping may be the echolalia of love sonnets, but then the closure, "by all the music a/bove accomplishment, accomplice, accomplice, accom/plice, accomplice, my accomplice ...", is the fade-out of the studio-recorded tune. The breakdown of all persuasive rhetoric, so evident in Erasers and Answer to Dr Agathon, and indeed, of the sentence itself, bears eloquent witness to that other than itself.
III
Theories, studies, and narratives mutate into nomadic adventures and post-disciplinary explorations; unsolicited and often unwelcome experiments which proceed without ideological conceptions and evade all moral imperatives. The study of self-replicating processes and self-organizing systems is also, necessarily, their engineering.
(Sadie Plant, "Connectionism and the Posthumanities", 1996)
"This record is a record here". (Erasers). "You have no idea [.....] how it will be recorded beyond." (Answer to Dr Agathon). Recording technology, indeed, has undergone its second revolution in a century. In Answer to Dr Agathon we see virtual power manifested in the deployment of rhetoric. We amost laugh, no longer in the shadow of mass broadcast oration, at the sound. We have started to live in the digital age where the written word itself has an active differentiating function. We fly around in our search engines, switched on by the very code that is to determine our destination in humanly unexplorable cyberspace, and liken our discursive adventures, romantically, to that of the nomads we are patently not.
But we only love the sun, the violent universe
and the return to redness that is the manifesto of feeling.
In "Personism: A Manifesto", Frank O'Hara recounts that it occurred to him whilst writing a poem for someone he had met at lunch, "that he could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born". On September 3, 1959, it was "too new, too vital a movement to promise anything". It still is. Personism, where cultural exchange is effected through the poem, itself intended as a present "between two persons", resists the abstract in practice. The poetry of J.H. Prynne provides, inter alia, an abstract matrix for connecting disciplines of knowledge. John Wilkinson, who is, after all, one of the best commentators around, would argue that there is a profoundly moral authority at work in Not-You, and perhaps a poem which disciplines one to acquire a shared formal language to define a condition, is thus. Authority is in the code. Dictionary neurosis is epistomological doubt. Such a project must essentially, however, be disinterested in who controls the (re)production of knowledge.The poetry of Stephen Rodefer is no less serious in the exemplary manner in which it builds up, democratically, a cultural reference sphere for present exchange toward an abstract future. With these poems, where authority is style, the aesthetic, with its concomitant difficulties of desire, difference, and identity, the reader is thrown in the deep end also. These poems demand intellectual labour with the awareness, always, of the socio-historical conditions that allow or restrict exchange. Qua ethics, it asks responsibility for the moment and, as such, it is humanist. When its historical particularities are erased through time, the personist poem will achieve true abstraction. Perhaps the poems of Villon, which Stephen Rodefer translated in 1976, are an example.'Tis sweating labour, to bear such idleness so near the heart'. Stephen Rodefer's worldly-wise humane poetry is set to wait up, a long, long time.