My attention was caught by two recent comments in conversation: "She'll never have an orgasm" and "She's neurasthenic on the same scale as Vivienne Eliot" said on the same evening. Round the same time, I received a letter remarking, about another woman poet, "I have heard her former director of studies say things about her which make my hair stand on end. This in the name of loyalty to Y." (Y wishes to believe that N, made very unhappy by his loutish and hysterically cynical behaviour, was neurotic and so the failure is not his; this doxa is then adopted by his academic associates out of male solidarity.) Shortly before, in another context, the comment X has been behaving very strangely" (translation: she was treated very badly about a proposed reading and dared to react). I've never before realised how vacuous the ordinary exchanges of judgments about a woman's character are, what a low quality of information is being traded. She infuriates all the men around and gives rise to a whole library of fantasy. How is she also going to write personal poetry in the middle of all this?
If the intuitive reading of character is largely a mendacious process, this raises serious doubts, not only about my practice as a reviewer, but about the whole process of reading texts which aren't like papers on engineering. Reading poetry is for me partly, even largely, reading of character, and the poetry I write is descriptive of character and asks the reader to piece details together in an overall schema using their ideas about behaviour. But how can these be epistemologically adequate processes when they're carried out by the same faculty, the same block of circuitry, that decides that Miss X is neurotic because she doesn't seem to be attracted by me?
This is an editorial about standing around in bars. It seems that there is always a majority of men in these bars; which doesn't prevent them from being the markets where poetic reputations are formed. I am filled with revulsion; we go there to exchange information, but that commodity is ordered by decisions based on a bad subjectivity. The attacks of feminists on matters of fact only uncover in poetics a much deeper problem of epistemological status: the possibility of representing other people accurately; a problem solved only in an aesthetic sense.
There is an element in gossip which is self-seeking, fantasized, and partial. The knowledge which the poet possesses seems to me to be largely of this kind. What's in doubt is that any character judgment gets beyond this plane. One experiences solidarity and revulsion. One experiences sexual and economic frustration. It would be nice if there were some cool area where body temperature would go down and one could reach an Apollonian evenness and optical indifference in judging people, poems, and situations. But I can't claim to occupy such a place. To these one could add literary frustration.
Four overlapping situations propose themselves: someone judging an essay, giving someone else a grade and so academic classification; someone, perhaps the same person, assessing someone else for a job; someone judging a poem; someone judging someone else in social life. This so capricious act of assessment is presumably where society meets literature; a sociologist would try to find links between these evaluations of a human being and the way a literary work presents human characters.
It is understandable that the human sciences have so obsessively tried, over the last thirty years, to acquire scientific status; regrettable that so far it is all carried out by imitation on the plane of verbal manners. A blind way out is supplied by the doctrines of Freud. The nineteenth century made great strides in anatomy, including comparative anatomy; it is true that an advance, such as was recently made, in the understanding of how the ankle provides thrust when stepping, applies to all ankles of all members of the species, a wonderful efficiency of investigation; the idea that the psyche has an anatomy, common to all humans, seems to be a mere imitation of physical medicine, a megalomaniac and therefore ludicrous attempt to acquire intellectual wealth. The brain is not so deterministic. The attachment of humanistic academics, ignorant of psychology and of logical method, to these ideas rejected by most psychologists, who do study logical method and do study medicine and psychology, seems like a trade in relics and miracles. There has, after all, to be some set of rules able to disqualify judgments as well as confirm them; the embracing of a fringe science, withdrawn from institutional examination and criticism, points us towards the circular authentication of the whole industry. Academics are validated by other academics, in the bar or in the office. Appropriating sonorous and irrational fringe sciences reduces people's competence to judge by increasing their self-confidence.
The smooth elevation of one's intuitions into objective knowledge, by the use of allegedly scientific terminology, is like the acquisition of institutional power. The teacher can fail the student for arguing badly, but not vice versa. In a relationship, this corresponds to believing that you are always right and that the other person is weak and emotional. The precondition of one's wishes becoming reality, losing subjective status, is possession of social power. Bar opinion attacks the weak because it is easy to do so; unable to acquire allies because one is labelled "neurotic" or "quarrelsome", one becomes weaker. The words of someone whose value is low become insignificant. The emerging pattern is simultaneously socioeconomic, linguistic, and psychological.
Tom Lowenstein
Days Journal 24 February 1976
There's a derelict hall—originally a schoolhouse—in the middle of the village which was built in Jabbertown around 1900. When Jabbertown fell, the school was dug up and brought into Tikigaq. Lately the old school transformed to community hall, but this winter some kids broke in, smashed the windows and set fire to the place—though part of the hall has since been reclaimed by "Head Start", an experimental playgroup funded by the federal government.
I wandered in this afternoon. There were flame-marks on the walls and the floor was charred; snow had drifted through the windows, and benches and tables lay scattered in the debris. But buried in this dreck, I found two valuable deposits. The first, in an alcove by the door, was the wreck of a radio-phone system ca. 1965: all the bakelite thoroughly axed and hammered. I stood in awe and surveyed the devastation. It was as though an epoch had flown in and crashed; and no-one had bothered to pick up the pieces.
The second trove was the dregs of a library. This must have been left here by Mike—a teacher and a true-believer—as a service to the village. The library—remnants of kultur and the epoch—lay scattered in slews of glass and splinters: Some sayings of the Buddha, The Bhagavad Gita, Gandhi's autobiography, Leaves of Grass, The Complete William Blake, Heidegger's Existence and Being, an anthology of pre-Socratic philosophy, and Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf. Nervously glancing round for the shades of librarians who might pounce on me for a ticket, I hurried off with as much as I could carry.
Overjoyed with this haul—bored silly with my own books—I found Hesse had brought me two distinct stories. For Steppenwolf had lain separate from the other books, alone in the radio-phone cubby-hole, skewered into the frost with that terrible spike from the liver of the American cocktail, an ice pick. I withdrew the point and riffled the pages, pulling them apart where they clung to the imprint—vortex, pimpled agenbite—of the ice pick's impression. When I got the book home I transcribed the words, by now warmed nicely in my jacket pocket, that had been punctured: one word (or word plus space and another word) per page in a more or less regular braille of prickles. The vocables—O dark Caesarian proscription—spoke disappointing nonsense; but there were places where a narrative tune could be traced in the wolf's tale. These are the ice-pick's indentations:
noiselessly - breathed - the - evening - Dostoievsky that - he - and none - moments - the wolf - of it was which - deep - impress - the - dregs - within - attracted - 'bourgeois' - his joys - considerable - were: to terms - himself - can be elements - science - dawns not her/(in poem) - each - calling - no - soared - next - certainly - fancy - down - this - I stiffened.
deep - sad - of the - gift - in once - unity - and dancing - amusement - with girl - let - got to be - ready - money's/sake - leaders - that - again joke - laughing - therefore/fleeing - appealing - connection their - man - way - when - before - no - wine did - with - eager - distant - a known - personality sense - dance - whom - It was - you - and saw - pretty - cabinet - unfeigned - last - each - hunting-had - has - watch - the/wheels - behind - now - are.
soon - police - say - comfortable - THE - disposal we - every - surged - word/leap - shook - entering river - delight/suffering - me - I - looked -
I/perceived - that - again - to/the - last - most/exalted/behind/me given - got - me
endurable - of - eyes/girls - cool from - is - Observe learn/seriously - nothing - held - with - eyes - inner
There were four main things that could be done with this kebab of proscriptions:
1) I could trace each word to the original, and then skewer them in German;
2) or they might be translated into my own German kebabble regardless of Hesse;
3) the disjunctions could be made into a poem using a mixture of Chinese translator-ese, plus the sort of Hölderlin-ish lingo that Heidegger discusses in my other trouvée;
4) the word bones could be set to work as an oracle.
In deference to Booster and in the absence of a dictionary, I settled for 3. My poem, in a German-Arctic sub dialect of Mandarin, runs as follows:
Noiseless breathed the evening.
When I, whose inner wolf,
which deep impressed the dregs within,
approached joyous value.
Dawn overwhelmed me.
The tao, clouded by my calling,
soared crying its poem,
till I saw my last moment.
All gifts infuse a deep, sad unity.
Dancing with women,
the laughter fled each lively connection.
But to be human and drink wine,
with no intoxication,
pushed keen the far and half-known character.
The sense-tao-danced.
Then undisguised and beautiful,
that other-you-beyond the last circle,
hunting each particular,
saw all was past now.
A life of ascent could not be uneasy.
At each surged word, the leap shook our entrance.
A river'd delight spoke dukkha also.
Gazing ahead, beyond last things:
those I saw—things exalted—
persisted and endured from too long past,
whose young girls,
cold from observation, learned gravity
with eyes held—nothing!—inward.
Andrew Duncan
Kicking Shit with Arvel Watson and C.Day Lewis: part 2 of the review of Conductors of Chaos (edited Iain Sinclair, 1996, Paladin, £9.99, 488pp.)
The title of the work conceals something of its content. Acoustically, it is an echo of counter culture; the prominent DUCT block, as also the conduit element, points us to the keyword UNDERGROUND, which is where the poets live; while the CHA of chaos reminds us of a specific town, what conducts us over a chaos must be a bridge, and in fact the whole phrase is a shadow of Lonductors of Cambridge.
Literary conventions; mediations
Literary form is the alleged opposite of chaos. If you converse with someone in a language of which you both only know ten words, you have few conventions; few common structures; but your exchanges are likely to be simplistic and repetitive. There is a prima facie possibility that having more conventions (more shared lexical items) allows more complex, diverse, and adequate communication. Poetry which doesn't use any special literary language tends to come out a bit Janet and John.
A hypothesis relates the superior emotional intelligence of girls to fine discriminations acquired in childhood years of assiduously breaking and re-forming friendships. The hypothesis also claims that poetry readers internalise a set of discriminations and conventions which they unconsciously apply while reading. The playing of such intense and absorbing games develops finely branched discriminatory pathways, and the ability to guess moves several steps ahead. Non-experts cannot follow the play; its signals are too rapid and subtle. The concept does make it possible to think about poets who don't use the poetic conventions: they appear impossibly self-righteous and their poems are repetitive and stultifying. Again, the mastery of forms is what allows you to let chaos in; it doesn't exclude fertility and indeterminacy. If these conventions exist, then what I should be doing as a critic is to force them to surface, and verbalise them for the benefit of the new reader.
The zone of mediations finds the edge of chaos, and so defines it. The distribution of vocables within a perceptual field is partly arbitrary, so that we (but not all languages) distinguish between a bottle, a jug, a pan, and a basin; but objects take their value from the intentional behaviour which manipulates and uses them. The overall classifications of the language are permissive, they need to be filled out in any given text by local ones, whose structure derives from intentions and purposeful behaviour. Mediation has to include the personality as the agency which bestows meaning and pattern on things. Of course the poet has the option of blanking out the personality, like a pop group leaving out the vocals: a drastic act which reveals that identification is the central act of Western lyric poetry, and does give us the chance to reflect on what that act means. Mediations in the broad sense include all elements of a genre; in a dramatic poem the characters play this role, in a narrative poem the events do, in a geographical poem regions, rivers, and soils do. The opposition which Lawrence proposes between chaos and form seems to me erroneous; any element of language capable of expressing any part of the cosmic energies can be described as form. Whatever is linguistic is formed; it has gone through the act of being coded in a shared semantic structure and shaped into a series of phonemes bound to that structure. Are we to accept that his na‹vety and repetition are not language, are not rhetorical, because they are inefficient? The opposition seems to be between someone dealing with a situation which is new, high-energy, exciting, hard to express; and someone in a situation which is old, has failed to renew itself, which has become colourless, worn, predictable, ritualistic. This cannot be a binary opposition, it is more of a patchwork: one place is interesting, another is not. The latter situation (which seems to predominate in the Day-Strong anthology) may derive, not so much from living in an overcrowded country with a constrictive spatial layout and social system, as from nervousness about technique, which makes you stick to tired subjects and familiar methods. Sticking to intuition, and being afraid of thinking about technique, produce this airless and weary effect.
The death of genre
In the 1940 Day Lewis-Strong anthology, there is what may be a poem of ostranenie, called "Presbyopia", after a special condition of the sight: "men sweat and cry,/ I muse and leer./ I have an eye,/ But not a tear. (...) There's beauty there,/ Solid and sad-/ A strangled bear,/ An ape gone mad,// A boy on stilts,/ A snail-eyed god,/ Women in quilts/ And men in quod.// Elbow on knee/ I muse and blink,/ And thoughtless see,/ Or sightless think." (by G.H. Luce). This is a very odd poem; its effects seem to rely on reducing the visual world to a plane, and distorting that plane all over; the effect is hard to cope with, and so may anticipate contemporary making it strange.
Defamiliarisation, ostranenie, was described by Viktor Shklovsky in 1925, not as something he'd thought up, but as something basic to literary art. W.S. Graham used estrangement as his favourite move: "When the birds blow like burnt paper/ Over the poorhouse roof and the slaughter/ House and all the houses of Madron,/ I would like to be out of myself and./ About the extra, ordinary world/ No matter what disguise it wears(.)" (from "Clusters Travelling Out", p.220). I fear that this inspires page rage in the reader; well, defamiliarisation is just something you're going to have to get used to!
It's common today to find one source of poetry in the riddle and the paradox. It's quite possible to argue that all metaphors are a form of ostranenie: by breaching classification categories, the poet makes an object seem strange, and through the strangeness emerges a new understanding of what it is. The reverse phenomenon, normalisation and desensitisation of language, is agreed to exist by everyone, not just the avant-garde: I don't know how you can overcome familiarisation except by defamiliarisation. Allen Fisher names a sequence of books Gravity as a consequence of shape: true enough, since the pattern of the Earth's gravitational field derives from the spherical shape of the Earth. Barry MacSweeney refers three times in his poem here to "maniac milk": it would be quicker if he just said "alcohol", but if you really object to this kind of periphrasis, you might be better off reading a newspaper. Modernity is a fine balance of conventional shared discriminations, the rules of the game, and subversive estrangement, twisting and invalidating the context. Each demands the other.
Shklovsky also says that slowing-down, zamedlenie, is basic to the literary art, all forms of ornament aim at this same thing. So also the enjoyment of poetry has something to do with pace; to do with making the brain work and making it play. None of the poems in this book contain information you really need; the point of reading them is to alter your brain state, temporarily; we can shut out the data layer and look at the more abstract levels of linguistic organisation for the payload. Since we're going to throw the information away, it doesn't matter if we get it quickly.
This approach can also claim an ancestry in Heidegger's poetics, where the aim is to write about everything as if I'd never seen it before, and the poet starts by emptying out knowledge which we already possess, trying to hypnotize us into a first-time experience. Heidegger wrote about the earliest available etymologies of words as if (a) they represented the temporal origin of the concept (b) by gazing at them we could lose our acquired knowledge and be present at the dewy dawn of pristine time (c) etymological reconstruction gave us an integral subject in a lived horizon rather than fragments pressured and gouged by the recovery process. Since none of these three things is true, poems based on them can be faux-naïf and pretentious at the same time. However, because Heidegger was observing something (for example, poems by Trakl and Hölderlin) which already existed, his proposals on poetics are tenable.
Defamiliarisation of a rule of social structure obliges us to think over its purpose; renormalisation has a low probability of returning to the original state, so the process raises political consciousness. Some laws of society seem right when thought over; large-scale ostranenie separates out natural climax states from unnatural ones by simulating the process thousands of times.
There is a prehistory of disconnection, running through surrealism; Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt; the Absurd; the montage poetry of the sixties, like Raworth's; psychedelia; the montage of the seventies; sampling; complexity and chaos. Mégroz speaks in 1933 of Edith Sitwell's disruption of logical sequence, and remarks "Most clearly revealed in Jules Laforgue is the beginning of a literary technique for making new associations by dislocating the normal sequences of conscious thought." Laforgue was writing in the 1880s. "In Gold Coast Customs, [her 1929 masterpiece] the discontinuity, if we are to accept her account of the composition, is a deliberate technical device to make the mind aware of several layers of argument simultaneously." Mégroz also devotes two chapters to "dreamlike" poets, which points to the prevalence of irrational logic already a hundred years ago: the shift has been in demarcation of the subjective processes. A feature of the 1960s was the death of genre: the rules linking ideas on a larger scale than the line were simply abolished, and the new poet had an empty space for building designs in. We have a lack of names for the designs of poems; critics feel a huge relief when they manage to identify a modern poem with one of the traditional genres, but the point is that awareness of design was very weakly developed until recently, and poets were recycling forms derived, often, from the Hellenistic and pre-Christian past, without thinking them through. At present, conventional junctures stick out like sore thumbs. Overall design is the most interesting aspect of the poem; an easy way out is to make the personality the source of all decisions, so that the poem simply presents the self, and has only to copy from nature. This, as a way of utilising an empty stage, is despair. The abolition of genre causes the reader problems: if you don't know how the parts are going to fit together, how do you know what to notice? People get angry because they have binding expectations and the poet doesn't fulfil them. I think you just get used to this; anyway, very similar severings of rules have been felt in cinema, pop music, painting, etc. In the suspension of logical associations, poets are judged by the speed and style of their irrational montages, of which there are a thousand kinds. Maybe I should sit around and think of names for them all. Arguably, every modern poem belongs to a different genre, because its high-level structure is unique.
Time-sense of modernity: the past as property, the past as damage
Social class is frequently invoked as an explanation for everything that happens in British society, usually an account missing because it simply alludes to an unstated, silent, knowledge which the listeners share. I must confess that I don't share this knowledge, I find enormous problems in formalizing it, and I don't think any theoretical framework for class is sufficiently advanced and error-free to be used to explain poetry. I believe the problem is a lot easier for the pre-modern period, for example the 1930s and 1940s: I'd like to quote a 1944 piece by John Sommerfield:
'Boy, bring me some more cakes, and jaldi karo!'
The accentuation and distortion of the vowel sounds, the assured tones of the voices, the phraseology of the conversations, gave so clear a characterisation of the speakers that I didn't need to see them. As an experienced hunter can tell from an animal's tracks and droppings its species, size and condition (etc.)... For some reason or other my mental picture was without faces. But I knew their expressions by heart, the lines and curves and wrinkles engraved on the mobile flesh by time and experience were shaped by the code of behaviour and thought that governed their lives (.)
Sommerfield was a thirties radical moving here into the wartime world of aspirations to a more just society. The class revolutions of the 1940s and 1960s disrupted the system which guaranteed his perceptions; social historians of the affluent society, such as Harry Hopkins, stress, from the later fifties on, the greater choice of lifestyles available to people in Britain, so that the predictive information contained in speech patterns simply evaporated. What disappeared was not power relations, but the transparent link between the sound of someone's voice and the way they behaved. Within power relations (a zone where dishonesty and disinformation are prevalent), the emphasis has shifted from inherited patterns, who your family are, to currently existing ones: i.e. what you own, your position in an organizational hierarchy, your income and purchasing power. I think people tend to mis-describe economic relations even though experiencing them, because their explanatory systems are stuck in the past and use origin as a clarifying metaphor. If the market is all-powerful, looking at someone's culture and family past is irrelevant. If, as I have claimed, there was a class revolution in the 1960s, this does not take us outside commodity capitalism (outside to where some people wanted to go), but does invalidate the existing set of prestige symbols, to produce a mismatch. The greater disposable income, and dilution of the "old" middle class by new cadres of graduates and professionals, made status signs insecure, inclining people to spend more on status symbols and reinforcing the commodity capitalist system. As choice of lifestyle became diverse and differentiated in a consumer revolution, as Hopkins and others have claimed, this diaspora dispersed the knowledge which Sommerfield claims, the "hunter's knowledge of the game" which was presumably his stock in trade as a writer, and threw up a crisis of representation; making a strength of unpredictability was certainly a solution, another one was probably evading the problem of depicting a new society by making the writer's own consciousness the site of the text.
The issue of the past is highly involved with the relations of class. Someone preoccupied with the past may not be consciously conservative, but preserving past relations denies the individual the right to define who they are and to make their own way in society. If literature is biased towards stored knowledge, it is also biased towards social hierarchy and immobility; literature of the past was undoubtedly used by the landowners as a tool for glorifying themselves and for disparaging those of lowly birth. The project of a continuously present poetry is political and aims to abolish all hysteresis effects and hangovers, to destroy the memory stores where the patterns of inequality are kept.
Elimination of syntactic markers may increase the ambiguity of the text, therefore the number of available information and interpretation paths, and so its adaptability to different conditions, i.e. to different readers. The cult of leaving out organised syntax (both at the level of the sentence and of the higher sense-units binding sentences together) may be entirely rational, the optimum way of achieving polyvalence to face a heterogeneous audience. When Raworth writes
his extensive library
the centre of his picture
merge into the verdict
one moment threatens
an explanation of why this language
representing the glorious past
belongs, even to those
following me into this war
by blending the impersonal ethos
beyond the reach of satire
to account for its success
in demonic or satanic terms
is irrelevant
yet the basis of this neutral identification
(from "Sentenced to Death")
the lack of semantic labelling is an apparent lack of resolution, even of completeness, which may quite literally leave more information inside the system. The semantic labels can be seen as eliminators of information. Leaving the extra paths in there leaves the poem uncommitted to any social or ideological group; the poet's voice evaporates, in a detachment which alienated much of the reading public, who wanted less ambiguity. Suppressing tribal loyalties makes you invisible in a world of eyes which are sensitized only to tribal stripes and insignia. Again, I have to point out that quoting one stanza understates the polyvalence of the poem. I selected this stanza because it may be about the construction of one-track language: "neutral identification" is the point in the room claimed to be occupied by the objective scholar, accountant, politician, or manager, taking decisions on behalf of other people. In writing this I am directing attention to one aspect of Raworth's work, destroying its ambiguity and probably annoying the poet whose best efforts are thus overruled; and claiming a neutral identification as a source of genuine information, eliding the slide from "I like Raworth's poetry because it is excellent" to "he likes Raworth so he obviously reads small press poetry and is that kind of person so we wouldn't let him into the building". Does a labyrinth of polarisations, step by step reducing the spectral target from 58 million people (in the UK) to 300 (who buy Angel Exhaust), represent a thousand generations of discrimination and refinement, or getting so close to silence that you can't hear yourself? Raworth's asyndetic syntax (look it up) leaves polarities unmarked, which is also what neutrality is, neuter meaning neither one thing nor the other.
We could ask whether this language is before (a highland region before social language has played its tricks) or after (a reprocessing of other language to win its raw materials). Is truth what we realize after the philosophers have spoken, or what was there before anybody began to fabricate and distort it? The explanation of why this language representing the glorious past belongs even to those following me into this war carries recognizable traces of an origin, in the mouth of someone, perhaps a wartime politician, justifying the war in terms of a shared community represented by language, by culture, by the past, as the long run of time in which individual differences and interests merge into a collective identity. This explanation is threatened, and one can see why; how could the language belong to everybody when the means of production belonged to a few hundred families? The official record is only one representation of the past, because access to it was selective; it conflicts with folk memory passed on from parents to children. "The centre of his picture" points to selectivity, because space has no centre; wherever we direct our attention is a focus, but different people focus on different things. The idea of a centre is where we pass from the world of light to that of power. Raworth is not in Conductors; the Introduction says he declined, having no work suitable for this outlet. His work, starting in 1963, sums up the rest, all the issues of determinacy, conflict with a prepotent information authority, rebuilding the laws of association, asyndeton, and so on.
One can see the past either as an accumulation of design expertise or as damage. The assertion that history is a convergent process which discards the bad paths and repeats the good ones justifies stored knowledge and so the distribution of wealth as the outcome of past events high up a maximisation curve; the good outcomes are in fact the content of the stored knowledge. Innovation, and the redistribution of wealth, then become dangerous steps back into the unknown. Language doesn't belong to everyone. The area of democratic choice is restricted by rules: a contest of past and living present. Indeterminacy describes series of states: it is difficult to work out the previous states of a gas from its state at any moment; we can say that a gas lacks a past. A liquid, equally, is unsuitable for use as an information store. This erasure of the past implies that the future is not predictable either. All of this implies, when addressed to social systems, that stored knowledge is of little use, because future states of the system are not contained within past states however exhaustively described. So a belief that society is a highly indeterminate system disagrees with the allocation of power to a few, based on past events; the need for hereditary wealth; the power of the educated; the burying of rules, from the past, which cannot be altered, limiting the area of democratic discussion and decision. The defence that the social system is a success tested by time assumes both that the future is like the past and that there was some optimizing mechanism, whereby the superior system became the real one. The more free the individuals in a system are, the more chaotic it becomes, and the less they can rightfully be bound by rules from a vanished past. That "a library/ [is] the centre of his picture" suggests someone who sets great store by stored knowledge; drawing attention to this suggests the alternative, putting faith in living people and so allowing them political and economic power. Because of the privileged access of the upper classes to the written record, intensive study of it may simply make you reproduce their viewpoint, concentrating the toxins of triumphalism and partiality in your tissues. After all, the written records are best at recording property rights, and the genealogies (of rich families only). My knowledge of the fifteenth century is almost entirely of landowning life, as preserved in the texts, whereas my experience of the twentieth century is somewhat lower down the social scale, to say the least.
The lack of causal relations in Raworth's poetry points to a universe, not one where causality does not operate, but where the causes and symptoms of things are not obvious: the past of the system does not forebode its future. He does not eliminate semantic labels altogether: in the quotation, the words even, to (account for), yet, and is irrelevant define (and so restrict) the relationships between primary semantic blocks. This stanza is atypical of Raworth's style. We can claim that a fully formed clause, such as one moment threatens an explanation, implies causal relationships, and that words like threaten, merge into, beyond the reach of, also have a pointing and de-ambiguation function. One can claim that the ordering of words implies such syntactic links, in English, because in that language word order is the main marker of syntactic function. Because to know causality implies general understanding, it implies knowledge of the past; and the excluson of change from the passage from past to present. But certainly this poetry is very ambiguous and non-causal when compared with, say, the prose I am writing. This stanza is soaked in the modern Left critique of the objectivity of managerial discourse, and so resembles the older kinds of poetry, which also contain ideologies; the effect of this leaning depends, however, on the quality of the intellectual system it leans on.
Analysis of poetry of the recent past, for example in the