Andrew Duncan
Alta oratoria civile: John Seed, Interior in the Open Air (Reality Studios, 1992, not paginated. ś5.99)
'Light filtered through the tangled rigging and the masts-sails looped in festoons to the yards. Barges filled with barrels of beer, sacks of flour. A schooner and a brig, both from Spain, laden with fruit. Hoys, deep in the moving water, tarpaulins covering the heaped-up cargoes. Sloops filled with cases of wine, bales of hemp, barrels of porter, crates of hardware (...) all corners of the earth ransacked, each for its peculiar produce. Axis mundi.' (the second poem in the book, describing the Thames Docks from the Custom House in 1849)The mid-19th C collapse of the shipbuilding industry in London was chronicled by Gareth Stedman Jones, a social historian like John. Both iron and coal were too expensive in London for it to compete with the Clyde and the north-east, the decline of whose shipbuilding trade followed at almost a hundred years' interval. As a port, London peaked in about 1930-the greatest port in the world. Not much left now. The decline of the central watercourse of Empire in the past 30 years compares with the simultaneous rise and expansion of the port of Antwerp, which deserves a poem of equal brilliance, I think. Emphasis is given to the Latin phrase: axis mundi. The axle of the world. The functional feature of an axis is that it rotates. (No doubt the dockers and labourers in the warehouses were accustomed to move goods on rollers.) The point of the poem is not the business and variety of the scene in 1849, but the implied contrast with the (unstated) state of the Port of London today: with no ships and no jobs. But this too isn't the point, which is instead the transience of the current power order. What is the product of decline, is itself on the way down. Stedman Jones details, in Outcast London, how the unemployed workers of the closed shipwright's yards became part of the homeless or semi-homeless poor. My guess about the of the title is that the Thames and its strands were then an interior in the open air: filled with the results of human endeavour. But also, with killing irony, it applies to people whose home is on the streets: 'Cold impenetrable/ steel plate the national index/ Under the bridges below/ Zero/ Kerbstone houseroom homeland/ Before dawn the morning tide.' These minimal poems were won by refining work on the originally given complexes. Burnt deeply into Seed's concept of what is not dispensable are the primary issues of heat, food and lodging; he talks about rain a lot, not in pursuit of some tremulous effect of light, but because it directly affects body temperature and so central physiological functions of any mammal in a northern climate. He isn't concerned with impressionism or aestheticism, just with primary energetics, the alternation of light and darkness, heat and cold. This is genuinely materialist poetry because its primary patterns are from the two-way coupling between the physical world and human comfort and vitality. The constant question is how man by social labour can find shelter against the night, the winter, and the rain.
Seed was certainly attracted, early on, by the work of Basil Bunting and by Grosseteste Review. He has named his favourite poets as Wyatt, Shelley, and Oppen. An early book, Spaces In (Pig Press, Durham, 1977) formed about half of History Labour Night (Pig Press, 1984):
headlights of the great lorries
flashing
speed and movement 'a kind of redemption'
surging rhythm of the
engine in the empty
streets
a metaphysic direction of events
second by second
shines on passing windscreens wing mirrors
outward
Seed's work follows in the track of Objectivism, for example in the way poems are laid out on the page and the way half-hidden relations are laid bare by erasure. The communism of Zukofsky, Oppen, and Niedecker always underlay the work (hence the cavorting of certain Christian and social-democrat critics tidying away the evidence) and is stronger in Seed than anyone else. Possibly, this should be struck into the tablets as one of the classic ways of writing Marxist poetry; alongside the dozen or so pioneered in Russia, Western Europe, and Latin America. Certainly, a good deal of objectivist verse is wilfully tedious. I could mention the Imagists, whom the Objectivists were certainly following; I could mention the so-called ermetici in Italy, a style developed at much the same time as Imagism, and also revelling in cutting poems back: I have the same problem explaining why a dozen syllables of Ungaretti contain more emotion than a hundred pages of someone else. I find this unfair and irrational, but I also know it to be so. (This style also included anti-fascist protest; Quasimodo expanded out of hermeticism into alta oratoria civile.) We could even apply a phrase about U. to Seed: 'the fascination of the images is in their refined and planned poverty'.
Perhaps one could approach the problem from the other side. Take this passage of Henryson, describing Saturn as the spirit of Cold and Apathy:
His face frosnit, his lyre was like the leid,
His teith chatterit, and cheverit with the chin,
His ene drowpit, how sonkin in his heid,
Out of his nois the meldrop fast can rin,
With lippis bla, and cheikis leine and thin,
The iceshocklis that fra his hair doun hang
Was wonder greit (...)
Atouir his belt his lyart lokkis lay
Felterit unfair, ovirfret with froistis hoir
(...)
Under his girdill ane flasche of felloun flanis,
Fedderit with ice and heidit with hailstanis.
Central to its effectiveness is its redundancy: it immerses the reader in winterness by repeating it in every word. H. doesn't really add any new ideas after the first line. This was an older way of achieving psychological depth. In order to say something only once, but create silence around it, one must be nearly silent; so creating texts which are scarse, sullen, verging on the barren. Worse, the poet can easily train himself to fix on a phrase for a long period, almost out of inanity, almost in paralysis, and fail to realize that the reader finds it banal and sees no need to dwell on it. Cutting and setting a dozen phrases which can still and satisfy the gaze, catching the deep silence, calls for the concentration of an Oriental monk. S. has this quality of almost violent patience and taciturnity, and his work brings me closer than anything else to a vision of the Absolute, of the spirit of History. Ungaretti exploits, perhaps, preset points of positional significance in emotional and linguistic space. I recall how they carry machine tools about, by putting a rope through a loop exactly at its centre of gravity: it's very stable and very easy to lift. Human affairs have such points of zero work, where the meeting of arrows of intensity mean that a few words carry ultimate force.
in the morning isolate we
Huddle in private bodies along the platform imaginary
Subjects ghosts
Of the structure of the
Language of the circuit of capital...
Imaginary keys to a real door locked iron
Rails the bitter wind a mouthful of broken glass
(from History Labour Night)
The parodic Objectivist poet writes a long text and strikes out words and phrases one by one until there is no redundancy. The traces of this are obvious. They would patiently reduce the Henryson passage to:
leid
With lippis bla
flanis
fedderit with ice
and consider this a far better poem. I would argue that there is information in the formal properties of a language string, and ignoring the 'emergent properties' of complex repetition is a form of reductionism. But the 'paring down' is a monk-like act of self-mortification which in 99 cases out of 100 misses all 'points of force' and is unmemorable. Writing poems twelve words long doesn't make you Ungaretti. 'Poverty' may be a key concept for John, the idea of simple repetitive physical tasks (this is social history), one thinks of him sharpening the teeth of a saw, tiny parings off the substance of tiny jags which stand in a certain relation to the felling of a forest. How small is the cut in relation to the tree. How little energy the eye needs, to redirect the hands. This is the poverty of the eye.
I counted 425 lines in Interior. This is a little disappointing for a book. Other pages are occupied by charcoal drawings of vague birdlike things; which leave a strong impression of vagueness, birdiness, and thinginess. The poems are set in very large type-which gives an unfortunate impression of padding or of children's books. Surely it hasn't escaped someone's attention that the Thames in its courses through most of London is remarkably free of birds, being abiotic due to the poisonous excesses of past (and more practically successful) generations? How many wading birds are there on the gravel spits exposed at low tide at Chelsea?
The issue of parataxis comes up-what Basil Bernstein said (in Class, Codes, and Control) about working-class speech; the rise of parataxis, asyndeton, and inexplicit logical relations has coincided with the rise of working-class poets. I think this is a distraction; if S. suspends lines without subordinating them to each other, it's because a field of eight words allows much more complete control of weights and directions than a field of forty words. Oppen and Zukofsky didn't eschew legato and hypotaxis because they lacked a knowledge of complex structures. Great simplicity and great complexity converge; the Hassidic rabbis recorded wisdom in incredibly compressed form, perhaps because their illiterate followers wished to memorize sayings, for lack of books. These sayings sometimes have the pithiness of Ungaretti or Seed. However, these Hassidim are also close to Walter Benjamin, a master of complex logical verbal structures and admirer of Buber and Gershom Scholem; it is at the edge where logic lays bare the mysticism of Benjamin's conceptions:
Storm blowing from the beginning
History history's angel
Hurled backwards into future
tattered wings spread, ears deafened
Watches the debris climb skyward
shattered
Crystal of human reason
(from 'After Walter Benjamin', in History Labour Night),
their founding in glimpses of irrational insight, that one realizes how much of classical Marxism is contained in Seed's fiery fragments. To that extent, he does not expound causal relations because an over-explicit, over-determinate, scientific view of history is the logical mapping inside which all his poetry is written. I consider that there is a plan linking all of Interior in the Open Air. If we look at the second to fourth poems, they are dated 1849-1984-1849. With the anti-marxist pessimism which Adorno brought to marxism, Seed is photographing relapse and repetition: history shackled to a pale, looping. I suspect that 1849 was chosen because it was the fading of the hallucinatory dawn of 1848 (which incidentally drove Marx into theoretical activity) and also the beginning of the accession of Liberalism, both to power and to degradation, emerging, not as a legislation for Utopia, but as the ideology of Big Business. To predict the effects of neo-liberalism, it is enough to study the nineteenth century. 'Each for its peculiar produce' implies Adam Smith's phrase about local advantages of production: mediated by the great waterways, this means you can buy anything in the shops, and also that your job is replaced by someone in Taiwan or the USA. The Thames was in 1849 the triumphal way of the Empire; today, it is an unemployed river. In 1840, British capitalism was already beginning to lose its competitive edge, failing to lead in the new product areas, dead set against the methods of automation, science, and mathematics which the skilled wright had not needed. Every poem in this book fits in another part of the pattern, circling around the Thames, empty and ruined buildings, and the transformative project. It is this which the last poem throws itself at: 'Permanent abstention is permanent disenfranchisement (...) It is crucial in a fight to be as angry as possible.' next Previous Up About
Gyron's Submission: The Mersey Goldfish, by Ian Duhig (Bloodaxe, 1995, ś6.95, 64 pp.)
John Goodby
Ian Duhig's first collection, The Bradford Count (1991), immediately established him as what reviewers are fond of calling a distinctive new voice. The book was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, and three years later Duhig was included in the New Gen promotion, one of the few genuine originals in its mainly bland band of twenty. What impressed was the poetry's superb stroppy accomplishment and independence, attributable to Duhig's London-Irish provenance, historical awareness and career as a homelessness and drug rehabilitation worker in Yorkshire. With such an advantaged background Duhig was liberated from the burden of faking the obligatory streetwise credentials, free to make an ex-centric, culturally hyphenated position his starting point rather than his goal. Writing mainly about times and places apparently very different from his own, Duhig's perfectly calculated tone carried the burden of relevance. Inhabiting the poetry in this profound way, he dispensed with personal appearances, implicitly debunking the poetics of genteel confessionalism. Exceptions to this rule, like 'Another Poem About Old Photographs', generally made the point in a different way:
This one
I call "Late Malevich, Town Hall, Macroom",
or, if in a figurative whimsy, "Klansmen
Routed by Doves in Freak Arkansas Snowstorm".
Duhig's style was also in accord with such deflationary strategies: dense and learned but idiomatic and argumentative, bitter and belly-laughing, the figures synecdochic, with simile rather than metaphor dominant ('I said he played the spinet/ like a lobster trying to escape its pot'). Yearnings for symbolist transcendence were guyed unmercifully; as an egoistic Apollinaire rhapsodises about Annie Pleydel in 'The Badly-Loved', his language collapses under its load of its gorgeous absurdity;
her Virgin-of-the-Bean blue eyes,
those eye-pods the colour of Egyptian lentils
and that mouth, a royal barge of Carthage
flaming behind the white cities of her teeth.
The humour, like the taste for syllabics and regular stanza-forms, stemmed from Northern Irish influences-Michael Longley in particular-although the formal restraint was itself a source of humour as it strove incongruously to contain anarchic energies. Into these barely-adequate corsets, The Count crammed neglected proverbs, tall tales and folklore to produce a series of bravura mentalit‚s-a Bulgarian Madame Sosostris on the eve of the Great War, Edgar Allen Poe legless in the Bowery, an English hangman returning from a job in Ireland and arguing with a drunken squaddie about 'hanging Joyce or the spelling of whiskey'. Brilliant, raspberry-blowing, dismissive of the history-as-tourism school, these pieces blended the pre-modern (Duhig is keen on Irish traditional and English folk musics) with a thoroughly urban Eighties taste for the sewer story-'Babylon' for example recalled the fiction of Iain Sinclair or Pynchon). Rarely since Browning had the energies of the dramatic lyric been so startlingly displayed, or the historicising power of the Grotesque been so mordantly deployed.
Despite the success of The Bradford Count, critical bets were busily being hedged. Some mainstream pundits, it's now clear, were lining up charges of puerility and obscurity against the time when the applause died down (although concerning obscurity it should be noted that the OED, an Encyclopaedia or a Brewer's will gloss most things in either collection).One real problem is that The Count was always going to be a hard act to follow. Though it is a more focussed book, The MerseyGoldfish doesn't -can't, by virtue of its concentration-have its predecessor's range of voices. Nor does the back cover help its cause. Leaving aside the wisdom of using endorsements from Messrs Hattersley and Kinnock, the publisher's blurb trawls up Byzantium, Faberg‚ and the Goddess Mnemosyne-unfortunate, as the goddess is AWOL when the goldfish is compared to 'the Wild Bolonial Koi'.This particular inspired spoonerism comes from a piece not included in Goldfish, despite its bearing the fabulous title 'An Herbertian Engine for the Psychoanalyst J. Chasseguet-Smirgel, whose Creativity and Perversion Showed the Poet his Imperfect Understanding of his Art, Fashioned as Sausages of Emilia-Romagna'. This piece actually did have a Mersey Goldfish in it, so it's hard to understand why it's been left out. None of which is worth dwelling on, except to make the point that the book is less concerned with coherent myth-making than Brecht's malodorously inescapable challenge; 'If the palace of culture stinks, is that not because it is built out of dogshit?'
In pursuit of this issue Goldfish draws far more on Duhig's own background than The Count, and uses it as the vehicle of an examination of blackness, shit and origins. Very much in the Northern Irish vein again, historical and linguistic layers are impacted to produce doublings, parallels, codes, meditations on individual letters. At one level, then, the book-which opens with a poem about the poet's son Owen-is intended as a kind of primer. Duhig's schooldays feature in, for example, 'The Soothsayer', where Julius Caesar 's 'What is't o'clock' provokes his '"Miss O'Rourke! I understand now!/ Shakespeare's using anarchism!"' (although it's the kind of thing, presumably, which had Tim Kendall in Poetry Review bemoaning the loss of 'redemptive humour' while solemnly missing the joke about a child who believes Yogi Bear invented television). Childhood namings and, more to the point, misnamings, allow Duhig to query his own name in order to investigate dividedness and creative uncertainty. Duhig, we learn, is a non-anglicised form of Duffy which comes from Irish Gaelic dubh, or black. Thus the poet etymologically acquires blackness. This might seem spuriously appropriative were the imposture not so clearly a debunking of a poetics of identity and linguistic-essentialist nonsense (and dubh is Irish for black things, not people-that being gorm, blue-which permits a critical glance at the 'half-arsed Irish fascists' of the 1930s who called themselves Blueshirts). This kind of trickery occurs at the level of the single letter; 'A Repeat', for example, builds itself around an 'episode of Sesame Street' featuring the letter K. The occasion seems to be a racist shopkeeper in Berlin locking her door against the poet Jackie Kay with a key that 'scrabbles' KKK, and a typically Duhigian sweet revenge (noshing cakes in full view through her window). From this, it's a short step to a poem like 'Gyron's Submission'. Gyron is the black character in Jarry's Ubu cycle, and Duhig has him urging PŠre Ubu to move to 'Brittania' rather than Poland. Gyron makes the point that Ubu's claim on the British throne '[is] etymological... two Us there mean you're doubly upper class./ B stands for Bacon, author of Shakespeare...' Gyron's etymological 'submission' is based on a claim that Britain has two 'aboriginal tribes / of indigenes', 'Melanochroi African colonists/ and Celtic-Anglo-Saxon Xanthochroi'. Gyron argues that the aboriginal blackness is still 'existent in a hundred surnames'-of which Duhig is one. But having proved that Brittania is a fit home for Ubu, King of Shit, Gyron acknowledges that he won't be able to enter the country himself: 'you'd never get me past their Customs Men:/ they would take me for the wrong sort of black'.
To show the illogicality of attributing essential characteristics to letters, words and names is not to overcome it; 'black' is the supreme example of a word which has acquired negative connotations. These connotations may all too easily be transferred to racial (or political) others. In Goldfish the others include the Jesuit 'blackrobes' who ensnare John Race, 'a bad Winnebago', with drink in 'The Medicine Rite'; 'black' as a term of abuse for Protestants by Catholics, but now, bizarrely, turned by Protestants against the RUC; and Rudolf Hess in 'Die Schwarze Paula'. The most tainted sources of this blackness, naturally, offer the strongest truths; Hess notes of Alexandria, his birthplace, that 'You English would hate it, you'd hate the "wogs"'. In 'Roll Call', too, it is politics which are black-the writer Dalton Trumbo, blacklisted during the MacCarthyite witch-hunts in Hollywood, is hired by Kirk Douglas as the scriptwriter for Spartacus. The poem opens with him suffering from writer's block; 'he can see no end,/ no gesture enacting its testament... What was it again that testa meant?' Pondering the meaning of this word gives Trumbo his cue: in imagination he cuts to the final scene of the rebellion's last stand; Crassus offers mercy to those who will denounce their leader, then 'Focus on Kirk's heroic face' as he announces 'I am Spartacus;
but his neighbour roars in stereo
'HE LIES. I, I AM SPARTACUS,'
then the next man's 'IT IS I' and the next
'I', 'I', 'I', 'I', 'I AM SPARTACUS.'
The conclusion is superbly effective at the level of narrative; Trumbo dramatises a utopian, compensatory, solidarity; this final scene is his 'testament'. But there is more here than meets the eye. One is the enactment of the fragmentation of the lyric 'I' at the end of the poem; it is ironic that a supreme gesture of solidarity is, literally, divisive, and this may be another example of the parodic extreme to which Duhig pushes the 'well-made' lyric. More significant, perhaps, is the fact that Douglas' use of Trumbo is an open secret. This doesn't make Douglas any less courageous, but it does multiply the ironies. Trumbo has changed his name for the sake of acceptability, but so has the man who would have him blacklisted, Samuel Goldwyn, n‚ 'Goldfish'. Examples are legion, although the procedure finds extreme form in 'Six More Sides to the Muck Island Box' where we're treated to examples of a numerological gravestone code so unsecret that it's laughable. It's a trait shared with the kinds of 'codes' used by fascist groups-'Column 88', for example-where, again, a kind of essential, magical quality is being attributed to a name/number (and the word 'cipher' covers both codes and written numbers and letters). Fascism is one of Duhig's targets, but he may also be suggesting that there is something duplicitous in language which allows it to be used in this manner. He has said that 'some of my poems are puzzles or a kind of idiot cabbala', codes made to be seen through. This power can unite and divide, reject and include; 'there is a fantasy abroad', as he has pointed out, 'that the principal function of language is to communicate. In many circumstances the principal function of language is to excommunicate.' If there is an attitude to history to be drawn from this it may be that rather than taking the doomy but ultimately comforting option of conspiracy theories, we need to mess simple Us/Them polarities up a bit. There is no plot to history, but there are undoubtedly many plots.
I've already suggested that Duhig, an avid pupil of the Northern Irish 'well-made', in many ways, pushes it towards parody, the taboo disintegration. Goldfish recalls Heaney's wish of 1973 to 'take the English lyric and make it eat stuff that it has never eaten before'; Duhig's somewhat similar desire leads him to write different kinds of Bog Poems than those of the Nobel Laureate. His own black list works its way from scatology, to Freud's anal stage, to childhood terrors and the dark sides of history in an unsettling, genuinely disturbing way. When The Count appeared Duhig was labelled a 'protean ironist' a poet whose work insisted that history 'does not exist to comfort us'. These were (and are) better guides than the New Gen profile which proclaimed soon afterwards that his favourite 'time-zone' was the Middle Ages, or the short but imperfectly-formed review by Adam Thorpe which fretted about such 'indulgence' of 'the dark corners of the Catholic past'. If Duhig's work-like W.N. Herbert's-represents one of the rare solutions to the problems of writing intelligent poetry in a living language within the postmodern dominant, then there has to be more than the occasional critical nod in the direction of 'marginality', particularly since mainstream reviewers have badly distorted what it's about. Such an attempt might try to show how Duhig's dual English and Irish origins enabled him to renew and the dramatic monologue and the Grotesque in the course of enjoying and parodying strict form. It would argue that dramatic form is inherently decentring, often dramatizing without conceding to the power relations of communication and interpretation (in the 1830s it became the political art of a post-revolutionary situation for Browning). On the other hand the the Grotesque arrives where a fantastic, ludic intellectual complexity and the raw intensity of a disruptive libido are forced to live together within a single style. By its concentration on extremes, on incongruities, the Grotesque has a dimension as cultural critique; its very fragmentariness, hybridity and intensity foreground the problematic nature of the sign, a strategy which, as we've seen, is at the heart of Goldfish. It is deeply historical because, as Isobel Armstrong puts it, 'the Grotesque's perception of incompleteness extends to modernity and historicizes that'. Finally there is language's inherent duplicity, its prevention of tidy closure, the spuriously symbolic, the slightly-tousled-but-ultimately-well-behaved lyric. This is unacceptable to those who are now suspecting, rightly, that part of the joke of such poetry is at their expense. Nevertheless, if it is clear that-with the New Gen honeymoon over-Duhig will have to struggle with calculated ignorance, it is equally clear that this is one poet who will be able to look after himself, as 'A Poem Ending with a Sausage' demonstrates:
AND should you ask one of these sea-cabbages what was the point
of their ballsed-up two-faced scrimshaw...
why, they look at you like you're shite, sneer about 'metaphor',
whack their flukes about their ears and bugger off through frilly water
like a ballerina with a ladder in her tights God help us all-
take my word: you can't trust a wimp to end with a banger.
next Previous Up About
Lucy Sheerman
In Through the Out Door: Out of Everywhere, poetry by 30 innovative women poets, edited by Maggie O'Sullivan (Reality Street, 1996, 256pp., ś9.00)
Susan Howe, Grace Lake and Bernadette Mayer share an embrace of the page as a space in which to articulate a sense of harm which fractures the poems collected together in Out of Everwhere. The title has a curious doubled sense of exclusion and seepage from the pores of 'everywhere'. The title, taken from a debate in the collection The Politics of Poetic Form omits the "[laughter]" which immediately follows in the original text (OE, 9). This laughter gives the statement a curious resonance with the poems in a collection which seems very concerned with voice and audience. Staging a production, creating an audience, the laughter resonates with the sound of both exclusion and inclusion, theatrical success and the worst kind of stage fright.
The pieces in this collection are concerned with the surface which separates expression from impression, the site of the page as it faces the writer with blankness, a space which laps at the edges of the impression, lapping the words, the edges, the fingers. The space in their work demarcates both the surfaces of the visual field and the emergent space of meaning. A complex intertwining of display and concealment in a text which incises language-words pulsate like butterflies before they are pinned to a board.
In Howe's sequence, the text like 'everywhere' is a desert and a marsh of voices-both starkly silent and excessively forthcoming. Articulation, the act of naming, is terrifying and yet for Howe it is silence which signifies death. How to speak and not betray or harm concerns these writers. How to write without damaging or even destroying and capture a mind in flight without arresting it influences her description of the compositional process of Eikon Basilike:
So I started to write something filled with gaps and words tossed, and words touching, words crowding each other, letters mixing and falling away from each other, commands and dreams, verticals and circles. If it was impossible to print, that didn't matter. Because it's about impossibility anyway. About the impossibility of putting in print what the mind really sees and the impossibility of finding the original in a bibliography.
The concern with damage not only occurs during the process of inscription, but also at the moment of impact with the glance. Misreadings are a troubling and also liberating part of the compositional process of these works. The readings seem deliberately incomplete, uncompletable-authority and authorial intent recede into the fragmented spaces of the text taking with them the clearly defined margin between inside and outside, the fictive and the real.
Experience tells us sense-experience and life are rivals. Bodies never really come in contact. We are alienated even from our own sorrows. Our waking intellects are baffled before some cause that refuses to be named. Impressions are apparitions. We see mediately. Nature has no memory. Anything holds true. We are fragments. (The Person, 153)
A language which has terminal points of exit from the text and into a central truth or reality is replaced by "the absent center [which] is the ghost of a king" (NM, 50).
The centre of the text is, ironically, Edward Almack's book A Bibliography of the King's Book or, Eikon Basilike, which seeks to legitimate the claims to royal authorship of another book, the original Eikon, which was produced on the day that King Charles I was beheaded. The book is a pro-royalist collection of essays, prayers and debates which was supposed to have been written by the king. The original recedes further and further back as the ghost of the dead king inspires the text's concern with "the vexed question of authorship" (NM, 50). The letters in Howe's text have an anthropomorphic existence, they swell and split and take on new properties, straight lines wave, and lines of text cut through the page and across other words. Words are overlapped and almost expunged, severed as the fragments have been severed from the original text . This is a poetics of damage, inflicted on letters and lines. The text's performativity, its prolixity and smooth-edged tonguing is torn away to reveal the bare bones jutting from the page's skin sheen.
At the heart of the sequence is a patricide-the poem is based on a single act of violence which transmutes into the dismembering of the master text-an aesthetic of incision and of bloody and unpleasant pieces:
Words are only frames. No comfortable conclusion. Letters are scrawls, turnabouts, astonishments, strokes, cuts, masks.
These poems are representations. These manuscripts should be understood as visual productions.
The physical act of copying is a mysterious sensuous expression.
Wrapped in the mirror of the word. (BM, 141)
Howe's poem drives in all directions, the page is multidimensional, readings eddy through the page like thought, without a linear path plottable. The page seems to hinge around the fractured and exploded words at the centre, "a pivot". But there is no single centre here. The search for the last word, the ultimate truth about authorship of the Eikon and indeed any text is disputed and fractured by the lack of centre and a clear sense of gravity. Images are treated as frail guides to the truth, unsigned, the site of dispute and calumny; "Similar (not identical) / unsigned portraits" are the norm in a text in which the status of the book-of language-as well as a king is on trial. With its heart ripped out, the bibliography's search for meanings becomes emblematic for the impossibility of discovering the true king beneath the page, the author the readers vainly tried to wrest from the propagandist pages and sought to preserve in their blood-soaked handkerchiefs. "His fate was compared to the Crucifixion and his trial to the trial of Jesus by the Romans. Handkerchiefs dipped in his blood were said to bring miracles" (NC, 47).
Words double and undo themselves in the poem, and authenticity is impossible to track through the cacophony of conflicting voices, disputing and challenging authorship. The doubling of words within a page which is anyway doubled on the other side of the page which contains the same text but turned upside down-as in the phrase "through populacy / through the populacy"-suggests the proliferation of meanings and possibilities presented by a mass reading public. The book is a royal icon; indeed, according to Howe, "a poem is an icon" (BM, 177), and the mass production of the king's book, despite Milton's attacks on the book in Eikonoklastes (the image smasher), creates an implosion of tiny pieces of that image into space. The singularity of the monarch or author is doubled with the beheading then disseminated in countless copies of his book to the "populacy". The relation between author and audience is therefore staged as a climactic enactment of decapitation of the king before the crowds. The text's public execution seeps into the execution of the poem by the poet writing.
In the "Eikon Basilike," the sections that are all vertically jagged are based around the violence of the execution of Charles I, the violence of history, the violence of that particular event, and also then the stage drama of it. It was a trial, but the scene of his execution was also a performance; he acted his own death. There's no way to express that in just words in ordinary fashion on the page. So I would try to match that chaos and violence visually with words. But a lot of what determines the arrangement is subconscious, in that I would start with the lines I wanted to use (which might change somewhat) and I would just arrange them on the page until they satisfied me. (Interview, 8)
Howe cuts a path through space to "write against the ghost", a presence which lingers in every fragment, "the idea of the dead generations weighing like a nightmare on the brain of the living - the idea of the ghost of the old revolution walking about is so right." (BM, 176)
The suppression of voice and of body which appears in Eikon manifests itself in Grace Lake's poetry as a punishment exacted on the body for the sins of the mind. The poet publishes and is devoured by a ravenous state-"a clever poetess would flee i am a potato / my clothes are made of potatoes" (OE, 202) -the poet produces language not food and is starved and silenced.
You have told me & in the telling have placed yourself above me as my keeper
this lacks voice positively, though your one word devastated me (OE, 197)
Ordered and subjugated, the poet is literally under the control of the speaker, trapped and silenced by 'one word'. The struggle for freedom to speak or a silence in which the poet's voice can be heard drives poetry-"this structural exercise which has now / become a gratuitous act" like "stars scratched onto a stone floor with heels of my shoes" (ibid). Expression and the impression of words onto the surface is an act of aggression and control. The poet is silenced, tongue twisted into silence, her body snapped and her throat throttled.
I have raced around myself like a maypole in the act of self strangulation
what a twisted girl you were you might have sighed before you popped
me into the oven having broken me over your knee like a long french loaf. (ibid)
The poet trapped and devoured by 'you' (the reader?) turns poacher and carnivore as she in turn enacts a ritual of cruelty and hunger "in a / chamber airy and unearthly light if a blue butterfly flew out I could nip its wing" in an echo of the wanton cruelty of "you" to "me" in the the first stanza. The mouth speaks and in its articulation devours and silences the other. The respite of the silence which the poet secures when she "in one bite feed[s] on butterfly's wing" is "silence" and freedom from the economy of desire and noise which frames the use of language in this poem. The articulation of the poem does not end in the silence of death but in "the lovely long life of limitless silence for nothing but wind, sun & bird song" (ibid.).
Beauty is sacrificed to violence to redeem art, but in the poems art creates the possibility of harmony between the desire for peace and the need to speak. Grace Lake's poetry is the poetry of a spendthrift, filled with diamonds, stars, flowers, colour and texture. There is a replenishment of language in these poems-the fleeting of intensely visual images through the poem-in a poetic of disconnection which is pitted against the connective agility of the reader's imagination. In the space between these bold linguistic strokes lies the possibility of escape from the momentum of the pendulum which at times swings dangerously close to the artist's rope. Lake brings to the poetry an artist's concern with the signifying properties of language and she loads the words with their optimum weight of intent, so that at times a line can seem hopelessly overloaded as an image spills over the sides onto the next line and into the margins. The margins here become a site of seepage, lines extending and breaking off in the sides of the page and the threat of harm which lurks in the sensibilty of these poems makes a poetry which dwells at the limits of expression and permission as it tangles and disentangles itself from the rules which threaten to silence the language completely. The status of expression and of its obverse impression is at risk of violent and coercive force, "a portrait I would not bear/ A portrait of throated wires through blood". While "war continues to char the air with shot speech, / Theses are buried or placed on parole for comparing the language of war & of peace". The peace so tentatively established at the end of Quarantine is almost drowned out here, "we cannot speak until spoken to", speech can only occur as an act of rupture and interruption, language on demand.
I read of women who have been found disregarding class, the heavy book
Bearing the sombre tone, we anyway tremble whilst we are broken down
Transgression of the 'rules' is watched for vulture-like, articulation and expression is a desire for power and is thus bound to the laws of power. Creativity becomes synonymous with persecution and risk. Beauty in art is inevitably wrong-footed and out of place it can never be in the right place at the right time-dislocation and transitions is its natural state; "the most beautiful poems speak to us / Yet we know they were written in the wrong country at the wrong time / When poets were forced to cross borders". Flight casts the poet into exile but it also catapults the poetry into motion; the expression thus remains transitional, the limits can never quite settle around the boundaries of the poem. The poet is thus pictured in transit, sailing, language an ocean which "resented them when uttered/ A mumbled ocean slapped to make an eternally recorded impression". Still the restless pen's inscription on the surface of the fluidity and flux of the sea's skin is 'resented' and the ocean metaphorically mumbles over the traces left by the poets. As the sea resents the poet's incursions so the poem resists the imposition of gridlines locked in place over the imaginative terrain where you must give reasons "for not reading paintings as though they were rule books". The need to continue to "progress through a sequence of tranquil passages" gives the reader the textual space which also permits reward. The poet's toil is hurtful, the sweeps weep "until they discerned that their tears had created ink" the text is not bleeding here, but weeping, setting the reading act afloat on a sea of tears and creating an aesthetic which allows a reality larger and outside of limits, "when we slapped the ocean the beach was too large for reality".
Bernadette Mayer's work can be read as an essay in rule breaking, the breathless iconoclast of Howe's poem is in control here. The coercive logic of grammar and language is smashed in her poetry and there is a pleasure in a reading which works as an exercise in non conformity, a liberating poetics of outrage committed on the law. The violence is deflected from the poet and onto the medium of language, the danger of entrapment and harm which lies in the previous two texts is met head on by riposte. The emotional life of language, investigating how a poem can "move" you, as well as its liberty is at stake here in the poem "Moving" (OE, 225). The movement of the reader through the text is a balance between lingering and compulsion. "Moving" is a study of things in motion invested with a resistance to becoming stationary. Nouns are repeated and confuted, 'the filling station' is a place the poet, like Lake, will "not therefore, following you, fill in this space or watch it" (OE, 197); even while stationary the poem or word is in motion, filling, flowing. Like Howe's writing the spatial arrangement of the page is at the core of the text, yet the auratic moment of each word is less pictorial and more dependent upon the counterpoise and balance of the words. Movement is essential in this text as a strategy of continual escape from expectation and textual destiny. Mayer's work owes some debts to Stein's "continuous present" and it seems impelled by the same fears of loss and even death in a still life.
In a poetry of movement the obvious analogy is with film, the "square and, lucky, & believable" sequence of shots, create a filmic sense of motion in which a still transmutes invisibly into motion. The pull of the words, dragging in all directions creates a record of experience which rests in the movement from one word to the next and the change in force and import which it acquires through its movement in time and its altered position in space. The camera pans in and out, up and down, creating a new relational logic of movement within a fixed scene: "a large account / camera account on cameras/ the camera's down / down far enough / the reverse // face the camera" (OE, 226).
The movement of the text is twinned with a slippage in meaning which occurred in Howe's text; filling a static form with movement the words themselves become directional imperatives, carrying the reader where her feet won't take her. The text is restive, the movement imperative, as the reader ploughs through the field of the book, "move // move will plow, did plow / did plow their turning did plow their turning plow / their turning plow did plow their turning plow share this". (227) In a brutal universe, in which "poems are being torn up by the roots", this collection offers the possiblity of freedom and indeed pleasure in rootlessness. Mayer's poem, The Garden, one of the last in the book, evokes a space in which
It would be good to be together
Both under and above the ground.
Susan Howe, The Birth-mark: unsettling the wilderness in American literary history, Wesleyan University Press
Susan Howe, The Nonconformist's Memorial, New Directions
Interview with Susan Howe conducted by Lynn Keller, Contemporary Literature, Spring 95, Vol 36, No 1.