Poetics + Expanse & Filiation

Édouard Glissant. Poetics of Relation.

"Poetics" was a much more useful chapter than "Expanse & Filiation"-- though only the latter is on my list-- so I'll focus on the former. Glissant is positing that the way poetics work-- in French lit, particularly-- is Relational model, rather than, formerly

1) poetics of depth: think Baudelaire who "quashed romantic lyricism's claim that the poet was the introspective master of his jos or sorrows; and ...it was in his power to draw clear, plain lessons from this that would benefit everyone.

Rather, knowledge in the matter (of inner-depth-delving) is the goal, "first dispossessing it of the sovereign subject (requiring the knowledge-- the gaze, or the hearing-- of another) then surrendering it to this subject (speaking 'in' the structures of any expressed knowledge" (24)

2) poetics of language-in-itself: Mallarmé? "The poetics of language-in-itself strives toward a knowledge that by definition would only be exercised within the limits of a given language. It would renounce... the nostalgia for other languages-- or the infinite possible languages-- now germinating in every literature."

3) poetics of structure: creator of a text effaced to be revealed in the texture of her creation

"The neutral rather than harsh reality of the object; the tightening of the locus; the low regard for any thought claiming falsely to be final; the literal and the flat-- these are a few of the factors linked with the works of numerous contemporary French authors that provide access to them w/in the context of poetics" (26)

a poetics of relation is about influence, but not always neatly, traceably so; and "the consciousness of Relation [is] widespread, including both the collective and the individual. We 'know' that the other is within us and affects how we evolve as well as the bulk of our conceptions and the development of our sensibility... a sort of 'consciousness of consciousness' opens us up and turns each of us into a disconcerted actor in the poetics of Relation." (27)

Relation informs not simply what is relayed but also the relative and the related; movement for France "a culture that projected onto the world (with the aim of dominating it) and a language that was presented as universal (with the aim of providing legitimacy to the attempt at domination)" (28)

central also to this idea is M. Samir Amin's global theory of worldwide economy: Centers produce & control, Peripheries receive

says Glissant: "the poet's world leads from periphery to periphery; ...that is, it makes every periphery into a center; furthermore, it abolishes the very notion of center and periphery." (29)

so the "movements" or described "relation" Glissant is tracking through contemporary lit seem to be more rhizomatic (but I can't help myself, the theory makes so much sense to me that I can't understand how else it could work... but perhaps because [and Glissant mentions this too] it's because our poetics owe so much to accumulation and duration)

side note: Glissant mentions something about the peripheries all forming not an Absolute but a Totality, which I understand as-- not a monolithic ideal (see French colonization) but an inclusion of all components and byproducts of what G calls a métissage-- interbreeding-- but seems to be the same as Deleuze and Guatarri's rhizome idea)

to be completely reductionistic and simplistic, then, the ideas of filiation and expansion fit in thusly: filiation is linear, centered around the mythic idea of a 'root' or 'source' that can be traced to-- heritage, lineage, etc; but the expansion of Relation provides a more accurate model or description of what actually occurs (or presently occurs) in that, see above, not everything is so tidily traceable-- and the quest to trace origins in such a linear fashion often isn't productive

Muse Poem

there’s a skelton in my closet

Heaven knows what should cause it

bound out with ugly claws it

opens ugly jaws to posit

that chrysanthemums are owls

licking bony jagged jowls

leaning in the windy howls

stems that bend and snap

fall into her velvet lap

green and mossy where they fall

if they even fall at all

like the stringy gossip thrall

whispered lips into the wall

(through a crack inside the wall)

like the lovers’ clandestine call

but thinner, violent and small

bound up inside my closet

nightmare composite

with a murderous Electra wit

if I even could control it

but the lock won’t split

light still unlit

press my ear against the grit

the tongue inside spits dictation

the door muffling its rations

shallow recitation

syntax broke against negation

prison-cell plantation

musing visit’s exploitation

my skelton’s teeth a constellation

beauty heaves inside her breasts

lingers on her breath

sweet sigh c’est

plus puissant que la mort

unchanged in Death I’ll take a listen

mumble barely above a frisson

(she says nothing else rhymes with listen)

save her eyes which surely glisten

at the thought of what I’m making

from the thoughts of hers I’m taking

with her knees aching, mind breaking

I’m making her

art unfinished, she’s waiting.

Ghost Poem

Oh no, she’s a Gasper (mouth hung Open she’s seen a Ghost)

très noir still breathing in spiritus

vessel be filled un réceptacle (un récepteur?)

passive but lucid but passive

how frightening! c’mon, baby, have no fear

cause Baby, the Ghost is near and it’ll getcha getcha getcha

one way or the other, get got hot possession, posturing revelation

strummed like a fiddle and played like the Magician you know you are not

idle but passive, passed over no blood on your frame

fat on your lips Death, come quick I have flowers for You, my Cups are stacked in 7’s and 8’s there’s a motion, it’s leaving time wilting staticky

inside the car hot foggy bent over neck craned or laid out before

on the table un cadavre exquis life brought to

mouth to

in the beginning the Verb breathe resuscitated vivant respire

an afterword after words

Derek Beaulieu.

I suggest that concrete poetry can also be closely read in conjunction with Sianne Ngai’s idea of a poetics of disgust as a ‘inarticulate mark’ that

deliberately interferes with close reading, a practice based on the principle that what is at stake in every textual encounter is a hidden or buried object, a concept of symbolic meaning that can be discovered by the reader only if she or he reads ‘deeply’ enough.

Says DB:

Concrete poetry momentarily rejects the idea of the readerly reward for close reading, the idea of the ‘hidden or buried object,’ interferes with signification & momentarily interrupts the capitalist structure of language.

Gomringer argues that concrete poetry is an essentially modernist gesture that “realize[s] the idea of a universal poetry” & can “unite the view of the world expressed in the mother tongue with physical reality” (see 'inarticulate mark' I suppose)

As Marjorie Perloff says, though, this

call for what Eugen Gomringer has characterized as ‘reduced language’ for ‘poems [...] as easily understood as signs in airports & traffic signs,’ runs the risk of producing poems ‘poems’ that are airport & traffic signs.

The concrete poetry which I endorse here — & which stylistically is of most

influence on my own work — is a poetic without direct one-to-one signification. It is rhizomatic in composition, pointing both to & away from multiple shifting clouds of meanings & construction, where writing “has nothing to do with signifying [...] it has to do with surveying [&] mapping”... Instead of a single, arborescent (think of branches forming around a monolithic centre) historical & critical framework, rhizomatic writing is “a map not a tracing”; & as a map it has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back to the ‘same’. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involved an alleged ‘competence’. (Deleuze & Guattari)

If “Capitalism begins when you / open the Dictionary” (McCaffery “Lyric’s Larnyx”), then concrete poetry is a means of political & economic critique upon both reading & writing practice & the Capitalist means of exchange.

...Any movement to refuse or oppose Capitalism in writing only serves to reify it as theother, reinforcing its grip on representational language. The best we can strive for are momentary eruptions of non-meaning which are then co-opted back into representation by the very act of identification, pointing & naming. These brief eruptions

disengage with the idea of transmission of meaning through heavily codified & linear language in favour of ambiguity [...] disrupt[ing] the possibility of a transferal of Deleuze & Guattari’s notion of Capitalist ideology through text as regulated by grammar & syntax. (Christie)

The matter of the restricted economy shifts from an investment in communication through the visual mark (the grapheme) to an investment in the mark itself, the grapheme & the container of communication.

These texts are the documentation of the waste & excess produced through non- prescribed use of business machines. The documentation of this libidinal excess, of this waste, categorizes “the letter not as phoneme but as ink, & further insist[s] on that materiality” (McCaffery “Bill Bissett”)

What radical concrete presents to the reader is a record of the waste produced by the consumption (reading) of a text by a machine. If “[t]o read [...] is a labour of language. To read is to find meanings” (Barthes), then the consumption & expulsion of texts by machines such as photocopies & shredders also finds meanings where meanings are not expected, fracturing the text at the level of the seme. In a text where “everything signifies ceaselessly & several times, but without being delegated to a great final ensemble, to an ultimate structure” (Barthes) even waste becomes poetically charged.

The voicing of these texts [texts utilizing or produced by photocopier degeneration], like the texts themselves, is “pulled off the page even as [it] disintegrate[s], a double thrust of text into silence” (Nichol)

A poetic of disgust includes both the “the figure of the turn, or moment of exclusion [...t]he movement away from the object as if to shun it” & the “negative utterance” (Ngai)

I extend Ngai’s formulation of the “inarticulate sound” to print- based media as well as the ‘inarticulate mark’...Concrete poetry – the ‘inarticulate mark’ – treats language as “raw matter” without a reinforced referent as a means to briefly interrupt capitalist exchange-based signification byinsisting on the disappearance of the referent while at the same time refusing to defer to other terms. It won’t coagulate into a unitary meaning & it also won’t move; it can’t be displaced.

Concrete poetry as an ‘inarticulate mark’ is a formulation of a poetics of excess; an excess which is not one of desire, but instead one of revulsion & rejection. ...It actively attempts to interrupt language’s making of capitalist value through the dis-assembly & re-assembly of the mark & the grapheme. Concrete poetry as a momentarily non-signifying map is an always impossible system of inarticulation, caught in the double-bind of the creation of meaning.

Rule and Constraint

Marcel Bénabou, Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature.

(41) The classical playwright who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules is freer than the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant-- Queneau.

It is as if there were a hermetic boundary between two domains: the one wherein the observance of rules is a natural fact, and the one wherein the excess of rules is perceived as shameful artifice.

...to the extent that constraint goes beyond rules which seem natural only to those people who have barely questioned language, it forces the system out of its routine functioning, thereby compelling it to reveal its hidden resources.

Also: helpful graphs aligning the objects of linguistics (letter, phoneme, syllable, word, syntagm, sentence, paragraph) and literary operation (displacement, substitution, addition, subtraction, multiplication (repetition), division, deduction, contraction).

As I'm reading through the theory in the section I labeled "Procedural Poetry and Poetics of Spatiality," I keep nodding as I'm reading that we can't escape form-- and as someone who responds really really well to limits, this all makes sense-- and I'd like to try some of these ideas, not as exercises, but incorporated into my practice-- esp. from earlier, Dan Zimmerman's anagram thing, but also play around with "fixed forms" whatever that means. This makes me appreciate Laynie Browne's sonnets even more--

Predetermined Avant-Garde Forms

Mark Wallace, An Exaltation of Forms.

This article is pretty short, and highlights 5 poets who have come up with forms for their poems-- the poems, perhaps, have created the forms (in some cases). Says Wallace:

...The goal of poetry was not to control experience by distancing oneself from it through formal devices, but to engage experience more openly and directly. Rather than seeing form as something that existed prior to the poem, such poets believed that shifts and disruptions of the moment of composition should determine form.

...That is, predetermined self-created forms allow writers to reveal their skepticism about the notion that any single form, or even group of forms, can offer a final solution to the problem of form in poetry, while making it clear that they understand that language structures exist prior to the act of composition.

Writers profiled: Jackson Mac Low, with one of his forties (I've read some of these but don't really get what he's doing with the form-- it's being ordered, somehow, or ordering, but I don't quite get the significance), Joan Retallack's AID/I/SAPPEARANCE (which seemed pretty good as a conceptual idea, but after the first rotation is kind of dull), Forrest Gander (trying to make his poems look like rocks or something, I don't know), Dan Zimmerman (awesome, more on him in a sec), and Tina Darragh, who models her text after an Ames distorted room on a dictionary page-- getting at, I guess, the recognition that must accompany reading? Making the reader aware of their own [active] participation?

So Dan Zimmerman is working with anagrams-- he starts with 4 words, such as

SKIN

WINE

ALTO

NOON

then finds words in them and their letters and composes a poem. I enjoyed his poems-- they reminded me of Jackson Mac Low's vocabularies or Gathas -- but more "structured" in that they were put together to make a poem, not just written down in a way that resists linear reading.

no lie is not known,

so on, like a non-twin,

I, a known stone lion,

now link one to a sin.

a silken notion now,

no lotion, a new skin,

a tension low on ink,

no oil in a news knot.

I skin no town alone,

know no one in a list.

I ink a sonnet, no owl,

ink sown onto a line,

a sonnet Loki won in.

I like that this is both a commentary on language's innerlinkings and doing its own thing-- I think I might try this, as Zimmerman says people will, get bit by the bug.

Bunny Poem

Let me sing you

a waltz

Out of now-

here, out of my thoughts

There is a bunny

in this little poem.

hop hop

the bunny’s name is

Mortimer, but that’s

not a lone just a loan

name.

She is a bunny

Like everything else

Mortimer’s just a synonym

For naming her self.

She’s a good bunny

All honestly bones.

All honestly hearts too

All honesty

Foam. She’s not good for eating

She’s not good for much

Sometimes she eats carrots

When she has her lunch.

Do you believe her

Eating her hay

Did anyone ask her

If she’s got something to say

(she does)

Stranger, I had you for dinner

tasted like vellum

When Mortimer eats this

It won’t go away

When Mortimer pees this

It’ll never spray.