The titles of the parts of the poem
are clear about the poetic’s foci, the various conditions for the largely vocal
performance of a poetic text (I
repeat: not the making, as in most poetics, but the formal remaking of one,
hence the insistence on transubstantiation). The five sections are:
‘Unvocalised (private)’, ‘Vocalised (private)’, Vocalised (public)’, ‘Voca-visu
(orientation)’, and ‘Fused Sonics (interaction)’. As such they formalise the states
or stages of the potential realisation of a text from silent reading to its
performance with musicians and others. It separates out phenomenologies of reading
(in its various senses) and of performance and collaboration.
As a poet dedicated to performance
one might suppose that Monk’s ‘Unvocalised (private)’ would see the lack of
performance or audience as negative. The condition of the ‘Lone Reader’ is
‘Incommunicado’, masked like the Lone Ranger hinted at, the words of the poem
‘Unutterings’. (Monk 2002: np) This leads to a ‘self-meeting’ inwardness
that is ‘cerebrally absolute’. More positively it is ‘Unpoliced’, of course, in
its privacy, though even that is balanced again the ambiguous detention of ‘The
body taken in to (care)’. But even though she describes a ‘Corpus in repose’
(which could equally refer to the corpus of the words silently read as to the
reading body) Monk is aware that ‘Eye-orbs fly-wink’. This ‘mini zigger-jit’ is recognised by cognitive
scientists as a ‘saccade’. Jane Stabler et
al. summarise the findings of considerable empirical research on reading:
Reading in a
strict cognitive psychology definition consists of a series of jumps forward,
rests and returns by the eyes: forward jumps are known as ‘saccades’, backward
ones are ‘regressions’ and the resting points are known as ‘fixations’. Readers
typically fixate … for about a quarter of a second and saccade forward about
eight character spaces with 10-15 per cent of fixations being regressions to earlier
points in the text. Difficult texts … produce longer fixations, more frequent
regressions and more cautious short saccades. (Stabler 2007: 205)
Poetic texts formally belong in
that last category, of course.[i] The
eye and brain are thus fully occupied by this unvocalised private reading,
while the body is prey to ‘Involuntary fidgets’ and drinking and smoking while
reading: ‘Tics. Itch-ay. Sips.
Drags./ Scra-T-cha~~cha~~~chaa.’ But
musicality keeps breaking through, as rhythmical scratching turns into a genre
of egregious dance music with its rhythmic name, and there is even ‘A semblance
of a toe-tap’ along to the poem as its musicality is spectrally registered if
not recognised. Even the purely visual elements of the text (‘-T-’, for example)
seem to be ready to burst into song. Chris Goode says that in a Monk performance
of this piece ‘the tildes outside language
were not pronounced’; they were ‘performed (though not emphatically) as hand
movements.’ (Goode 2007: 171) Similarly Goode feels this first section of Insubstantial Thoughts, with its many
visual glyphs, punctuation marks and signs, ‘could be said to extend the
liveness of performance back to the moment before
the poem begins to be written; in other words, it may matter how you
pronounce the punning graphic bundled within “dis♥embodied”, but it doesn’t
matter yet.’ (Goode 2007: 171) This is because it is, as yet, private in its
vocalisation (though there is some irony in Monk actually performing this piece
publicly!).
However much cognitive science may
be used to show the eye-dance of the reader, Monk’s reader is clearly also the
poet (as the poem is its own poetics). Indeed when she reminds us ‘Authorial
origins can be dubious’, she is not just reminding us about the intentional
fallacy (or its post-structuralist equivalent, the death of the author, or the
‘authoaxer’ in her wonderfully minatory neologism), she is again positing
poesis as a formally transformative process. The poet is a ‘Shape-/shafter’
rather than a shamanistic shape-shifter, the enjambment abruptly holding the
hyphenation in supreme tension as we consider ‘shape’ and ‘shafting’ as a more
violent – even sexually so – version of the shape-shifter’s transubstantiation.
[i] Stabler et al. raises quite a challenge to our
assumptions about close reading: ‘A full, slow, thoughtful reading of a poem
will produce all the characteristics of a reading that a psychologist would
recognise as typifying an impediment.’ (Stabler, et al. 2006: 205) Part of the answer, for students of form, or for
a poet like Monk, is that reading becomes performance.
