1 Polemic
In Ulli Freer’s long work of recent years, TM (of which the booklet Blvd.s is a part) the juxtaposition goes
beyond the streams and jumps of earlier pieces, and amounts to an indissoluble compound of diction and
discourses. The texts, often printed
large, centred on the page, have the thingness of monumental abstract
canvases. Norman Jope recently pleaded
that he could not devote the possible ‘levels of time / attention (often of a
crossword-solving nature) … in order to wrest some kind of personal effect’
from these enigmatic texts. Those of us
who have no desire to wrestle for
reductive summary tend to be impatient of such strategies. ‘Confronted with work as stunning as TM,’ remarks Adrian Clarke of Jope’s
disquiet, ‘what are the stiff little pricks of English small press poetry to
do?’ (See Responses 20 for the full
exchange.)
I believe TM (and its unpublished predecessor Rushlight) to be one of the most
vigorous works of the last ten years. I believe the danger of the ‘prickish’
response to it will be the hiding of this work in Freer’s bottom drawer while
he gets on with the next brilliant sequence.
Catch at least this Equipage
Blvd.s (available from Rod Mengham,
Jesus College, Cambridge). There is a
full Freer bibliography by Scott Thurston in Pages 239-259.
2 Analysis
Aspects of creative linkage in Blvd.s. One complete
section:
filling
with waste land residuum
opium
dialectic flushed up and down
in
lift shaft
on
gravity overdose
mulled
blood oozes dormant
from
this non-reflective river
whisper
policy
from
spindle flesh
(i) points towards toxic waste (waste land
residuum), drug addiction (opium … overdose), both chemical disintegrations in
a landscape of urban decay (up and down the lift shaft), against governmental
secrecy (whisper policy);
(ii) odd adjective-noun combinations: opium
dialectic, gravity overdose, mulled blood, spindle flesh - all of which involve
changes in bodily states (spindle = needle);
(iii) flushed suggests a cleansing (a word
which re-appears, as do so many, paradigmatically, throughout the book) which
seems uneasy in this waste, the poisoned blood, this dormant and murkily
non-reflective river. Far from flushing the text foregrounds, by opening
with: filling with waste. Spindle flesh suggests neither flushing nor
filling, but an emptied, emaciated body.
Oozes dormant: oxymoronic viscous poisoning;
(iv) Waste Land points the literary-minded to
Eliot’s allegorical river, but even his, 1922, ‘sweats oil and tar’;
(v) dialectic up and down like a lift in its
shaft ODing on gravity: vacillating, frantic, never achieving stability or
synthesis. Opium dialectic could be a
version of the addict’s algebra of need but also (I don’t write or in this context) an addiction to the
gravity of dialectic, Western thought-mechanics, so ironically distant from the
delirium of opiates. The fix of reason
may lead to the whisper policy (thought feebly or covertly enunciated and
slenderly embodied in) spindle flesh;
(vi) covert dealers playing out the same
oppositions in their toxic territories.
This semantic commentary
illuminates each facet of the crystal, as it were, without revealing the
gem. It is - to change metaphors - more
of a compound than a mixture: I cannot simply isolate lines to bring out the
juxtaposition. Parts of Blvd.s are openly sceptical of the kinds
of solution and paraphrase that Jope apparently seeks: ‘with a tv dinner take
part in war / as though truth is narratively kissed’. Even my notes above delimit the semantic
compounds, turn the text, with the Judas-like kiss or narrative, to univocal
simplicity.
Syntax, in the broadest
sense of the word, must be taken into consideration (more of this later) but so
must sound. An alliterative linkage
tenaciously declares that, away from the semantic level, these words belong
together: lift / shaft; mulled blood; whisper
policy; spindle flesh. There is even visual punning: blood oozes. It is partly this ancient device of
stress-alliteration (as witnessed in Freer’s performance style) which enables
the text to be both more disruptive than the arrangement commonly called
juxtaposition, and also less disruptive.
It has a smoothness that blends the links in with the materials. (Collage always seem to imply a torn quality,
a violence.) Notice how the alliterative
pairs overlap with the list of above of adjective-noun combinations to confirm
the doubleness.
3 Theories
In Deleuze and Guattari’s late What is Philosophy? they contrast the ‘mixtures’ of scientific
thought with the ‘compounds’ of percepts and affects that create the bloc of
sensation which they define as the
work of art. Percepts and affects are
not the perceptions and emotions of the lived experience so beloved of
empirical British literary culture. They
are what have been made of them: respectively, ‘the non-human landscapes of
nature’ and ‘the non-human beings of man’.
‘Man’ (sic) himself is only a compound, composed of percepts and
affects, in the context of a work of art, fictionalised.
‘Should the heart / be
redundant or floated / in juxtaposition’, asks Freer, less sure than Deleuze
and Guattari of the role of the human, aware also of a different point: ‘that
these juxtapositions / metronome ourselves’ seems at least an ambivalent
process. Metronomic juxtapositions may
serve to regiment us (as in the indeterminacies of advertising), as much as the
refrains (riornellos) that Deleuze and Guattari write of elsewhere, may help to
liberate us.
The anxiety, a constituative
anxiety, of ‘linguistically innovative poetry’ in this country has been clear
even before Gilbert Adair provided some of us with this cumbersome term: that
the discontinuities that form the surfaces of our work might prove metronomic
(like advertising) and not provide ‘new continuities’ (as Adair himself
demanded). Or, in my borrowed metaphor,
that the combinations might not be compounds but merely mixtures, that the
linkage is not creative but simply communicative (or non-communicative).
There is no litmus test for this. As Deleuze and Guattari put it: ‘The only law
of creation is that the compound must stand up on its own’. The lores of creation, as I would prefer to
say, are the differing means to constitute these compounds. Indeed, for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘standing
up’ can involve deformation as much as formation, and, if they offer 3 varieties of artistic compound, it is
not as a strict categorisation but as a description of tendencies they have
conceptualised.
The third of these
varieties, ‘the opening or splitting, hollowing out sensation’ seems to
approximate what I wish to call creative linkage in the work of Ulli Freer:
withdrawal, division, distension, (when
… two sensations draw apart, release themselves, but so as now to be brought
together by the light, the air, or the void that sinks between them or into
them, like a wedge that is at once so dense and so light that it extends in
every direction as the distance grows, ad forms a bloc that needs no support.
Deleuze and Guattari have sculpture as their model
here (in music they associate this third variety with theme rather than the simple air
or resonating motif), but I believe
that the lineation, syntax, and sound in Blvd.s
operate aurally as this dense-light wedge to compose a new bloc of sensation.
Andrew Duncan once developed
a theory of the pulse (a word which
appears throughout Blvd.s), partly in
relation to Freer’s textual and performance practice. ‘One should think of absolute stress,
dominating an empty space. You have to
generate enough silence for your stress peaks to be heard.’ (See Fragmente
4) This seems close to the
Deleuzoguattarian concept, and accurate to the experience of witnessing Freer
read. Also, in the text:
praxis
strong
as a pulse embedded in random
noise
key
in you spoke
The isolated ‘praxis’ holds its own against the
similarly spaced ‘noise’, and is the model of (poetic and/or political)
activity. The ambiguous last line offers
a turn on or a tuning in as much as a solution.
The key is not one for Jope to unlock the text. It doesn’t unlock; it speaks. We key in for
praxis.
In an update of the
influential ‘Minor Literature’ chapter of Kafka,
Deleuze and Guattari comment specifically on literature. ‘The writer uses words, but by creating a
syntax that makes them pass into sensation that makes the standard language
stammer, tremble, cry or even sing.’
This deforming passage into sensation is achived by undoing ‘the triple
organisation of perceptions, affections and opinions, in order to substitute a
monument composed of percepts, affects and blocs of sensation’. The means for this seem to be syntax but, as
Duncan observed not altogether uncritically of ‘pulse poetry’, ‘Syntax is
replaced by juxtaposition’. In Blvd.s juxtaposition is syntax.
4 Thematics
Blvd.
Such an odd abbreviation for an English eye (and its
even odder plural: Blvd.s). American or
French? A resonant word, politically:
the blvds of Paris were designed by Haussmann to minimise the opportunities for
insurrection, yet they have been the scenes of uprisings, the cobblestone
happiness of 1968, for example. Only one
section relates to the title directly:
baited sidewalks
blockades
ugh hugs tediously
wordless police
cordoned off
enkindle hope from
alleviation sneers
vaguely
dubbed to be free
elaborately stranded
dressed in spidery
gabardines
rumble pulses
This is a passage of
contrasts and of identity in difference, carried by the syntax of
juxtaposition, or of creative linkage.
The ‘ugh’ of a (cinematic) punch eye-rhymes with the ‘hugs’ that are
emotionally its opposite, however ‘tedious’.
‘Baited … blockades … cordoned off … stranded’ suggest alienation and
entrapment, rather than the object of the linkage, ‘alleviation’ and ‘hope’. ‘Wordless police’ are ‘dubbed’, both
speechless and spoken for, at once.
‘Dubbed to be free’ sounds suspiciously like somebody else is
rhetorically doing our talking for us, despite the subject matter. (Remember, Thatcher crusaded to empower us.) The ‘spidery gabardines’ (another unusual
adjective-noun combination) connote surveillance and traps, again by that
police (in ununiformed uniforms). The
Arachno-detectives. The concluding
‘rumble pulses’ combination is oxymoronic: a rumble is a constant, a pulse is
an interval, pulses a series of them.
Like the histories of the blvd.s of Paris (along which traffic both
rumbles and pulses) the text links external control with the desire for
liberation, the pulse of purposeful ‘praxis’ juxtaposed with purposeless
interference: ‘pulse embedded in random/noise’.
Pulses released from random
noise (refrains, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms) form monuments for the
future.
Pulses as links in a chain,
not of communication (the traditional opposite of noise) but of creation.
March 1995 Pages362-380, January 1996
