To make a ‘personal’ poetics
public, to share it with others, agonistically as position statement, or as a
provocation for the benefit of other poets, is to widen poetics’ effects. It
beomes an immediate social fact, and implies at least community of exchange or
even of risk. I wish to compare two contemporaneous American and British
attempts to write a formally innovative poetics. I evaluate each in terms of
the poetry it suggests and the commonalities between them, and I draw
conclusions about appropriate forms for the discourse of poetics.
Charles Bernstein’s text, Artifice of Absorption, arose out of the New Poetics Colloquium in Vancouver in 1985,
organised by the Kootenay School of Writing, at which an early version was
delivered. The text was published in 1986, as an edition of the magazine Paper Air, and collected in A Poetics, published by Harvard
University Press in 1992. Even before this prestigious eventual destination for
the piece, Charles Bernstein clearly had a community to which, and for which,
his poetics would have a use, beyond himself: the immediate context of the New
Poetics Colloquium to which he speaks the text, and from which he draws his
text, even dialogically incorporating others’ responses to his original talk
presentation; and the wider context of North American Language Poetry. The
public ‘talk’ is a communal mode of North American poetics, common amongst the
poetics documents of the Language Poets. Bob Perelman describes this wider
context well, emphasising the ‘talks on poetics that took place frequently ...
They were not only addressed to immediate participants: they were also
recorded. However contingent or trivial some of the remarks were, those tapes
were aimed toward entering and redefining literary history’. (Perelman: 14)
Bernstein himself is central to this ‘aim’, and to North American Language
Poetry groupings, as a major poet and as former editor of the influential L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics magazine. After two decades of consciously producing
poetics outside the academy, he headed the Poetics Program at the State
University of New York at Buffalo, which favours an ‘interdisciplinary approach
to literary, cultural and textual studies’, thus providing a rare institutional
centre for the discourse of poetics. (‘Poetics’ 1999: 1)
Allen
Fisher’s Necessary Business is an
essay on British poets J.H. Prynne, Eric Mottram and cris cheek, containing
taped (private) interviews with the latter two. Interestingly, he follows Eric
Mottram’s example in his employment of the taped interview to gather poetics, which
Mottram undertook chiefly
within the context of ‘Poetry Information’ evenings at the ICA and the Poetry Society during the 1970s, though the widespread use of
this reactive, private-public form is telling. So is the (predictable) refusal
of Fisher’s provocation to poetics by J.H. Prynne (who did, however, engage in
private correspondence with Fisher). The North American talk is an explicit
public form; the British tape interview has to be occasioned. Necessary Business was composed between
1980 and 1985, and published in the year of its completion, by Spanner, Fisher’s
own press. In edited form it was republished by Tsunami Press in 20XX. Unlike
Bernstein, Fisher has to virtually manufacture his community in his very
text-making. He speaks from ‘entrenchment’ within ‘a considerably small room’
(Fisher 1985: 163) rather than to a community. This text was written towards
the end of the post 1977 lull in alternative British poetries, particularly the
aftermath of the activities at the Poetry Society. [1] Fisher
is central both to what Mottram calls the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s
and 1970s and to the Linguistically Innovative Poetries that followed the 1977
‘entrenchment’. Indeed, this text could be regarded as the pivotal public poetics
between the two and is clearly a dividing line between Fisher’s two long
sequences Place (1971-1980) and Gravity as a consequence of shape
(1982-2006). Place exemplified, formally speaking, a method of
connecting and juxtaposing materials that almost became a privileged style of
the British Poetry Revival: the field of patterned energies, with nodes, or
notes, of facts disposed upon the page in a primarily spatial disposition (the
resultant white space being often performed as silence), a mode loosely derived
from the work of Charles Olson, and from a face-value reading of his poetics
essay ‘Projective Verse’ (1950), as well as nodding towards the ideogrammic
method of juxtaposition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos.
Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat (1975) and
Lee Harwood’s The Long Black Veil
(1970-2) – which both have the
added heteroglossic dimension of prose discourses – Barry
MacSweeney’s suppressed volume Black Torch (1977), or Eric Mottram’s Elegies (1981) are typical of this. The
Olsonian proselytising of Mottram himself, a crucially important figure for
Fisher in many ways, was an obvious candidate for the tri-partite speculations
of Necessary Business.
Despite
being the most considerable working out of a useable Linguistically Innovative
poetics, there has not been much explicit reference to, or use of, Fisher’s Necessary Business. While Bernstein’s
essay is often cited and referred to, Fisher has perhaps paid the price of
self-publication. This is ironic since the small presses and self-publication,
where the decisions of book-design follow poetic practice intimately, are two
of the themes of the essay, and something which unites his three chosen writers.
It is also a theme to which I return in relation to form.
Both
texts are formally innovative. Bernstein has written a poem (although it has
prose quotations and regular scholarly footnotes). One of Bernstein’s hallmarks is evident here:
his breaking down of the divisions between poetics and poetry. Likewise,
Fisher’s essay is not merely accompanied or appended by interviews; they
‘interrupt’ each other and the flow of the first half of the essay. There are
other interruptions, such as pages printed in different colours and one page is
printed upside down. (Fisher 1985: 183) Fisher’s poetics, like his creative
work, is process-showing, deliberately foregrounding its poetics as formal
activity; his concern with jumps and multi-voiced presentation, and various
spacetimes, is encoded in the poetics.
The
first, short, section of Bernstein’s Artifice
of Absorption is entitled ‘Meaning and Artifice’. The persistent use of the
word ‘artifice’ alerts us to its critique of Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s Poetic Artifice: A Theory of
Twentieth Century Poetry (1978). Before 1986 it is probable that
Forrest-Thomson’s main readers were British. (It is odd that Allen Fisher, at
this stage, seems not to have been one of them, but her initial influence was
largely within the ‘Cambridge’
school.) Poetic Artifice – part
theory, part poetics, as I suggest in Chapter 4 – explores the techniques and
devices that make poetry a unique and autonomous discourse. The betrayal of
poetry’s specificity she calls ‘Bad Naturalisation’, which she defines as an
explanatory ‘attempt to reduce the strangeness of poetic language and poetic
organisation by making it intelligible, by translating it into a statement
about the non-verbal world, by making the Artifice appear natural’
(Forrest-Thomson: p xi). This is the process with which many readers of poems
seem content, to talk away the poetry and its formal facticity, even oddness,
in prose paraphrase. What Forrest-Thomson demands is a method of delaying this
(inevitable) process long enough for a poem’s formal features to be fully
registered as an integral part of the poem’s total effect, not as a mere
vehicle or supplement.
Good
naturalisation dwells on the non-meaningful levels of poetic language, such as
phonetic and prosodic patterning and spatial organisation, and tries to state
their relationship to other levels of organisation rather than set them aside
in an attempt to produce a statement about the world. (Forrest-Thomson: xi)
Bernstein baulks at the ‘formalism’
of her argument, revising it so that all levels of poetry may be
regarded as meaningful, so that artifice becomes meaning, ‘even in the face of/
the difficulty of articulating just what this/ meaning is’ as he puts it.
(Bernstein:18). As Alison Mark, in her pioneering study of Forrest-Thomson, Veronica
Forrest-Thomson and Language Poetry, points out: ‘Forrest-Thomson’s move,
which Bernstein takes a stage further by refusing to designate any aspect of
language as non-meaningful, seeks to shift the emphasis in reading – and indeed
writing – poetry from the primacy of
meaning, to refute the view of meaning as an extractable “essence” of the
poem.’ (Mark 2001: 113) Bernstein can also agree with Forrest-Thomson,
favourably quoting her quotation from Wittgenstein, one which can be used to
support his revisions of her theory to demonstrate that all levels of artifice,
all formal features, are meaningful in a revitalised way: ‘Do not forget that a
poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in
the language game of giving information’. (Forrest-Thomson: x; Bernstein: 14)
This is precisely the critical stance of part two of this study, and
Forrest-Thomson’s thought, and Bernstein’s revision of it, resound not just as
a form of poetics but as a poetics of form.
If a poem is not used in the informational language game,
then what is this Bernstein ‘poem’ doing? He seems to be almost repeating an
explanatory exercise in Forrest-Thomson’s book where lineated prose posing as a
poem is ironised purely by the addition of line breaks to demonstrate ‘that the
differences between the prose and verse passage are the result of a change in
conventional expectations, modes of attention, and interpretative strategies’.
(Forrest-Thomson 1978: 22) Rather than summarise Bernstein’s ‘argument’ I wish to
draw attention to the forms of his poetics, the way in which, in the course of
an argument which asks us to attend to matters of artifice and its
construction, the text’s own artifice – which is its meaning, in Bernstein’s
terms – must be seen as crucial. Because it is a poem (the introduction to A Poetics warns us it is a ‘temptation
to read the long essay-in-verse ... as prose’ (Bernstein: 3; my italics), one I
shall resist for a while by reading it as poetic discourse). Artifice of
Absorption is not free of the implications of the argument which it
absorbs. In the course of an argument which relies heavily upon the notion of
the construction of a poem and its reading being governed by varieties of
absorption, the way the text absorbs the creative and critical texts of others
must be problematic, as Forrest-Thomson’s exercise suggests. Even a single
line-break changes a prose quotation’s meaning in a reader’s experience. The
conventions of reading a poem are not identical to those of essay reading. How
do we read the following assertion in the poem, whose obviousness is undercut
by the enactment of the irony of its presentation as a poem by the fundamental
use of the line break?
The obvious problem is that the poem said in any
other way is not the poem. (Bernstein: 16)
We have to ‘say’ this line with
its line break functioning in our reading, otherwise we commit the heresy of
paraphrase, and it has the affrontery to both warn us and demonstrate the fact.
With the line break in any other place, this is ‘not the poem’. If this
sentence is not being used in the language game of giving information, or is
only partly, or parodically, doing that, in what other language game is it
being used? The answer lies partly in Bernstein’s description of the piece as a
‘pataphysical extravaganza/ of accumulating works & fields’. (Bernstein:
20) Because it enacts, even undermines, its own poetics (its content), this
essay poem on poetics formally subverts its own status as metanarrative, while
absorbing the language of metanarrativity. The metapoetics I am sketching out
turns, as language game, into patapoetics. To adapt one of Jarry’s definitions
of pataphysics, it will be the ‘science of imaginary solutions’ (Jarry: 13),
purely extravagant, as recognised by an early commentator on the poem,
Barbiero, when he defined the text as a ‘poetics of a paradox ... a systematic
paradox that is built into and simultaneously comments on the very system of
writing and reading’. (Barbiero: 117)
This is not to say that the main, second, part of Artifice and Absorption, has no
argument, but that it might not operate in the way in which it seems to, formally
speaking. It appears to offer a binary opposition between the two terms of this
section’s title: ‘Absorption and Impermeability’. This has been called into
being to replace the simple-minded binary between text-as-transparency (of a
supposedly non-artificial mainstream) and text-as-opacity (of an
anti-conventional avant-garde), that obfuscated both North American and British
formulations of the fields of poetic production. As Bernstein reminds us:
‘transparency is/ but one technique for producing absorptive works.’
(Bernstein: 26) This optical metaphor is replaced by a tactile and fluid one in
Bernstein’s text, one that seems to be useful both for describing the
construction of a text and as a way of describing the reading of one. From a
constructivist point of view the text might, on one hand, absorb its range of
materials as a satisfying content; from a reader’s point of view, a text has
degrees of absorption, allowing the reader access and continuing interest. Its
opposite, impermeability, acts to resist the intrusion of untransformed
materials at the level of construction and with devices which resist comforting
or confirmatory reading . ‘Poetry has as its outer limit, impermeability/ &
as its inner limit, absorption’, comments Bernstein, slipping here into parody
of Zukofsky, and suggesting a realignment of definitions from the Objectivists’
obsession with music and speech. (Bernstein 1992: 66) It is all a question of
readability.
The proliferation of definitions that Bernstein allows
himself results in this extraordinary list:
By absorption
I mean engrossing, engulfing
completely,
engaging, arresting attention, reverie,
attention
intensification, rhapsodic, spellbinding,
mesmerizing,
hypnotic, total, riveting,
enthralling:
belief, conviction, silence.
Impermeability
suggests
artifice, boredom,
exaggeration,
attention scattering, distraction,
digression,
interruptive, transgressive,
undecorous,
anticonventional, unintegrated, fractured,
fragmented,
fanciful, ornately stylized, rococo,
baroque,
structural, mannered, fanciful, ironic,
iconic,
schtick, camp, diffuse, decorative,
repellent,
incohate, programmatic, diadactic,
theatrical,
background muzak, amusing: skepticism,
doubt,
noise, resistance. (Bernstein: 29-30)
As Bob Perelman remarks, ‘These
definitions, especially the second, work against any sense of definitiveness.’
(Perelman: 86) In fact the passive and static ‘impermeability’ is most often
substituted in the text by the more re-active term ‘Anti-Absorption’. Impermeability is a state; anti-Absorption is
a strategy. As a binary, it operates rather oddly, as a series of resistances,
augmentations, and reversals of the concept Absorption. Rather like Bataille’s
economies of the general and restricted (which are mentioned with relation to
Steve McCaffery’s theorising) they operate within one another, not as
alternatives, but as tendencies.
Bernstein provides a whistle-stop tour of the major works
and practitioners of Language Poetry writing, and the essay seems useful for
its apparent encyclopaedic scope, except that it is itself ‘unintegrated’ and
‘diffuse’ if it is read in the expectation of scholarly absorption. We read
example after example. However, I want to pass over this informational overload
and stay close to the texture of Bernstein’s arguments and also initially
present a familiar example to show how his two major terms collapse into one
another. The famous or infamous boredom and repetition of a text or script by
Samuel Beckett which consists of the most apparently repellent of devices for
readerly attention, can actively become the principle of a reader’s or audience’s
absorption in the material: the hypnotic fascination of the strange stasis of
language, character and action. A work which Bernstein describes as solely
anti-absorptive, McCaffery’s Panopticon,
seems open to the irony, and perhaps the criticism, that its readers might be
chiefly ones addicted to its difficulties of text, image, over-print,
over-determination, and obvious visual processing, thus making it an object for
eventual (critical) absorption. Whereas Beckett succeeds, there is the suggestion
that McCaffery’s work is at the outer limit of impermeability, and is only
capable of a wilful and critically armed recuperation. The absorption by
boredom is a major tenet of the poetics of conceptual writing that emerged in
the wake of, and in reaction to, Language Poetry. But this contemporary stance
may not be singularly satisfying for Bernstein, since he clearly favours a
creative doubleness and complexity that produces hybrid effects, more
paradoxical interinanimations of his opposites, for which novel names exist in Artifice
of Absorption: hyper-, trans-, neo- and dis- Absorption. The extravaganza
and excess of the text is felt here as the reader passes from example to
example without time to ‘absorb’ the flow of the ‘argument’. This is because it
is more associational than logical, which would befit its
pseudo-conventionality as a poem, and also Bernstein’s pataphysical plea for ‘a
criticism intoxicated with its own metamorphicity’. (Bernstein: 16) This toxic
anti-absorption results in, or from, a rapid conceptual proliferation, using
the works of others as its ingredients and results in the mental equivalent of
indigestion. The reader cannot absorb the argument, cannot soak up the
distinctions as they spill. Its solutions are imaginary, in Jarry’s sense, in
that they are experimental.
The main use of the favoured ‘intersection/ of
absorption and impermeability’ (86) is less the awareness of materiality or the
intrusion
of words into the visible
that marks
writing’s own absorption into the world (Bernstein: 87)
with which Bernstein ends, or
indeed with its not-easily absorbed catalogue of North American Language Poetry
devicehood, but the ‘poetic thinking that results’ for his own practice.
(Bernstein:166) He is not just describing what Artifice of Absorption
dubs ‘dysraphic’ poetry – the adjective means a fusion of elements that do not
properly belong together – but is laying the grounds for a poem of his own such
as ‘Dysraphism’ which enacts the fused stitching of the absorptive and Anti-absorptive
implied by that title. He summarises his position, in a partial return to
Forrest-Thomson’s terms:
There is ... a considerable history
of using antiabsorptive techniques
(nontransparent or nonnaturalizing elements)
(artifice)
for absorptive
ends. This is an approach
I find myself peculiarly
attracted to, & which reflects my
ambivolence
(as in wanting multiple things)
about absorption & its converses. (Bernstein: 52)
Two recognisable reversals in
Bernstein’s poem ‘Dysraphism’, one effectively transforming (if not deforming)
Creeley’s famous formulation of Projectivist Verse, and another drawn from
demotic conversation, enacts ‘absorption and its converses’ quite explicitly,
even clumsily:
Extension is never more than a form of content. ‘I
know how you feel Joe. Nobody likes to admit
his girl is that smart.’ ‘I feel how you know,
Joe, like nobody to smart that girl is his admit.’
(Messerli:794)
As he states in Artifice and Absorption:
In my poems, I
frequently use opaque & nontranslatabtle
elements, digressions &
interruptions ...
This can be seen in
‘Dysraphism’ in the multiple interruptions, in its joy and delight in shock,
and in its use of abrupt elision:
Joy
when jogged. Delight in
forefright. Brushstrokes
on the canals of the ... (Messerli:793)
Such are used
as part of a technological
arsenal to create a more powerful
(‘souped-up’)
absorption than possible with traditional,
& blander, absorptive techniques. (Bernstein: 52-53)
Bernstein acknowledges:
This is a
precarious road because insofar
as the poem seems
overtly self-conscious...
it may produce
self-consciousness in the reader
destroying his or her absorption by theatricalizing
or conceptualizing the text ... (Bernstein:53)
A self-conscious formal construction
can lead to a self-conscious reading process which alienates the reader (but
which really is a self-alienation). Perhaps some readers feel uneasy being
teased with a performance of belief, one
that attracts and repels the reader simultaneously, as here in a passage that
parodies those manifold attempts to define the difference between prose and
poetry, though perhaps Bernstein offers a unique definition of Language Poetry:
Poem, chrome.....
That is, in prose you start with the world
and find the words to match; in poetry you start
with the words and find the world in them.’ (Bernstein:797)
Whatever he or she thinks of
this distinction, the reader cannot ignore the juxtapositions which attempt the
continuous ‘focusing/unfocusing’ shifts Bernstein risks between absorption and
its opposites, the movement of which ‘ultimately becomes a metric weight’
(Bernstein:78) a notion to which we shall return in terms of the frequency of
such shifts. Artifice of Absorption is ultimately more of a gestural
poetics than a prepositional one. Like any poem, in Forrest-Thomson’s theory,
poetics must be absorbed slowly, allowing the retarded processes of good
naturalisation to unfold its artifice.
By
contrast, Allen Fisher’s Necessary
Business is a prose essay, which arises experimentally out of a detailed
reading of three books, physically present on Fisher’s desk, by three British
poets: J.H. Prynne’s Down where changed
(1979), Eric Mottram’s 1980 Mediate
(1980), and cris cheek’s A Present
(1980). Whereas Prynne has been characterised as the chief poet of a supposed ‘Cambridge’ poetry, Mottram, as a poet, theorist, and
collector of poetics, has been thought of as the principal figure in a
supposedly complementary London
poetry. However, their shared attachment
to the poetry and poetics of Charles Olson points to commonalities, even though
Prynne took Olsonian concerns with knowledge towards the creation of an
increasingly impacted textual density, while Mottram took the use of
‘resources’ and quotation in the poetic text towards open field presentation
and collage. Indeed these characteristics might be thought of as determining
factors of the two respective poetries. [2]
Cris cheek may be considered a London poet, as could Allen Fisher
himself, but is more accurately described as coming from the experimental and
performance context of Bob Cobbing and his Writers Forum workshops of the
1970s; cheek was also early associated with the American Language Poets.
Significantly, he is a younger poet than Fisher and was probably selected as an
example of the current state of cutting edge experimental and performance poetry.
In short, the three represent a considerable range of poetry across the British
Poetry Revival, their books simultaneous snapshots of that activity. The
purpose of the contextualising interviews between which the main argument is
collaged, seems to be to discover points of comparison and contrast. However,
as in the case of Bernstein, I wish to dwell primarily upon the essay’s formal
function as poetics.
Fisher operates with a binary opposition which underpins
his argument, although it is less subject to collapse or breakdown, less
pataphysical, than Bernstein’s. He contrasts an ‘impertinent’ poetry which he
characterises, in terms reminiscent of Adorno’s attacks upon conservative art,
as that which merely affirms the values of existing society, and shows a
flattering mirror to its audience which is ultimately an ideological mirage.
Its corrective opposite is the poetry of ‘the new pertinence’. (Fisher: 163)
Like Bernstein he separates a consideration of the constructivist aspects of
the text for the writer from that of the role of the reader. He borrows the
term ‘pertinence’ from Ricoeur’s characterisation of the fresh significatory
effects of ‘live’, as opposed to ‘dead’, metaphor. Such poetry similarly,
though not necessarily through metaphorical usage, creates fresh
significations, not in itself, but when engaged by an active reader. Fisher
acknowledges several reader response theorists such as Fish, Iser and Jauss,
but he avoids the hypostacisation of an ideal reader. Not having to provide an
encompassing theory of reading has its advantages from the point of view of
poetics: he remains faithful to acts of reading as productivities of particular
readers grounded in historical and social processes. Such engagement can be
seen as assisting in the subversion of the dominant and impertinent social
values. A text is judged on its ability to escape the writer and invigorate the
reader’s continuous engagement, an engagement that is the site of a utopianism.
His or her very participation in text-realisation is the ‘necessary business’
of Fisher’s title, a productive use of the strictly rationed leisure time
granted under capitalism’s providence. While not denying the importance of
text-construction, or its necessity for the writer, Fisher’s emphasis is on
this readerly engagement.
Fisher does not articulate these issues in terms he might
have derived from North American Language Poetry; he prefers to found his own
poetics upon Mukarovský’s concept of the Aesthetic Function, as outlined in the
Prague School linguist’s 1936 book-length essay
Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value as
Social Facts. This post-formalist work attempts to delineate the aesthetic,
while managing to make the aesthetic a socio-historical process, a subsisting
though changeable feature among the variations of fashion or change. ‘Aesthetic
function,’ writes Mukarovský, ‘is one of the most important agencies in human
affairs, and every object can manifest it.’ (Mukarovský: 95) This flexible
concept is best thought of in relation to the function of objects. The
beautiful clock on the mantle-piece that stops working one day can thenceforth
only have an aesthetic function, becomes essentially art, where once it had a
use function as well. (It is almost an answer to Elvis Costello’s haunting aestheticist
chorus: ‘What shall we do with all this useless beauty?’) Yet as Fisher argues,
echoing Mukarovský, in art the aesthetic is the dominant function (though it
may have other, less constitutive, functions). Political art whose function is
predominantly political is not (paradoxically) art at all, because, in
Mukarovský’s words, ‘the aesthetic function is facultative and subordinate’ to
the propagandist or informational functions. (Mukarovský: 87) Mukarovský’s
essay concurs with Forrest-Thomson’s and Bernstein’s answers to Wittgenstein’s
question about what kind of ‘information’ is contained within the aesthetic
object, when he states, ‘The aesthetic function, by dominating over the
informational function, has changed the very nature of the information.’
(Mukarovský: 72) The importance of
Mukarovský’s essay, which is used quite selectively in Fisher’s poetics, lies
in its preservation of the arena of the aesthetic as the centre of formal
experimentation. It is a bulwark against theories that collapse the distinction
between art and life (such as that of the Fluxus movement, a British offshoot
of which Fisher once had been aligned to). Life can only be admitted to an
art-work as the necessary ‘challenge which can be met by overcoming the
contradictions encountered during the complex process of perceiving and
evaluating the work’ (Mukarovský: 85), the necessity of the engagement of an
active readership. Fisher concludes: ‘Whatever else I may get from a work of
art, because its dominant function is aesthetic it requires my engagement to create
it, to produce it. The significance I most warmly value derives from this
production, its affirmation of life.’ (Fisher: 164-65) The various entries of
the various readers into the actual text is its affirmative moment. However
imaginary the community Fisher was addressing in the early 1980s, he has
avoided the illusion of the ideal reader, which could function only as a principle of reading.
One example of an active reader is Fisher himself, in his
approaches to Prynne, Mottram and cheek in the text of Necessary Business. The reading of one each of their poetic texts
is the central activity of Fisher’s essay. Thus, like Bernstein, he mimes his
poetics’ essential point in the process-showing of his poetics presentation.
His extrapolations of the poetics of textual construction derive from his
‘readings’, which I shall summarise, since they are not the focus of this
chapter. Transformative power for the reader derives from a demanding and also
unpredictable poetry that does not predicate society as it is. It is openly
habit-breaking; indeed, poetry breaks its own rules and paradigms to create
discontinuities and leaps. But, just like Bernstein’s consideration of
McCaffery’s Panopticon, Fisher finds
an instructive moment of criticism, or of formal outer limit, in one of his
examples. His reservations about the ‘float perceptions’ of cris cheek’s A Present concern its dangerous
presentation of homogenous disorder (‘noise’) which ironically has the
impertinent effect of stability. (Fisher: 184) ‘His risk is the balance of
noise and music and to hell with the balance.’ (Fisher: 231)
More positively, Fisher’s three poets create structures
that ‘deconstruct consistent and chreodic memory’, that is memory that is
constructed, biologically, as a ‘necessary path’ during the ‘necessary
business’ of readerly engagement. (Fisher: 196)
The term ‘chreod’ derives from Waddington, whose ‘biological
terminology’, Fisher tells us, emphasises ‘“necessary path”, whose charge is
canalised once started in a certain direction’. (Fisher: 196) Through
techniques of textual rupture and formal jumps, these texts ‘intuitively invent
new memories’; reading is seen as a revolutionary act to alter consciousness
along its new canals. (Fisher: 211) Memory becomes a reinvigorated invention of perception (which will, in
its turn, transform consciousness). The techniques involve the reader in the
differences that are created, of different spacetimes of, and in, the text,
along with a resultant polyphony of voices, or ‘plurivocity’ as Fisher puts it.
(Fisher: 237) Both of these things disturb
the impertinent desire for consistency or a single referent in a discourse. As
with Bernstein, and as one would expect of poets who articulate their poetics
publicly, the world Fisher constructs for his reader in his own poetry is
clearly modelled upon his poetics. His poetics and his incidental definitions
of poetics as a discourse) have a clear focus: ‘Poetics encompasses all fields
of each artistic endeavour, incidentally and substantially, held by ideas of
aesthetics and how consciousness is constituted’. (Fisher 1999: 115) Aesthetic
judgements are fundamental to poetics, but ‘poetics,’ he goes on to suggest,
‘spins across the epistemological boundaries of scale and energy,’ and he draws
nearer to his own concerns as he elaborates: ‘A poet’s attitude to and
understanding of quantum field theory will affect that poet’s experience of
gravity, drawing, and reading’ – and, of course, his or her poetic writing, as
we have seen both in Necessary Business
and Gravity as a consequence of shape.
(Fisher 1999: 115) Fisher calls the ordering principle of these ‘attitudes’ the
‘Complexity Manifold’, which Scott Thurston summarises as ‘an all-encompassing
horizon of experience’. (Thurston 2002b: 28) It is this synthesising centre
that ‘gathers the aesthetics at all levels and all functions of a poet’s
production.’ (Fisher 1999: 115) ‘Boogie Break’, one of the early poems from his
long project Gravity as a consequence of
shape which was ‘permitted’ by the poetics of Necessary Business, enacts just such a catastrophic complexity in
fragmented narrative mode.[3]
Part one reads:
Took
the walkover to the park to change transport
in a
squeezed State.
The
noise first expressed as random in phase
fluctuated
and obscured gravity. It
shifted
the discourse into a gap where
measurement
relied on quantum non-demolition.
The
Mathematician took notes on a microchip blackboard,
obscured
from a saxophone Busker by a bend
in the
wall. Out of a desire to minimise uncertainty,
enhanced
by the squeeze,
a
massive irruption of bright colour
in
soft, contrasted hues
gave a
volume, tore the Busker from the wall
and
suspended her,
cut her
image surfaces into prism clashed edges into
the
non-trivial significance of her libidinal investment.
Her
energy glowed.
In this
phase-sensitive, nonlinear interaction
the
Mathematician was provided with heightened
signal-to-noise
rations. It presented the discourse
with
date bus technology to reach an escalator
with
many user sites, but no repeaters.
As the
Mathematician noted,
No
classical analogue exists
for
this State without ideologemes.
Such
technical language exhaust-fumed
reflection,
left my pinched head in
a
juxtaposition of buzzes and roars.
I biked
back to the High Road to witness
where
they reread the ice. (Fisher 2004: 74)
‘Collage’ is an inadequate term
to describe this inventive, self-interfering form, and I have elsewhere used
the term ‘creative linkage’ to approximate its operations of disjoining as well
as linking, linking while it maintains discontinuity.[4]3
Words like ‘squeeze’, ‘state’, ‘demolition’, ‘gravity’, ‘bus’, ‘escalator’, and
‘rations’ (where one might expect ‘ratio’), are themselves multiple words in a
plurivocal narrative. The resultant textual world is complex and fragmentary,
so that even the self, like that of the Busker, is miraculously dispersed
without loss; indeed, it glows with energy. ‘Classical analogues’ are eschewed
in favour of quantum logics and contradictory actions, however painful for the
narrator. No wonder ‘technical language exhaust-fumed/ reflection’; it is only
the quiddity of ‘I biked to the High Road’ that anchors the reader to the
world. To return to his central term, absorption, this is what Bernstein
describes when he writes:
A poem can absorb contradictory logics,
multiple tonalities, polyrhythms. At the
same time, impermeable materials – or moments –
are crucial musical resources for a poem…
(Bernstein: 22)
Jon Clay, picking up on the
term ‘creative linkage’ says: ‘Creative linkage across incommensurable
sensations … is a result of the intensity of the irrational cut itself, an
intensity that is in fact produced by the incommensurability of the sensations
that it both links and separates.’ (Clay 2010: 171) Or as another of Fisher’s
poems says, absorbing his poetics into his discourse, and again suggesting the
mental exhaustion of the effort:
The quantum leap
between some lines
so wide
it hurts. (Fisher 2004 :6-7)
In Fisher’s work, as often as
not, this absorption operates ‘dysraphically’, as Bernstein would say,
to create a hyperabsorptive textual
gravity in which the different originary elements
are no longer isolable. (Bernstein: 23)
This is
precisely the effect of the disruptive flow of many poems in the three
collecting volumes of Gravity as a consequence of shape and,
as Bernstein hints also, part of their poetics is to think of textual
‘cleavage’ as both the division and holding together of materials in the very
metaphor of Fisher’s title: gravity. Without this textual energy or dynamic,
everything flies apart, the linkage is no longer creative. ‘It/ shifted the
discourse into a gap where/measurement relied on quantum non-demolition.’ The
speed of the shifts as Bernstein says, ‘becomes a metric/ weight’ (Bernstein :
78) or can create a rhythm of gaps between the juxtaposed materials.
There are relative degrees
or valencies of impermeability that can be angled
against one another to create
interlinear or interphrasal ‘gaps’ that act
like intervals in musical composition. (Bernstein: 22)
Fisher concurs: he outlines a
‘quantum-jump methodology’ in Mottram’s technique of breaking syntax to produce
rhythm in ‘phrasic positioning’ in a work and, in Prynne, of ‘the aesthetic of
his selection tensioned in collisions of the same set (or line)’ in Down where changed. (Fisher: 225)
Bernstein speaks of being jogged; Fisher speaks of jumps. Both speak of rhythm
in terms beyond conventional metrics, as an effect of juxtaposition, an effect
these poets, in different ways, use as a central dynamic of their writing. Both
poets provide clearer ways of thinking about creative linkage and about how
indeterminacies and discontinuities operate in both text-construction and
text-reception in their own work and in others. That both agree on a general
poetics points to particular commonalities between the practice of North
American and British poets during the mid-1980s and since. It also demonstrates
the valuable role poetics has played in the poetic thinking of each, despite
the differences in currency between the two documents examined.
There
is one further lesson to be derived from this excursion in comparative
metapoetics, one fundamental to the whole project of poetics’ claim to offer
‘permissions to continue’. (DuPlessis: 156) There is a danger in poetics, one
which is hinted at in Bernstein’s own reference to Jerome J. MacGann’s The Romantic Ideology and one that I touch on it my definitions
of poetics in the first appendix to Chapter 1. MacGann’s concept of the
‘ideological imaginary’ involves ‘an uncritical absorption in
Romanticism’s own self-presentations’.(MacGann: 1) One need think no further
than the privileging of imagination over fancy, the organic over the
mechanical, terms of Coleridge’s which still guide much critical thinking.
Bernstein articulates the congruence between MacGann’s thinking and his own,
typified by their dual use of the term ‘absorption’:
The
uncritical absorption of a poem of William
Wordsworth, for example, entails an absorption
of Romantic ideology that precludes an historically
informed reading of the poem. In order for a
sociohistorical reading to be possible, absorption
of the poem’s own ideological imaginary must be
blocked... (Bernstein: 21)
Is there not a analogous danger
in that poetics texts such as Bernstein’s and Fisher’s could present
their own ‘ideological imaginary’, which could operate to pre-judge readings,
and offer preferred textual strategies to readers, to stabilise the jolts and
bridge the gaps, to close down the text for readings and readers of the future,
even while their intention is to open up text making for construction and
readers?
Bernstein
and Fisher both attempt to counter this by formal invention and readerly
intervention. Their public documents, in different ways, internalise their
poetics in their meanings and artifice, particularly in their dialogic aspects.
They attempt to stop poetics becoming absorbed by (or as) the metalanguage of
literary theory or criticism, which, according to MacGann, ‘too often likes to
transform the critical illusions of poetry into the worshipped truths of
culture’. (MaGann: 135) Poetics asserts its own claims as a discourse, as a
language game with its own players and rules, commitments and ethos. As
Bernstein says: ‘Poetics don’t explain; they address and redress’ (Bernstein:
160). Pataphysics and creative linkage, in the cases of Bernstein and Fisher,
respectively, cannot avoid absorption into critical discussion – as here – but
will resist absorption long enough for its artifice and use to be acknowledged,
for it to continue to operate as an historical provocation. Poetics is not asking
to be read back onto writings, or to pull the reading of literary texts back to
itself as a validating discourse. It attempts to keep itself open for further
readings – in the plural.
Works
Cited
Barbiero,
D. ‘Untitled Letter’, Paper Air 4:2 (1989): 117.
Bernstein, Charles. A
Poetics. Cambridge
and London: Harvard University
Press, 1992.
Clay, Jon. Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze. London and NewYork: Continuuim, 2010.
DuPlessus, Rachel Blau. The
Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice. New York
and London:
Routledge, 1990.
Fisher, Allen. Necessary
Business. London:
Spanner, 1985
Fisher, Allen. ‘The Poetics of the
Complexity Manifold’. Charles Bernstein. Ed. 99 Poets/1999: An International
Poetics Symposium. Boundary 2, Volume 26, number 1 (1999): 115-18.
Fisher, Allen (2004) Gravity. Cambridge: Salt.
Forrest-Thomson, Veronica. Poetic
Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth Century Poetry. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1978.
Jarry, Alfred. The Ubu
Plays. London: Eyre Methuen, 1968.
Mark, Alison. Veronica Forrest-Thomson and Language
Poetry. Tavistock: Northcote House, 2001.
McGann,
Jerome J. The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation. Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1983.
Messerli, Douglas. Ed. Fom the
Other Side of the Century: a new American poetry, 1950-1990. Los Angeles: Sun and
Moon, 1994.
Mukarovský,
Jan. Aesthetic Function, Norm and Value
as Social Facts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1979.
Perelman, Bob. The
Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing and Literary History. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996.
‘Poetics’:
‘Poetics at Buffalo’,
hhttp://wings. buffalo.edu/epc/poetics/prog.html: 1 March 1999
Thurston, Scott. ‘Allen Fisher:
The Necessity of Change’, Poetry Salzburg Review, etc, pp. 28-33.
[1] See Peter Barry’s Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the
1970s and the Battle of Earls Court, Cambridge: Salt, 2006.
[2] See Andrew Duncan’s ‘Two Tribes’, Angel
Exhaust 8 (1992): 1-4 for more on this.
[3] Gravity as a Consequence of Shape was written
between 1982 and 2006 and the whole is now available in the collecting trilogy:
Gravity (Cambridge: Salt, 2004), Entanglement
(Willowdale, Ontario:
The Gig, 2004) and Leans (Cambridge:
Salt, 2007).
[4]
‘Creative linkage’ first appears as
a concept in my own poetics in ‘Linking the Unlinkable’, Far Language. Exeter: Stride, 1999:
54-55, but I re-deploy it as a literary critical term in my chapter ‘Creative
Linkage in the Work of Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer’ in The
Poetry of Saying. Liverpool: Liverpool
University Press, 2005:
194-213.
