Vanessa Place telling us that money is poetry
Read an earlier piece here on Conceptual Writing. It examined Vanessa Place's contention that 'Form doesn't matter'. Like this posting it it an early draft of a critical work in progress on form.
Vanessa Place's Statement of Facts consists of appropriated statements of the ‘facts’ of sexual assaults, collected unedited from her work as an appellate criminal defence attorney. Kenneth Goldsmith describes a public reading by Place, as he formed the text in his response (clearly responding to her undeniable authoredness, despite the compromised provenance of the words spoken): ‘When you hear Place read these words,’ and Goldsmith responds to three quarters of an hour of this live material, ‘you realize that the vile content of the work is just the tip of the iceberg. What happens to you, the listener, during the reading,’ is the work’s significance. (Goldsmith 2011: 104) ‘I am asking the reader to bear witness, or to choose not to,’ Place explains, emphasising the balanced ethical positioning of the listener.[1] ‘Either way, they become complicit.’ (quoted in Goldsmith 2011: 105) ‘The first reaction is of shock and horror… But you keep listening. It’s hard to stop,’ affirms Goldsmith. ‘The narrative draws you in.’ (Goldsmith 2011: 105) One paragraph reads:
The man fumbled,
touching Barbara B.’s breasts with his hands and mouth, then put his penis in
her vagina. She could not tell if he ejaculated or withdrew, but he put his
penis in her vagina a second time; he also orally copulated her. Barbara B. did
not feel a glove on the man’s hand. Throughout, the man continued to tell
Barbara B. he only wanted to make love to her and not to hurt her. After, the
man told Barbara B. he was going to leave and she should count to fifty. She started
counting to herself, he told her to count out loud. As Barbara B. heard the man
leave, she asked him to close the door so her cats wouldn’t get out; she heard
him go through the kitchen and close the sliding door as he left. Barbara B.
then called the police. (RT 917-920, 925) (Dworkin and Goldsmith 2011: 491)
Place’s role as a ‘mouthpiece’ here may be as much a defence
for herself (and a hopeless one perhaps) as her ‘real’ defence of the accused
in the courtrooms of her day job. Experiencing the staged situation of the
reading (Place dresses as an attorney in performance), Goldsmith reports on the
effects of this (upon him). ‘I had been transformed from passive listener to
active juror,’ Goldsmith realised at some point. ‘She actually transformed my
position as receiver of the work, spinning me around in ways that were very
much against my will. I didn’t want to objectify my experience but I did. Place
used passive coercion’ to engender his complicity, he claims. (Goldsmith 2011:
105) It may seem indelicate at best, or immoral at worst, to attempt a formalist
analysis of ‘vile content’, but Goldsmith has already indicated that the content
is not everything here. To be moved from a subject position of listener to one
of witness requires more than passive coercion perhaps. The most significant
formal marker of Statement of Facts is
its sheer relentlessness; second is the non-everydayness of the language, the
matter-of-fact tonality that records incidents of extreme human behaviour
(Place reads it deadpan).[1] We
are told ‘he put his penis in her vagina’ twice with the same form of words, a
choral device at odds with a rule of expository prose that prefers variations
of phraseology over repetition (though, and perhaps because, that is a ‘poetic’
device). ‘He also orally copulated her,’ is an odd distanciating phrase given
that the previous statements had been gynaecologically detailed. The following
sentence also topples our equilibrium, partly through lack of narrative
cohesion: ‘Barbara B. did not feel a glove on the man’s hand.’ Amid the
statements of fact, this negative seems all the more (horribly) significant.
The oddness of the expression (and oddness is often, or elsewhere, a marker of
‘poetic’ language, both in ancient poetic diction and modernist defamiliarisation)
conceals the forensic fact that the man may have left fingerprints elsewhere. Accidental
poetic artifice appears in the victim’s name, as it reappears in its
abbreviated form; when combined into the collocation ‘Barbara B.’s breasts’ its
alliteration seems excessive, inept, tongue-twistingly so if read aloud. ‘She
started counting to herself, he told her to count out loud’ is an ungrammatical
broken-back sentence, but it feels right to balance the ‘she’ at the start of
the sentence and the ‘he’ that answers it in this way. A semi-colon would have
been more accurate; two are used correctly in the paragraph to join two
statements into sentences, so this was a matter of artifice on the
statement-taker’s part. This scribe, to use the ancient term descriptively, is
not to be confused with the author Vanessa
Place (though Place may have taken the statement).
It is Place who has framed the writing, thereby authoring it, as a literary
text (as this reading is interpreting it as a literary text).
The poignancy of the conversation between
the rapist and victim (to use terms that the statement must avoid at all costs)
about her errant cats in this narrative is grotesquely incongruous (partly
because in other situations it might be comic). Inconsequential but precise, it
is a statement of a fact that may or not be legally important. The unease it
evokes may be akin to the unrelated guilt that an examination of diction,
grammar, punctuation and alliteration, such as mine, in such a horrific case,
engenders. The reference numbers that dot this and other passages of Statement of Facts operate to
de-automatize our responses by interrupting the narrative that clearly does not
just ‘draw you in’ as Goldsmith reports. The paragraph (the work generally)
does do that, but it does more, through operations of form, to disable the
reader or listener, and draw him or her into a disruptive formal world of
substantiated statements in distanciated sentences. Form operates to make or
re-make the text, to frame it and to partly unframe it again by foregrounding
poetic devices and prose conventions (and heightening tension between them).
More accurately form only appears in
acts of forming, which are only
operative when the reader or listener per-forms the text for his or her self (and
that gender difference may well be quite important to the mode of performance
undertaken). It is during these engaged acts of forming discrepant and
incongruous elements that Goldsmith (for one) experiences the feeling of
complicity he describes so eloquently.
How complicit can we feel, though, when North
American TV programmes such as C.S.I :
Crime Scene Investigation and its offshoots, and a specific series of Law and Order, Special Victims Unit (or in
Britain,
The Vice), routinely transform sexual
crime (often violent and fatal) into mainstream entertainment? The answer must
lie (despite the appropriative techniques used by Place) in the felt
authoredness of the statements, in the feeling that ‘the experience of the
inventive literary work … arises not from the content of the invention’ – and Goldsmith has directed our
attention away from that in Place’s work – ‘but from the reader’s performance of it – and its performance
of the reader.’ (Attridge 2004: 102) The ‘mouthpiece’ utters a text only minimally
transformed (this is an example of one of Goldsmith’s younger writers ‘literally
moving language from one place to another’ (Goldsmith 2011: 3)) but text transformed
enough (and well enough) for the kinds of readerly per-formance re-enacted
above. The form of the ‘statement’ rubs ever so uneasily against the form of
the ‘facts’. Formal concerns are central to conceptual works, it seems, though
form may be their repressed that has yet to return in their poetics. (More on form here.)
Works Cited across the last three
posts. To see links to these and other posts relating to my The Meaning of Form project click here.
You can read about my own recent poetry here and here, and follow the links to points of online purchase. )
You may read my 'How to Produce Conceptual Writing' here.
You can read about my own recent poetry here and here, and follow the links to points of online purchase. )
You may read my 'How to Produce Conceptual Writing' here.
Attridge, Derek Attridge. The Singularity of Literature. London
and New York:
Routledge, 2004.
Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the
Author’, in Heath, Stephen, tr. Roland
Barthes: Image-Music-Text. Glasgow:
Fontana/Collins, 1977: 142-148.
Eds. Dworkin, Craig, and Goldsmith, Kenneth. Against Expression: An Anthology of
Conceptual Writing. Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 2011.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative
Writing. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2011.
Morris, Simon. Getting
Inside Jack Kerouac’s Head at www.gettinginsidejackkerouacshead.blogspot.com (accessed 31 January 2014)
Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in
the New Century. Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 2010.
Place, Vanessa: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/2117
(accessed 31st January 2014)
Popper, Karl. Unended Quest. Glasgow:
Fontana/Collins, 1976.
Rasula. Jed. Modernism and Poetic Inspiration. New York
and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Update September 2016: For those who can buy The Meaning of Form in Contemporary
Innovative Poetry, or order it for libraries, here are the places
[1] See her reading at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5pd2AF0RmA
(accessed 4 February 2014).
