You can access all the other Re:Views via the hubpost here: Pages: ReViews 1-8: Number 1: Mimeo Mimeo 4 (magazine)
Gap
Gardening: Selected Poems (edited by Nikolai Duffy with the author)
Rosmarie Waldrop
New Directions
232 pages
[This is the last ReView in the series. This piece was originally published as ‘Rosmarie Waldrop’s Gap Gardening’, The Wolf 34, December 2016. Of course, I had written about some of her work in The Meaning of Form, but here I wanted to introduce the general reader to her work, without too much cogitation on ‘form’, the obsession of the moment, that moment and, I should admit, this moment too! Well, my moment. I possibly wrote the whole in one day. Here's a prefatory post about Waldrop and form: Pages: Notes on the Poetics of Rosmarie Waldrop: Form]
Rosmarie Waldrop is unique in
American poetry for being so European. Located at the heart of Language Poetry
(though she predates, and her work is a precursor for, it) she nevertheless
maintains connections with European writing (chiefly French and German language
poetry) through the act of translating it into English. Just as she has
maintained her Austrian accent, her poetry has maintained a European tinge.
Nevertheless, the formal narrative of her development is in line with certain paradigm
shifts in American poetry and poetics and the result is one of the most distinctive
bodies of work of recent years. There was a smaller selected poems, Another Language, some years ago, but
this new book, Gap Gardening, is
substantial. Co-edited with Nikolai Duffy, the author of Relative Strangeness: Reading Rosmarie Waldrop (Bristol: Shearsman,
2013), an invaluable guide to the work, Gap
Gardening samples every period of her writing life, and shows that, now in
her eighties, Waldrop’s formally investigative strategies continue.
The early work
is lyrical in a general modernist way. The
Aggressive Ways of the Casual Stranger was published by major publisher
Random House in 1972, and her poem ‘Between’ introduces her recurring sense of
the liminal, here expressed in first person free verse, but also with abrupt uses
of enjambement and rapid changes of focus that are (to borrow from the poem
itself) not quite at home with the aesthetic of the time:
I’m not quite at
home
on either side
of the
I’m not
irritated the fish
kept me
a home makes you
forget (6)
‘Irritated’ strikes a discordant
note here, though so does ‘fish’. The dissonance caused by the syntactic
indeterminacy between these elements as negotiated by enjambement unbalances
the reader; this uncertainty suggests her later poetics. With a poem dedicated
to Jabès and another ventriloquising Hölderlin, the focus is European, a cultural
rather than personal ‘betweenness’ which is important to her.
At the time she
was also plugging away at a PhD which was published as Against Language? ‘dissatisfaction with language’ as theme and as impulse
towards experiments in twentieth century poetry. (The Hague: Mouton, 1971) It
was a taxonomy of the variety of techniques used by European experimental
writers, like the German Helmut Heissenbüttel. This analytical approach was to
pay dividends for Waldrop’s developing poetics, because it probably taught her
how to conceptualise the use of particular techniques at the level of form (and
not at the level of content or authorial intention). What I mean is that she
would henceforth work by project or in book length serial form, which, although
quite common in the New American Poetry, she would assimilate and develop as a much
stricter formally investigative tool. Once a form or a frame was established,
she would run various materials (whether her own words or the appropriated
language of others) through that system and the resultant texts would be (and
mean) the results of the occasion of her actions. She would not be expressing
herself. Which is not to say she is ‘Against Expression’ in the manner of the
contemporary conceptual poets, Kenneth Goldsmith and associates, but that
content is never more than an extension of form.
This sounds
counter-intuitive but Waldrop has a simple explanatory fiction on this subject.
Some of her earlier poems (later poems, it turns out, too!) concern her complex
relationship with her mother. Resorting to the liberating technique of collage
(Waldrop often quips that collage is the ‘splice of life’) she found the resulting
cut-up poems were still about her
mother. The moral of the story is that despite (or perhaps because of) the use
of a distanciating technique, the concerns of an author will show through. This
explains the mysterious remark of Tristan Tzara when he offered a recipe for
collage or cut-up during the First World War; he stated that the resultant work
would resemble the assemblagist. Similiarly, Waldrop’s poems are not empty
forms, but gather their contents as they develop, and (almost paradoxically)
are some of the most intensely reflective writings we have on gender, history,
science, and many other ‘themes’. Her PhD studies and her acquaintanceship with
some of the members of the French Oulipo group – at whatever stage in this
process they were discovered – must have encouraged her in the belief that
formal constraints of various kinds are actually productive of potential
meanings. Later American Language Poetry practices (the numerological
obsessiveness of Ron Silliman, for example) must also have encouraged her
(while we must recognise her influence upon them).
Her breakthrough
volume, The Road is Everywhere, or Stop
this Body, was published in 1978 by the small press Open Places. Waldrop’s
‘breakthough’ is a formal one; it would be some years before she would be
published by a large press once more. This book appeared about the time the
Language movement was beginning to be first noticed (in an under-the-radar way),
and the influence here (as I insist above) goes both ways. Syntactic
indeterminacy is no longer a stylistic ploy to deflect readerly continuity but
a structural device to articulate and disarticulate reading at the same time,
extending over a long series of short poems. The lines are hinged, so that line
A syntactically coheres with B, and line B coheres with C (but A doesn’t with
C). The poems were written during a car commute and the semiotics of the ‘road’
journey (there are literal road signs in the text) and the flows and
disruptions of the travelling (female) ‘body’ are played against one another in
this model of linguistic celerity. Nothing rests. (It is curious that the title
is articulated by a single comma; the poems aren’t.)
200 miles of
nerve per hour with the guardrails down
can churn the
intermittent
shapes into
sheer
bodies touch
there’s no
question why
my tongue on
your
speed leaps
ahead of
he will come on
a stallion
he will come on
the power and
fury of wind
(30)
Questions of language and movement
are raised throughout, but in a speedy, mutating discourse that mimes the
incidental and moving perceptual registering of American highway travel:
‘outlines/ into threshold’. (20) This is an impressive formal achievement and
one that had a lasting effect on the work of one British poet, Adrian Clarke.
There is a
simple narrative concerning Waldrop’s development that is refuted by the
selection of Gap Gardening and that
is that she gave up writing lineated poetry and took to permanently writing a
species of prose. This isn’t true, but it is
true that the major formal innovation in her work has been her prose
experiments, which were first published in the 1987 volume Reproduction of Profiles and collected with the later Lawn of Excluded Middle and Reluctant Gravities in the trilogy Curves to the Apple (2006). (She was
again published by a large press, New Directions.) Judging from anthologies and
critical work one may say this is presumed her masterpiece, though later
experiments in this mode develop beyond it. She knew what she was losing and
gaining by her decision to write prose. The impedimenta of lyric poetry are
dispensed with and the cooler propositional grace of philosophic writing is
entertained as style. Again this is consistent with, and is partly predictive
of, a perceived move in American (and other) poetry, towards what the critic
Stephen Fredman calls ‘poet’s prose’, an ugly term no more satisfactory than
prose poetry. In short, the syntactic play of the lineated work is turned
inside out. Syntax comes back into play as the rhythmic as well as the semantic
organising principle of the flow and surge of prose; the spatial splice of
enjambment is replaced by an often invisible switch mid-sentence, that allows
Waldrop to not just jump from one subject to another, but to formally rupture
discourses, and to use invisible thread to stitch scraps together into
beautifully-relaxed prose rhythms. Violation of method does not result in
violent rupture. (Compare her measured prose with the similarly collagic work
of Bruce Andrews, for example.)
But what is she stitching together? It is here that her sense that all writing is palimpsestic – that beneath the surface of any writing lies the years, decades, centuries of writings that inform it. Conversely, she provides a new palimpsestic layer as she ‘writes through’ (or over) other texts (a lesson probably learnt from translation practices that must always be kinds of writing through, though here adopted to works in one language). Perhaps the most famous are her sinuous and humorous writings-through of (and writing-back to) Wittgenstein. Of course, this revelation of method could ruin the effect of first reading the text, in which the initial naturalisation might be that we are overhearing the slightly oblique language of an arguing couple, but somehow this knowledge enhances a sophisticated reading at a number of levels. This is an arguing couple but is it also allows the palimpsestic traces of Wittgenstein through, here with his insistence that the meaning of a word is its use. The ease and poise of voice, the pattern of dialogic exchange or lack of exchange, (‘I thought … you said’) carries the reader. (76) The first sentence of ‘Feverish Propositions’ demonstrates quite clearly how the intervening splicing produces evocative non-sequitur:
YOU TOLD ME, if something is not used it is meaningless, and took my temperature, which I had thought to save for a more difficult day. In the mirror, every night, the same face, a bit more threadbare, a dress worn too long. The moon was out in the cold, along with the restless, dissatisfied wind that seemed to change the location of the sycamores. I expected reproaches because I had mentioned the word love, but you only accused me of stealing your pencil, and sadness disappeared with sense. You made a ceremony out of holding your head in your hands because, you said, it could not be contained in itself. (76)
Comedy matches philosophic despair but questions about the nature of language, as ever in Waldrop, are to the fore. Wittgenstein wrote most of his works as propositions, wonderful material for this formal method of making propositional language feverish, making masculine language feminist. As the ‘Prologue’ to Reluctant Gravities (1999) puts it, talking around the gender dynamic at play in many of these prose works,
The difference of our sex, says one voice, saves us from humiliation. It makes me shiver, says the other. Your voice drops stones into feelings to sound their depth. Then warmth is truncated to war. But I’d like to fall back into simplicity as into a featherbed. (90)
This, like the previous quotation, is a complete paragraph (taking the role of the stanza in the same way the sentence takes over the function of line). Elegant, mysterious (‘The page lures the voice with a promise of wood blossoming’ (91)), beautiful, subsequent experimentation with the poetics of the sentence, in works like the more linguistically-focussed Split Infinites (1998) or Blindsight (2003), play with sentence barriers to create flow and impediment, boundary and bleed, within the now-familiar paragraph-unit.
Here I work towards. A kind of elegy. Here a strange ceiling. ‘Earth fills his mouth.’ I would look at you. And write you. A spell but slack at the edge. And in the door where I stand your voice goes. Hollow. (163)
This is one paragraph-unit from
‘Hölderlin Hybrids’, feeding out of the German poet’s works (and signalling
back to her earliest poems) in Blindsight
, a collection which intensifies the processes of reading-through art objects
and poetic texts, from Joseph Cornell’s boxes to the texts of Mallarmé and
Stein. The latter receives a rare pastiche as homage: ‘Plenty of space plenty
of ordinary plenty of present’, which collapses space into time. (180)
Waldrop’s
most recent individual volume, Driven to
Abstraction (2010), plays with notions of infinity and limitlessness at one
end, and the microscopic at the other, the scientific in one guise, the
religious in another. It is like some raging theology of the absolute (although
it’s more about absolute zero): ‘Nothing. Zero. Absence of things, of signs.’
(222). ‘And the rabbis?’ ‘So It’s Nothing’ opens. ‘In spite of the void in the
beginning, not inclined to discuss it.’ (225) Drawn, a note tells us, from the
volume Signifying Nothing, the Semiotics
of Zero by Brian Rothman, one can see just how far the interrogative,
formally investigative strategies of Waldrop’s prose have taken her, of how the
language may be torqued in several directions, towards the conversational and
towards the essayist, but always with a certain mystery that suggests the
linguistic mysticism of Jabès (which also returns us to her early poems, and to
her complementary work as a translator of writers like Jabès).
Woven between these developing prose works have been a number of other collage texts, and the most interesting of them find Waldrop at her most American, in Shorter American Memory (1988) and A Key into the Language of America (1994). The first of these books, according to a note, is ‘derived from sources collected in Henry Beston’s American Memory’, obviously an historical anthology or miscellany published in 1937. (103) Waldrop’s ‘Shorter’ hints that her book is an abridgement, and in a sense it is, but in the spirit of collage the history presented is a condensed radical re-organisation of the early history of America, to emphasise its wildness and religiosity:
Looking over the hearts of my neighbors I saw a stout fellow pursuing me with a cutlass which I expected in family worship. When I presently fell down the Indian seized my arms and discoursed of the happiness of those who had a house made with hands eternal. (105)
However, this piece, taking one source only and de-forming it and re-forming it, seems less transformative than the more philosophic prose texts, but it is effective in defamiliarsing a familiar story. A Key into the Language of America is formally a more hybrid affair, with its lineated lists and lyric passages, one of the many returns and partial returns to poetry writing per se. More disruptive than Shorter American Memory, it juxtaposes different lineations and layouts as it processes the text of a primer on Native American language (and possibly other sources). Words are defined, histories are told, and a plangent lyric voice ends each of its sections, in this case with a surreal sexual frisson:
nostalgia
figured
in bruised shins
and loss
loss of eternity
in triplicate
such that my
kness
could come apart
and tell
their seeds
(131)
Gap Gardening offers us the various works
of one of the most remarkable writers of our time. Returning to the texts
again, they offer up radically different facets; they exemplify the fact that
reading is a continual return, an event that both happens to us and is an act
that we must perform; the openness of these texts allows us to perform them
towards perpetuity.
31st October 2016
