Robert Sheppard: My review of Adrian Clarke's Austerity Measures on Stride plus further notes, thoughts and links

My review of Adrian Clarke’s new book Austerity Measures is now up on Stride and I hope you will read it now. It is here.

On a personal note, this is the first piece of critical writing I’ve produced since finishing the grand slog of The Meaning of Form (see here for more on that volume of critical writing). That is, with the exception of the floating prose of Pulse, a sort of ‘treatise on metre’ that I am hoping will be published soon.

On another personal note, I have a poem dedicated to me in Adrian’s book and, by rights, I shouldn’t review the book, but I wanted to; I don’t know who else might and I regard Clarke as important (and somewhat neglected, though I don’t know why).  I simply ignored the poem in my account (though I like its references to 'C21 Blues'). I also ignored the poem dedicated to Patricia, which indeed is published on this blog here! Have a look: it gives an idea about how ‘austere’ Adrian's ‘measures’ are. There were plenty of other poems to deal with in their obdurately material insistence (along with their concomitant teasing indeterminacy)!

I have all of Adrian’s books on my desk at the moment and I’m surprised how many there are. Apart from the book reviewed, (see here) I’d check out the VEER website and look for Drastic Measures and Possession as starters. Or Excess Measures. If you don’t know the work. Here and here.

But there is one more example on Pages, from Adrian's 'Muzzle' here.

My earlier article on Adrian, ‘Colossal Fragments’ from Pages (as a print journal, 219-238, April 1994). Pages has been digitalised (see here) but I’ve also re-published that piece on this blog here. It was reprinted in my short critical volume Far Language here. But I also write about Clarke’s ‘creative linkage’ in The Poetry of Saying. See here.

But I haven’t written about his work recently (though there is a poetics piece dedicated to him in Berlin Bursts and I was surprised to find it still online in  the Singaporean magazine Softblow, here).

In the Stride review I wanted to present the work in its demanding delight without intervening critical discourse. (My one ‘reference’ to Guattari, whom I am currently re-reading, is heavily muted!)

So there are lots of places you can go to search out this work if you don’t know it, and plenty of books to buy (in addition to the new one). And there is one more link that will help you: I deal with Adrian’s poetics (in contrast to Pierre Joris’) here.

When I say in my review

Recently, I’ve read a lot of descriptions of rather mild excursions beyond the poetic normative as ‘experimental’, ‘innovative’, or ‘radical’, but very little measures up to Clarke’s excessive, austere, ghostly and (even) drastic measures…

I had a specific example in mind: a call for submissions for a magazine on Twitter that asked for collage work, cut-ups, surrealist writing, without irony! What we need, in Ranciere’s phrase, is something that will put the disruption back into montage! Adrian Clarke's work does that.

There is a second review, on Stride too, by Clark Allison, HERE.

Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Bob Cobbing: Sightings and Soundings

in honour of his 75^th birthday

This page (written 1995) was read at the Bob Cobbing Symposium in May 2015 as part of my talk 'Bobliography' (see here), breaking off at the end of the page, and moving on to other writings on (and with ) Cobbing:

 

1          Two Lessons

I visited Bob Cobbing, and thus met my first poet, on November 3 1973.  I was still at school, keen to put on an exhibition of concrete poetry.  I recognised this as the wilder edge of the new British poetry I had discovered through Horovitz’ anthology Children of Albion and Bill Butler’s Brighton bookshop.  In the school library there was, unaccountably, Emmett Williams’ An Anthology of Concrete Poetry.  Bob was in it.

When I arrived at Randolph Avenue to collect some hansjörg mayer posters, Bob was already talking to a student who was writing a thesis on language in visual art.  I listened as they talked and sounded some of the Shakespeare Kaku.  I remained mute, uncertain.  Bob played a tape of himself and Peter Finch performing e colony from the Five Vowels, a then incomplete project.  He showed us the work in progress.  I stayed for six hours literally learning the life of a poet.

Two lessons, one immediate, the other lasting:

 

  There was a world of poetry which did not hypostacise the Poem as a closed structure.  (I left burdened with booklets and off-prints from Cobbing’s own work and excerpts from Lee Harwood.)

  The importance of radical consistency for an artist: to refuse to mark out an aesthetic territory which is then colonised, but to move confidently on, to create structures, large and small, for continued experiment.

 

2          Selected Sightings and Jottings 1978 - 1994

Bob Cobbing, Bill Griffiths and Paul Burwell, May 10 1978: Public House Bookshop, Brighton.  ‘Two poets concerned with the discontinuity of language.  Yet even more concerned with the building up of the discontinuous, into new structures … the simplicity of Cobbing’s Alphabet of Fishes … it is what Cobbing does visually (typographically and otherwise) and vocally that gives a poem its complexity, its ‘art’ … bellowing like a walrus.’

King’s College, November 26 1981: ‘with Griffiths and Fencott.  He swigged from his own ‘secret supply’ and launched into an hour of completely new material’ to put a wedge into the bibliographic mentality that cannot distinguish between the ‘latest’ and the ‘last’.

Saturday, July 13 1985 (the rest of the world watching Live Aid):  Bob beneath a tree in Clerkenwell churchyard.  ‘SILLIWHIG’ he yelled, from the


The rest may be read

here.

This is the last chapter of Far Language and the last to be posted or linked-to here.

Link now to the new 'Introduction' and links to the contents of the book here.

And here are the chapter links to the original publication.

The (original) 'Introduction': here.
'Reading Prynne and Others': here.
'Far Language' (MacSweeney) here.
'Irregular Actions' (Allen Fisher) here.
'Timeless Identities' (Roy Fisher) here.
'Utopia Revisited' (John Ash) here.
'Flashlight Propositions' (Robert Sheppard's 1987 poetics) here.
'Education of Desire' (pedadgogic poetics) here.
'Commitment to Openness' (Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood, Tom Raworth) here.
'Poetic Sequencing and the New: Twentieth Century Blues' (poetics) here.
'Buoyant Readings' (J.H. Prynne, Bruce Andrews, Ken Edwards, Aaron Williamson and Gilbert Adair) here.
'Collosal Fragments' (Adrian Clarke) here.
'Tune Me Gold' (Maggie O'Sullivan here.
'Linking the Unlinkable' (poetics of Twentieth Century Blues) here.
'Adhesive Hymns' (Ulli Freer) here.
'Bob Cobbing: Soundings and Sightings' here.

 

Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Linking the Unlinkable (poetics)

Linking the Unlinkable: an answer to the question ‘Why Do You Do What You Do?

Such questions as ‘Why Do You Do What You Do?’ require one set of answers no individual writer can access about him or herself, in a personal history that is far from personal often, or in a genealogy of some profound but obscure disposition towards language or one of its substrata.

            Aesthetic allegiance, from this point of view, may be no more than a position for this disposition to be situated. By this time, this doing can no longer be questioned. It is so far from a why, so ingrained perhaps in the individual’s concsciousness, that it requires the jolt of history to shake this intensity free of its occasions.

            The question eventually becomes – or became for me – ‘why you continue writing’. The pre-disposition to write (for me) seeks a justification, in poetics, in the processes of a resistant practice, a negativity that balances the affirmation of the originating impulse. The project Twentieth Century Blues is a ‘net/(k)not-work’. One of its current aims is to link the unlinkable.

In ‘Discussions, or phrasing “after Auschwitz”’,   (The Lyotard Reader, 1989), Lyotard considers  this name that, for Adorno, risked overstamping all human endeavour, including, famously, and relevantly to my current purpose, poetry. For Lyotard, ‘Auschwitz’ is ‘a model for’ … ‘the incommensurability between the universe of prescriptive phrase (request) and the universes of the descriptive phrases which take it as their referent’.  The ‘agon of phrases is perpetual’. The just action can only be to effect ‘the linkage “that suits” in a particular case, without there being known what the rule of suitability is’. One can only ‘invent rules for the linkings of phrases’.

Derrida responded to Lyotard's lecture and revealed himself less interested in phrases, than in the processes of the essential linkage.

We have, he says, ‘to make links, historically, politically, and ethically with the name, with that which absolutely refuses linkage’. It is the ethical imperative that I find both profound and resonant in these remarks. He continues: ‘If there is today an ethical or political question and if there is somewhere a One must it must link up with a one must make links with Auschwitz.’ But this necessity could be broadened, both ethically and technically; for me, it demands a writing practice that must link the components of the daily catastrophe, along with all its ecstasies, that we live. ‘Perhaps Auschwitz prescribes – and the other proper names of analogous tragedies (in their irreducible dispersion) prescribe – that we make links.’ These remarks have haunted (indeed, have been linked in) my recent work The Lores, Twentieth Century Blues 30, to offset the Adornoesque negativity that also haunts it. It implies a practice: ‘It does not prescribe that we overcome the un-linkable, but rather: because it is unlinkable, we are enjoined to make links.’ Any apparent unlinkability, I would generalise, requires creative linkage for a writer, a kind of investigative experimentation.

The writing practice will determine that such linkages be articulated at times on a surface which is like the skin of delirium, with simultaneously more disruption that would be connoted by the term ‘juxtaposition’ – and also less, where the links are so melted into the materials that they disappear.

This derivation for Derrida is different, tough allied, to Adrian Clarke’s fortuitous blending of Lyotard’s poetics of the phrase with his own phrasal poetic practice to form the poetics of his Listening to the Differences talk. (RWC Extra, 1991) Clarke himself integrates the theory and his practice and demands ‘a subversive plurality that many of the rules available to link phrases may also be used to sustain, short-circuiting the connections that might combine to pronounce a sentence, but not necessarily those constituitive of a critical judgement whose force is less than absolute.’

The rules of this subversive linkage, I believe, have to be invented to counter absoluteness with plurality. The disruption of the authority of the sentence by the micro-judgements of the phrase is one way. There  may be others, as linguistically innovative writers momently create new ‘rules’ for linkage, for what suits the particular ‘case’: the disparate materials in need of procedural linkage. Lyotard has previously described the paradox of this process in The Postmodern Condition (1984): ‘The artist and the writer … are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.’ Indeed, ‘short-circuiting’ is an interesting analogy for a wholly unexpected and deregulated linkage. As Lyotard notes: ‘To link is necessary, but how to is not.’

Asking myself, again, the question ‘Why Do I Do What I Do?’ evokes the necessary response:

To link the unlinkable.

[January 1995]            Generator 7:2: Whydoyoudowhatyoudo?, December 1995

                        Pages 362-380, January 1996

Link to new 'Introduction' and links to all contents of Far Language here.

Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Tune Me Gold (Maggie O'Sullivan)

TUNE ME GOLD: NOTES ON THE TOTAL TECHNIQUE OF MAGGIE O’SULLIVAN

 

Maggie O’Sullivan: In the House of the Shaman, Reality Street.

 

Joseph Beuys was interested in the transformative aspects of shamanism, and, like Maggie O’Sullivan, brought this practice, as metaphor, into the heart of a transformative twentieth century art.  ‘The nature of my sculpture is … change.’  Beuys provides O’Sullivan with one of the epigraphs for this work.  Sign posts.

Marks on the page; tracks across the snow that the shaman follows.  Linguistic proliferation is the nearest you’ll get to the processes of nature.

First, precision: ‘Great brilliancy and projection: the eye seemed to fall perpendicular from level to level along our trees, the nearer and further Park; all things hitting the sense with double but direct instress.’  (Hopkins, Journal, 1870)  Then, exuberance: ‘Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, wherever an elm arches, / Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and part.’  (Hopkins)

But why exuberance as sound?  Certainly ‘The whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a stir.’  But this would be to admit that sound is simply a matter of imitation.  The only way to make language shift like a lump of lard in different temperatures is to sculpt with instability inside the linguistic sign.

‘Naming’ is a poem with an apparent riddle structure.  It ends:

this is called /

 

fish

 

The oblique and the space hold the noun, the naming word, isolate, exposed, and insufficient.  It is uselessly general though ‘tench’ is named in the thick of the poem.

Mixed Pulses etched

Finningly, brilliant corners decapitate

 

The creation of adverbial neologisms is a favoured technique.  ‘Finningly’ emphasises the function of the very small, independent fins in the larger movement, ‘pulses’ that are therefore ‘mixed’.  But etching and decapitation suggest both a cutting movement of fish through water and the violence of the river itself: a martial violence. 

Beast’s

coat Loading

battlegivens:

 

echoes Anglo-Saxon (and possibly Bill Griffiths) with its compounds:

 

                        wound

Livery

laid into rivers

 

has the alliterative weight of Bunting.  Fish as wounded soldier.  Maggie O’Sullivan names by naming anew.  Such ‘description’ is a displacement of its object.  What remains is a transformed language.

This work must be performed, a consequence of its exuberance.  ‘She reads unhurriedly letting the measured syllables relate to establish their rhythms in an appropriate time’ (Adrian Clarke).  There needs to be a published tape.  What happens during this performance?  I believe we may experience language in a state of becoming; it always is becoming - both in individuals and society - but never in the concentrated way O’Sullivan handles it.  A becoming in which movement and scent, for example, are ‘Uppies! Downies! Jumpies! / Fire-Sinuses!’.  An ideolect becoming dialect as an audience listens.

Maggie O’Sullivan’s poetry, then, is the very creation of meaning.  Derek Attridge, writing of lexical onomatopoeia in Peculiar Language, deals with this single form of linguistic exuberance in a way I believe is relevant to all the devices and techniques in O’Sullivan’s work.  Onomatopoeia is one example of neologism. 

 

All speech involves muscular movements …; and the particular aspects of this complex physical process which function in a given example of onomatopoeia depend less on the specific configurations of the phonetic sequence in question than on the meaning of the passage.  The result is a diversion of attention away from the referent in itself to the activity of referring carried out by language …  .  And it is that focus of attention on the materiality of language as it does its work of bringing meaning into being that has so often been interpreted as mimetic or iconic representation, because the experience is unquestionably one of increased vividness or intensity of signification. (pp 153-4)

 

The epigraph from Pound for the poem ‘Of Mutability’ announces an alchemical ‘seeking a word to make change’.  This astonishing text goes beyond neologism, beyond precision, description.  The creative exuberance produces its own linguistic transformations.  You can hear ‘groundsel’ in ‘ground all’, ‘bird in the hand’ in ‘bids in the fist’ (perhaps ‘buds’ too, appropriately bucolic to this collection, if you submit to this language’s processes).  ‘Flecks / flux / flues’ snapshots the processes like a Muybridge; flux indeed.  But the lines

 

flew trees / few truths /

                        fish-

                                        in-

        frog

 

equate the kinds of linguistic slippage in the first line here, with natural metamorphoses hinted at in the three single words.  The result is that, for O’Sullivan, in the final words of this poem, ‘GOLD / Is Recovered’.  This is not the twittering of Yeats’ gold bird of artifice and fixed eternity.  The gold, that which is produced by transformation, is the artifice.  (For O’Sullivan this is also in nature.)

A doubleness.  Reference and autonomy, for want of better words.  A tension between precision and transformation.  William Carlos Williams wrote in Spring and All of this doubleness:  

The word is not liberated, therefore able to communicate release from the fixities which destroy it until it is accurately tuned to the fact which giving it reality, by its own reality establishes its own freedom from the necessity of a word, thus freeing it and dynamizing it at the same time. 

Perhaps Williams had Gertrude Stein in mind.  Stein is present also in In the House of the Shaman in an epigraph which declares that writers, far from expressing themselves, ‘express what the world is doing’ (which is transforming, which is what the language is doing, etc.…)

The effects (I’ve outlined only a few) are thick in the material texture of O’Sullivan’s language.  The technique is total because it is so exhaustive and to describe small effects is to create a lexicon of devices which would bear as much resemblance (on the page and, particularly, as sound) as a sex manual to the experience of orgasm.  It demands an engagement with language that is unusual in activating possible responses on so many levels at once.  It has to be experienced at length before description is possible.

‘Yonderly’, a repeated coinage.  To speak of ‘yonderly’ things you must speak from ‘here’ and know the difference between the two, as a shaman does.  The real shamanism of this extraordinary language is that it is double; it belongs to the world and yet passes beyond it.

 August 1994                                                                     First Offense 10, Winter 1996

 Link to new 'Introduction' and links to all contents of Far Language here.

 

Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Poetic Sequencing and the New: Twentieth Century Blues

Read here... The text dates from 1992; it appeared online in 1999!

Complete Twentieth Century Blues is still in print (see link).

Link to new 'Introduction' and links to all contents of Far Language here.

Robert Sheppard: Far Language: Commitment to Openness (Roy Fisher, Harwood, Raworth)

COMMITMENT TO OPENNESS

Roy Fisher: Poems 1955-1987, Oxford University Press.

Lee Harwood: Crossing the Frozen River: Selected poems, Grafton Paperback.

Lee Harwood: Rope Boy to the Rescue, North and South.

Tom Raworth: Tottering State: Selected poems 1963-1987, Grafton Paperback.

When a comprehensive literary history of late twentieth-century British poetry is undertaken, it will have to take account of various writers who have not conformed to the still dominant norms offered by the Movement.  Roy Fisher, Lee Harwood and Tom Raworth have all refused the orthodoxy; each has a commitment to a poetry that emphasises its own procedures, which explores reality in language, rather than through it.  Writing, for them, need not be tied to realism or social perspectives; to varying degrees, they have felt obliged to break the paradigms that generally define what poetry will be, and have not been afraid to assimilate European and American modernism.

Roy Fisher’s work has been acknowledged as some of the best of the last thirty years, though so often in partial accounts that hint at, or openly regret, his formalism  while comfortably concentrating on his ‘English’ empiricism.  His writing encompasses the Angst-ridden perceptual realism of City, and the surreal prose narrative, The Ship’s Orchestra.  The essential point is that what generates the brilliance of Fisher’s writing is precisely that tension between formalism and realism, experiment and empiricism.  Poems 1955-1987 is an expanded, paperback version of Poems 1955-1980.  Despite Fisher’s identification of the poet as a ‘spy’ or, less subversively, as a ‘witness’, what has developed in the twenty-four new poems printed here is an anecdotal ‘voice’, even if it is distanced, as in the humorous ‘The Lesson in Composition’: ‘I could feel slighted / knowing my own work hardly ever mentions me, except / by way of some stiff joke like this one.’

This section contains some of Fisher’s finest poems, some of which extend or re-examine previous successes.  In ‘The Home Pianist’s Companion’, Fisher takes the same attitude to involuntary memory as in the terse lyrics of the 1970s.  He still avoids the ‘comforts’ of a falsifying nostalgia, but he allows himself a more discursive explanation of the processes of association experienced while playing the piano.  He reflects on the value of early childhood memories, a value which combines the surprise of specific details with the anarchy of memory’s unpredictable realignments:

reminding me

what it was like to be sure,

before language ever

taught me they were different,

of how some things were the same.

In Lee Harwood’s Crossing the Frozen River there is also a productive tension: between his desire to write as simply and honestly as possible and his taste for baroque and fictive.  This collection shows the excellence of his best work and the diversity of its attempts to delight the attentive reader.  Early poems tinged reality with dream, in a controlled surrealism that is still present beneath the most elaborately constructed of his later fictions.  The ‘voice’ is so frequently that ghostly presence, the fictional narrator.

Harwood’s aim is to leave the text open, to enable his readers to participate in its creation of meaning, to force them to make connections between disparate fragments.  This, combined with his eroticism and concern for the meaning of human relationships, makes for a poetry at once distanced and intimate, unique in British poetry.

holding a young rabbit in my hands

walking across the stubble in the late afternoon

soft fur                           shocking like the heart-beat

the dark river                                and angry knights milling

in the courtyard

setting it free in a hawthorn thicket

safe from the dogs

at night the land so bare                             ‘rustles’

‘They have no tradition of keeping their colonies neat.’

‘I care for that woman’ the song began

This style culminated in the expansiveness and openness of the book’s longest text, ‘The Long Black Veil: a notebook 1970-1972’.  Since then the juxtapositions have become less abrupt.  The ‘assorted stories’ of ‘Dream Quilt’ are presented in a wide-ranging sequence that still requires the reader to assemble the sum of its parts.  In his latest poems - and there are more in Rope Boy to the Rescue - there is a new romanticism that, in the imaginary ‘song cycle’, ‘Gyorgy Kurtag meets Sandy Berrigan’, achieves a lyrical combination of directness and artifice: ‘Naked heart to heart could warm us, / yet my fears, our fears, freeze us.’

Tom Raworth’s poetic iconoclasm has been total.  From the start, his refusal of certain conventions of artifice and his invention of new ones has caused his extraordinary work to be neglected in Britain, a state of affairs now happily rectified by the publication of Tottering State.  Early poems were often a combination of Olsonian projectivism and a surrealistic concentration on the quirkiest of everyday perceptions that normally remain unsorted by our minds.  The poems are not afraid to refer to themselves, or to delete or revise themselves, though always with Raworth’s mercurial wit.

Recently Raworth has favoured long poems of short (even one word) lines, as in Writing and ‘West Wind’.  Like subliminal messages on film, the lines flicker past the reading eye: the sudden jumps in point of view and discourse are alarmingly unpredictable.  As in Harwood’s work, the reader has an active role to play, though here it is constantly to revise deductions and predictions, each poem a ‘tottering state’ of referential acrobatics:

‘beware of the bomb’

nailed to our fence

a little

skeleton rattling

the romance

of the politics

of romance

relax

a muscle remembers

saved by the breaks

fragments

of black spider motion

All three of these writers exemplify the best of a certain tradition in British poetry.  Raworth’s work, with its energetic juxtapositions, points to where that tradition might be heading.

1989                                                           Times Literary Supplement, 10 March 1989

Link to new 'Introduction' and links to all contents of Far Language here.

Robert Sheppard: Far Language: (Flashlight) Propositions (poetics)

PROPOSITIONS 1987

 

1          There are two general aims of the kind of poetry proposed:

 

1.1       The investigation and invention of poetic forms to accommodate and inaugurate new modes of perception and expression.

 

1.11     This will have the additional effect of extending the paradigm ‘poetry’.

 

1.2       Secondly, it frustrates the processes of naturalisation: delays readers reducing the strangeness of poetic language to paraphrase, to everyday language statements about the external world.

 

1.21     In a poem, it is only through the operations of poetic artifice that the perceptions of the ordinary everyday world are disrupted and criticised.

 

1.3       The concept of ‘poetry’ is entropic, and ceases to break its own paradigm, through time.

 

1.4       It is only through the development of new formal devices that both naturalisation and entropy can be delayed.

 

2          Such a poetry owes a general debt to modernism; specifically it is a reading of its forgotten vitality.

 

2.1       It looks to the more extreme forms of modernism (Spring and All not The Waste Land; Finnegans Wake not Ulysses), those still not wholly assimilated, and neutralised, by the Movement orthodoxy in British Poetry.

 

2.11     This paradoxical return can be called postmodernism.

 

2.111   It is broader in its use here than the simple ludic metaphorisation which the Movement orthodoxy, with its anti-modernist streak, has also claimed in its name.

 

2.12     It is also more precise and analytical than ‘postmodernism’ used as a tag to sell an apolitical product and consumer boom in contemporary art.

 

2.2       There should be a better term, one that is not itself a battleground, but there isn’t.

 

3          Postmodernism can be most usefully used to designate a general philosophical worldview.

 

3.1       Knowledge is defined as a permanent condition of exploratory and incomplete process.

 

3.2       Rules are not seen as normative prescriptions, not necessarily as descriptions, but a parameters produced co-terminously with the event or process they regulate.

 

3.3       Any activity is seen as unpredictable and is constantly moving into the unknown, towards the creation of the new, not returning always to the recognisable.

 

3.4       This worldview affects poetic knowledge, production and regulation directly.

 

3.41     Writing’s only possible state is one of change and development, a process of working towards new meanings hitherto unuttered, not the formulation of a product from prior assumptions of meaning.

 

3.5       This worldview also affects the reception of the literary text, which must be seen as an active process.

 

4          Indeterminacy and discontinuity are central notions for this poetry of the open work, drawn from the vocabulary of postmodern science.

 

4.1       Indeterminacy need not mean randomness, but a process of working with contingency in a conscious fashion, a dialectic of choice and chance.

 

4.2       Perception is an indeterminate process - for the writer writing, for the reader reading.

 

4.3       The types of indeterminacy may change, but they include:

 

4.31     Structural (and syntactic) indeterminacies of poetic form (and of grammar and discourse):

 

4.32     Semantic indeterminacies of reference and sense, multiple ambiguity;

 

4.33     Rhythmical indeterminacies of syllable and line: developing, often, co-terminously with poetic activity.

 

4.331   This determinacy of rhythm sometimes erodes the distinction between poetry and prose, sometimes mixes the forms.

 

4.4       Discontinuities could be similarly listed.

 

4.5       The role of subjectivity in the text will be indeterminate, the self/selves discontinuous.

 

4.51     Subjectivity becomes a question of linguistic position, or of a discordant polyphony of voices, rather than one of a single authorising presence, even of a ‘narrator’ or ‘persona’.

 

4.6       Indeterminacy de-emphasises the authorising role of the writer in the creation of meaning.

 

4.61     It also activates the reader so that he or she enters into the text to attempt to complete it.

 

4.7       Systemisation of any indeterminacy (as in prescriptions for ‘free verse’) establishes norms for imitation which diminish the de-automatising effects the devices will have upon the engaged reader.

 

4.71     Modes of indeterminacy and discontinuity will necessarily alter through time.

 

4.711   Static formulations of openness will have to be abandoned.

 

4.712   Determinate and continuous modes may also be able to effect de-automatising devices for the reader.

 

5          By employing foregrounded artifice, by laying bare its devices, the poem delays naturalisation.

 

5.1       Foregrounded artifice de-automatises the reader’s responses.

 

5.2       It makes what might be falsely taken to be ‘natural’ to appear truly as artificial.

 

5.3       It makes the familiar, presented in poetic discourse, strange.

 

6          Poetry defamiliarises the social world, the reality principle; it is not directly mimetic.

 

6.1       The subversive aspirations which surfaced in the 1960s have moved from the political to the aesthetic dimension.

 

6.11     The attempt to aestheticise politics at least politicised aesthetics.

 

6.12     The desire to change the world is not simply exchanged for the desire to change the reader.  For a poem, as it is being read, they are slenderly identical.

 

6.13     This is to concede a powerful defeat: to begin to change the desires of a reader.

 

6.2       Subversion, in the text, is effective primarily at the level of form.

 

6.21     Aestheticism is not necessarily apolitical, although it should not be complacently and autonomously closed.

 

7          Defamiliarisation and deformation are subversive and transformative elements in the poetic text.

 

7.1       The objects of the world are liberated from the reality principle in the formal autonomy of the poem, as is language, free from reference.

 

7.11     The autonomy of art institutes its critical function.

 

7.12     The aesthetic function animates the critical function: the objects of the world and language are capable of recombination.

 

7.13     The critical function is de-centred, sceptical, anarchistic.

 

7.2       It is not a question of reproducing a coherent utopian vision (or a consistent discourse) but of producing active ‘figures’ or ‘noise’ - depending upon one’s metaphor - which frustrate natualisation and notions of social consistency.

 

8          The text must be constant in its inconsistency, forever in a state of critical becoming.

 

8.1       The ethic of working for the poet is not a work ethic.  Working the work is his or her state of becoming.

 

9          Reading the poem should be an active education of desire, not a recognition, fulfilment and killing of desire.

 

9.1       The reader, producing the poem in his or her reading, enters an incomplete, open realm of imaginative freedom, recognises its formal autonomy.

 

9.2       This is the poem’s affirmative moment at which its indeterminacy and discontinuity, or its foregrounded devices which invite the reader to participate, co-extend with the reader’s act of reading.

 

9.3       The affirmative moment can never wholly be divorced from the critical function: the cry of hope and the cry of despair are heard together.

 

9.31     They can either be made to be heard in harmony (offering utopic images or a programme).

 

9.32     Or they can be made to be heard in dissonance (countering consistency).

 

9.321   Only this last combination can fully engage the reader, educate desire.

 

9.4       In the act of constructing its meanings, the readers share in the poem’s state of becoming.

 

9.41     In doing so, they should discover that it is also what a text is made to do, not merely what it is made to mean, that is revolutionary.

 

9.42     At this point, the constant change of the postmodern condition engages the future possibility of non-programmatic social change.

 

9.43     These meet, in the reader’s reading, not in the writer’s writing, in changing the desires of a reader, at the moment of affirmation.

 

10        The poem, as it is read, projects a future in its very refusal to mean this world.

 

10.1     This moment of affirmation, the turning towards the future suggests that however much postmodern these propositions are, they are pre-something else, flashlights unwittingly signalling as yet unreadable messages.

 

 

 

Sources: The material for these propositions is found also in my Some Aspects of Contemporary British Poetry, with particular reference to the works of Roy Fisher and Lee Harwood (unpublished), ‘Pre-script’ (Pages 1-8, 1987), and ‘Working the Work’ (First Offense 3, 1987).  Beyond these, the propositions are indebted (at least) to works by the following: P Ackroyd, TW Adorno, R Barthes, A Easthope, U Eco, A Fisher, V Forrest-Thomson, S Fredman, Y Lotman, J-F Lyotard, H Marcuse, M Merleau-Ponty, J Mukaéovskú, M Perloff, V Shklovsky, EP Thompson and WC Williams

 

 

18 October 1987                                                                        Previously unpublished

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