constant structure

constant structure

What is wrong with the expectations we place on language?

There are innumerable centres and positions for us to occupy.[1]

Contemporary non-realist philosopher Hilary Lawson insists that the act of ‘closure’ is unavoidable and characterises our ways of ‘holding’ the world as supposed reality. Closure is an act of selective definition made in the face of an openness that eludes final containment. Our acts of art—our actions as humans, period—are forms of illusion or misrepresentation.[2] We hold the world in certain ways according to our needs and in order to make proper use of it—in the end, Lawson tells us, reality is ‘unholdable’.[3]

This writing claims no home or way there; nonetheless, it will state preferences with candour. Poetry performs repeated incursions—call them self-incisions—into the corpus of language that elicit accounts of experiential occupancy in the world. Consider Brasch’s heartfelt plea in ‘The Silent Land’:

               Man must lie with the gaunt hills like a lover,
               Earning their intimacy in the calm sigh

or Ursula Bethell’s intense act of supplication in ‘Time’:

               Oh, become established quickly, quickly, garden
               For I am fugitive

or Curnow’s quashing of distance into the waning ‘eye of day’ at Karekare Beach in ‘Lone Kauri Road’:

               The first time I looked seaward, westward,
               it was looking back yellowly,
               a dulling incandescence.

Simply put, there’s no definitive answer to be found in poetic texts or elsewhere. As we enter the new land of AI, we look back and see that our habitual ways of writing and reading have been helplessly self-centred, anthropomorphic.[4] Our local history of poetry channels the world of sensory input into an assemblage of inter-subjectivity. We have made the world a feature of an interposed, all-encompassing capital first person ‘I’. We outreckon God.

The purpose of this piece of writing, a matter of floating shards, is to defenestrate the subject-making that has long underpinned the ‘held’ in poetry. Such subjectivity is implicated in an implacable conjuring up, projecting and subjugating the discoverable world in an extenuation of self or selves. Or, to put it another way: I wish to attest a poetics of bottomless infinitude. Firm footing in the world is an oxymoron in the order of futility. This involves more than fatal attraction.

John Coltrane’s rendition of ‘My Favourite Things’ evokes yet is clearly not identical to the instantly recognised original tune. When Albert Ayer performs ‘Spiritual Unity’, he shatters God and the world into a thousand fragments. Timing and timbre in music are everything to play for, with. Originality is the lure. Thus it comes to language and poetry. There is, in poet Anne Lauterbach’s phrase, only the given and the chosen of attention.[5] Yet distinctions are to be made.

Like the reflexive ‘I’ on which it is posited, poetic language affirms an innerness that evades final encounter, try as one might. No essence lurks. The language cannot help but fall between the two because, like chicanery or a form of fiat currency, it is granted (nowadays precarious!) value without rock-solid foundations. A thing is something although never a self-sufficient anything; it invites its opposite and is what it is by virtue of what it’s not. And even that sentence brings about change. There is inevitable proliferation, papañca (Skt. Prapañca) as the Buddha terms it. Sages point a finger to the moon (who points nowhere?)—presumably to alert us to the limits of looking and knowing: ‘The description is not the final thing. And yet it is not pointless’, remarks Donald Hoffman.[6] The pun, admittedly, is mine: everything, every word, iterates contingency, a makeshift placing within an assumed or fabricated context. Kendrick Smithyman is the local poet who has explored such terrain most assiduously:

               A yellow-breasted bird
               heraldic upon a rock
               devised himself to give back
               due light to the afternoon.
               Who from his posing took
               strength, as from the sun. 
                              (‘Kingfisher Song’, ~1945, my italics)

The ‘who’ is ‘himself’ a proximate I, reflexively male. Smithyman recognises that pronouns are implicit claims upon the material presented. In loosening their hold, he incidentally tosses settled ownership to the wind. Furthermore, ‘heraldic’ might as well apply to the above lines quoted from Curnow, whereby time and distance collapse in an emblazoned gazing into an abyss—something an earlier poem refers to as ‘To sink both self and all why sink the whole / Phenomenal enterprise’ (‘To Forget Self and All’). Subjectivity does get pretty weird.

I’m not going to try describing that run
from down by the creek where it starts being
a river, up to the ridge where everything falls
away westward. For the first time again
you look out on a sea bigger, further, than remembered. (~1985)

Assuredly, there is a (befuddled) ‘I’ leading the way; however, the playfulness, here as elsewhere, has less to do with self-declaration and more to do with a realisation that efforts at self-existence are perspectival, improvised. Conveniently, the speaker transmutes into ‘you’. It is within reality’s non-existent ur-house that poetry prepares a dwelling.[7] Smithyman I consider to be our first non-realist poet.

               The word ‘culprit’ is not what it implies. 
               Neither derives from the other, nor does 
               either give rise to this incarnation. That’s 
               what free agents are. It is designated the 
               entire language of our insouciance. Whether 
               a queen or a ruffled flower, culprit baulks.

Transitions in poetic centres in Aotearoa-New Zealand intrigue me.[8] In the early 20^th century, it was considered male poets were serious thinkers and women largely poetasters. The subsequent revolutions of the ‘thirties, ‘seventies and ‘eighties, the ‘noughties, reveal an interesting set of progressions, not only of poetics in relation to the world, but also the way in which I is refigured. From the late ‘sixties onward, youthful, activist, female and Māori voices become increasingly unashamed, outspoken, activist. In the present century, the rapid devolution into multi-gendered, multi-ethnic and multi-poetic viewpoints has been remarkable to behold, as witnessed in the appearance of the whopping queer anthology Out Here (2021).[9]

What were our poets thinking? What are we to make of their shaping thour world? On whose behalf? How encompass such expansive accommodations with precision? Like the Matisse of the late cut-outs, where the shapes rendered are not reducible to beforehand or a straightforward extrapolation of importance. Shaping-sounding-scripting has their own meaning. And articulating (an articulation of) the shaping is still another shaping. Meaning endlessly devises. There are innumerable centres and positions to adopt: a poem means giving shape. The one it is as much as those it is not.

What does Joanna Paul evoke when she paints an image or writes a poem about the interior of a house or body? Is this contrary to the Brasch-Curnow possession of the world? Look at this account of habitation of interspersed spaces, I-not-I, signalling disarray in the location of identity.[10]

Here the mis-alignment between assumption and encounter is what Paul places into prominent question. It is not that an answer to the question is sought, much less assumed; rather, the questioning takes the form of slivers of incompleteness within a squeezed disclosure. Such exploration I see occurring in diverse ways in the work of Anna Jackson (psychoaesthics), Michele Leggott (mythopoetics), Richard von Sturmer (zenaesthics), Robert Sullivan (ethnoaesthics), essa may ranapiri (gendaesthics), Barnes & Tse (queeraesthics), Iaian Britton (ecoaesthics), Lisa Samuels (aesaesthics), among others. The father/progenitor of such proliferation in poetic mode, wittingly or unwittingly, given his own insouciance, I take to be Mark Young (aesthetics 101). A question that has yet to be properly addressed: is form proprietary? And what happens when we are given too much of a good thing, too many things?[11] Are we—our poetry—our splaying human predilections—in an unfortunate state of surfeit?

We hug subjectivity like a rock. ‘I’ isn’t happening inside my body.

The course of ‘human civilisation’ does not prevail.

This contra: ‘Yuval Noah Harari argues that AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation’ (Economist, 28 April 2023).

Whence the anti-intellectualism of the flamboyant ‘I’?

Well thought out positions haven’t yet managed to save the world. Nor poorly thought-out ones. The hyphen is the culprit.

To reject art on any other basis than form is legitimate while at the same time it is a desecration of art. Only art is content with the contradiction.

Reality (abhors) stasis. Nor is it still or moving.

Poetry is non-definitive. It registers hard points along a referential path (which it endeavours to respect), in the process finding that what holds constant is constantly breaking down. Poetry is witness to the entropy of human endeavour. Alone (with other art forms) it’s an intimation that cannot be further intimated: the extenuation of prospect, ad libitum:

               The way Bill's blue hydrangeas open in the air, 
               occupying it. For me, when I open, I am aware of a 
               certain resistance, theirs and mine.

As content collapses, or dissipates over time, it reverts to form.[12] What belongs to poetry & what doesn’t? Things are the way they are held.

This happens near Bill's place, where various
hydrangeas pop among leaves like oversized blue
bulbs. When I see them, I am reminded of Annette,
who regularly attends the Zen steps, and is nothing
like either Bill or the bulbs or shielding hedges, or the
flattened leaves, though she cleans the steps. Where
angels tread cautiously.

Out Here is an extraordinary book of uber-claim on the power of the pronoun, especially in relation to the exercise of gender and sexual orientation in contemporary society.[13] But for all the upheaval of traditional pronoun use—ranipiri turnstiles ‘i, xe, xir, their, ur’—the singular I proves the hardest to shake off. One way or another, everyone remains resolutely attached to self-authentication. When I speak I wrap myself thus: ‘I’. But what is an I and who is one?

Within strange promise and translucency—like a sky rocket propelled upward only to suddenly expire in a brilliant array of multicoloured individual lights—I read with interest the steady launch of new poetry sites and book publications (in a sampling from the NZ Poetry rack at Takapuna Library): Oscar Upperton’s New Transgender Blockbuster (2020), Jordan Hamel’s Everyone is everyone except you (2022), Vana Manasiadis’s The Grief Almanac: A Sequel (2019), Lynley Edmeades’ Listening In (2019), Emma Barnes’s I am in Bed with You (2020), Jake Arthur’s A Lack of Good Sons (2023). These are fresh, exhilarating sky-shots. If I express a reservation, it concerns their narrowed orbits round the moon of subjectivity. Let me illustrate, not unkindly, with 2½ lines taken from the penultimate title:

               I capital I capital I start these sentences in my
               head on the night I have an existential crisis
               about my gender 
                                             (‘I am a man’)

Six self-references, plus one in the title. The unaddressed crisis nestled within the highlighted gender crisis, deserving as it is of attention, is our settled, untroubled adoption of ‘I’ as the ‘true’ source of authority to speak and choose and need.

We risk reverting to form as content’s support, like a coat hanger on which a garment is arrayed. There is nothing wrong with using form to convey content, or treasuring poetry based on content. On the other hand, the argument presented here is that it is form that makes content possible and not the other way around. It’s form we must somehow crack.

Nestled in the opening pages of Out Here is slightly older queer poet Alison Glenny.[14] But ‘queer’ here intimates the earlier sense of an unusualness that eludes definition. The Bird Collector is a poetics of antithesis, metamorphosis, anywhere everywhere and vice versa. It opens:

       ‘But we do not know in advance which key will unlock the hidden 
       melody. Discovering it is a matter of chance—like opening a drawer 
       at random and finding snow, or the ghost of a bird fluttering among 
       the cogs and feathers’. The composer fell silent, leaving Odile to 
       ponder his gift; the way it grew heavier the closer she approached. 
       Eventually she would have to unwrap the box, burn the finely 
       embossed paper. There was no telling what they might glimpse 
       among the ashes. The remains of field notes or the charred pages 
       of a poem—its ruined homologies. A book of instructions on how to 
       mourn, which gradations of ribbons and ornaments. She sensed that 
       the question would continue to revolve as they turned the handle, 
       a machine releasing oracles that were mistaken for songs.     (‘Key’)

Encapsulated in this beautiful paragraph is much of what I wish to say. An unanchored pseudo-narrator (Odile); an un-self-explained composer (‘his’); musical motifs, music-making machines (‘hidden melody, cogs, handle’); secrecy, hidden spaces, randomness (‘key, a drawer, chance, mistaken’); disclosure, discovery, treasure (‘unlock, unwrap, gift, oracles, homologies’); an omnivorous collector, especially of birds (‘ghost of a bird, feathers, field notes’); despondency, despair, loss (‘mourn, ashes, charred, ruined ‘). The crazy thing is that any of the words quoted in the brackets might escape them or be exchanged with one or other of the preceding words and we’d be none the wiser. An angel recedes—into the book’s future!

Interestingly, Glenny credits a threesome of non-poet, non-illustrator and non-publisher with putting together a pretty polished book of poetic non-poetry (it contains no verse).[15] This is key. Poetry shows that the things it is made of are floating points. Dis-locatings. The no-definite-thing-ness of things is what form ultimately defines.

Perhaps serendipity places Glenny’s name at the head of this text? Displacement is its characteristic mode (there is no contents page). There are glossaries on obscure antiquarian themes (‘the Nineteenth Century Novel: A Glossary of Terms’, ‘Footnotes to a History of Birdsong’). Other sections are occupied mostly by empty space (‘From Field Notes’, ‘Fragments and Notes’). More intriguingly, there are drifting footnotes to texts that are not included. Here’s one:

       ⁵ Interiority was a spatial concept that relied on hidden rooms and 
       cabinets. When she put her ear to the keyhole, the sound of ghostly 
       minuets. (15)

And let me stop here. Having sent The Bird Collector into the ether (another rocket?) it already inhabits.[16] To say this book wastes time is to offer an idiomatic compliment. Aesthetics is a null set, vacuity’s allure.

Postscript:

       Aesthetics of the Aesthetician
       What is the aesthetician
  	But a mule hitched to the times?
			           (Kenneth Koch)

Subjectivity as the parent of orientation is rightfully under siege.

notes

[1] Cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman cites Gödel’s ‘no theory of everything’ and Cantor’s ‘an infinity of infinities’ in asserting that the world can never be adequately or finally described. He explains, ‘Objects… have no definite values of physical properties, such as position or momentum when they are not observed’, concluding, ‘Our senses do not show us truths about objective reality’ <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/367000099_Fusions_of_Consciousness ‘Fusions of Consciousness’, 2023>

[2] A kinder explanation might be that representation, because it arbitrarily gives form, is misrepresentation.

[3] Lawson argues that no objective world can be known because any attempt at objectivity is indexed to self-referentiality, especially in language, which is itself an artefact (‘when you say something and it doesn’t apply to itself’). He calls this ‘the central flaw that undermines realism’…. ‘Products of a monist universe cannot be true or false, they merely exist’. (Closure: A Story of Everything, Routledge/Kindle, 2001/5, loc 482). Also <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qh38Gaxg9tw>

[4] The ushering in of language poetry happened through John Cage and Jackson Mac Low—mesostics, aleatoric (chance) operations, the slicing and dicing of modernist as well as classical texts like I Ching. Theirs were among the first efforts to liberate the signifier and move literature away from self-reference (Barthes’ ‘death of the author’) towards autonomous relations within language.

[5] Lauterbach explains, ‘The world as such cannot be in the poems. Only language can be in the poems…. [Poems] are about what might arise between the given and the chosen.’ She approvingly cites Cage’s ‘turn art into life and life into art’ and a reconfiguration of facts in an ‘erosion of inwardness’ (Pennsound, ‘The Given and the Chosen: A Meditation’, 2010) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZKPthDG7as>

[6] See footnote 1. In conversation with Direct Path spiritualist Robert Spira, 2023 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rafVevceWgs>

[7] Consider Heidegger’s idea of poem as ‘dwelling’, especially in the case of Hölderlin; or Wittgenstein’s point that language is incapable of describing what’s outside itself; or Derrida’s contention that meaningfulness ultimately self-collapses.

[8] Of course, inception belongs to the narrative of start—middle—end. What we term the origin in Aotearoan poetry, generally attributed to the group of male writers who appear around 1930, is in fact a contrivance (see Roger Horrocks, ‘The Invention of New Zealand’, AND/1, 1983).

[9] Eds Chris Tse and Emma Barnes, AUP. Women have had it hard. For lack of them, Leigh Davis, co-editor of AND/1, adds an eponymous ANNE BLAND to the contributor list on the back cover. Five years later, in Yellow Pencils, editor Lydia Wevers parades 28 real women poets to demonstrate what they are actually up to. Some 40 years on, Wevers’ effrontery appears rather mild compared to the 200 women poets Paula Green features in Wild Honey (2019).

[10] From Unpacking the Body (1996), mixed media, in remembrance of Paul’s daughter Imogen, who died in infancy.

[11] There have been and are times when poetry approaches spiritual text. Cultures as diverse as Greek and Māori, in their founding narratives, commingle mundanity and the divine, another hybridisation.

[12] See my application of Walter Benjamin’s retroactive take on time in ‘holy smoke!’, sidedoor, remake2 <https://www.remake2.wordpress.com>

[13] See my review ‘OUT HERE’, sidedoor, remake8 < https://www.remakeight.wordpress.com>

[14] ‘The Propeller Club’ seems pretty conventional when compared to her two published poetry texts.

[15] Carrie Tiffany is the fabulous illustrator; Compound Press the outstanding publisher <https://soundcloud.com/paekakariki-fm/dinah-hawken-and-alison-glenny-poets-on-te-pae-24th-october-2021>. As an aside, I consider the deserved progenitor of open-textuality is Anne Kennedy in 1000 Traditional Smiles (1985), another work of woven time and floating protagonists (see my ‘Wholes in part’, JNZL 34.2, 2016).

[16] Notice that Glenny’s earlier collection, The Farewell Tourist (2018), combines the same unfilled spaces and ellipses/strikethroughs, musical geological & naturalistic motifs, as well as cryptic sequences that contain a proper name or two, listed footnotes to specified but unlocatable works, two appendices etc. She comments: ‘One of the things that appeals to me about the use of footnotes as primary text… is the invitation this seems to offer to readers to imagine their versions of what that missing primary text might be’ <https://nzpoetryshelf.com/2018/10/05/poetry-shelf-in-conversation-with-alison-glenny/>