Getting out: a contemplation on the disclosure of two worded bodies (how things fall apart)[1]

Girls will be boys and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, except for Lola
La-la-la-la Lola / The Kinks

emulation is divergence / Joe Boyd

decorum

Bodies are solid, intractable things; they don’t ask to be turned inside out, but t(here) you have it. Mark Young’s whopping The Magritte

Poems, his 50^th+ publication, and Dani Yourukova’s quiz-themster 1^irst Transposium, are paired here as on a dating app, say tinder, grindr, tumblr. Not that I—our AI nether^twin—propose to serve as some kind of algorithmic chaperon (rhymes with rhythm). Naturally enough, most poets do not like being pose-squeezed together,

unless of course they themselves should so deign: historically, at least, they are better considered as chancers-in-fortuity, makers of the palaces of make-believe, rare envisioners. Late in life for cis

octogenarian Young—who’s understandably has had his own share of wobbles in life, geographically chemically behaviourally—and early in life for queer Yourukova, waifish offspring to a ‘Bulgarian mother’ and an unwelcomely ‘touched’-by absent ‘father’ figure & ‘what boys did to you’; and a precociously sure-footed student of classicism. Our chosen pair appear at first

glance to comprise an unlikely enough ‘match made in heaven’. So, who’s to adjudicate this festive realm of gamesuptheirship? Someone must have got (the) time wrong—after all, eight decades transposed to two, an unwonted exorbitance. Surely, someone will have to pay… but, who, me?

That is what I do. La-la-la-la Lola.[2]

Is all that we make made on the backs of other folks’ prior endeavours, whether acceded to or not—or do we simply arrogate the taken-in-given as our own, repurposed new history forever? In reality everything is always more than what’s already been said & done and can never be made solely ours, us—as these two poets demonstrate. Manoeuvrability, as humans, poets, voyagers (in ships) is a contrivance, shuffled between havoc and containment.

        The Ship of Theseus is a well-known metaphysical experiment on the   
        question of identity. As the ship decays against the tides, the 
        Athenians replace the boards, trying to keep the wreck alive, rotting
        boards pried from healthy flesh.
                                                 (‘Phaedrus Recites a Catalogue of Ships’ (1))

I proffer an affected text that may be received in a couple of ways: either on its own terms, as ornery speculative makeshift, or else as a purposeful consideration of the poetic merits of these two rather fine, if divergent, books. We sail into uncanniness. The vessel arrives at that upside down spun-out place that never ends and seems to be the impetus for—& product of—our deranged collective nisus. Why give our lives over to madness? Is disorder ordered by art or does art exacerbate what it supposes to resolve? Does endemic disorder obey any laws whatsoever? These many words begetting words, endless. No wonder they tumble head over heels, only to quickly re-right themselves, in somewhat ungainly fashion, like those resurgent funky kids’ toys.[3] In a wor d iness (removab e ‘l’s) which exists only in nascent self-righting, no certainty or permanence of form is ever to be counted on. Get used to it. It’s how things move. Our pair knows that poetry is one of the nearest things to wilful noncompliance. No originary mothership to reinstate. If there is a truth, it belongs neither to words nor to time: as one of our finest forbear poet’s attests, we traverse ‘nameless waters’.

It’s all about wholes, right? Whole bits? Bits of a whole? Double u & a hole, huh?

abandoned logic / layered absence / obscensibility

Our intrepid pair advance in pursuit of unforeseen, peculiar possibilities. They pose, sometimes poseurs, always smarty-pants. Young approaches—^erm!spellbound—Magritte’s superfluity of paintings (many titles are shared in the poems), verbally reenacting (Yourukova’s label is analogues) the painter’s brazen violation of pictorial norms bound to verisimilitudinal exactitude. You don’t actually look at what appears on a Magritte canvas (or in a Young poem). What is presented is an imposition of arbitrary images belying what holds them together, in-absentia visual fields. For example, you see an open window, misplaced objects, floating clouds, the reflected back of a head—sequestered & out-of-context. Ceci n’est pas une pipe (inscribed on the painting of that name) is a regular declarative sentence and a fact and a lie: ‘the extra rich- / ness of language that allows us to say / different things with a single word’ (‘Be careful, when travelling, not to wound the feelings of your friends’). The world and everything contained in it is reduced to either fetish or make-believe or both: negation rules. These sleights-of-designation are observations that insist that representation is ever and only a mode of appearance—no safeguard or inner sanctum exists:

For Young, personal biography is superfluous, spurious; perhaps just as well. The name ‘Magritte’ (perhaps too ‘Georgette’, his spouse) is encountered more often than that of ‘Young’, not excluding auxiliaries ‘I/me’. The poet wears his own art, himself—like Magritte’s ubiquitous bowler: ‘I put on / a bowler hat… // as my own (‘The Son of Man’). Together, each in his guise, these word-image-smiths abandon themselves to an indeterminable otherwise of genteel metonymic displacement, readily encapsulated as ‘Without Magritte, the invis- // ible would never be rendered / visible & we would never know // what direction we should follow’ (‘Memory of a Journey’). An irretrievable gap persists. Drawn to where we are all drawn yet where we cannot go. Kirk to bridge, ‘Beam me up, Scotty’.

                   The Improvement

                 Things might seem to be
                how they seem until you

                reach the door – or, more
            probably, one of many doors –

                 marked Magritte the Magi-
                   cian, open any of them, &

                   discover the invisible that 
                  resides behind the visible.

Needless to say, the response is art, seeing that cannot eliminate anticipation. For all talk of ‘discovery’ of the ‘invisible’, intimation

supplants revelation. We arrive no further forward, although perhaps that is the point: progression and improvement are bubbles that burst inside each other’s mouths, revealing beatific noughts: ‘the intention must be there to / move forward, to invent the fu- / ture or re-invent it before our one // arrives’

(‘The Window (2)’). Futures &—by implication—presents & pasts are speculative imaginings, one-&-the-same and not even that. Con- = fabulation = us (see ‘The Empty Mask’: ‘If we give / objects / different names to those / they were made or / born with // are we changing reality / or merely re- / arranging it?’)[4]. Structuring civilisation entails repeated conjurings, better watch out for the magician’s coordinated hand eye gestures.

Titles beginning ‘The’ are rampant and this bodes poorly for the edifice of representation as it does for the reputation of the definite article. ‘The’ is the new ‘I’ and ambivalence abides. Young, aka Magritte, performs magic: ‘I live my life vicariously’ through ‘Magritte the Magi / cian’ (‘Le Sang du Monde’). Space is occupied along with a refusal to comply with the laws of occupancy. Occupying none—unseen is better:

          … there
          can be no
          such thing as
          a blank page
          since the
          invisible is
          just waiting
          to be made visible
                          (‘La Page Blanche’)

What is sought is the uns(p)eekable. Superposition delivers our prison break: noticing something where it is not yet is. Absurdly clever, Mark.

sl[e]ight diversion

For all the disorder remaining near at hand, the standpoint assumed by a Young & young poet is surpassingly upbeat. The next moment might occur anywhere and bring anything and therefore assures just the right kind of rupture/rapture, divergence hinged on a vowel-choice. Neither poet would likely survive a day in the bleak terrain depicted in Markéta Lazarová (1967), Czech František Vláčil’s film, a grainy dark medieval landscape borne of treachery and lust where

blood is not gain and loyalty is neither love nor sex. Moving on a couple of years and further east to Geogia, we encounter filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s Soviet Armenian Sayat-Nova / The Colour of Pomegranates (1969).[5] The pains and

uncertainties of life are etherealised in this mesmeric visual extravaganza. Here, our two poets, for all their braggadocio, might well dwell happily for some time. Poetry (like film) has one of the very best shots at banishing time from the Republic. After all, petite Yourukova was entirely unforeseeable on the day neophyte Mark Young published ‘Lizard’, a poem about an old man surviving the ravages of age and confronting his demise, in The New Zealand Listener in 1959. Young turns 18 that same year, I turn five, and Yourukova is not a figment in anyone’s imagination until some 40 years hence. What the two poets do have in common is precocious virtuosity. Fabrication settles beauty on an unwary, even hostile world. World is art’s combatant in perpetuity.

Magic away. Into existence, click. Not seeing how the trick’s done. Vamoose!

o^ve^rl^ap: simulation (‘The sims…’) // simulacra (‘’) / space junk / idyl / ‘bejewelled androgyny’ / ‘decalcomania’ / ‘neoteny’

Enigmatic poetic personae: ‘Briseis’ encounters Magritte’s proxy.

Yourukova:

pan-sympathetic

be-mused, 'Briseis'

Briseis, from the House of
the Tragic Poet in Pompeii,
fresco, 1^stC AD

imaginative, spirited, gutsy

provocative, audacious, irascible, petulant, bruised

erudite, witty, cunning, sophisticated

‘what it means / to look inside a person’ 3; ‘apophenia’, ‘unmotivated seeing of connections’, ‘shifts in the random’ 30; ‘maybe all children are insufficiently loved’ 33

'what your father might have done to you... has anyone every touched you... her retaliatory rage... what boys did to you...' 29-34; ‘with my stepdad when I was twelve, and awful’ 40

‘truth that memory cannot produce’ 32; ‘premise of the poem’ 38; ‘space between what is known and what is just slightly beyond knowing’ 68

‘masc, trans, love that a Bottom has for a Top, wearing fishnets to a fox hunt, Daddy Dom, Gold Star Gay, femme king, Hot Girl, hot hot hot…’

‘the woman loses track of herself inside the negatives’ 43; ‘it’s too hard to be a person with any sort of consistency’ 65; ‘is it enough to love the absence / of certainty?’, ‘holes cut heart-shape / across the throats of people’ 67; ‘I am so fucking hot right now’ 82; ‘at the altar / in honour of your eyebrows’ 88

Young:

genial, deft, witty, roguish



sleighting-of-hand,  enchanter



cascading, egoic diaspora



unflappable, compassionate


freethinking, syllogisticated

Google search returns some 100 hits for Dani Yourukova before the connections become increasingly tenuous. When it comes to Mark Young (poet), I stop scrolling after multiples of 100s, bushed. What does agglomeration achieve? What’s in a name—fame—uttered to infinity? Names, words, body parts, parklands, hemispheres, delimited demarcations no more. Keats’s wishful ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, / That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’ seeks to dispel as much as conquer time, knowing it can’t. Recent research confirms our human tendency to correlate beauty with moral goodness (truth), because we unreflectingly transpose them in our minds (an unattractively dressed person is automatically considered less trustworthy), rather than there being any intrinsic equivalence between the two.[6] It’s like this with everything. Our problem is that we think the container contains something of special significance—meaning, representation, beauty—whereas in actuality it includes only what’s inside and excludes everything else.

               What plural
                        & singular
                                is identical?

Words are so many, trillions upon trillions. Little wonder we parade only tiny morsels at any one time, in any language, notwithstanding AI’s shenanigans (intelligence equates to ‘artificiality’, really?). Thought (as measure, as language) is a metaphor for constriction. There is no static self-contained statement that we can enter into or that binds us together—rather we seek freshness, enterprise, free-exchange, unshackling, distraction, insatiation. Maybe it’s frivolous on my part to attempt to matchmake Yourukova and Young, even as vivant sapiosexuals?[7] What is romance, anyhow? How does one speak (i.e. the writer) when not obliged to listen? I hold my head in my hands and gape. Movement is in poetry what flight is in air and flow is in water. Stillness falters.

sims / abduction

Not so quick, rejoinders Yourukova. Unlike genteel punster Young (‘I take off what’s left of / my clown clothes. Naked- / ness is the proper dress for / facing existential questions’ (‘The famine’), Transposium‘s angsty, introspective poet-persona trails a plethora of ‘I/me’s through their self-confessed ‘psychosexual fever dream’. Strangely enough, the fever dream shares (seems to, at least) the space it occupies with scraps of actual painful autobiography (persona as sim?). A different way to be in the same wor(l)d, let us say—as per ‘The Sims is a two-player game (always has been)’. Whether in process of wrecking received gender-sexual behavioural norms, or simply recalibrating them (‘sometimes I want to outsource my identity’ (‘Ten thousand digital ghosts in my pants’), percipient Yourukova, like charismatic Young, turns traditional notions of perspective and human intimacy inside-down. Theirs is an inverse logic, the illogic of abduction.[8] More broadly, they figuratively join hands in a kind of simulated love quest of daring escape in & out of identity, their own and others. While Young doubles down on his wager ‘the invisible / hides nothing’, Yourukova restages with hyperbolic volubility multiple heres-&-nows, everywhere. Should MagritteYoung Taxidermists Inc. be said to revel in a feigning of living life, Yourukova remasters—no, arrogates as their own—Plato’s entire classical Symposium, in which the world’s greatest philosopher invites seven preeminent Athenian guys to expatiate on the topic of Eros, the Greek god of love.

In the original, we learn about the many-sidedness of Greek love, whether sexual (specifically between older and younger males),

exploitative, warriorlike and valourous, noble, honourable, platonic, vegetal or death-defyingly divine.

Retaining Plato’s speaking order, Yourukova retains only a modicum of the arguments as given, piecemeal snippets, and instead the reader is required to undertake a three-page quiz, comprising five pretty random questions: ‘You must answer all questions’. Seven multichoice responses A-G, when answered consistently, invite the participant to ‘turn to’ a subsequent page that contains a poem (‘analogues’) under the name of that particular Symposium speaker. Any carryover from the two-&-a-half-millennia-old material (as I say) is selective, though shrewdly chosen, and of a totemic rather than representative nature. Spry Yourukova, gone all rogue. We’re off to the races.

        Thinking about the Socratic dialogue of Symposium as a ‘form’, led 
        to a thinking about poetic form and the strategies we use to hold a 
        thought or argue a point, and the ways in which poetry disrupts 
        those expectations… I wanted to adapt that liveliness, that sense of
        finding answers by slipping between identities, by using drama and
        narrative and humour and lyricism as a way of articulating the vast
        diversity of experience that we have with love in its various forms.       
                                                                                                NZ Booklovers[9]

Tellingly, our surrogate poet ‘slip[s] between identities’ as facets of themself. The hilarious unanswerable quiz format, established in I TRANSPOSIUM, section I of III, has contestants placed in thrall to the quiztheirster, who insists: ‘We / will judge you by your answers’. Shunted about, the flailing contestant is enjoined to take the quiz again (& ‘again’).[10] The only ‘CORRECT’ answer, it transpires, leads to the beheaded SOCRATES page, a revelation in itself (‘Feels good to be validated by arbitrary systems of classification’, eh); yet the winning instruction—‘Turn to page XXXX’, which is nowhere—is immediately retracted, bafflingly, with the call ‘Do it again’.

The actual, true inspiration (given goody two-shoes Socrates self-cancels) is the seventh and final speaker, Alcibiades. He has long had a crush on Socrates and, taking (or taking) the hint, Yourukova abandons themself in a passage of gender-flipped teasing insouciant arousal, ahh:

        Her eyes are wide enough to drink from [is how the section opens] 
        she skims a slow kiss across the shell of my ear / too much and not
        enough / I feel the salt-white swoop / of her throat / against my 
        mouth [is how it ends]. (19)

Logic—the magic of logic—is a debauch. The dialecticians are as much interested (except Socrates, who Alcibiades avers is beyond sensual indulgence) in getting drunk and/or getting into each other’s (others’?) pants/himations as in winning the cerebral contest (what’s the real prize, anyway?). The operative verb is thrust:

                                                                     To love is 
          to heave that body against a foreign shore

          and hope for the best. 
                                                                     (‘Eryximachus’)

The title of the middle section ‘II DIALECTICAL’ is misleading because, while several other protagonists are involved in the action, the subjective perspective and ‘I want to re-enact my inability to form / healthy attachments’ insistence is entirely the property and propriety of the zippy, fraught Yourukova persona (cleverly reverse-addressed as ‘you’). Forays into a predatory world of unpredictable relationships—energetically regaled, & often enough staged between raw expectancy, trepidation, and disappointment—invariably ricochet back onto the persona-poet’s shaken inner state, like a boiling jug of water whose faulty switch won’t allow it to stop.

          You are obviously very attracted to me
          my best friend’s polyamorous Tinder Dom reveals
          in a deeply inauspicious WhatsApp message.
          It is a complex matter, to query the truth of this suggestion.
                                                      (‘Pausanius Explains My Sexuality to Me’)

‘Phaedrus Recites a Catalogue of Ships’ is especially revealing in this regard. As indicated in brief quotations included above in o^ve^rl^ap: simulation, the choppy crossover between Phaedrus’s account of Grecian ships and a personally troubled Bulgarian upbringing risks capsizing the distinction between persona and poet-person:

        44. Briseis’s [concerned] mother strokes the child’s fair cheeks,
              whispers dearest, no one will like you if you cry so much 
              into the soft wisp of her hair.

The 50-part poem (‘fifty ships in all’) closes with wrenching one-liners: ’It has taken many years for the ships to stop burning’ (49) and ’You can see the ships in your eyes as they lie to you’ (50). At its midpoint reside disclosures of invaded emotional and bodily space that coalesce in the child’s ‘memory of the Bulgarian proverb “I can see the ships in your eyes”’ (23), followed by the mother’s pressing: ’Has anyone ever touched you?’ (24).

Male family members, current or ex-lovers, the Uber driver, their ‘best friend’s polyamorous Tinder Dom’, endless partying and ‘a thousand first dates’—notwithstanding the compelling libidinal energy that underpins the section—are instances of an undercurrent that keeps resurfacing through the book as sexual and psychological ambivalence, returning feelings of unsafety, and susceptibility to intrusion. If not poetically (the great reprieve), in other respects, fears of being mistaken, individually or interpersonally, lurk.

The third section recalls the enticing speaker who ended section I: ‘III ALCIBIADES CHOOSES THEIR OWN ADVENTURE’. The sequence’s opener states explicitly: ‘You Are Alcibiades’, whereby once more the poet-persona’s voice strikingly self-animates (‘You’ doubles as ‘I’). The quiz format is redeployed, this time dispensing with the makeshift questions, so freeing the reader to respond on their own terms to each deft, loosely-related poem. The ‘turn to’ instruction appears now in bold at the foot of the page. The tantalising ‘Alcibiades walks into a room’ (‘like being on the inside / of a disco ball with tits’) footnotes thus:

        >  Time passes differently when you’re waiting for a response 
            to a text message.  Thousands of years go by, civilisations 
            rise and fall, and your mortal flesh twists and shrivels, dry 
            as a stick.
            You are dead.

Again the onrush of the voiced and the unvoiced , oblique biographical revelations, and heaps of talk about identities with a veritable ragbag to choose from. If the tone is grittier and more confrontational than Young’s (‘what lady likes to be treated rudely?’, he quips), Yourukova’s metaphysics is similarly implosive. Salvation lies afar; nearby abysses abound.[11]

                                                          and you
          understand the impulse to
          create a fantasy of yourself, like reaching
          across the sky
          to run your fingertips along
          and endless string of pearls
                          until it all goes dark
			                     (‘You Are Alcibiades’)

          secret signals between, whispered
          under, the mattresses of frivolity
          atmospheres colliding
          stars shining, eliding the boundaries,
          and tangled in the string            of everything else
  	               	   	            (‘Gender is fake and so am I’)

For both poets, titles provide irresistible occasions for delight. Young commends ‘the giving of titles that bear no relation to the / item in question’ (‘Le Prisonnier’), and a particular Yourukova gem: ‘Body dysmorphia is expensive and poetry is free’. Redemptorist ploy, Alien in drag? No answer will come from or with words. Certainly, none went into making them, and the book’s last poem is the end of time, another rude commencement:

          Your hands are on my body
          and soon,
          a friendly cactus emerges
          from my abdomen,
          damp with blood, and 
          crowned with light. 
                                           (‘Love poem for a future’)[12] 

In the night I pick flowers. The feeling of aliveness repudiates measure. Life without a static molecule. Thought comes out of relationship as it in turn comes out of thought. Like a cactus, nowhere’s home. The time is right.[13]

There is a fluttering of wings.

zombieing / benching / breadcrumbing

  
She takes a few steps forward, stoops, folds her body forward from the hips & looks back up
thru her (spread) legs. Oh I (he)…


     for the fearful of homosexual impulse (?), fears—and of bisexuality—words                                                              

 (discourse#5, 1985)  

Literature covets all it touches. Like humans. What is it has you imagine you give rise to anything? Give me a break. The role you have is akin to a taxi driver or astronaut or taxidermist, navigators of roads and purveyors of pole dancers. Imagination is magic, simply add c. A shutter stroke and everything is reframed. Time-pincher.

        A comic effect is obtained whenever we pretend to take literally 
        an expression which was used figuratively. 
                                                                       (Henri Bergson, Laughter)[14]

Another ‘Beauty-is-good’ conflation? See above.

Saying one thing never ends. A container leaks; on a platform you teeter at the edge, staring down; every gesture has ‘mistaken’ baked into it. Saying nothing is (really) something (sic¹¹). Behind language spar clarity and obfuscation in equal measure. That word again!

We polish the mirror and consider it a lamp. Shall I call the summer pohutākawas a bloodbath in motion? One examines oneself in minutest detail only to register neither-here-nor-there. Not so much as the play of light upon the surface of a mirror or that emanating from a lamp. Name droppers. Spurious correlations. There is no world in which an event occurs, except in afterthought. Whether or not they justify them, ends don’t end means.[15] I set about contemplating the endeavours of two adventurous poets, steps taken. Now I realise the obverse, too: art is the biography of a collective nisus, endless tumbling. Ordering’s cascade.

Flourish. A fluttering of small wings. This is how bodies form.

notes

[1] Mark Young, The Magritte Poems (Sandy Press: USA/Australia, 2024), 650 pages; Dani Yourukova, Transposium (AUP: Auckland, 2023), 96 pages. The first is a compendium of Young poems written on or about Magritte; the second is a super-modern rendition of Plato’s classical text Symposium, in which seven prominent Athenians are invited to address the topic of Eros.

[2] I prefer my personal innerness not to be talked about. Outerliness—well, division is breakage. Parajanov’s Sayat-Nova contains discrete tableaus that do and don’t contribute to the film in which they belong. That is the reason why the hands of God are large and broken. Young and Yourukova poems can be taken either way, bits or

wholes but hardly at the same time. I grew up on Lavelle Road, at the far end from where the wooden Holy Cross Church was relocated to and cared for by the parish priest who bore that same name (just as Magritte’s tongue is not Young’s and only a single Bulgarian phrase passes Yourukova’s lips: ‘na bŭlarski’) celebrated mass. I used to watch Fr Lavelle (and his successors) raise the host in the monstrance at benediction and on occasion I wept or else my skin seemed to lift off from its own runway. During this period of my life, as a young teenager, and following the period of personal and sexual turmoil, much like that recounted in Transposium, including trouble with girls, I daily attended early morning mass with the Sisters of Mercy at Holy Cross Convent. At the time, it was Fr Buglar who came to celebrate mass. He coaxed me to join Legion of Mary meetings, and I, in turn, coaxed my sister also to attend. One stands alone. It was at the adjacent convent school where I had been taught by the nuns, often enough strapped for misbehaviour. At early morning mass with the nuns, tired as I was and in school uniform, my heart would soar when the consecrated host was elevated. Later, at the intersection of Matai Road (formerly Lavelle) and Kotare Street, now nativized, exactly where my family home was located, I stormed my mind. I realised life is a convoluted network of crisscrossing intersections, another and another.

[3] ‘A roly-poly toy, roly-poly doll, round-bottomed doll, tilting doll, tumbler, wobbly man, or wobble doll is a round-bottomed toy, usually egg-shaped, that tends to right itself when pushed at an angle, and does this in seeming contradiction to how it should fall’ <Wikipedia>.

[4] From ‘The Empty Mask’. The Wikipedia note continues: ‘Viewed through a freestanding frame of irregular shape, these images are a sky, a lead curtain festooned with sleigh bells, a house façade, a sheet of paper cut-outs, a forest and a fire. The title evokes the fear of the invisible which pervades the artist’s work and reflects the surrealists’ fascination with the subconscious’.

[5] Check out <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58B6SMlqQ_w> and <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NtuEVEbsDmk>

[6] ‘Our brains reflexively associate beauty and good’, Anjan Chatterjee <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UkCnuX89CY>

[7] ‘”It becomes tedious, and just feels like you’re doing admin, like you’re not connecting with anyone and you’re just trying to get through people”, she says. While the appetite for virtual dating has fallen, the data shows that the use of queer-oriented apps and sites has remained steady, with most being used as much as before…’ (‘Why are People Falling Out of Love with Dating Apps’, The Guardian, 8 Dec 2024)

[8] ‘Abductive reasoning, unlike deductive reasoning, yields a plausible conclusion but does not definitively verify it. Abductive conclusions do not eliminate uncertainty or doubt, which is expressed in retreat terms such as “best available” or “most likely”. While inductive reasoning draws general conclusions that apply to many situations, abductive conclusions are confined to the particular observations in question’ (Wikipedia). Yourukova, who admits somewhere ‘poems are skewered’, in ‘Phaedrus Recites…’ speaks of ‘extracting meaning from structures’ and ‘shifts in the random’. In ‘Love poem for the space you ought to occupy’ they ask: ‘is it enough to love the absence / of certainty?’.

[9] <https://www.nzbooklovers.co.nz/post/interview-dani-yourukova-talks-about-transposium>

[10] Curiously, the prospect of the unanswerable quiz seems to have appealed to Young as well. His ‘Pour devenir un fort soldat / To become a strong soldier (1918)’, ostensibly tragic in its circumstances, nonetheless follows the same rubric of nonsensicality. What we take as life is suggested to be an arbitrary abstraction of it.

[11] One night in a dream I watched myself lop off part of a middle finger and hand it to Elon Musk, who occupies a kiosk just past my window, and I suggest he plant it in the fertile ground that surrounds us. He does so; and indeed, legions of fingers start to sprout from the soil. This is what I call ‘giving the finger to Elon Musk’—now a much-covered hit by the stars. Or take Young’s ‘perfume of the / abyss’ (‘Le Goût de l’Invisible (1964)’) or ‘A- / void the abyss which is al- / ways here- or thereabouts’ (‘L’Atlantide’) or the poems titled ‘The Flowers of the Abyss I’ and ‘… II’.

[12] Organic preternaturality eschews easy biological or gender classification. Wikipedia gives the flavour: ‘About 94% of flowering plant species are either hermaphroditic (all flowers produce both male and female gametes) or monoecious, where both male and female flowers occur on the same plant. There are also mixed breeding systems, in both plants and animals, where hermaphrodite individuals coexist with males (called androdioecy) or with females (called gynodioecy), or all three exist in the same species (called trioecy). Sometimes, both male and hermaphrodite flowers occur on the same plant (andromonoecy) or both female and hermaphrodite flowers occur on the same plant (gynomonoecy)’. In ‘Driver’s licence’ Yourukova self-identifies with the axolotl as ‘model organism’: ‘neoteny means that the axolotl / reaches sexual maturity without / undergoing metamorphosis’. ‘Plants experience Eros’ is one assertion made in the opening quiz. Another natty title is ‘Eryximachus on the erotic life of plants’ (‘the path down the stairs to my flat / erupts into a cicada sex dungeon’). Frenzy is order. Young’s milder equivalent is ‘Perspicacity’, in which Axolotls help ‘to see / how life cycles’. Even the Economist wants to get in on the act: <https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2024/12/19/how-the-axolotl-rose-from-obscurity-to-global-stardom>

[13] Downhill fast is where the world is headed, albeit in dazzling company, whether that be the finest Socratic protagonists or else the preeminent wizard of 20^th century Western painting. The good news is that the world is round—at least, around. This was actually articulated years ago—for example, Anne Kennedy in her preposterous 100 Traditional Smiles (VUP: Wellington, 1988), proffers repeatedly the inversive declaration: ‘North is south’. Thought endeavours to keep righting what is constantly tumbling over and in disarray.

[14]  <https://youtu.be/g6vdkDwN7Pg?t=1130>

[15] ‘Aristophanes at the contact centre’ provides a variant: ‘no person should be used as a means to an end, / but only as an end in themselves’.