How-or-Whether New Poems MEAN^[1]

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(a) I am not setting out to resolve anything. In any case I don’t consider language or poetry to be about resolution as such, although something ties both to life; as are we, so are they active. Hence poetry’s acuity.

(b) Because, of course, meaning is an indeterminacy except when it is used in a fixed practical application, such as fitting a round peg into a round hole: equal roundness is required. Otherwise, meaning is a posteriori, mediated, not originating but constructed. That is why poems are so interesting as forms. But, also, because poems are not to do with communication as we normally understand it.

©  The charge of excessive resistance to interpretation made against these poetic texts (see Stafford et al, New Zealand Books, Sep ‘94-) is defensive and more than anything else reflects the intellectual intransigence (one doesn’t say regression)of those who make the charge. It amounts to the past insisting on its right to judge the future. Moribund discourse: critical miasma.

(d) These two quite different books catch my interest. Beyond the local linkage, it is the beautiful grasp of language that each displays, supple enough. The way they lose nothing of themselves (as writers) in the forms they work with; as too the way neither’s form is lost to itself (as written). Nothing drags, sticks out, makes one think the writer hasn’t with some prescience anticipated the range of possible readings that a phrase or a piece might attract. And I don’t mean within only a single reading. I mean that each anticipates multiple readings, from multiple standpoints.

(e) Nor am I simply on these writers’ side, whatever that might mean. And anyhow we don’t usually talk much about the content or concerns of our writing and reading of poetry in that way, do we, really. (Except maybe in the classroom; and there, of course, the purpose is otherwise.) Poetry isn’t thought, isn’t enhanced communication. Not that it wants or needs to be either. But, then, even what I am misgiven by these two writers I still somehow get.

(gee)  (Each is involved in a deliberate undoing, a deconstructing of received forms and conventions – although I do have a lingering reservation that each may in part also risk its own undoing: perhaps moreso in Michele’s case, but more on that to come.)

(i) They are not expressing themselves, for there are too many other things, other voices, to be considered. It is my reading of them and of others before and during them of which they speak – they know what it is that I almost cannot help but notice; they know how I read. And in this matter I am just like you. And yet they connect me and these other things through their own text as contained yet entirely referential, sensate fictions.

(j) So what do I mean, risk their claims? A dash of disingenuity here, I wonder – although it is perhaps something that is endemic in poetry. Alan’s subversion of the autobiographical mode, his refusal ‘to tell the story of my life’, is true in the sense that he doesn’t use the continuous narrative form, chops back and forward in time, alternately telescopes or distances details without a sense of proportion or accumulation: these together with other aspects show his refusal to perpetuate the received form. Yet it is still Alan, the same Alan, all beautifully, exactly Alan. The life-source remains verifiable (Alan Brunton mocks at this in his Lf190 review): the oncestuttering, ‘lopped… fingers’ professional printer, father-with-son Wellingtonian, the recuperating poet who surprises himself weeping ‘like a frightened child’ in front of the McCahon Gate Series – surely, all Alan. Yet beyond the scrambled life events, the recuperation of words, phrases, memories that seemed once erased (as under the angelic white ribbon of the typewriter), coalesce Alan’s characteristic practice as a poet. His movement forward by detail, the terse parsings, tightness of linguistic attention, the telltale ‘&’s and ‘thru’s, especially the fact that the writing is not immediately penetrable, that it continues via its own insistence to resist easy access, comprise its singularity. Its strength annoys me, I love it. It cares for itself, I like that. It doesn’t much care about me; I (kind of) like that. And it is a wonderful offering. What it is. Focused and near humourless in its fixity, not imposing but demanding attention – and in that demand insisting on its quality as reading, reading here meaning meaning.

(k) Michele’s almost opposite. Cares for herself, variously decipherable; a constant permeation, enter here, exit there, enter, exit. Over there, go. But then the feeling is exquisite, the care for affection, the pride in having and having had it. Unabashed wholeness, wholesome. Seems to care what I make of it, or perhaps not me, but another anyway.

(l) These two writers may or may not agree with the viewpoint expressed here. That is not my concern. So on with meaning.

(M)ichele: this is more than an obvious care for her sons, her husband, the community of those she cares for (in particular the neglected Aotearoan women poets). As Alan sets about to trouble the received autobiographical mode, Michele sets about ‘investigating’ and ‘rewriting the androcentric history’ of love-telling and masculine-centred sexually ecstatic formations. I say ‘disingenuous’ advisedly because for me the greatest enjoyment to be had from her text is the way that she is able to render herself in terms of these historical mouthings (i.e. forms), whose supreme elegance she perhaps alone among us can best match. The reservation I feel is that at the time of the writing the disputed androcentric conventions appear already in our historical setting to have been substantially feminised (am I right?). I somewhat miss and want more sense of historical differentiation. The ‘ventriloquism’ of the seven voices is insufficiently distinct from the panoply of the one voice, and the suppleness of that voice as much compli/ements as it complicates or corrupts the tradition it stealths among.

(en)  She has not done what Pound did with Li Po or the Provencal poets, or what Williams did with Watteau’s slipper (two poets suggested in ‘Blue Irises’). The wonder of the tradition that she enquires into is, among other things, cocksuredness, its splendid indulgence in eloquence.

(ouf)  Yet she does somehow get right inside the received form = shares it with those who would never think to share it with a woman as a form. As if it was always their prerogative, their tradition. And she carries it off with grace, tipping the usual assumptions off the surface that now is occupied with an updated language and an easefulness of sensuous speaking identity.

(p) I note that both writers sign their texts prominently with their given proper names. This, together with the University Press insignia and polished poetry formats, help preserve the convention of an assumed authorial autonomy. This sign/ing is, at least notionally, exclusive. It speaks as an ownership of the materials that come under its claim, as if otherwise non-recoupable.

(q) I guess it’s the confabulation I especially admire in our poetry. It’s a deadly serious business (why else do people make such a prize of it, behave so rapaciously), yet it amounts to nothing. I am speaking about this particular delivery of poetry into the small (elite?) intellectual/art community. Poetry, the world, do not ultimately need or serve each other. That is poetry’s charm, its allure. Brilliant negation.

(r) Difference is, the poetry is much more mobile. I press, it moves; I move back, it approaches. Something in it pisses me off, suddenly it smiles and says something else. As I tire of the visual suggestion of a phrase or line, it dissolves into a sound or sounds, then into pure intellection, the pleasure of having a thought transmute in the brain, the little washes of chemical that come with that. Brilliant negation. This is more than polysemy.

(s) There’s no reason why we cannot, as John Cage and Jackson Mac Low have shown decades back, determine certain operations (chance or otherwise) by which others – our students, machines (arrgh!) cancompose and be named as our poets.

(t)he world. Poetry poems (verbalism). The very thing is that its importance, as I have said before in regard to Alan’s work, is always only maybe. That’s its attraction.

(u) Writers (we know) write about writing. The poetry community, while astonishingly tiny, stretches across much of the English-speaking world, it reaches me and others here in Japan; it is the people who publish, sell, read or read about, comment on, respond to the texts (actively or as usefully passively). It is this community to do with writing that matters. Out of its history, into its history. There are other better ways to ‘improve’ the world. Neither book (dare I say) elicits in me a new perspective on the world. I don’t take that to be their job. Other media, especially nowadays, when intellectual and social practice is becoming increasingly technologically radicalised, have demonstrably greater capacity for political and social impact.

(v) The value of things that are understood is that they can be catalogued for later reference, retrieval. The value of poems is their dubious usefulness, their failure to catalogue. And that is very difficult when they cannot but conform to being part of an historic traffic – they too bear their embedded markings. But while they are inseparable from their time instance, it does not exhaust them. I feel their pleasure as a now, while not forgetting. So, what have I just said, is that poetry?

You cannot live other visions, others’ visions. Tonight I’m watching a Fred Frith video, something Inga got copied. He too talks about present communities, despite his ideals, views of Tokyo, teeming junk with rivers through it: this is marvellous. So, Alan’s and Michele’s visions, they are not what I take, not what I need to take to live more fully or at least as fully as I can. So, why read. More than just to be pleasured; that could come easier from elsewhere. If I didn’t write poetry, would I read it. Life is rich. But that does not diminish what’s going on. The richest part includes what’s missing.

(y)  It will have been noticed that this is not much by way of an extrapolation or paraphrase of what’s said or intimated in the poems. Such contribution remains to be made; as, to be sure, we each make anyway according to our own best means. Otherwise why read?

(zz)  Bibliographia, retaining Decorum:

Citing review texts, publisher etc., referring to the writers by name (even if by firstnames), sticking to prescribed four pages limit (that took care of f, h, x), displaying some familiarity with contemporary poetic and critical issues, balancing (wanting to) praise and misgiving, taking the role of representing literature on behalf of an implied intelligent informed wider reading community, signing off with the integrity of my own proper name; viz: DR JOHN GERAETS. Other conventions may have been flouted. During the final rechecking (another convention) of the draft I am enjoying Chris Knox on CD and rereading Derrida’s ‘Signature Event Context’. Amazing how writing thinking writing thinking, indeed so.

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[1] ‘How-or-Whether New Poems Mean’, A Brief Description of the Whole World 3 (June 1996), ed. Alan Loney, Auckland, pp. 62-65. The books considered are Loney’s The erasure tapes and Michele Leggott’s DIA, both published by Auckland University Press in 1994. The piece was written in Japan and originally accepted to appear in the online magazine taproot (USA). It was an interesting prospect to write in a somewhat circuitous manner about two innovative New Zealand poets for an American audience, and I take this chance to express appreciation to editor Luigi-Bob Drake. However, taproot folded and as a result the two poets were repatriated. The four pages referred to is the limit placed on invited contributors to A Brief Description of the Whole World by founding editor Alan Loney, coincidentally one of the two subject poets of the review.