Ideas of Space in
Contemporary Poetry
Ian Davidson
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Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
10.1057/9780230595569 - Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, Ian Davidson
Also by Ian Davidson
AS IF ONLY (Shearsman)
HARSH (Spectacular Diseases)
HUMAN REMAINS AND SUDDEN MOVEMENTS (West House Books)
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AT A STRETCH (Shearsman)
Ian Davidson
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Ideas of Space in
Contemporary Poetry
© Ian Davidson 2007
Foreword © Peter Barry 2007
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Davidson, Ian, 1957
Ideas of space in contemporary poetry/Ian Davidson.
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1. English poetry“21st century“History and criticism. 2. English
poetry“20th century“History and criticism. 3. American poetry“21st
century“History and criticism. 4. American poetry“20th
century“History and ciriticism. 5. Modernism (Literature)“Englishspeaking countries. 6. Postmodernism (Literature)“English-speaking
countries. 7. Space and time in literature 8. Materialism in literature.
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List of Figures
vii
Acknowledgements
viii
Foreword by Peter Barry
ix
Introduction
1
1 Aesthetics of Space: Cubism to Language Poetry
6
2 Spatial Theories and Poetic Practices
Space and place
Spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of
representation
The rhizomatic and the nomadic
Space and the body
24
28
3 The Space Age: The 1950s to the 1970s
Poetries of places
Maps and mapping
Charles Olson
Edward Dorn
59
59
60
65
70
4 Histories of Selves: Space, Identity and Subjectivity
Histories and space
80
80
5 Space, Place and Identity
Catherine Walsh and Eavan Boland
Ralph Hawkins
Fanny Howe
Old endings and new beginnings
v
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33
39
48
89
103
106
114
122
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Contents
6 Now You See It: Visual Poetry and the Space of
the Page
Histories of visual and concrete poetry
Visual poetry and the poetic line
The 1950s and 1960s
Graffiti artists: from clean concrete to dirty visuals
Pages and spaces
124
124
131
138
141
149
7 Through the Looking Glass: Poetry in Virtual Worlds
163
Works Cited
186
Index
193
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vi Contents
1.1
2.1
6.1
6.2
6.3
6.4
6.5
6.6
6.7
6.8
6.9
7.1
‘Karawane’, Hugo Ball (1917)
‘Text 1’, War w/ Windsor, Bill Griffiths (1974)
‘Intermedia’, Dick Higgins (1995)
‘Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard’, Stéphane
Mallarmé
‘Silencio’, Eugen Gomringer (1954)
Carnival, Steve McCaffery (1999). Panel 1: 2, 3, 4 and
Panel 2: CHANGE OF ADDRESS
‘WORM’, Bob Cobbing (1966)
‘beba coca cola’, Décio Pignatari (1957)
‘rubber-stamp poem’, Emmett Williams (1958)
‘in situ’, Caroline Bergvall
‘Languedoc Variorum’, High West Rendezvous, Ed Dorn
(1996)
Peter Howard’s website – ‘Low Probability of Racoons’
vii
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10
44
126
130
133
134
140
142
143
151
152
180
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List of Figures
This book comes out of a long process of engagement with poets and
poetry in Britain, Ireland, the United States and Canada. To begin to
name all those people who have talked about the ideas in the book, or
have talked about their poetry, provided me with new leads or given
me more formal feedback through attendance at conference papers
or as editors, would be an impossible task. All I can do is register my
thanks for their unfailing generosity.
Some of the ideas in this book are otherwise explored in papers
that have either been published or are forthcoming in Performance
Research, The Salt Companion to Lee Harwood, Removed for Further Study:
The Poetry of Tom Raworth (The Gig), Additional Apparitions (The Paper)
and Poetry Wales. My thanks to the editors.
The research and writing of this book has been supported in part
by an AHRC/Welsh Academy Creative and Research fellowship, and
by research leave from the University of Wales, Bangor. Without that
support the book would have been less than it is and I thank them
for the opportunities the funding provided.
This book takes advantage of the principle of fair dealing in its
quotation of copyright material. Every effort has also been made to
trace holders of copyright material and permission has been registered
below. If any have been overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to
make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity.
I would like to thank the following for permission to quote their
material in this book: Denise Riley, Jim Bennett, Ralph Hawkins,
Geraldine Monk, Peter Riley, Tom Raworth, Carcanet, Bill Griffiths,
Fanny Howe.
viii
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Acknowledgements
Back in the early 1990s, when I was a lecturer at LSU College in
Southampton, I heard on the grapevine that a commissioning editor
from Manchester was visiting the University. I managed to get him
to call at LSU as well, and we had lunch in the Inner Avenue, just
across the road from the college, at a born-again local which was in
process of becoming very trendy. The project I wanted to put forward
was an edited volume on contemporary avant-garde poetry, a book
which I had been plotting with Robert Hampson since the mid-1980s.
Over the years, lists of potential contributors and possible topics in
Robert’s meticulous handwriting were done (literally) on the backs of
envelopes, usually in pubs in the vicinity of Tottenham Court Road
after poetry readings or day conferences, as I prepared to head back
to Waterloo and the train to Southampton. I used those notes to
type up a full-scale ‘proposal’ which I handed over to the Manchester
commissioning editor in the half-light of the backroom bar in Inner
Avenue (in retrospect, most discussions about contemporary poetry
seemed to happen in half-lit backroom bars). The press was interested,
and the book was duly commissioned, resulting in New British Poetries:
The Scope of the Possible, jointly edited by Robert Hampson and Peter
Barry, in 1993. It was the first book about contemporary avant-garde,
or ‘neo-Modernist’, poetry to appear in the United Kingdon from
a major press and designed for a wide readership of academics and
practitioners. Before that, the only critical material available was of
a much more fugitive kind and was aimed at a coterie readership of
the already initiated.
Today, the situation is transformed, and the welcome appearance
of Ian Davidson’s book is one of the indications of that change. As he
says, if there are still ‘distinctions between a mainstream centre and
an experimental margin, they are no longer sustained by availability
or visibility’. In other words, ‘small press’ (and ‘micro-press’) work
today is as widely distributed as the work of poets who are published
by Faber or Picador. Information about them is instantly available on
the Internet, and new imprints like ‘Salt’ and ‘Shearsman’ maintain
extensive lists of poets in print, and publish full-scale critical books
ix
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Foreword
Foreword
on innovative contemporary poetry. Thus, the existence of a distinct
‘other’ or ‘parallel’ or ‘neo-modernist’ tradition of British poetry is
widely recognised, and this work is increasingly taught on courses
in contemporary poetry. Widely available anthologies exist in which
these writers are fully represented, and Ian has adopted the excellent
policy of drawing material from those sources for his main examples
(such as Poems for the Millennium from Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre
Joris and Keith Tuma’s Oxford University Press Anthology of TwentiethCentury British and Irish Poetry).
Likewise, there is increasingly a formal scholarly record of the
breadth and nature of all this poetic activity – examples include
Wolfgang Gortschacher’s two substantial volumes, Little Magazine
Profiles: The Little Magazines in Great Britain, 1939–1993, and Contemporary Views on the Little Magazine Scene (both from University of
Salzburg Press) and David Miller and Richard Price’s British Poetry
Magazines, 1915–2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’
(The British Library 2006). My own Poetry Wars: British Poetry of
the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt 2006) puts on record
a detailed historical account of the now-distant period when the
‘margins’ and the ‘mainstream’ engaged in open hostilities. Recent
full-length monographs include Simon Perril’s Contemporary British
Poetry and Modernist Innovation (Salt 2006, in the series ‘Salt Studies in
Contemporary Poetry’), and Robert Sheppard’s The Poetry of Saying:
British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950–2000 (Liverpool University
Press 2005). Influential accounts in prestigious volumes of literary
record include Peter Middleton’s chapter, ‘Poetry after 1970’ in The
Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Literature (ed. Laura Marcus
and Peter Nicholls, Cambridge University Press 2004), and Randall
Stevenson’s widely discussed volume, The Last of England?, Volume 12,
1960–2000 in ‘The Oxford English Literary History’ (Oxford University Press 2004), in which ‘Part II Poetry’ (pp. 165–270), has four
chapters that contain a good deal of useful and relevant material.
Ian’s book, of course, is not confined to UK poetry, nor does it set
out to especially foreground the neo-modernists – on the contrary,
he is very much committed to furthering ‘the spirit of inclusiveness
a more spatial perspective can bring’. He is a practitioner as well as
a theorist and critic, and my colleague Matthew Jarvis has written
on place in Ian’s own poetry in the 2005 volume of the annual
Welsh Writing in English (‘The Poetics of Place in the Poetry of
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x
Ian Davidson’). Doubtless, the vigour and directness of Ian’s writing
about poetry stem in part from that triple identity as poet-critictheorist. I am delighted to have the opportunity of welcoming his
book in this Foreword, and of expressing the hope that the Aber and
Bangor wings of the University of Wales will be able to collaborate
further in the area of contemporary poetry.
Peter Barry
Aberystwyth
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Foreword xi
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This book explores the impact of ideas of space and spatialization
on recent and contemporary poetry and demonstrates the way some
poetry, through form and content, engages with some of the most
pressing and urgent social and cultural issues. These issues include,
but are not limited to, relationships between political, social and
cultural structures, between people, language, identity and places,
epistemological issues relating to language and ‘reality’ and to the
impact of a global economy and environment on everyday lives.
Much of the poetry I discovered that tried to deal with these issues is
difficult. It does not give you easy answers or solutions, but specifically and implicitly through form and content critiques a culture or
cultural products that present themselves as finished. If a shrinkwrapped commodity conceals its materials and processes of production behind a shiny surface, then all too often these poems have
their constituent parts on display, telling us how they’re put together.
They can seem to have too little ‘meaning’, if meaning is what we
take away from a poem, or too much. Some of this poetry has been
described as elitist, or intellectual, or academic, or as too interested in
theory. What I discovered, to the contrary, were socially concerned
poets trying to deal with the complexities of a post-modern world,
unwilling to reduce experience to the neatly turned lyric.
I took the poetry from wherever I could find it; books, magazines,
pamphlets and the Internet. Many of the poets I study have published
extensively through small presses, and when I began this work
in the mid-1990s, tracking down the work was a major problem.
The Internet and digital technologies have solved that problem;
1
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Introduction
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
online book selling now means that the four-page stapled pamphlet
by the smallest micropress is available for order alongside books
by mainstream publishers. New printing technologies have allowed
Shearsman and Salt to become major publishers in the United
Kingdom, providing unprecedented access to extended collections of
poetry. Online publishing through the best magazines means that a
broad variety of new work is always available. If there are distinctions
between a mainstream centre and an experimental margin, they are
no longer sustained by availability or visibility. In order to help the
reader further to track down the poems I discuss I have also used
examples from recent anthologies wherever possible, including the
two volumes of Poems for the Millennium from Jerome Rothenberg and
Pierre Joris, and the Oxford University Press Anthology of TwentiethCentury British and Irish Poetry edited by Keith Tuma.
The main historical focus of this book is short, not much more
than 50 years or so. The relationship between ideas of space and
poetry could be set in other and longer historical contexts. Relationships between people, places and broader spatial constructs are not
a product of a modern or even a post-modern society and a longer
historical reach would provide a different perspective. Similarly its
geographical limitations are all too evident, and the poets I refer to
are principally from the United Kingdom and the United States, with
some excursions to Australia, Canada and Europe. I regret that, but
hope, rather than making this book seem limited, it means that this
book can be seen as only one part of the broader examination of
the role of ‘space’ in contemporary cultures in general and in poetic
practices in particular. If this is a point in the book for negatives, for
things I do not do, then I must also confess that this book will give
no new insights into the study of space or the discipline of human
geography. That is not its aim. In common with other interdisciplinary projects it breaks new ground, or goes back over some already
tilled ground to see what has been missed in its principal discipline, poetry, while applying more familiar tools and ideas from other
disciplines such as human geography.
I draw heavily on the intellectual insights and explanations of the
work of Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey to provide a theoretical background to the book. In all their theoretical speculations on
a ‘spatial turn’ they never lose a concern for the lives of ordinary
people. The best poets do this too. Within the process of charting a
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2
movement from a modernist historical awareness to a post-modern
spatial consciousness, they sustain an ethical responsibility to people
and to places. Doreen Massey’s latest book, For Space, has been fundamental in my understanding of the importance of space in the differences and similarities between structuralism and post-structuralism.
Despite first appearing in French in 1975, and in English in Donald
Nicholson’s English translation in 1991, Lefebvre’s best known work,
The Production of Space, continues to gather interest. I believe that we
are only just beginning to appreciate Lefebvre’s immense contribution to twentieth-century intellectual life through his examination of
the relationships between alienation, space and everyday experience.
Three recent studies of his work, by Elden, Shields and Merrifield
are testimony to this. I have drawn on other theorists too, and the
sparks that fly in Deleuze and Guattari’s collision between Marx,
Freud and post-modern life have helped to illuminate potential ‘lines
of flight’. Fredric Jameson reintroduces a sense of agency into an
ahistorical post-modern world of surfaces through the processes of
cognitive mapping and Michel de Certeau’s work on everyday life and
David Harvey’s economics of space-time compression have similarly
helped to identify and explain spatial phenomena. Out of the work
of these writers I draw on four main ideas: the relationship between
space and place, the relationship between representations of space
and lived experience, ideas of the nomadic and the rhizomatic, and
the relationship between space and the body. These concerns overlap
and inform each other, and any boundaries I may have erected
between them are simply for the purposes of aiding explanation and
discussion.
Some poetic schools or traditions lent themselves more obviously
to this project, although I have always chosen to examine poets individually rather than as representatives of any group. The geographical
concerns of Charles Olson, and through him to those of Ed Dorn,
formed a way into poetic responses to ideas of space in post-war
America. Frank O’Hara’s concerns with the urban space of New York
and its relationship to sexuality provided another perspective. Eric
Mottram’s spatial description of poetic processes in his work defining
‘Open Field’ poetry meant that I followed this up with an examination of the more experimental and innovative examples of British
poetry from poets such as Bill Griffiths, Geraldine Monk, Denise
Riley, Barry MacSweeney and Peter Riley. Others, and Fanny Howe is
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Introduction 3
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
an example, see self-identify as being outside of any group. The use of
spatial terminology to describe the ‘politics of form’ by those known
as ‘language’ writers in the United States, the United Kingdom and
Canada was a way into that poetry, and through poets from both
the United Kingdom and the United States I found ways through to
European writing, and particularly the work of those associated with
Surrealism, Dada and Situationism. Caroline Bergvall works out of
the United Kingdom but is also both French and Norwegian and her
work is clearly within a tradition of the European avant-garde, and
Peter Manson identifies with Tom Leonard as part of an explicitly
internationalist but identifiably Scottish writing.
The structure of the book is spatial rather than historical. It does
not try to suggest that over a period of time, say from 1950 onwards,
the world or social awareness of the world, or poetry, has become
increasingly spatial; although a process of space–time compression
through both means of travel and new technologies has brought
about a new awareness. The book does suggest, and hence the title,
that ideas of space have changed, and that space is represented differently in a variety of disciplines. There is evidence in a number of
art-forms, and the ‘installation’ and site-specific art so popular in
the later decades of the twentieth century are obvious examples,
that space is not a container waiting to be filled but is something
produced by human activity. In poetry I would trace this idea back
to free verse, and the way that the shape on the page is produced by
the poem, in comparison to the more regular poetry that fills a preexisting space. In the first chapter I describe a series of relationships
between space and aesthetic or poetic movements of the twentieth
century, outlining the centrality of collage to modernist aesthetics
and its replacement by more post-modern notions of the network
and the rhizome. This chapter is paralleled by a second in which I
discuss the principal spatial concepts I work with in this book, and
their various genealogies, and begin to apply those ideas to different
writers. Following a more detailed and historical account of ideas of
space and poetry in the ‘space age’ of the 1950s to the 1970s in the
third chapter, I give more thematic accounts of relationships of visual
poetry and the spatial, of relationships between space, poetry and
identity and between poetry and the virtual space of the Internet and
digital technologies.
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4
The book does not seek either to define a particular history of
poetry or set out a particular way forward for poetry. The reductive
nature of such an approach would only detract from the spirit of
inclusiveness a more spatial perspective can bring. Instead, I hope I
have demonstrated something of the diversity of poetic practices that
are present, albeit in only a small part of the world, and their complex
engagement with contemporary political and social concerns.
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Introduction 5
Aesthetics of Space: Cubism to
Language Poetry
Cubism and the use of collage techniques are both illustrations
of the beginnings of a turn towards the ‘spatial’ in the twentieth
century, a turn which was, in part, to escape the over-determination
of classical ideas of perspective and historical notions of progress
which no longer seemed possible, and to develop artworks which
could represent the fragmented nature of modern experience. If
this was an experience characterized by an inability to maintain
a common perspective over past, present and future, whether that
perspective was ideological, ethical or optical, then the freeze-frame
of Cubism and the fragmentation of collage provided both the
method and the form for its representation. They could simultaneously represent despair at a lack of unity and coherence, while
suggesting that coherence might result from a process of rearrangement, as well as demonstrate the increasingly individualized nature of
experience.
Collage is a visual example of what Walter Benjamin would
subsequently refer to as a ‘monad’, ‘time filled by the presence
of the now’ (Benjamin 1999b, p. 263), a moment in time in
which different perspectives could come together, and his unfinished ‘Arcades’ project uses that method for its construction by
combining quotations from a variety of sources. For Benjamin this
process was also dialectical; by showing different aspects of an object
or an idea, and by placing those different aspects in a construction that the reader could reconstruct in a variety of formulations, he could maintain movement between the objects within
the work. Although elements from different periods of the past
6
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1
were taken out of a continuum and located within a collaged
‘present’, in order to suggest new relationships, they remained
in a relationship with the past from which they came and in
the continuum of that past. Benjamin’s reason for placing them
in a ‘now’, within which new relationships could be formed,
was political, and was to develop dialectical relationships between
objects which would demonstrate the ways in which narratives
of continuity conceal political, economic and social structures of
control.
In his essay ‘Collage’ the art critic Clement Greenberg refers to
collage technique as ‘a major turning point in the evolution of
Cubism, and therefore a major turning point in the whole evolution
of modernist art in this century’ (Greenberg). Collage featured in the
work of the initiators of Cubism very briefly, however, and Braque
and Picasso did not begin making collages until 1912 and had stopped
making them by 1914. Despite the brevity of its use in Cubism, the
ideas of collage and its practice continued to exert an influence and
feature in a variety of other art movements, including Dada and
Surrealism from the early to mid-century, and late twentieth-century
and contemporary site-specific and installation work. There is also a
renewed contemporary interest by digital artists, and the principles
of collage underlie much digital art.
Cubism challenged the fixed viewpoint that had dominated
Western Art since the early modern or Renaissance, and introduced
the possibility of a number of simultaneous perspectives. The two
main approaches to Cubism, the earlier ‘abstract’ Cubism in which
the subject was fragmented into its constituent parts, and the later
‘synthetic’ Cubism in which an image was constructed out of preexisting elements or objects, was bridged by collage, which simultaneously introduced into cubist paintings something of the ‘real
world’ through its use of found materials, emphasized the plasticity of the work and its sculptural qualities rather than the illusion
of the picture surface, and implicitly questioned the relationship
between the elements within the work. Literary collage, or collaged
texts, drew readily on these ideas. Modernist works by writers such
as T. S. Eliot in ‘The Waste Land’, Ezra Pound in The Cantos and
Louis Zukofsky in A use collage techniques as do many others, particularly from more international and internationalist avant-gardes.
Without wanting to repeat my more extensive treatment of visual
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Aesthetics of Space: Cubism to Language Poetry 7
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
texts and their emphasis on the materiality of language in later
chapters, these ideas include some important elements of structuralist and post-structuralist thought. A literary collage, made up of a
variety of texts from a variety of sources, makes evident the intertextual nature of all texts. The collage can situate the everyday next
to the exotic, and relationships between objects in a collage become
paratactic rather than hierarchical. New forms of correspondence
between ideas and objects otherwise held apart can form new types of
conjunctions and disjunctions; relationships become based on principles of contiguity and coincidence rather than via syntactical structures and more formal logic. Collage provides a mechanism through
which the writer, by bringing together a variety of texts within the
single space of the work, and often by putting texts from different
times and contexts together, can function in a more liberated and
liberating present, free of literary ‘history’. Collage can imitate the
semiotic overload of the contemporary urban experience, and both
provide a means of representing it, and provide a means of reintroducing a sense of agency through the reordering of experience; a process
which has its digital counterpart in the ability to ‘drag and drop’ a
selection of texts from the seemingly endless supply on the Internet,
into a single document.
Tristan Tzara made the link between the process of visual collage
and the process of writing poetry more explicit. His instructions are:
TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to
make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article
and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are – an infinitely original author of charming
sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
(Rothenberg and Joris 1995, p. 302)
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The process simultaneously critiques the idea of the poem as the
product of an individual, lyric sensibility, while still claiming that
the final poem will reflect something of its maker. The method also
questions both the authority of the author and the authority of
syntax and logic as methods of structuring language. What has been
removed by the physical act of cutting up a newspaper article is the
conscious intent of the author to give the text meaning, lifting the
individual out of their own narrative and their own writing history.
Through using Tzara’s methods the language itself becomes material,
to be shaken up and physically handled, before being constructed
into the poem.
By treating language as material, Dadaists could move easily
between the visual and verbal arts, and processes and products of
collagist activities were an ideal vehicle for bringing together different
forms of their work. They ‘designed’ pages with words, made prints
with linocuts and carved words into wood. In the ‘sound’ poem
‘Karawane’ written in 1917 (Richter 1978, p. 8), a poem in which the
sound of the words rather than their meaning is the primary organizing feature, Hugo Ball uses letters arranged into groups that look
like words, apparently in a variety of languages, but which are not
words at all (Figure 1.1). This absence of meaning once more emphasizes the materiality of text and its visual surface, an idea reinforced
by giving each line a different typeface. Elements of discontinuity
disrupt the reading process, denying any illusion of a coherent text
arranged according to syntactical or semantic logic. The reader can
no longer imagine the text simply refers to some pre-existing reality,
and attention is focused on its visual and sonic qualities. The poem,
and it is written in lines with each one aligned to a left-hand margin,
is therefore both a collage of typefaces, one that can be read as a kind
of parody of a poem, but also becomes a collage of words which,
because they lack reference, must be read as visual objects, and form
a picture of a poem. ‘Karawane’ does, however, contain many of
the elements of rhythm, rhyme and repetition which support the
reading of the text as a poem, and the performance of similar work
had already been the subject of the experimental ‘Poeme Simultane’,
written and performed by Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janko and
Tristan Tzara in 1916 (Richter 1978, p. 30). This poem, which on
the page resembles a dramatic script and a musical score as well as
a poem, was performed simultaneously by three voices. The time of
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Figure 1.1 ‘Karawane’, Hugo Ball (1917)
the poem, following the lineation and the rhythm, collapses into the
moment of the three voices, no one having precedence, as a kind of
collage of sound. Further typographical experiments (Richter 1978, p.
130) demonstrate an ongoing interest by Dadaists in the disruption
of the linearity of textual presentation and the use of the page as a
visual field.
In ‘The Cut-Up method of Brion Gysin’, some 40 years after Tzara,
William Burroughs describes the ‘cut-up’, a method he developed for
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the reordering of language within texts by cutting the page into a
number of sections and then rejoining them in a different sequence.
The result is a text which fails to follow the norms of syntax, and
sentences are left incomplete or different parts of sentences fail
to join up, although themes seem to strangely echo and connect
over distance as phrases from the same sentence or paragraph are
consigned to different places on the page. Burroughs is explicit about
the benefits of the cut-up:
The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been
used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still
camera. In fact all street shots, from movie or still cameras, are
by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition, cutups The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but
writers until the cut-up method was made explicit – all writing is
in fact cut-ups; I will return to this point – had no way to produce
the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you
can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of
scissors.
(Burroughs and Gysin 1979, p. 29)
Like Dada and surrealist acts of repositioning found objects within
different contexts, and later processes of the Situationists in
subverting or changing the contexts of objects or events, cutups are a specifically procedural and political activity. Through a
process of defamiliarization, cut-ups make the reader re-examine the
constituent parts of a text, breaking down established paradigmatic
and syntagmatic relationships. According to Burroughs, cutting up
and recombining texts releases hidden meanings locked into the
familiar structures of the text, meanings which are normalized and
naturalized to the point of invisibility. For Burroughs, constructing
texts in this way is democratic, and ‘cut-ups are for everyone’
(Burroughs and Gysin 1979, p. 31). The process promises to allow
writer and reader to break free from the influence of tradition and
the literary canon, from the standard syntax of the language system
as a way of presenting knowledge about the world, and to exist in
the ‘now’.
Many of these ideas of collage and cut-up were to emerge in a
variety of other contexts. These include the poetry connected to Black
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Mountain College and the idea of a poem constructed in an inclusive
‘open field’, the New York School and particularly O’Hara’s combination of events in his ‘Lunch Poems’(1979), and in the constructivist poetics of the ‘language’ poets. Burroughs also had enthusiastic
readers in the United Kingdom, and the poet and critic Eric Mottram,
a key figure in the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s who had written
extensively on Burroughs, specifically refers to ‘the various effects of
cubist and Dadaist dislocations and reassemblages which constitute
a resource in innovative literature from the 1920s onwards’ and to
the way Ezra Pound ‘began to consider the possibilities of new spatial
organization in poetry’ (Mottram 1975, p. 271). Mottram refers to
William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein as cubist writers who
produce poetry and prose which ‘sees the in and the through/ the
four sides’ (1975, p. 289). If the perception of a work of art from
a single point of view is a process which emphasizes time, and in
a poem the reader moves from line to line, accumulating information, then Stein, Williams and others, Mottram claims, disrupt this
linear process to produce a ‘total sound of the poem’, which can be
perceived all at once and in different ways (1975, p. 289). Time, the
duration of the engagement with the artwork, now has to take into
account the spatial distribution of perspective and viewpoint.
The method of writing Mottram described as follows:
Composition by field combines the forms of lyrics, rhythms,
speeches of different kinds, conversation, images, ideograms, paratactical formations and collages of information in various forms.
(Mottram 1975, p. 4)
Importantly for Mottram, composition by field is more than a poetic
process, but also a stance towards the world (1975, p. 10), implying
a certain ethical and political approach. Drawing on the work of
Williams and Olson, Mottram outlines a poetics which seeks to be
inclusive, to see the poet as an object within the field of the poem, not
its centre. The poem becomes a representation of the distribution of
objects within a landscape, located by a mapping process. In pictorial
terms the poet figure in an open-field poem is part of the landscape,
rather than a figure that stands out from the ‘ground’ of the painting;
they too must negotiate the objects in the ‘space’ of the poem, and
can adopt a variety of perspectives in relation to those objects. The
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Situationist drift or ‘dérive’ adopts a similar perspective; it is the view
from the ground and not the view from above. For the ‘Situationists’,
a group of artists and political activists from the 1950s and 1960s, the
dérive was the way in which they sought to defamiliarize the cities
they lived and worked in, and encourage citizens to look beyond the
design of the urban environment through subverting its determining
functions of guiding the population in particular routes, and, by
giving themselves up to the Drift, to experience, in the words of
Sadie Plant, the way: ‘certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with
states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for
movement other than those for which an environment was designed’
(Plant 1992, p. 59). It is a collage, but rather than being able to
rearrange the order of objects within the city, they change the way
they experience those objects. Guy-Ernest Debord, spokesperson of
the Situationist Internationale, expands further:
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their
relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual
motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by
the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there.
Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might
think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical
contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that
strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
(Debord 1958)
While moving through space might promise to provide an undetermined choice of direction and velocity, Debord suggests that the
activities of city planners and a state ideology overlay that space with
sequences of patterned behaviours. The dérive is not a process that is
seeking to introduce choice, but one that is seeking out the ‘alternative’ routes, equally meaningful, but outside the assumed patterns
of behaviour. Collagist activities can suggest both undirected play
and planned processes of subversion.
The relationship between the coincidental nature of collage, the
way things happen to be next to each other, and a more planned
process that seeks to understand the implications of fragmentation,
runs through works from the earlier part of the twentieth century.
These include T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and
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later work influenced from the last quarter of the century such as that
written by the language poets. Both Pound and Eliot use fragments
of information from a variety of sources and, although the content is
historical, their methodology seems closer to the process of collage, in
the way they combine information from a number of sources and use
a range of voices and perspectives. Fragmentary though they are, both
works still assume a lost and discoverable historical unity existing
beyond the poem. Pound’s ‘I cannot make it cohere’ at the end of The
Cantos (Pound 1975, p. 796) and Eliot’s use of footnotes at the end
of ‘The Waste Land’ both indicate the desire for the existence of an
external totality of which their fragmentary poems are a representation; a totality that, if discovered, could give back to society a purpose
and an ethical coherence. This is a unity or totality that post-modern
and post-structural theory would appear to deny in its identification and, in some cases, celebration, of the partial and inconclusive,
the playful rather than the purposive, the multiple rather than the
binary and surfaces rather than depths. At its most superficial postmodernism suggests that history, rather than being something that
can help to explain our current condition, becomes a collection of
styles that can be plundered in order to decorate the present. Rather
than an aesthetic developing over time in the development of a tradition, all possible styles are spread out and simultaneously present,
allowing a contemporary response to be constructed (see Woods
1999b for example). In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, Fredric Jameson suggests that post-modernism has arrived
when modernism ‘no longer has archaic features and obstacles to
overcome and [post-modernism] has triumphantly planted its own
autonomous logic’ (Jameson 1991, p. 366). As a consequence of this
logic ‘Memory, temporality; the very thrill of the modern are all
casualties in this process [and] even classical bourgeois culture of
the belle époque is liquidated’ (Jameson 1991, p. 366). Time and space
lose both their ontological and their ‘natural’ status and become the
‘consequence and projected afterimages of a certain state or structure of production and appropriation, of the social organization of
productivity’ (Jameson 1991, p. 367).
The resulting fragmentation and decontextualization of historical
narratives leads Jameson to suggest that there is a ‘compartmentalization of reality’ (1991, p. 373) that conceals the truth while
providing the facts. His answer lies not in reconfiguring genealogies,
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a kind of rewriting of history, to get at the ‘real’ truth, but in a
spatial and collagist process of looking across different media and
different narratives and their recombination. He refers to an ‘aesthetic
of information in which the generic incompatibilities detected in
post-modern fiction now comes into a different kind of force in
postmodern reality’ (Jameson 1991, p. 375) and consequently a
language usage ever more divorced from reality. In artistic terms
this results in work in which language is reduced to ‘an experience of pure material signifiers’, and a ‘breakdown in the signifying chain’ within a continuous present in which the subject
is unable to map either their own history as they are lost in a
‘present [which] engulfs the subject with indescribable vividness’ (Jameson 1991, pp. 26–7). Jameson’s example, and he quotes the
poem in full, is the poem ‘China’ by the language poet Bob Perelman
(1991, p. 416).
Jameson is both appalled and fascinated by the cultural products
of post-modernism, and in his essay ‘Language as History/History
as Language’, Derek Attridge describes the way Jameson (and Terry
Eagleton in his book Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1983) implicate
Saussure’s emphasis on the synchronic, rather than the diachronic
aspects of language and language usage, as one reason for the way in
which a spatial awareness has superseded a historical consciousness.
If diachrony describes a language as an ‘entity constantly changing
over time’ and synchrony as a ‘language as a system existing at a
given moment’ (Attridge, Bennington and Young 1987, p. 183), then
an emphasis on the latter privileges the spatial over the historical.
The histories of particular words, and authentic meanings that can
be traced back and identified through patterns of language usage
to an ‘origin’, become relativized, and replaced by meanings within
particular contexts. The language poets set out to explore this relationship, and the way that the meanings of words are contextually
derived from their place in the language system rather than from
their correspondence with a ‘real’ or ‘concrete’ world. Marjorie Perloff
in her essay entitled ‘Language Poetry in the Early Eighties’ sums up
the project as follows: ‘the attempt is not to articulate the curve of a
particular experience but to create a formal linguistic construct that
itself shapes our perception of the world around us’ (Perloff 1985,
p. 230). The poem becomes an object made up of language, and
the language poets drew on the idea of language as material, of the
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concrete and plastic potential of words in space. It is the construction
of the poem itself that is the event, not some occasion or emotion
that passes through the poem to the reader, and the poet becomes
construction worker, bringing in data from different sources. The
relationships between words within the poem, often extracted from
a variety of media and sources, are mapped across the page rather
than following one another, a page that becomes the ‘construction
site’ of the poem.
The language writers worked with an arbitrary, multiple and
contingent relationship between signifier and signified; the word and
its referent. This does not, as Jameson suggests, mean that they deny
the referential nature of language in order to turn it into a ‘rubble
of signification’. In the introduction to The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
Book, a collection of statements on poetics taken from the magazine
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the editors Bruce Andrews and Charles
Bernstein say:
The idea that writing should (or could) be stripped of reference is
as bothersome and confusing as the assumption that the primary
function of words is to refer, one to one, to an already constructed
world of things.
(Andrews and Bernstein 1984, p. ix)
They go on to refer to the ‘multiple powers and scope of reference (denotative, connotative, associational’ (Andrews and Bernstein
1984, pp. ix–x). The language writers operate within that tension
between word without referent and word with direct referent and
what they seem to do best is to bring the question of the relationship between language and the world to the fore as the primary
question for poets. Therefore, rather than a notion of experience
put into words or ideas expressed through language, the poet, in
the process of constructing the poem, constructs the experience and
constructs the idea. There are multiple references, which are specific
to the context of the language that makes up the poem and the
context of the reader at the point of reading the poem. The polysemous nature of individual words is stressed through the disruption of ‘normal’ syntax in the construction of the poem, forcing the
reader to cast around for the varieties of references that might be
present.
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In The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, spatial metaphors are often
used in describing the form of the poem and its materials and its
process of production. The ‘multiple scope’ of the word is itself a
spatial, three-dimensional concept involving an idea of time and
history as well as one of surface. Through a process of displacement
from the norm of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships, the
word, phrase, sentence and poem seek out a range of different references from past and present, and from the local to the global. The
poetry is unreadable if the reader is seeking that ‘one-to-one’ relationship between the words in the poem and an ‘already constructed
world of things’. The poem can only be given meaning or reference
by the activity of the reader and from the context within which that
reader is located, and s/he has to cast around for connections in
different temporal and spatial dimensions.
The experimental nature of the work of the language poets challenges methods of reading as well as writing. In his essay ‘Text and
Context’, Bruce Andrews refers to ‘Unreadability – that which requires
new readers and teaches new readings’ (Andrews and Bernstein 1984,
p. 31). He makes a connection between ‘referential signification’
and ‘depth’ where the referential nature of the signifier, according
to Andrews, brings security, provides a commodity that the reader
can take away with them, and continues to talk about ‘the comfort
of a semantic presence’, ‘semantic elixirs’ and ‘imagist tonics’. He
contrasts this vertical reading, a diving into the security of the past,
with ‘horizontal readings’:
The vertical axis downwards (as a ladder tempting us) need
not structure the reading – for it does not structure the text
Horizontal organizing principles, without an insistent (that is
to say imposed) depth. Secret meaning is not a hidden layer but
a hidden organization of the surface. Meaning is not produced
by the sign but by the contexts we bring to the potentials of
language (the) hollowing out of lower depths of labyrinthine caves
of signification, goes on within the gaps.
(Andrews and Bernstein 1984, p. 33)
The intersections between the vertical and the horizontal, the
historical and synchronous, between a place which can always be
explained by reference to somewhere else and the self-referential
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space of the surface, produces poetry which refuses a passive reading:
‘READING: not the glazed gaze of the consumer, but the careful attention of a producer, or co-producer Language is not a monologic
communication but a spatial interaction’ (Andrews and Bernstein
1984, p. 36).
Through this characterization of history or time as the vertical ‘y’
axis and space or geography as the horizontal ‘x’ axis, the vertical axis
becomes related to the paradigmatic, a philological process relating
meaning to the history of usage of the word, and the horizontal axis
the syntagmatic, relating the word to its role within the language
system. Other poets associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing
make similar references to space and spatialization. Ron Silliman
says ‘Reference is a compass’, Nick Piombino refers to his ‘poetic
geography’ and Bernadette Mayer to ‘Construct[ing] a poem as
though the words were three dimensional objects (like bricks) in
space’ (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, pp. 16, 71, 81). In ‘Chronic
Meanings’, Bob Perelman creates a poem made out of 25 four-line
stanzas. Each line has five words and ends in a full stop, creating a
parody of a sentence. It begins:
The single matter is fact.
Five words can say only.
Black sky at night, reasonably.
I am, the irrational residue.
(Hoover 1994, p. 501)
Each line says something about the form and the concept of the
poem and its method of construction. The opening line refers to the
materiality of the poem; it is not a ‘single matter’, reducible to a
single fact, nor is it a pragmatic ‘matter of fact’, although it sounds
like one. The second line reflects the poem’s limitations, the third an
example of the kind of line those limitations might produce. The final
line locates the ‘I’ within the poem as simply an ‘irrational residue’,
something which is both left over and of little value and which
both cannot be explained and which does not explain the poem.
The idea of ‘residue’ within the poem also suggests that rather than
being seen to contain too little information to make sense, it contains
too much.
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There are tantalizingly incomplete phrases scattered through the
poem: ‘She put her cards on.’, ‘I think I had better.’, ‘The weather isn’t
all it’s.’ (Hoover 1994, pp. 502–4). The obvious ending to the sentence
is left hanging somewhere over in the right-hand margin. There are
other lines that appear to be complete phrases; ‘Society has broken
into bands.’, ‘In no sense do I.’, ‘So shut the fucking thing.’, but are
often made to appear incomplete by the context in which they are
placed by preceding or following lines. The lines also appear to refer
to a number of different events woven through the poem, none of
which arrive at any conclusion. There are domestic references, to the
home and to shopping, and there are references to economics and to
the process of writing the poem.
The form of Perelman’s poem has no precedent in speech or in
writing, although the words themselves are ones in common use and
the syntax, incomplete though it is, familiar. The poem is heavily
structured or patterned, but the patterning appears to obfuscate rather
than elucidate, to force the poet into only half explaining himself,
leaving the reader to close the gaps. Why would the poet choose
this structure, this particular patterning, for the poem? There are a
number of possible reasons. In Writing Talks, Perelman refers to the
use of a five-word line in ‘Primer’ as:
trying to contrast rhythms of units of meaning with units of
sound You’re not counting syllables, you’re not counting stress.
You’re counting meaning units I want you to hear the grammar,
and that a phrase could end here or it could go on and connect
and therefore change itself.
(Perelman 1985, p. 81)
The function of the form is not to impose a ‘timing’ on any reading
of the poem, but to set up a tension or a contrast between sound
and meaning. Perelman’s is a spatial practice which consists of
putting incomplete sentences one after the other and sending the
reader into the creative space at the end of each line, a space in
which there exists a number of possibilities for the completion of
the line. The reader has to actively engage both in the process of
completing the half-completed lines, which often seem to be made
up of bits of conversation, and ‘found’ material, from films, books or
magazines.
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The syllogistic move above the sentence level to an exterior reference is possible, but the nature of the book reverses the direction
of this movement. Rather than making the shift in an automatic
and gestalt sort of way, the reader is forced to deduce it from the
partial views and associations posited in each sentence.
(Silliman 1989, p. 84)
The new sentence therefore ‘focuses attention at the level of language
in front of the reader’ (Silliman 1989, p. 88), echoing Perelman’s
phrase ‘I want you to hear the grammar’ from the quotation above.
Silliman refers to three levels of reference for the individual sentence;
within its own diction, with preceding and succeeding sentences,
and with the paragraph as a whole (Silliman 1989, p. 84). By selfconsciously beginning each line with a capital letter and ending it
with a full stop, Perelman gives the poem a stop-start momentum,
the full stops pulling readers up with a jerk and both returning them
to the sentence they’ve just read as well as the sentences before
and after it. Yet the reader is not given sufficient information to
develop any kind of occasion or location, let alone closure, but
is thrown back on the language itself as well as being projected
into the space of possibility beyond the right-hand margin. To
use Andrews’s terminology, a reader engages in both vertical readings, in the process of picking out the referential signification of
each word and sentence, and horizontal readings across the grammatical surface of the poem. The surface is, of course, grammatically incomplete; a reader is never allowed to settle anywhere
other than in the poem; that which is exterior to the poem, to
which the words appear to sometimes refer, only appears in occasional flashes. The locale and occasion of the poem are the poem
itself, into which the poet brings fragments and bits of speech,
instructions, observations and information. It is not that the poem
has no history; it has multiple histories within apparently endless
possibilities.
In 1987 the language poet Lyn Hejinian published the booklength sequence My Life, an autobiographical prose poem. The
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Some further explanation of the form of the poem can be gleaned
from Ron Silliman’s commentary on Gertrude Stein’s ‘Custard’ in The
New Sentence:
poem contains fragments of narrative split into sections, each
one with a prefatory line in italic type in a space cut out of
the text. Like the Perelman poem (and like much ‘open field’
poetry), the poem combines direct observation (phenomenological) with received information and commentary without necessarily distinguishing between them. The poem also contains many
of the elements of narrative, although its flow is constantly
disrupted, folding the reader back on that which has gone before
and forcing them to cast about for clues to that which is to
come. There is more than one perspective on the events being
related; that of the child and that of the poet at the time
of writing:
My mother had climbed into the garbage can in order to stamp
down the accumulated trash, but the can was knocked off balance,
and when she fell she broke her arm. She could only give a little
shrug. The family had little money but plenty of food. At the
circus only the elephants were greater than anything I could have
imagined. The egg of Columbus, landscape and grammar. She
wanted one where the playground was dirt, with grass, shaded
by a tree, from which would hang a rubber tire as a swing, and
when she found it she sent me. These creatures are compound and
nothing they do should surprise us. I don’t mind, or I won’t mind,
where the verb ‘to care’ might multiply.
(Hoover 1994, p. 387)
Hejinian is using ideas of surface (space) and depth (time) in two
ways. One is the sense of bringing childhood memories to the surface
and putting them alongside the contemporary event of constructing
the poem in a collage of past and present; the other in the sense of
creating a poetic surface of sound. The tone of the passages is even,
and in the majority of the sentences the syntax is standard. While
a number of satisfactory readings of the piece can be made, none of
them is final, and there are always elements, often tiny, which disrupt
the progress of the narrative. What is the ‘one’ that she wants? Is it a
school? Or a house? Are the creatures the elephants, or is she referring
to language? The answer is both and neither, resulting in a variety of
potential readings. In an essay, ‘The Rejection of Closure’, she says:
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The progress of a line or sentence, or a series of lines or sentences,
has spatial properties as well as temporal properties. The spatial
density is both vertical and horizontal. The meaning of a word in
its place derives both from the word’s lateral reach, its contact with
its neighbours in a statement, and from its reach through and out
of the text into the other world, the matrix of its contemporary
and historical reference. The very idea of reference is spatial: over
here is word, over there is thing at which word is shooting amiable
love arrows.
(Hoover 1994, p. 654)
It is an attractive metaphor, with the word playing cupid to its
referent. The relationship between word and referent becomes full of
possibility and the poem’s action is within that gap between the two.
Reference, as I have claimed throughout this chapter, is also historical,
a movement back into the histories of personal, cultural and social
language usage. Sometimes Hejinian appears to close the spatial and
historical gap, to produce a sentence that can be unproblematically
related to some past event, only to throw it all up in the air with the
next sentence. At other times the reader is not allowed the luxury of
even a single sentence before being derailed. In another part of My Life
she says, ‘But a word is a bottomless pit’, echoing Andrews’s metaphor
of ‘a vertical dimension acting only as an echo, a nostalgic reverb’
(Andrews and Bernstein 1984, p. 35).
The concern of the language writers is language, the forms it takes
and its relationship to everyday experience. They use spatial metaphors (ideas of depth, marginal, horizontal, etc.) to describe the
relationship between language and the world, the signifier and its
signified, and the relationship, or the lack of it, between the poem
and an external other. For the writer it is words and their syntactical
relationships that are the building blocks of the poem, and they
will refer to the ‘architecture’ of a poem. The language writers work
within what is, or was at its outset, a specifically political agenda, and
operate within the gaps, between the word and its referent, between
the subject that is constructed by the poem and the subject that
constructs the poem. Ideas about space and its construction are part
of the processes of the poetry.
A spatial aesthetics will work on a number of different levels. It
will be concerned with, and draw upon, ideas of physical space
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and representations of space, and transfer ideas from the concrete
to the abstract and the conceptual via the use of spatial metaphors. Artists and writers have used spatial practices in the spaces
between, and the cracks around, bureaucratic regulation, working in
the space of the multiple possibilities of the relationship between
symbol and object and signifier and signified. Their reasons are
often political, and the modernist painters and writers at the beginning of the twentieth century used Cubist and collagist techniques
to simultaneously express bewilderment at the loss of moral and
ethical certainties, as well as to create ‘free’ space in which new
ideas could be developed and explored through the combination of
ideas and objects otherwise held apart. Simultaneous bewilderment
and euphoria is present at the end of the twentieth century and
the beginning of the twenty-first, in a ‘post-modern’ world in which
globalization provides a variety of possibilities for increased mobility
and the reconstitution of determined histories, as well as the end of
history in an homogenized and commodified present. The processes
of homogenization produces a world which should be comfortable,
where we can travel without leaving our own culture, and, as English
speakers, can even reasonably expect that someone can speak our
language. The opposite is true, and the flat desert of MacDonaldization and the commmodification of heritage and local difference
has produced a world every bit as alienating and frightening as that
characterized by ‘difference’, and one in which techniques of collage,
of multiple perspectives, the dérive, the open field and the deconstructive activities of the language poets are still both necessary and
relevant.
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Aesthetics of Space: Cubism to Language Poetry 23
Spatial Theories and Poetic
Practices
The ‘spatial turn’ in cultural and social theory is more than simply
an increased interest in space or spatial relations brought about by
low-cost travel, the development of the Internet and the activities of
multinational companies. It is also a result of changed concepts of
space and the way that these changed concepts have been disseminated across a variety of academic disciplines. This trans-disciplinarity
of spatial concepts has not made the difficult task of describing the
concept of space any easier, and each discipline will provide its own
emphasis. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary lists 15 definitions and
the Oxford English Dictionary some 30 pages of references. These range
from ideas of space within time, as an interval, to space as negative
and empty distance and its use to describe the ‘stellar depths’. There
are numerous references to printing and printed material, to the
spacing of words and to space within a book, and to the idea of
personal space around the body. The latter half of the twentieth
century is also, of course, the ‘space age’, following the first usage
of the term in 1946, and defined as ‘the period of human exploration and exploitation of space’. The drug culture of the 1960s and
1970s produced terms such as ‘space cadet’ as ‘a person regarded as
out of touch with reality, esp. (as if) as a result of taking drugs; a
person prone to flights of fancy or irrational or strange behaviour’,
and ‘spaced-out’: ‘To experience a drug-induced state of euphoria; to
become disoriented by the use of narcotic stimulus To lose one’s
train of thought while under the influence of a drug.’ All these references are in play, and are all part of the ways in which the word
is both used and understood in modern and contemporary culture,
24
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2
and these different understandings of space will emerge in the poetic
texts I examine.
The proliferation of meanings and references and different contexts
within which the term emerges can, as Lefebvre says in his revised
preface to The Production of Space, simply serve to avoid a more
rigorous analysis of space and its effects, leaving the commentator
shifting between space as the cosmos, Euclidean geometry and the
idea of an ‘a priori’ space (Lefebvre 2003, p. 206). Lefebvre tries to
be more specific; for him space is produced by social activity, but a
product that is neither a ‘thing or an object – but a cluster of relationships’ (2003, p. 208). This definition means that for Lefebvre ‘Space
can no longer be conceived of as passive or empty’ but neither can
it ‘be isolated or remain static’, but is evident in the processes of
production and in everyday life. Derek Gregory in The Dictionary of
Human Geography echoes Lefebvre when he says:
space and time (or space-time) are now seen as being ‘produced’ or
‘constituted’ through action and interaction. According to this view,
space and time are not neutral, canonical grids that exist ‘on the
outside’, separate from and so enframing and containing everyday
life, but are instead folded into the ongoing flows and forms of
the world in which we find ourselves.
(Johnston, Gregory, Pratt and Watts 2000, p. 771)
Within this overall concept of space and time as being produced,
rather than having a priori status, I want to identify a number of
overlapping key concepts and demonstrate the ways in which these
might support and connect to readings of some modern and contemporary poetry. The concepts include: changing ideas of relationships
between space and place in the work of Doreen Massey in particular;
from Henri Lefebvre the idea of space as socially produced and the
‘triads’ of ‘perceived’, ‘conceived’ and ‘lived’ space and ‘representations of space’, ‘representational spaces’ and ‘spatial practice’; ideas
of the nomadic and the rhizomatic, particularly as they appear in
the work of Deleuze and Guattari; and relationships between ideas of
space and ideas of the human body. In some ways it is all too easy to
cherry-pick a number of these ideas, some of which come from very
different genealogies, and ‘map’ them on to some ideas from contemporary poetics by developing a series of metaphorical relationships
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Spatial Theories and Poetic Practices 25
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
between notions of simultaneity, coincidence and contiguity.
As Lefebvre waspishly points out, though, a metaphor, however
helpful in supporting an explanation or providing another
perspective, is not a substitute for thought. Bearing this in mind I
intend to take a slightly different approach and, rather than simply
draw comparisons, illuminating though they often are, between ideas
of space and twentieth-century poetry and poetics, I try to integrate
the implications of the spatial turn into twentieth-century poetry and
poetics through a process of application, thereby creating both an
explanation and an example.
The location of real world ‘geographies’ and changing geographical
imaginings within texts is therefore only one part of my project,
although an important one which informs my examination of the
work of Charles Olson, Edward Dorn and Frank O’Hara. In other
parts of this book I also develop relationships between ideas of
space and the form of contemporary poetry through the aesthetics
of mapping, including from Fredric Jameson the idea of cognitive
mapping; through ideas and methods of collage; the idea of the
disciplined, monitored and surveyed body from Michel Foucault; and
from Michel de Certeau the idea of city as text and the relationship
between a strategy and a tactic. I also attempt to demonstrate,
tentatively, a set of relationships between the language of space, the
way space is described, and the way poetic language and poetic form
are described and used, in order to demonstrate the ways in which
there is correspondence.
The context for the multi-disciplinary ‘spatial turn’ is the
continuing and accelerating process of globalization and spatialization, whereby the relationships between ‘things’ are established
and described according to their relative position in space and the
connections between them, as well as through historical connections.
This is not a new process, and is certainly not simply a consequence
of post-modernity. An increasing spatial awareness can be traced
through the development of means of transport and exploration
from the early modern period, through industrial developments in
the Victorian period, and through relationships between scientific
and technological developments and modernity. Anthony Giddens
in The Consequences of Modernity and Henri Lefebvre in The Production
of Space both outline, from a Western perspective, developments and
changes in spatial awareness from a feudal population dominated
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by place, to industrial and post-industrial populations with an
increasing awareness of space. Although Rob Shields criticizes this
genealogy and chronology of a spatial awareness as ‘armchair
anthropology’ which ‘draws little on detailed anthropological
research’ (Shields 1999, p. 173), it is self-evident that, in recent years,
spatial awareness has accelerated. If there is a significant difference
between modernity and post-modernity, it can partially be located
in the pace of development, and in the process of ‘space-time
compression’ as David Harvey calls it.
If the context of the multi-disciplinary spatial turn is the accelerating process of globalization, the reason for it is often epistemological and political; it is to ask questions about what we know
of the world, how we know it and how we represent that knowing
back to ourselves through revealing that which is concealed, and
deconstructing naturalized processes of spatialization. For Lefebvre,
a turn to matters spatial was a continuation of his explorations into
‘everyday life’, while for Foucault it was an exploration of the ways in
which the human body was monitored and controlled and how political power was established and sustained through dispersed processes
of surveillance. For Massey it was, in part, to demonstrate how control
over space was ‘gendered’, while for Deleuze and Guattari space
contained within itself possible ‘lines of flight’, ways of subverting
or resisting ‘control’. Michel de Certeau’s depiction of urban space
as a text, and walking as being like reading, provides ways of deconstructing that text, and his distinction between strategies and tactics
provides ways of subverting and disrupting administrative control
over space. For Jameson, a contemporary fascination with surfaces
and depthlessness as consequences of a global commodity culture
has led to a displaced and dislocated population, who need to engage
in processes of ‘cognitive mapping’ in order to relocate themselves.
It is no surprise, therefore, that those poets most influenced by the
spatial turn are also the most socially or politically engaged, and part
of international and specifically internationalist movements, rather
than necessarily major figures in national literatures. The most satisfying responses to spatialization and globalization are from those
poets who engage with those processes through both the content
of their work and through experimentations in poetic form. In
the sections that follow in this chapter I outline the four different
spatial concepts, of space and place, of the relationship between
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Spatial Theories and Poetic Practices 27
28
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
Space and place
Traditional, physical geography is the study of places within space,
where a ‘place’ is a bounded area set within ‘space’ that is best
described through a set of coordinates. Space is therefore ‘a priori’,
it was already there and places, such as towns, villages, homesteads,
farms, cities, regions and so on, are located within it. Without places,
space becomes empty and meaningless, a mathematically calculable
desert. Places provide spaces with content, and the populations of
those places with identity and security; as well as being geographical
locations they are also ‘structures of feeling’.
In recent years the world’s population has become more mobile,
whether through economic migration by choice or through forced
movement as economic or political refugees from their ‘place’. If identity, through language and a shared culture, tradition and history,
is linked to a particular place, then leaving that place is a traumatic event. Capitalism has also become increasingly mobile, using
the process of ‘MacDonaldization’. Global brands set up franchises
around the world and develop new markets for goods that do not
originate from the country in which they are sold or consumed. As a
consequence populations become further alienated from the means
of production and acts of resistance have often been based around a
reassertion of place, or an idea of a place. This is true of Aboriginal
rights groups in countries such as Australia, as well as working-class
movements in the United Kingdom. The miners’ strike of the early
1980s was, for example, a struggle over community and place as much
as it was over jobs. Massey notes that ‘the notion of place (usually
evoked as local place) has come to have totemic resonance For
some it is the sphere of the everyday, of real and valued practices, the
geographical source of meaning, vital to hold on to as the ‘global’
spins its ever more powerful and alienating webs’ (Massey 2005, p. 5).
However, as David Harvey points out:
In clinging, often of necessity, to a place-bound identity,
however, such oppositional movements become a part of the very
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representations of space and representational space, of the nomadic
and the rhizomatic and the idea of the ‘body’ in space, and apply
them to work from a variety of poets.
Spatial Theories and Poetic Practices 29
Resistance, based on the assertion of essential ideas of place (a key
element of much British post-war poetry), has other disadvantages.
It means that a place, and the community within it, must be constituted as having intrinsic qualities and values different from other
places. Through identifying a set of values, place, as well as being a
place of inclusion and a place where identity is affirmed, becomes
a place of exclusion, where some are included but others are not.
Places, domestic, rural or urban, and the communities within them,
can conceal injustices, inequalities and abuses. They are not necessarily places of security. Neither formulation of place is therefore satisfactory. In a globalized world, where place is homogenized through
processes of commodification, populations became dispossessed and
dislocated. Yet to assert the essential characteristics of a place and
identify a set of common values is to develop a ‘politically conservative haven one that fails to address the real forces at work’
(Massey 2005, p. 6).
If a new formulation of place is required, that in turn requires
an appropriate formulation of space. For Massey space is characterized as a ‘dynamic simultaneity constructed out of the multiplicity of social relations across all spatial scales, from the global reach
of finance and telecommunications, through the geography of the
tentacles of national political power, to the social relations within
the town, the settlement, the household and the workplace’ (Massey
1994, p. 4). For Lefebvre ‘the form of social space is encounter,
assembly, simultaneity’, a form in which everything is assembled;
‘living beings, things, objects, works, signs and symbols’ (Lefebvre
1991, p. 101). Yet a global population still needs places, otherwise
maps of the globe would simply identify flows, climatic or tidal, of
finance, of information and of people rather than interconnected
places with which people identify. This does not mean that such
places need to be sites of sentiment and nostalgia, or sites of exclusion in order to maintain their essential identity, and Massey suggests
that they might instead be ‘moments’ and ‘particular articulation[s]
of those relations’ (Massey 1994, p. 5). The ‘moments’ would not
necessarily include the whole place, there could be a remainder, and
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fragmentation which a mobile capitalism and flexible accumulation can feed on.
(Harvey 1990, p. 303)
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
any one moment might include relationships between those within
the place and those outside it.
Representations of rural life often seek to establish a geographical
community that ascribe to a common set of values. In the poem
‘Going, Going’, Philip Larkin (Tuma 2001) characterizes English
rural life as ‘The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,/ the guildhalls,
the carved choirs’, yet also a rural England in which there would
‘always be fields and farms/ where the village louts could climb’.
Larkin is identifying a heterogeneous rural population, louts and
not-louts, yet one that has a common interest in opposing the ‘spectacled grins’ that ‘approve/ Some takeover bid that entails/ Five per
cent profit (and ten/ per cent more in the estuaries):’ and which
encourages industry to ‘move your works to the unspoilt Dales’
(Tuma 2001, p. 454). Massey’s definition of place allows for a more
heterogeneous local to be linked to the global through an infinite
variety of temporary and coincidental connections. As Massey says, a
response which dismisses struggles against globalization (and Larkin’s
stance to outside capital in the poem could be characterized as a
struggle, even if he doesn’t fit the classic eco-warrior model) as
‘only local’, or alternatively ‘romanticizes them for their supposed
rootedness and authenticity depend on a notion of the local as
effectively closed, self-constitutive’ (Massey 2005, p. 181). This is
the way Larkin represents the rural, as a closed and self-sufficient
world, in harmony with itself, and threatened by the new roads and
industry.
Yet a place that is always in process, a kind of open field or threedimensional network with unlimited potential combination and
connectivity, can effectively operate within an increasingly spatialized society. It can become more than a place of retreat, of sentiment,
nostalgia and opposition to technological development, but a place
that also links to the broader environment. I am aware that this
reconstruction of place is sounding utopian, as if it can have all the
benefits of traditional ideas of place and the economic and cultural
benefits of a globalized world. This is not the case, and the casual
sideswipe of the tail of global capitalism can disrupt the lives of thousands, but I am claiming, along with Harvey and Massey, that it is no
longer possible to pull up the drawbridge and claim immunity from
economic, social, cultural and environmental change.
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30
I would also claim that just as, in an increasingly spatialized world,
notions of place have to change, so too will notions of poetry. If a
place is traditionally characterized as a bounded community with its
own history, then a ‘poetry of place’ frequently sought to identify
the nature of a place through an exploration and recovery of its past.
The poet and critic Jeremy Hooker refers to a place as ‘a totality all that has created it through the process of time the connection
within a single compass of all those living forces’ (1985, p. 203). In
his poem ‘Beidiog’ (S. Butler 1985, p. 114) he refers to ‘ stones
with red marks/ like cuts of a rusty axe’, where the geology itself
is a kind of present surface marked by the past. In another poem,
‘Common Land above Trefenter’ (S. Butler 1985, p. 122), he identifies the traces that human habitation has left after people have lived
there, then tried to move on. It was a place where ‘poverty abounded’,
and where ‘dwellings’ were ‘built in a night’ and the ‘fields wide
as an axe throw/ From the door, patterning/ Moorland with stony
patches’. This historical description of the way in which the place was
constructed, the remains of the walls that marked out the smallholdings determined by the custom of throwing an axe from the doorway
as far as one could (a kind of crude way for the fittest to survive;
unable to throw an axe, no food), is not developed by Hooker. For
him all that is left is the ‘ bare history/ Under foot – holdings/
Untenable’.
Yet some poetry, in the way it refuses a fixed location and shifts
between places, seems closer to Massey’s description of place as
‘constructed out of the multiplicity of social relations across all spatial
scales’. In Alice Notley’s poem ‘Go In and Out the Window’, from
her autobiographical collection Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), there
are references to specific locations and to her history, to the ‘shit in
our sinking cesspool behind alley house’ and where ‘Momma and
Charley stand in 49 or 50/ and look at the collapsing lawn’. But the
poem does not, like the Larkin or Hooker poems, provide a single
perspective; it shifts around, going to Iowa, Spain and Morocco. Yet
more importantly, and within that transnational movement, it shifts
according to the perspective of the writer and, ultimately, the reader.
The poem is ‘not mine, I/ want it but have to go in order for it to
live/ or go in and out/ of it and see what we can see’; it is not an
extension of the poet’s self but, through a number of perspectives,
examines relationships between place and identity, and author and
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Spatial Theories and Poetic Practices 31
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
poem. As she says at the start of the second stanza ‘the poem is not
your name’ and in her recollection of being paranoid on hashish
in Marrakech she ‘leave[s] the room’ in order not to be ‘the word
paranoid a hippie on hash/ American poet of this or that possession/ American woman in a mini/ / somebody else’s person’. Yet,
and importantly, the poem is not simply a process of finding herself
amongst this multiplicity, except perhaps in the implied narrator of
the poem. The poem ends:
There’s nothing in that Woman’s brain out the window –
she couldn’t write a poem – who is she, Momma? is she
me? She doesn’t know anything.
(Notley 1998, p. 29)
The poem is about place and identity, yet its conclusions are fluid
across both space and time. Identity is never fixed, but is located
in the movement in and out of the window, in a transitory space
between places, between inside and outside, and even ‘in and out of/
species even tongue of grass or fire’. By refusing to identify herself
with any fixed geographical place, yet acknowledging the importance of places, the poem itself becomes the place, albeit one that is
conceptual rather than physical.
The poem can therefore take on the attributes of a place,
ranging from the conservative, historical and bounded notion
of place, of a place as a structure of feeling, and Massey’s
more dynamic notion of place as ‘time-spaces’ with a ‘global
sense of place’(Massey 2005, pp. 179–81). Massey’s proposed ‘relational politics of place involves both the inevitable negotiations
presented by throwntogetherness and a politics of the terms of openness and closure’ (2005, p. 181). Massey’s point, and it is a good one,
is that:
The ‘lived reality of our daily lives’ is utterly dispersed, unlocalized, in its sources and in its repercussions words such as ‘real’,
‘everyday’, ‘lived’, ‘grounded’ are constantly deployed and bound
together; they intend to evoke security and implicitly they
counterpose themselves to a wider ‘space’ which must be abstract,
ungrounded, universal, even threatening If we really think
space relationally, then it is the sum of all our connections, and
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Spatial Theories and Poetic Practices 33
It is not enough to simply describe ‘space’ as ‘open’ and ‘abstract’
and ‘place’ as ‘closed’ and ‘concrete’. To do so simply sustains an
opposition that does not exist. As I said at the start of this section,
space and place are interrelated and coexistent. Nor am I suggesting,
although it is tempting, following Michel de Certeau by giving a
poem the status of a ‘place’ within the ‘space’ of language (Certeau
1988, p. 117). I am, however, suggesting that to think about the
form of a poem as having some of the qualities of a place, as well
as a representation of place in its content, allows a broader range of
responses to place within a broader range of poetries.
Spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of
representation
Space is both lived and conceptualized. In other words, we have an
embodied experience of space a well as a mental concept of space. The
sense of where we are is a combination of that immediate embodied
experience and the concept of our location within a larger picture,
shifting our perceptions from the phenomenologically encountered
experience to the larger geographical and social structures we are part
of. Henri Lefebvre, at the start of his book The Production of Space,
is emphatic that mental conceptions of space, and indeed mental
conceptions of anything else, should be developed alongside and
within practical, real-world experience. Otherwise ‘a powerful ideological tendency, and one much attached to its own would-be scientific
credentials, is expressing in an admirably unconscious manner, those
dominant ideas which are perforce the ideas of the dominant class’
(Lefebvre 1991, p. 6). Ideas or concepts cut off from experience tend
to produce a ‘mental space which is apparently extra-ideological’
(p. 6). This process of abstraction to a mental space cut off from social
practice ‘creates an abyss between the mental sphere on one side and
the social spheres on the other’ (p. 6). The reasons for identifying
this ‘abyss’ are political; to demonstrate the ‘kinship between this
mental space and the one inhabited by the technocrats in their silent
offices’ (p. 6).
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in that sense utterly grounded, and those connections may go
around the world.
(Massey 2005, pp. 184–5)
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
Lefebvre’s aim in his book is not to produce a ‘discourse on space’,
that would simply produce another ‘mental space’, rather his aim
is to ‘expose the actual production of space and the modalities of
their genesis together within a single theory’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 16).
For Lefebvre, any ideas of space need to be grounded in experience
and in material reality. It is a spatial materialism, in which knowledge is situated and embodied, rather than an abstracted spatial
theory, and is therefore in a constant reflexive relationship between
ideas of space, and an experience of space that is also a spatial practice. In order to sustain this relationship, Lefebvre identifies three
types of space; physical space, mental space and social space (1991,
p. 14).
The triad, or three-way relationship, is vital to Lefebvre’s theoretical
approach. It avoids a return to the dichotomy of mind and the body,
a dichotomy sustained by mapping concepts or abstractions of space
on to the mind, and real or concrete space as experienced on to
the body. The three-way relationship means that such connections
are never allowed to settle, that theory is constantly tested against
practice, and practice is located in the context of theory. Lefebvre
develops two further three-way relationships. The first is between
‘spatial practice’, that which produces social space, ‘representations of
space’ as the conceptualized and abstract space of planners, scientists
and so on, and ‘representational spaces’ (as translated by Nicholson)
or ‘spaces of representation’ (as translated by Shields) as ‘space as
directly lived through its associated images or symbols and hence
the space of inhabitants or users’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 39). This third
element is simultaneously space as it is, everyday spaces, and space
as it might be, as a space of actualization.
Lefebvre immediately introduces another three terms, those of the
‘perceived, conceived and lived’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 39). This seems
unnecessarily complex, but the reasons become evident. Attempts to
define these terms as categories into which different spatial activities, processes and products can be located will fail; both Elden and
Shields in their comprehensive studies of Lefebvre are reduced to
admitting that the terms in the triads are interchangeable only with
some difficulty (‘spatial practice’ for ‘perceived’ space for example)
and that the distinctions between the terms within the individual
triads are difficult to determine and sustain. I don’t intend to add
further definitions. Instead, I want to consider these sets of terms
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as related, but incapable of being satisfactorily mapped on to each
other. Lefebvre’s ‘categories’ are therefore possibilities or directions
towards definitions, which are always made indeterminate by their
application to any event. As Lefebvre says:
The perceived – conceived – lived triad (in spatial terms: spatial
practice, representations of space, representational spaces) loses all
force if it is treated as an abstract ‘model’. If it cannot grasp the
concrete then its import is severely limited, amounting to no
more than that of one ideological mediation among others.
That the lived, conceived and perceived realms should be interconnected, so that the ‘subject’, the individual member of a given
social group, may move from one to another without confusion –
so much is a logical necessity.
(Lefebvre 1991, p. 40)
If space, according to Lefebvre, is everything, ‘living beings, things,
objects, works, signs and symbols’, and, according to Massey (2005),
‘the sum of all our connections, and in that sense utterly grounded,
and those connections may go around the world’, then any moment
within space, any coalition of forces and objects, whether we choose
to call that a ‘place’ or not, will contain different elements of the
triad and connections between the elements. It is the messiness of
human existence, and the simultaneity of coincidental events that
Lefebvre is trying to grasp. He is not trying to stand back and identify
a ‘proper’ place from which to observe and categorize human spatial
interaction at whatever level, but is more interested in the human
interactions that produce space, and the ways that spatial practices
use representations of space and work within and produce representational spaces. As he goes on to say: ‘Representations of space are shot
through with a knowledge (savoir) which is always relative and in
the process of change’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 41). A map, for example, or
a diagram, or an architect’s drawings, are all representations of space,
yet are also culturally coded, suggesting modes of spatial practice and
the production of spaces of representation.
Representations of space are therefore ‘abstract, but they also play
a part in social and political practice’ and a ‘specific role in the
production of space’ (Lefebvre 1991, pp. 41, 42). Representational
spaces on the other hand ‘need obey no rules of consistency or
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cohesiveness’. Those who study representational spaces, and Lefebvre
names ethnologists, anthropologists and psychoanalysts, ‘forget to
set them alongside those representations of space which co-exist,
concord or interfere with them; they even more frequently ignore
spatial practice’ (p. 41). The need for this interconnectedness can
be easily demonstrated. A domestic house is represented by a set of
architect’s plans which can be read in the abstract and, like any other
text, read in different places and at different times. Yet while the
physical plan might cross times and places, the particular reading
must be ‘embodied’, and located in a specific time and place. It will
be ‘read’ from a particular cultural perspective. Not all readings of the
plan will be the same, but will change according to the perspective
of the ‘reader’. A person can also physically enter the house that is
constructed using the plans, and on approaching will get an idea of
its overall shape and construction, as well as picking up a range of
cultural signifiers, which will provide them with a set of expectations as to décor, scale and so on. Entering and moving through the
house will involve shifting backwards and forwards between the plan
and the embodied experience of scale, direction and perspective. The
direction of movement through will be based on a combination of
overall concept and embodied experience, as well as response and
reaction to the symbolic elements of home and domesticity. The
movement through the house is therefore a combination of embodied
spatial practice, response to a representation of space, and reaction
to the symbolism and imagery of representational space. A long-term
inhabitant will have a more complex reaction to the representational
spaces of the house, such as the kitchen where meals are taken or
the living room where the family might have spent their time. The
representational space of the house is therefore produced by every
individual who enters, and it is a representational space that contains
within it representations of space.
Michel de Certeau compares walking in a city to writing a text.
He describes the walkers as ‘practitioners of the city whose bodies
follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without
being able to read it’ (Certeau 1988, p. 93). He notes that people who
move through cities do so without knowledge of them, that it is an
embodied experience that is not conceptualized. In contrast to the
planners and administrators of the city, they ‘compose a manifold
story that has neither author nor spectator’ (p. 93). If I am to relate
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moving through space to processes of writing and reading, I prefer
Lefebvre’s account that movement through space is a spatial practice
that brings together an embodied process and a conceptual awareness. Experience is located within wider and more abstract discourses,
and in the case of moving through space this could include a map
or the timetable for the day. Even shopping indicates a teleology,
people shop for something and will have some broader plan of
action in their head. It also has a history, and items will be checked
against a memory of past purchases to see if they’re value for money,
witnessing a traffic jam might spark off thoughts about the need
to cut down on car use, and stumbling over a street dweller might
bring about thoughts on the need to develop a more equal society.
The encountered phenomena develop a dialogue with categories and
concepts.
Comparisons can be made between moving through space and
reading a poem, and there are ways in which a poem can be usefully
conceptualized as a place within the space of language. I would claim,
however, that any attempt to map the processes directly on to each
other will result in a reductive set of definitions which fail to engage
with the full complexity of either activity. In a poem such as Alstonefield by Peter Riley a number of ideas about space can be identified.
First, the poem is about a place: Alstonefield is a village in the North
Staffordshire Peak District in the Midlands of England, and the poem
is a book-length response to the place. The reader enters the poem as
night falls, yet it is as if they are entering a performance space:
Again the figured curtain draws across the sky.
Daylight shrinks, clinging to the stone walls
and rows of graveyard tablets, the moon rising
over the tumbling peneplain donates some equity
to the charter and the day’s accountant
stands among tombs where courtesy dwells.
(Riley 2003, p. 5)
The description is that of a churchyard at the end of the day. The
figured curtain is the night sky, the figures are the stars, and as
the curtain closes it fills the space below with darkness before the
relationship between dark and light is balanced by the appearance
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of the moon over the landscape. The poem contains language that
simultaneously adds to the description, yet also distracts from it,
opening the poem out to different discourses. The ‘figured curtain’
suggests a stage for the performance of the poem, introducing the
dramatic, and more theoretically informed discourses of performativity. The idea of the location of the poem as a stage set is picked up
in Stanza 2, where the ‘theatre of eyes flickers and dies’. Further on in
Stanza 1 the words ‘equity’, ‘charter’ and ‘accountant’ introduce ideas
of value, of profit and loss and commodification. Again, these ideas
are picked up in subsequent stanzas. In Stanza 2 the ‘Fallen/ light
sets up its booth’ and in Stanza 3 the place is described as ‘unvalued’,
suggesting both a place that society does not value as well as a place
that is free from commodification.
Relationships between representations of space and spaces of
representation are complex in this poem. There is a sense in which the
whole poem is a representation of the place of Alstonefield, yet the
location of the poem is also a representational space: ‘space as directly
lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space
of “inhabitants” and “users” This is the dominated space which
the imagination seeks to change and appropriate’ (Lefebvre 1991, p.
39). If the writer switches back and forth between phenomenological
encounter and overview, and between presence and absence in the
scene, then the reader does so too. Yet within the description of the
location the poem brings in other discourses, and most consistently
that of the commodification of rural space. Within its movement
forward, as a description of the relationship between landscape and
the poetic self, the poem opens up other conceptual spaces that reflect
back into the poem. The poem is therefore a representation of space
in that it is a verbal description of the landscape, and a representational space in that it is a space the reader inhabits. Within the
poem the references to commodification and subjectivity are both
their own conceptual spaces, with links into their own discourses,
as well as part of the poem. The outcome of an examination of the
poem through the framework of Lefebvre’s triad of terms demonstrates that the terms are not categories but ideas, and ideas that can
be simultaneously applied, and that overlap and are entangled. So
it is not simply that a poem is a representation of space or that it
is a representational space, it is both simultaneously. And it is not
that the references to commodification and subjectivity within the
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poem are part of representational space and not part of the poem as
a representation of space, they are both. The very difficulty in distinguishing between the terms is a further demonstration, in practice, of
the way they exist simultaneously yet provide different perspectives.
What the terms and the concepts they bring with them provide are
different ways of reading the poem through ideas of space. When
Riley writes ‘Mirror/ flashes, on the horizon, distances steeped in
petrol,/ lives snapped to zero’ (Riley 2003, p. 6) or
the hill crests take
the surge of territory to its break and
mark it as on paper, ink under blue wash.
Making clear what I thought I knew, that
Truth is at the rim and rings like cash.
(Riley 2003, p. 9)
Riley is both describing the landscape and inhabiting it. He is also
describing the landscape within the context of a variety of discourses,
drawing on ideas of visual representation, ideas of ecology and the
impact of humans on the landscape as well as his own position to
those ideas.
The rhizomatic and the nomadic
In his book Nomad Poetics Pierre Joris says:
What is needed now is a nomadic poetics. Its method will be
rhizomatic which is different from collage, i.e., a rhizomatics is not
an aesthetics of the fragment If Pound, HD, Joyce, Stein, Olson
and others have shown the way, it is essential now to push this
matter further, again, not so much as ‘collage’ but as a material
flux of language matter.
(Joris 2003, p. 5)
By moving from the modernist notion of collage to a more postmodern idea of the rhizome, Joris is moving from the location of
objects within a frame to the idea of a system that produces its own
space. In preferencing those key terms of ‘rhizomatic’ and ‘nomadic’,
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he is referring explicitly to the spatial concerns of Deleuze and Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1988), the second volume of
their capitalism and schizophrenia project. Through combining ideas
from Freud and Marx, Deleuze and Guattari produce a highly abstract
text that seeks to bring together the psychoanalytical and material
effects of capitalism. The ongoing appeal of the texts lies in their
desire for liberation, to suggest ‘lines of flight’ that might be used to
subvert and escape from the monitored and surveyed life of the state
and global capitalism, a life that Foucault can only describe. In the
first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1984), they describe the schizophrenic as
the figure who can escape the Oedipal trap of all psychoanalysis, a
trap which sustains the subject in the ‘mommy, daddy, me’ triangle,
and who can achieve freedom of and from desire. In the second
volume, A Thousand Plateaus, they produce or further develop ideas,
however, which have circulated widely amongst arts, humanities and
social science disciplines, the most evident being those of the rhizomatic and the nomadic. They develop metaphors that, because of
their abstraction, can be applied to a range of contexts, while simultaneously describing them in such a way as to give them sufficient
solidity to make them portable.
The ‘rhizome’ is the principal figure in A Thousand Plateaus, and
can also be applied to the structure of the book and the social space
the book describes and analyses. The ‘rhizome’ tries to discard the
image of the tree with a main ‘taproot’ and then a network of roots
getting smaller and smaller as they are distanced from the taproot,
yet implicitly leading back to and supporting the centre. Such a tree
exists at a single point; it can be plotted. The rhizome, on the other
hand, has no such centre, but exists as a network that produces its
own space. It may well have points or nodes in the system, but
these are simply stopping-off points rather than a set of points that
can provide coordinates. Deleuze and Guattari identify a number of
‘approximate characteristics’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 7). The
first are the ‘Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point
of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be’
(p. 7). The rhizome does not, however, simply construct or produce
space, it also plays a part in deconstruction, in revealing the ‘semantic
and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of
enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field’ (p. 7). Like
Lefebvre and Massey, although, despite its biological associations,
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the rhizome is less ‘grounded’ than their spatial models, Deleuze
and Guattari are interested in exposing inequalities and concealed
or naturalized power structures; in this case those of the relationship
between structures of language and the social world. They take this
one stage further and seek out ‘lines of flight’ as possible escape
routes from the ‘striated’ or ‘sedentary’ space of state capitalism, but
I will return to that later in the chapter. The rhizome is not simply
passive, it is not a set of ‘dark wires’ waiting for the electronic impulse,
but active: ‘A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between
semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relevant
to the arts, the sciences and social struggles’ (p. 7).
They continue to outline more characteristics; that it cannot be
reduced to either the one or the multiple but is composed of ‘directions in motion’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 21). It is without
beginning or end, but is always a middle, like a plateau, and between
places. If it is like a map, it is a map that is always in the process of
production, that is always ‘detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of
flight’ (p. 21). The rhizomatic is therefore always in the process of
construction, and never settled, and contains within itself the possibilities of its own liberation.
I began this section with a quotation from Joris where he suggests
the need for a ‘nomadic’ poetics. The ‘nomad’ and ideas of the
‘nomadic’, for Deleuze and Guattari, indicate the possibilities of
subverting bureaucratic functionalism, and celebrate the synchronic
and the situational as against the intrinsic. In spatial terms the nomad
inhabits smooth space, a space of flows. In order to avoid surveillance
and capture by the state apparatus, those who are nomadic engage in
rapid processes of change, both changing the space they inhabit and
their location within it through processes of ‘territorializing, deterritorializing’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 353). The nomad has to
avoid the coordinates of Euclidean space and the functional grid that
would allow the state to get them in their sights. There are other
characteristics of the nomadic. Rather than language being a form
of self-expression and a way of expressing concepts, they stress ‘The
necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner
in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and bring
something incomprehensible into the world’ (p. 378). Processes of
language similarly influence processes of thought. Nomad thought
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Spatial Theories and Poetic Practices 41
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rejects the thinking subject as the producer of truth about the world,
locating thought ‘with a singular race’ or tribe, a way of thinking
that is neither individual nor emanating from a nation-state, and
is deployed in a ‘horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe,
desert or sea’ (p. 379). The nomad inhabits a ‘territory’ in which ‘the
points are subordinated to the paths’ and the ‘in-between enjoys
both an autonomy and a direction of its own’. As a consequence of
this privileging of movement through space over residence within a
‘place’, the ‘life of the nomad is the intermezzo. Even the elements
of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever
mobilizing them’ (p. 380).
If ‘one of the fundamental tasks of the state is to striate the space
over which it reigns’ and to relegate smooth space to a conduit or
a means of communication, then the nomad will seek to ‘distribute
himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space;
that is his territorial principle’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 381).
If the migrant, forced to move from one country to another, is deterritorialized, in the sense that they lose their territory, then they will
seek to reterritorialize themselves in the country they move to. The
sedentary will inhabit state-controlled striated space, their experience
mediated by the state, while the nomad exists in deterritorialized
territory, a territory that is located between striated spaces of state
control and a sedentary lifestyle.
Ideas of the rhizome and the nomad can provide a reading of
Bill Griffiths’s poetry. In his essay on Bill Griffiths’s work in Out of
Dissent: A Study of Five Contemporary British Poets, Clive Bush describes
Griffiths as someone for whom, although ‘Never seeking disaster,
his disassociation from the dullness of British culture is no mere
gesture of alterity, but a passion for the differences of actual life
actually lived in the British Isles’ (Bush 1997, p. 212). That disassociation has included a lifetime’s commitment to the marginalized
and the dispossessed, in particular their mistreatment by the forces
of law and order. His publication history is itself an example of the
nomadic. Part of the so-called ‘British Revival’ in the 1970s, and
associated with Bob Cobbing’s ‘Writers Forum’ in London, many of
his publications were pamphlets and chapbooks, hand sewn, stapled
or with spiral binding, and distributed via alternative networks. He
has had more substantial collections in more conventional bindings,
including most recently a collected poems with Salt and collections
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42
with West House Books, Etruscan and Invisible Books, but there
seems a coincidence between the form and content of his pamphlets
and more marginal publications which only strengthens connections
with the nomadic and the rhizomatic. His pamphlet War w/ Windsor
[War w. Windsor] from the mid-1970s is a good example. The cover
is paper, hand sewn with coloured thread on to five internal sheets
folded once to give 20 unnumbered pages. It looks photocopied, and
in places the text is barely legible, and the mixture of typefaces, sometimes on the same page, gives it a ‘cut and paste’ feel. It is a text
that by its very material nature distances itself from official ‘literature’. The contents are divided into five ‘texts’, with each text made
up of a combination of genres including poems, prose, newspaper
reports and ‘visual’ works by Sean O’Huigin. ‘Text 1’ (Figure 2.1)
requires the book to be rotated to ‘landscape’ to reveal a text which
uses four columns, a simple device that disrupts the reading process,
leaving the reader unclear as to whether they should read across
each line from left to right, or read each column. Yet even if the
reader makes the decision to go one way or another, the columns
will suddenly dissolve into each other and form a continuous ‘line’.
The syntax similarly gives few clues as to how the poem should be
read and the occasional words in capitals rarely seem to indicate the
start of a sentence. The poem has the appearance of a ‘cut-up’, as if
Griffiths has found a number of texts, cut them into columns and
randomly rejoined them. If it is a cut-up, it is one that includes some
of Griffiths’s own texts within it. The ‘angels’ in Line 2 are Hell’s
Angels and the ‘rat’s fur on ‘is anarack’ links to ‘the scooter awry’
on the next line, where the ‘mod’, who rides a scooter normally
wore a ‘parka’ with a fur-lined hood, is scathingly referred to as an
‘anarack’. To say that riding a scooter is like ‘riding a donkey’ is to
reinforce the slowness of the scooter in comparison with the motorbike. The image of the broken scooter is also linked to Griffiths’s
arrest, and is referred to in the prose account of a violent incident
which, along with a number of newspaper cuttings referring to the
same incident, makes up ‘Text 5’ of the pamphlet where there are
references to prison and to the law, to a row of windows, a ceiling
and a floor. The text is also cut through with a series of mythical
references, to Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of the world, to Vulcan and
Oceanus, and to more obscure figures such as Mettus and Hasdrubal.
As well as producing a text which distorts syntax, Griffiths also uses
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Spatial Theories and Poetic Practices 43
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Figure 2.1 ‘Text 1’, War w/ Windsor, Bill Griffiths (1974)
a vocabulary which combines archaic language with modernist backslashed abbreviations and more standard English.
The form of the poem is ‘rhizomatic’. The poem can be cut at
any one point and rejoined with other texts or with other points
in the poem. Each point in the text can lead off in different directions. The text does not form a coherent whole, in which each piece
can, with some shuffling around, be combined with other pieces to
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44
make a coherent picture. The content of the poem is an attempt
by Griffiths, and his most ambitious attempt in this pamphlet, to
construct a text that reflects his idea of what it means to be alive in
1970s Britain. It is set within a contemporary time that combines the
past with a multiplicity of contiguous presents and, as a scholar of
Old and Medieval English, Griffiths combines language from across
the history of English.
In these texts, and in subsequent poems in Bikers published in
1990, Griffiths examines the idea of the nomadic through the characters of the Hell’s Angels. Although with lives as family men, and
having a variety of working-class and labouring jobs, they existed as
Angels when they were ‘on the road’ and perpetually between places.
Hunter S. Thompson in his book Hell’s Angels says that ‘I have never
met an Angel who claimed to have a home town in any sense that
people who use that term might understand it’ (Thompson 1967,
p. 160) and Bush describes Griffiths as having ‘lived in Germany as
a “guest-worker,” returning to England to live on a houseboat in
Harrow, London, only to have it accidentally burned while being
repaired. He was then homeless for two years and at present he lives
in Seaham in the North East of England, still in indigenous circumstances’ (Bush 1997, p. 212). In ‘Five Poems’ from Bikers Griffiths
says:
I wld jal kiri to the Ace when I wanted a home
[go]
(Griffiths and Muckle 1990, n.p.)
The Ace café was a famous meeting place for bikers on the North
Circular road around London. This is not to suggest that Griffiths
still lives as a Hell’s Angel, as far as I can tell his time spent amongst
motorcycle gangs was fairly brief, but it was a time that left him with
an interest in the nomadic. For the Angels on a run, the highway
becomes a smooth space, the run itself opening out potential lines of
flight as an escape from the sedentary space of everyday life. While
this highly romanticized view of Hell’s Angels obliterates a number of
unpalatable attitudes to gender, sexuality and race, and a predilection
for random violence which Griffiths acknowledges without judgement and Thompson tries to explain away, for a certain time in the
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1960s and 1970s the anti-establishment stance of the Angels and the
iconic lone figure on a motorcycle as a representation of freedom
were a part of popular Western culture in books, films and visual
images, and Griffiths is one of the few writers able to capture that
excitement without a glorification of the lifestyle. He is also not alone
in linking them to the ‘nomadic’, and Hell’s Angels often had close
links to Romany or Gypsy culture. Various Hell’s Angels chapters
have ‘nomad’ in their name, Hunter Thompson refers to the ‘Gypsy
Jokers’ and Griffiths frequently describes Angels as ‘Nomads’, as do
the press reports he collages in ‘Text 5’ of War w. Windsor. In ‘Five
Poems’, from the Bikers pamphlet, Griffiths draws on the freedom of
travel and movement in the outdoors:
Sat me then on its roads
watch its fast – lights – hollowing feeling
(Griffiths and Muckle 1990, n.p.)
The experience is not just outside striated space but also between
languages, as if normative English syntax and vocabulary would
be restrictive, and the poems include a variety of words from the
Romany language, with English versions in squared brackets at the
end of the line:
I got my bike
sent my wheels running, on the road
(I got a hold on my bike, easy – like
To where
Was teams of patnies
[ducks]
Rockring and dipping on water (clear seeing beaut air),
(Griffiths and Muckle 1990, n.p.)
Griffiths inhabits this space between languages, yet draws on them all.
The bikers are similarly happiest between places, and, on a motorcycle
outside the domestic space of the family home, they are only too
aware of the weather and the countryside around them. In ‘Five
Poems’ each one is set in a particular time of year or a particular state
of the weather, and contain acute observations of the landscape, from
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Spatial Theories and Poetic Practices 47
In them tho was the war still
in their tempers and the bikes
kaulo riddo in that black
[dark jacketed]
or with a great blue, openly
just fighting
(alone and)
kicking like drums.
(Griffiths and Muckle 1990, n.p.)
Ultimately, for Griffiths the Angels are ‘catastrophic’, suggesting both
a disaster, and a revolutionary event as a sudden upheaval or discontinuity. Their roots in a masculinist working-class ideology, their
liking for sudden violence, glorification of aspects of fascism and
their unpredictability meant that they were always going to be a
part of the problem as well as a part of any solution, and their
romanticization during the years of the counter-culture has to be put
in the context of some fairly brutal crimes in the 1970s. They are,
however, particularly apt as an illustration of Deleuze and Guattari’s
combination of Marx and Freud. The reason the Angels captured
the public imagination was because of their image of freedom, that
they didn’t work as ‘wage slaves’, submit to monogamy or respect
law and order. Their commitment to excess and to random behaviour means that, in the terms used by Deleuze and Guattari, they
are more ‘schizo’ than ‘sedentary’. Their own sexual liberation often
involved the debasement of others, and their lack of respect for law
and order meant a carelessness towards the safety of others. Deleuze
and Guattari often demonstrate a similar carelessness, applauding
the schizophrenic, and their image of the nomad as Bedouin is as
masculine as a Hell’s Angel on a motorbike. In Griffiths’s work the
conjunction of ideas of the nomadic is more striking because of
the breadth and depth of Griffiths’s learning and the way he can
effortlessly plunder a thousand years of history. By failing to keep
to his place, and by bringing together high and low culture, he is
able to produce a poetry that celebrates freedom while maintaining a
breadth and a depth of perspective.
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urban, to suburban and to rural. Arrival at their destination often
sends them lurching into meaningless violence:
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Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, describes the way the body
retains a knowledge of domestic spaces, and that ‘over and beyond
our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in
us’ (Bachelard 1994, p. 15). In a haunting and affective study he
describes an intimate relationship between memory, bodily gestures
and habits, and details different responses brought on by changes
in scale and perspective. It is a fascinating account, but one that
describes, as it says in the title, a ‘poetics of space’, rather than a
‘spatial poetics’. Although Bachelard draws extensively on imaginative literature to develop his ideas, he finally only succeeds in
demonstrating the relationship between representations of space in
the poems and the spaces themselves. I want to develop a more integrated relationship between ideas of space and both the form and
content of the poems as well as the processes of their production and
reception.
Throughout the 1990s the body has increasingly become a preoccupation for social and cultural theory, particularly in gender theory
and post-colonial studies, but also drawing on work such as that
by Michel Foucault in describing geographies of power and control,
the relationships between the state and the individual body and
capitalism and the body. There are two principal approaches to the
study of the body; that of the body in space, and the way the body
‘produces’ space through perspective, scale and travel, and that of
the space of the body itself, both its internal space and the surface
of the skin. Within spatial practice they function coincidentally;
the body in space produces the space of the body, and cannot be
conceived as existing without it. In the early 1960s Charles Olson
explores the relationship between the surface of the body and its
inner depths in the process of writing. In his essay ‘Proprioception’ he
refers to the way in which information is received and analysed from
the ‘proprioceptors’, or, as Olson puts it, ‘SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE
ORGANISM BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES’, and a process
whereby the ‘data of depth sensibility/ the body of us as object
which spontaneously produces experience of depth’ (Olson 1997,
pp. 181–3).
Discourses of the body are frequently centred on ideas of difference,
otherness and exclusion for reasons of gender, sexuality, age and race,
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Space and the body
all of which are treated as social constructs. Often from a feminist
perspective, they claim knowledge to be situated and embodied rather
than decontextualized and disembodied, and that it results from the
activities of the body in space rather than from a consciousness of
the mind. Hélène Cixous, for example, talks of the way in which
‘my body is active, there is no interruption between the work that
my body is actually performing and what is going to happen on the
page. I write very near my body and my pulsions’ (Wilcox, Watters,
Thompson and Williams 1990, p. 27).
I argued strongly in the previous sections of this chapter for the
importance of an embodied awareness of concrete space, but also
argued that such an embodied awareness includes, in a reflexive
relationship, the notion of the decontextualized concept, and that
the specific, actual concrete situated experience coexists with more
general concepts. This is important, as I also insist that the process
of reading a poem, the actual embodied experience of moving from
word to word in a particular place and time, is carried out in a more
general conceptualization of the overall form of the individual poem,
the genre of the poem, concepts of poetry and, within the context
of a specific usage of language, consistent with the general rules of
language.
That the issue of situated knowledge versus the apparently objective
or transcendent should arise in discourses of the body is unsurprising.
Abstract concepts of gender, sexuality, race and age all act as frameworks through which the biological body is read. Following Judith
Butler in Gender Trouble, the characteristics of gender are understood
to be constructed and performed rather than essential. We, as social
beings, are constructed as masculine or feminine through acting out
a set of characteristics rather than having an essential set of biologically derived characteristics that determine behaviour. The process of
acting out or performing could include activities that stress a normative relationship to the social construction, or could be subversive
or transgressive. Studies of women’s skin, for example, will as often
focus on activities such as tattooing or piercing as on the type of
‘skin care’ associated with more ‘normal’ feminine activities. Discussions of body shape will focus on cosmetic surgery, and the activities of artists such as ‘Orlan’, who has had herself remodelled into
the ‘perfect woman’ in a series of operations, transmitted as online
performances.
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The poet Anne Waldman, in the poem ‘Fast Speaking Woman’
from the 1970s, uses a long chant poem over some 40 pages to reflect
on her construction within ideas of femininity and womanliness,
and simultaneously makes a claim for the knowledge situated in her
experience. The majority of the early part of the poem is constructed
in short lines following the formula ‘I’m a [something] woman’, with
that something ranging from ‘automobile’ to ‘clock’ and to ‘serpent’.
Later in the poem the principal formula becomes ‘I’m the [something]
woman’, the definite article replacing the indefinite. The poem does
sometimes break off into other forms, but these two variations form
a kind of skeleton around which the poem is built. In some ways
the poem can be dismissed as a relic of its time, with its implicit call
to a universal and transcendental idea of woman within a universal
sisterhood, albeit one at odds with more traditional histories of the
feminine. A paragraph of dedication at the start of the poem refers
to her debt to ‘the Indian Shamaness in Mexico guiding persons in
magic mushroom ceremony’, further placing it in a self-consciously
‘alternative’ space. Conceptually, therefore, she could be seen to be
simply reversing the idea that there are many men and one woman,
in order to claim many women, yet still remaining clearly within
a role-reversal male–female dichotomy. Yet I think the poem goes
beyond this from the multiplicity of its practice. The chant ‘formula’
combines both the physical act of chanting – Waldman refers to
‘reading aloud as intended’ – and an extended meditation on the
meaning of the word ‘woman’. In the introduction to her epic poem
Iovis, Waldman says:
I always feel myself an open system (woman) available to any
words or sounds I’m informed by. A name. A date I get up and
dance the poem when it sweeps into litany. I gambol with the
shaman and the deer. It is a body poetics.
(Waldman 1993, pp. 1, 2)
The form of ‘Fast Speaking Woman’ follows the trajectory of its
sounds and meanings. At the start of the poem there is a loose series
of couplets; from ‘ shouting woman’ to ‘ speech woman’ and
from ‘ atmosphere woman’ to ‘ airtight woman’. The couplets
also spill over, from ‘automobile’ to ‘mobile’ to ‘elastic’ and with
elastic referring back to ‘flexible’ a few lines earlier. Following the
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trajectories of these thought processes reveals an interlocking and
intersecting pattern of qualities and values that are simultaneously
embodied and situated and part of Waldman’s representation of a
‘universal sisterhood’.
The chant is both an affirmation of the self and a negation of the
self through its repetition. At other times she moves out of the chant
‘formula’ amd literally leaves herself behind:
I’m an abalone woman
I’m the abandoned woman
I’m the woman abashed, the gibberish woman
the aborigine woman, the woman absconding
(Waldman 1975, p. 3)
She hands over centre stage to:
the
the
the
the
the
the
Nubian Woman
andeluvian woman
absent woman
transparent woman
absinthe woman
woman absorbed, the woman under tyranny
Before returning:
I’m the gadget woman
I’m the druid woman
I’m the Ibo woman
etc.
(Waldman 1975, p. 4)
I’m not suggesting that the poem can be collapsed back into itself to
provide a reading which joins up at all points, or that the poem can
be disentangled into thematic categories; that is neither the poem’s
ambition nor a possibility of its structure. But I am suggesting that
the variety of material within the poem builds a relationship between
the poet/narrator and the gender she both inhabits and is denied.
The form of the poem reinforces the embodied and performative
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Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
aspects of the act of writing or composing the poem, and its performance creates a space in which ideas of ‘woman’ are both asserted
and explored. For Waldman, the gendered body (and how can it be
non-gendered?) has to assert itself in all spaces through an unstoppable voice. The poem ends on a note that is both assertive and
ambivalent:
I’m
I’m
I’m
I’m
a
a
a
a
fast speaking woman
fast rolling woman
rolling speech woman
rolling water woman
I KNOW HOW TO SHOUT
I KNOW HOW TO SING
I KNOW HOW TO LIE DOWN
Through the use of capitals she asserts her right to a voice, to make
art and, simultaneously, to not make art and just lie down and,
somewhat ironically, to be submissive.
Geraldine Monk similarly addresses issues of identity, the body,
space and voice in her poem ‘James Device Replies’ (O’Sullivan 1996,
p. 153), part of a series of work based on the execution of witches at
Pendle, Lancashire. She chronicles the last minutes of Device before he
is hung. The poem begins with a stanza with three columns, thereby
providing three left-hand margins or three points at which the voice
starts over. The three columns break up the line and the syntax, giving
a stuttering feeling through the reversal of short phrases:
I wasn’t here
here I wasn’t
I was here
here I was
I won’t
here I
The poem then charts the gradual dissolution of the body from the
bitten tongue to the lolling tongue and the lips stitched together as
the voice descends into broken words:
tongue lollery
lip-s-titched to-g
where the consonants begin to move between words, not quite part
of one or the other. A phrase like ‘part bit’ refers back in the poem
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to ‘bit part’ and then forward to his role in the performance of the
hanging and on both occasions to the idea that he has bitten part
of his tongue off. The breakdown of the body is the breakdown of
the voice, a process described by both the form of the poem and
the story it refers to. Like Waldman’s poem, Monk’s ends in the
use of capitals, but in a negative exclamation rather than a positive
affirmation. Device was ultimately not ‘HEARD’.
In ‘Ode Long Kesh’ (Caddel and Quartermain 1999, p. 120), Barry
MacSweeney combines what Bryan Turner calls Foucault’s interest
in the ‘micro-politics of the regulation of the body and the macropolitics of surveillance of populations’ (Featherstone, Hepworth and
Turner 1995, p. 23). The title provides a location, the notorious H
blocks in Northern Ireland, where both Republican and Loyalist prisoners were interned (a procedure under which suspects could be
held indefinitely without trial) between the early 1970s and 2000. A
disused RAF base just outside Belfast that was converted into a prison,
Long Kesh was (in)famous for two major incidents: the burning of
Long Kesh in 1974 whereby the ‘prisoners’ rioted, burned down a
large portion of the camp and had a pitched battle with the guards;
and the hunger strikes, which were an attempt to secure ‘special
category’ status for the Republican internees as prisoners of war rather
than criminals. Special category status would have meant that they
would have certain rights: not to wear a prison uniform; not to do
prison work; free association with other prisoners; to organize their
own educational and recreational facilities; and the right to one visit,
one letter and one parcel per week. They would avoid aspects of
the regulation of the body, which, in Foucault’s terms, results in a
‘docile body’. The hunger strikers fought back against their treatment with that which they had at their disposal, their own bodies,
and refused both food and basic hygiene facilities. Ten of them died
before the hunger strike was called off. This followed a period of
unrest where hundreds of prisoners had gone ‘on the blanket’ and
engaged in a ‘dirty protest’, and remained naked in a cell smeared
with their own excrement. The dirty protests and the hunger strikes
were also massively symbolic, with pictures of the abject figures of
prisoners wrapped in a blanket in an empty cell illustrating the resistance of flesh and bone to the military machinery of the Britain state.
Long Kesh continued as a focus for the ‘troubles’, and 19 prisoners
broke out in 1983, one of whom was then involved in the ‘Brighton
Bombing’ of 1984.
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Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
By calling his poem ‘Ode Long Kesh’, MacSweeney is drawing on
one of the most potent symbols of the use of the human body in a
process of resistance to an implacable and uncaring state apparatus
which provided some of the most powerful images of incarceration
until the United States established the prison at Guantanamo Bay in
early 2000. The poem comes from nowhere, beginning mid-sentence
and with an ampersand, as if it was the ending of a longer work. In
a rapid, almost playful style, in which syntax and grammar play-off
lines of varying length beginning from a variety of positions on the
left side of the page, MacSweeney brings together a series of references
to incarceration, hunger and sexual desire. There is something almost
Elizabethan about the language, reminiscent of the speeches by the
Fool in King Lear, particularly in the phrase ‘best uncle, Flapless
Man’. A man without flaps is naked, and it is in the ‘Flapless Man’
that MacSweeney constructs a figure to represent the more abstract
ideas in the poem. The suffering of the individual body, whether
in the fiction of Lear or the history of Long Kesh, makes abstract
representations of pain, injustice, suffering and loss real; it gives them
concrete form. Everything collapses back into this figure:
& tie strings together
as the sky falls
between the knees, fragrant
lard mouth. A planet in decision, but
falls sunless towards
the best uncle, Flapless Man.
(Caddel and Quartermain 1999, p. 120)
Flapless Man is never quite complete and all the figures of speech
that relate to him don’t quite make sense. Flapless Man is sexual,
and the sky falls between his knees, and his name is male, but the
sexual reference in flapless is female. Yet the word also suggests flop,
the loss of the male erection, a pun that MacSweeney uses when
he says ‘Flop goes Flapless’. The desire remains, whatever the condition of the body, and he ‘fails to strangle inclinations/ between
those sheeny thighs. Flapless/ never comes’. The desire is never satisfied, there is no climax, and Flapless Man remains in a condition of
becoming.
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54
The body is hungry for food; it has ‘bracken ankles’, suggesting both
an archaic version of ‘broken’ and the thin and fragile form of the
plant ‘bracken’. Flapless eats ‘digital pie’ and ‘broth of caps’, linking
‘pork pie hat’ to ‘virtual’ pie and the cloth cap of the stereotypical
working-class man, and consequently linking the prisoners to the
working-class struggle and to famine and hunger in Irish history. This
echoes the infamous ‘communiques’ of the revolutionary group ‘The
Angry Brigade’, which linked the shipworkers’ industrial action in
Clydeside with the IRA in the Bogside. MacSweeney also refers to the
Luddites and the Tolpuddle martyrs as reference points in an ongoing
working-class struggle, and in the last two lines he savagely satirizes
the trend for ‘nouveau cuisine’, in which small portions of expensive
food were elegantly arranged on the plate, as well as referring to the
idea of ‘nouveau riche’, and ironically forecasting the rise of ‘new
labour’:
Nouveau Flapless in the garments of rich
hunger, living on potatoes & nitro-glycerine.
MacSweeney emphasizes the link between hunger and the war for
independence, a link made all the more poignant by the subsequent
deaths of ten hunger strikers in the early 1980s. He weaves together
sexual need, physical hunger and the restraint of the body, locating it
all in a series of references to the politics of class and the Republican
cause in Northern Ireland. Clive Bush refers to the way in which, in
the ‘Odes’: ‘MacSweeney’s poetic world presents the complex interactions of things and mind as lived through the deep structures and
patterns of rhythm and language’ (Bush 1997, p. 379). The poem
has much of the abstract meaning of music, a meaning which arises
as much from the rhythmic arrangement of sound into syntax and
lineation as from the references, which often seem some way off the
mark. It is a poetics of indeterminacy and accumulation, where to
pin down words or phrases to a single reference is to lose the movement of the poem, and a poetics that combines a physical and a
mental response. When Flapless is ‘Overliving the skin/ & out for
the year’, he is both living too much for his skin and wearing it out,
as well as living too far in his skin and out of circulation for the
year.
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Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
To say that the body is important is an inane truism; it provides
perspective, scale and a sensual response to everyday experience. For
Lefebvre, however, the body does not just occupy space, but produces
space (Lefebvre 1991, p. 170), and, as importantly, provides a ‘route
from abstract to concrete which has the great virtue of demonstrating
their reciprocal inherence’ (p. 171). Lefebvre’s thought is characterized as a trajectory from a concern with the alienation of everyday life,
through an analysis of the production of space, to an interest in the
relationships between physical and social ‘rhythm’ in his last work,
Rhythmanalysis (2004). The individual human body is central to his
concerns. In The Production of Space he historicizes the relationship
between the body and space, claiming that: ‘before the analysing,
separating intellect, long before formal knowledge, there was an intelligence of the body’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 174). For Lefebvre, if there is
an escape from the alienating effects of capital, then it is through
a coming together of mind and body; a renegotiation of reasoned
knowledge and situated knowledge. In an almost Arcadian conceptualization of the past, he refers to a time when ‘the network of paths
and roads made up a space just as concrete as that of the body’ (p.
193), whereas modern space, and its ‘narrow and desiccated rationality, overlooks the core and foundation of space, the total body, the
brain, the gestures and so forth. It forgets that space does not consist
in the projection of an intellectual representation but that it is
first of all heard (listened to) and enacted (through physical gestures
and movements)’ (p. 200). He states later that it is not his desire to
look backwards to a golden age, but rather to contest the tendencies of contemporary social and economic structures and systems,
including language, to metaphorize, abstract and fragment the body
through a renegotiation of the relationship between mind and body,
and between an embodied and situated experience of space and the
conceptualization of space.
Deleuze and Guattari develop the idea of the Body without Organs
(BwO) in A Thousand Plateaus, an idea of the body capable of
providing both freedom from desire and freedom of desire. They draw
on a post-modern aesthetic of fragmentation in their description
of the process of dismantling the ‘organism’ and repeatedly affirm
that the body without organs is not ‘against’ organs, but against
organism and against the organization of the individual through
processes of signification (saying what something means) and subjec-
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tification. There is a double argument going on in their description of the body without organs. On the one hand it is simply
a complex and intellectual take on Zen and Hatha Yoga, on the
need to live with the world rather than against it, of the need to
open up the body to flows and exist within an immanent now, to
balance the external and internal pressure, to removing ‘blockages’
which dam up negative feelings; all ideas that can easily be located
in counter-culture literature of the 1960s and subsequent personal
development discourses. On the other hand they are continuing
their argument with psychoanalysis and its representation of desire
as conscious or subconscious fantasy. Psychoanalysis, they assert,
simply locates desire in the conscious or subconscious rather than
in and through the body. The body without organs does involve
danger and, as they say, to reach it through anorexia, masochism
or drug use is to court danger of death, but to achieve it through
carefully dismantling the self is to achieve freedom from desire and
openness to desire, and arrive at a condition where desire flows
through the body without organs and does not encounter blockages.
It is relatively straightforward to make connections between poetic
form and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the BwO; ideas of
open form and of flows and rhythms link easily to more experimental ideas of poetic form. The more difficult process is to demonstrate how the materiality of the body, the space it contains and
the space it produces and is produced by, link to the form and
content of poetry. A poem is not a body and a body is not a
text, yet both exist in a relationship between their materialism
(the text as material and the body as material); their conceptualization through processes of representation; and their performance in specific times and places. It is in this complex of relationships that a focus on the body can support various readings of
poetry.
The four principal concepts in this chapter overlap. The idea of
place links to the idea of the body and gender, which subsequently
connects to the ways in which places are both represented and
experienced. The notion of the rhizomatic implicitly questions the
ways in which places function in space. I have taken them separately in order to examine their implications for varieties of poetry
and to draw out some particular characteristics. In subsequent
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Spatial Theories and Poetic Practices 57
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
chapters I will be folding these ideas into the work of a number
of poets in order to provide further examples. These four ideas
are not therefore a limitation of the field of spatial awareness, or
even a framework, but rather a more detailed examination of how
some of the more widespread ideas of space can be traced through
some contemporary poetry, and provide a more detailed context for
subsequent chapters.
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The Space Age: The 1950s to the
1970s
In the three volumes of The Maximus Poems Charles Olson constructed
a poem based on the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, while in his
‘Lunch Poems’, Frank O’Hara traced his walks through the city of New
York. Both these writers spanned the period from the 1950s to the
1970s and, in very different ways, were exploring the production of
a mid-century American space. Despite his early death in 1966, Frank
O’Hara’s influence has grown as a poet whose methods and poetic
procedures relate not simply to people and places, but also to ideas
of sexuality and space. Charles Olson, a key figure for the post-war
avant-garde, wrote both poetry and a range of critical and theoretical works that describe and explain his methods, and was influential
in the development and dissemination of ideas relating to ‘projective
verse’ and to ‘open-field’ poetry. The Maximus Poems, in their form and
content, deal directly with ideas of place, of space and spatialization,
and relationships between the geographical and the historical.
Poetries of places
The national and regional poetries of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and
England often refer to the idea of ‘place’ as a way of authenticating
a local identity discovered via historical processes. Some US-based
poets, and Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson and Ed Dorn are only
three examples, use a range of information within their poetry that
just as often presents the incoherent nature of places and their
intersections, and describes ways in which time and space interact
in the processes of production of places. Their process is additive
59
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Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
rather than reductive, resulting in sprawling poems that seem to
contain swathes of information difficult to reduce to an overall
theme. The reason for this difference between American and UK
practices might be obvious: America was a place under construction,
making up a national identity out of its diverse and still changing
population; in Lefebvrian terms the space of America was, from an
imperial and colonial perspective at least, still in the early stages of
production. The English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish on the other hand
had centuries of evidence all around them, but had to use methods
of historical analysis to break through the ideological surfaces of a
traditionalized, colonized or commodified world in order to discover
an identity the modern world was concealing from them. I think the
distinction is more complex than that. It doesn’t explain the ways in
which Olson, Dorn and O’Hara are, in different ways and amongst
other writers, drawing on different conceptualizations of space and
relationships between places. They will question the notion that the
poem can capture, through the listing of essential ingredients, the
‘true spirit’ of a place and an identity that exists prior to and outside
the poem and is expressed by the poem. They suggest that the poem
is capable of making many connections, some of which may be back
to the geographical place of the poem’s origin, but some of which
will also connect in various ways and within different contexts
across time and space.
Maps and mapping
Donald Davie says of The Maximus Poems that they: ‘aspire to give
in language a map, a map of one place, the town of Gloucester,
Massachusetts’ (Davie 1970, p. 221) and early editions of Olson’s
‘Maximus’ had a map of Gloucester on the cover. Using a series
of signs and symbols on a mathematical grid, a map has a twodimensional surface through which the ‘world’ can be read. Maps
assume no perspective and are drawn to a consistent scale rather
than being seen from a single viewpoint: they implicitly claim to be
neutral. Like other forms of representation, though, they do have
an ‘angle’, however explicit or implicit that may be. Maps are both
ways in which we represent ourselves as regions and nationalities,
and part of the way in which communities and national identities are
produced. They may appear fair and objective (a measured picture of a
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concrete reality) yet result from a mapping process which is ‘situated,
embodied, partial: like all processes of representation’ (Gregory 1994,
p. 17). While suggesting a historical innocence and a mathematical
objectivity, maps do combine ‘roots’, providing both a location and
a structure for memory and tradition, with ‘routes’, numerous ways
of passing through the landscape.
One view of the map is that it provides, within boundaries, a
series of places, principally arranged according to their congruity
rather than causally. The map, because of the two-dimensional nature
of its surface, is a ‘slice through time’, and as such can suggest
and reveal connections and links which are otherwise concealed. A
reading of the map as representative of a particular social and cultural
perspective will not only critique the map’s aura of objectivity, but
can also identify the reasons for what is included and what has been
left out, the significance of the symbolism used, and the scale. A more
post-structuralist approach would reveal two other important facets.
The first is that the map’s construction is discursive (made up of a
number of competing discourses), rather than having an ideological
purpose the subject can discover, and second, that through reading
the map, or travelling the terrain it represents, the subject position
can be various. Instead of a single view from above, however much
that view might expose concealed ideologies, there are a number
of ways through both map and terrain, and multiple perspectives.
The potential complexities can be demonstrated in ‘Personal Poem’
(O’Hara 1974, p. 156), where Frank O’Hara maps out a journey
through New York. The poem is made up of a series of overlapping
and disjointed physical, social and intellectual ‘maps’ through which
O’ Hara moves between the global and local to outline an international, gay sensibility. The poem begins in one ‘place’, the lunchtime
walk, yet quickly references Europe through the ‘old Roman coin’
given to him by the artist Mike Kanemitsu, and a ‘bolt-head that
broke off a packing case/ when I was in Madrid’. Both these objects
are described as ‘charms’, and there are ‘others’. These could also
be bank notes or coins, as they ‘keep me in New York against coercion’ and are most likely to be in his pocket at lunchtime. In that
first stanza, and sandwiched between the opening and closing lines
which both locate him in New York and give some idea of his state
of mind (‘happy for a time and interested’), O’Hara sketches out an
international world of Rome, Madrid and New York. O’Hara also
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calls the poem a ‘personal poem’ and as he worked in MOMA and
curated international exhibitions, it is a reasonable assumption that
the packing case contained art. The map that has been sketched,
economically, is that of the art world O’Hara inhabits. When we
next meet him, walking through the streets of New York, this is the
context we read him through. The ‘map’ for the rest of the poem
might be large scale, with at times an intense detail, but, like the
figure in ‘Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean Paul’ who
looked up ‘rue Frémicourt on a map and was happy to find it like a
bird/ flying over Paris’, the figure in this poem circles overhead for
a while before locating itself in ‘the luminous humidity/ passing the
House of Seagram’. The international art references in the opening
stanza also prepare the reader for the range of cultural references in
the second stanza. As he walks past the House of Seagram, a liquor
company, the poem rapidly shifts tone. The detail and ‘cause and
effect’ structuring of the description of ‘the construction to/ the left
that closed the sidewalk’ is interrupted by a different voice which says
‘if/ I ever get to be a construction worker/ I’d like to have a silver hat
please’. It is as if he has gone down a side street, or taken some subterranean route, until he reaches ‘Moriarty’s where I wait for/ Leroi’.
During the detour a world of fantasy and sexual potential opens
up. The world is the same, that of constructions and construction
workers, but the tone is simultaneously naked, childlike and sexually
pleading. The poem’s narrator has temporarily entered a coexisting
different world, and it is only in coming back to the real world that
he has to deal with the incident of Miles Davis being ‘clubbed 12/
times by a cop’. It’s a world that O’Hara, through his mapping
processes, wants to make his own, but one in which the repression
of people because of their race or sexuality is always evident. Yet the
strength of the poem is that it never settles in any one position and
does not map oppressions as if they all came from the same source.
The light and waspish humour keeps the poem shifting between a
variety of maps, including a sketch map of contemporary literature,
and where the homoerotic fantasy of the ‘silver hat’ becomes, later on
in the poem, an image of wealth and success where ‘we just want to
be rich/ and walk on girders in our silver hats’. The poem is as quick as
the mind can think as it follows the patterns of shifting and multiple
meanings. Rather than establishing simply oppositions between gay
and straight, oppressor and oppressed, each with maps of the world
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that are in conflict, he charts the way that one subject position
will inhabit a range of maps simultaneously. He goes ‘back to work
happy at the thought’ that maybe ‘one person out of the 8,000,000
is thinking of me’, although he undercuts the happy ending with
‘possibly so’. While the movement through the poem seems ‘serial’,
things happen one after the other, the manipulation of syntax,
repeated motifs and the formal aspects of line length all induce a more
circuitous process, in which the readers have to retrace their steps and
look again at the map, and, sometimes, work out which map they
are on.
Maps simultaneously empower and disempower; in crude terms
they provide routes through territory and ‘show the way’, but
they also show others where you are. Their role in processes
of imperialism and colonialism was to show the territory that
could be invaded or controlled, and the mapping process was
an explicit form of domination with global maps providing
representations of empire, allowing the totality to be seen.
In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991),
Fredric Jameson draws on the work of Kevin Lynch in The Image
of the City (1970) to develop the idea of cognitive mapping, where
the subject, overloaded with information, brings her own location into a relationship with the broader sum of global relations.
It is through the process of cognitive mapping, a process that
can be seen to be at work in O’Hara’s ‘Personal Poem’, that, for
Jameson, the postmodern subject can reclaim a sense of agency
and her own history and trajectory in a contradictory world of
semiotic excess and simulation. Michel de Certeau in The Practice
of Everyday Life outlines the way that mapping, in the course of
its development, has become increasingly divorced from embodied
experience, and supports Lefebvre’s view that modernity tends
to produce abstract representations of space divorced from the
embodied experience of everyday life. This process has happened
over time:
in the course of the period marked by the birth of scientific
discovery (i.e. from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century) the
map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the
condition of its possibility.
(Certeau 1988, p. 120)
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He describes the way in which the pictorial representation of a
journey, what he calls ‘historical operations’, give way to a process
in which the map ‘colonizes space’ (Certeau 1988, p. 121). The
production of maps is a result of the use of information which is
received from previous times and results from embodied experience:
‘the data furnished by a tradition and those that came from navigators’ (p. 121). Ultimately the map becomes:
a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought
together to form the tableau of a ‘state’ of geographical knowledge, [it] pushes away into its prehistory or its posterity, as if into
the wings, the operations of which it is the result or necessary
condition.
(Certeau 1988, p. 121)
The map becomes apparently timeless and conceals the processes
of its production. At the same time, while a map might appear
to be a spatial construct, Certeau points to how the history of its
production from the movement of bodies through space can reveal
information about both the mapmakers and the spaces the map
represents.
Jameson’s vision, which envisages the subject dislocated in the
abstractions and simulation of modernity, is typically counteracted
by the more celebratory approach of Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze
and Guattari refer to the traditional map, with its grid system forming
a ‘striated space’ or a ‘sedentary space’ controlled by the state, as
a ‘tracing’ or a copy of reality. The tracing is, for them, ‘tree logic’
(Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 12) rather than rhizomatic logic; it is
structural and determined: ‘its object is an unconscious that is itself
representative laid out along a genetic axis and distributed within
a syntagmatic structure’. The map, on the other hand:
does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it
constructs the unconscious The map is open and connectable
within all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible
to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, reworked by
an individual, group, or social formation.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 12)
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For Deleuze and Guattari the map contains within itself potential
‘lines of flight’; it contains ways of escape and ways of living within
the condition described by the tracing. Yet the map will always
contain the tracing, which is in some ways a precondition. For
Deleuze and Guattari map making is a performance involving moving
over the tracing, an embodied and situated process in a specific time
and place. It is a performance that can provide multiple perspectives,
bring together potentially conflicting discourses, and, more importantly for Deleuze and Guattari in their aim of redefining psychoanalysis, frees up ‘blockages’ and permits flows. The psychoanalytic
process results in ‘rooting shame and guilt’ and only ever making
‘tracings or photos of the unconscious’. Yet, in a process reminiscent
of Lefebvre’s desire to link representations of space with representational space, and abstraction with experience, Deleuze and Guattari want to ‘Plug the tracings back into the map’ in order to bring
together both structure and experience. Their ‘performance’ of map
making begins to take on the characteristics of a journey; a situated
and embodied movement through terrain which is located in the
abstract representation of that terrain on the ‘tracing’. This is a movement that can metaphorically be linked to the process of reading; a
situated and embodied performance of the text that is simultaneously
located in both the structures of literary forms and the structures of
language.
Charles Olson
Donald Davie describes Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems as
‘geographical, rather than historical, in its focus’ (Davie 1970, p. 221)
and the multiple references contained within the term ‘projective’,
from the title of Olson’s influential essay ‘Projective verse’, provide
a clear indication of the complexity of his response to ideas of space
and processes of spatialization. In the title of the essay Olson draws
out three of these references – ‘projectile’ (moving forward into
the future), ‘percussive’ (as with rhythm) and ‘prospective’ (casting
around), each preceded by an unclosed bracket which indicates
an unfinished definition. A dictionary search reveals many more.
Projective also refers to the act of throwing out or expelling, and
has a further range of meanings from other disciplines, each one of
which can be folded back into the processes of reading and writing
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poetry. In cartography it refers to the act of drawing a map or a plan
of a surface or a three-dimensional object. In architecture it refers
to a feature on a building that juts out. It has an alchemic reference to throwing or casting a substance on to something to cause its
transmutation. There is a psychoanalytic reference to the process of
projecting feelings on to another to avoid recognizing them as one’s
own, and a projective test is ‘designed to reveal unconscious elements
of personality by asking a person to respond freely to words’. In
mathematics, projective space is ‘a space obtained by taking a vector
space of the next higher dimension, identifying all vectors which
are multiples of one another and omitting the origin’ (Shorter Oxford
English Dictionary). This final mathematical definition sees the poem
rising from the physical reality on which it is based to form its own
object, yet with an infinity of intersections between the new object
(the poem) and the old reality from which it is projected. It is the
total of these references, and their combination of time, space, representation and calculation, which opens up the full potential range of a
‘projective’ verse. Writing the poem becomes a project with uncertain
consequences, it projects from and into both space and time.
In ‘Letter 10’ from The Maximus Poems, Olson speculates on the
origins of Gloucester:
Letter 10
on John White/ on cod, ling and poor-john
on founding: was it Puritanism
or was it fish?
And how now, to found, with the sacred and the
profane-both of them – wore out.
The beak’s
there. And the pectoral.
The fins,
for forwarding.
But to do it anew, now that even fishing (Olson 1960, ‘Letter 10’)
The poem moves out from the historical figure, playing on the word
‘found’ as America as a country that is literally, from a Western
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perspective, found, and that has ‘founding fathers’. The images of
the birds and the fish are those of driving forward, but fishing is also
the historical economic basis (the foundation) of the communities
Olson goes on to name in the next section of the poem. The fishing
industry has also ‘foundered’, in the same way, as Olson suggests,
the idealism of ‘Puritanism’ has ‘foundered’. Olson continues in
the poem to describe the production of the ‘American’ space; the
arbitrariness of decisions, the incidents and coincidences that mean
that a town is ‘found’ in one place rather than another. He cuts in
his own history and says ‘It sat/ where my own house had been
(where I am/ founded’ (Olson 1960, ‘Letter 10’). The forward thrust
of the poetry, its projection, is emphasized by the shape of the
poem, the last section reproduced above has its left-hand margin
pushed forward as if under pressure by the ‘beak’ and the need to
‘do it anew’. The alliterative ‘f’ appears in quick succession, and
then the reader has to hold on in anticipation before the final ‘f’ in
‘fishing’.
In ‘Projective Verse’, Olson describes a collapse of space and time
to a single point from which the process of writing the poem can
begin. Like Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism which ‘cannot
do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in
which time stands still and has come to a stop’ (Benjamin 1999a,
p. 254), Olson’s ‘now’, the beginning point of writing the poem,
becomes ‘the practice of space in time’ (Sherman 1978, p. 108). In
this structuralist construction all material is spread out in a frozen
representation (like a map) before the poet, who can then select
material from across times and spaces, form new combinations, and
develop new and multiple meanings. In ‘Letter 10’ he collapses his
own history and relationship to Gloucester, the historical events that
constructed Gloucester and its ‘founding’ theology, and his anxieties
and aspirations for the future based on this past, into the moment of
the poem.
In The Maximus Poems: Volume 3 the material for the poem ‘The
Savages, or Voyages of Samuel de Champlain of Brouage’ is visually
arranged in order to represent the spatial nature of the relationships
between the events in the poem:
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Music the night
I fell down from the skies upon Cape Ann in
Nineteen
65
and of the Norse so well
Land of the
Bacall
[the scene of Cabot’s landfall]
a o
(Olson 1975, p. 82)
George Butterick, in A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson,
traces the possible personal reference to a flight Olson took in 1965
in the phrase ‘I fell down from the skies’ (Butterick 1978, p. 586).
Olson goes on to link the next three references through Newfoundland, itself ‘the scene of Cabot’s Landfall’ and, as Butterick says, the
assumed place where Vikings would first land (1978, p. 581). Butterick
again quotes William Saville, a citizen of Gloucester and a frequent
source of material for Olson, as saying ‘The great island of Newfoundland, the scene of Cabot’s landfall, and the adjacent region appears
on the earliest maps as the land of the Bacallao, the Spanish and
Portuguese name for codfish’ (Butterick 1978, p. 586). The gaps on
the page are indicative of the gaps in Olson’s presentation of the
material, the conceptual leaps a reader must make, not least of which
is rearranging Bacall and ‘a’ and ‘o’ to make Bacallao, turning iconic
movie star into codfish.
For Olson, space is not a production of time, although in his
theoretical writings he is unable to move beyond the idea of
experiencing space by stopping time. In a particularly structuralist
formulation of the ‘instant’, Olson says in his essay ‘The Present is the
Prologue’:
My shift as I take it is that the present is prologue, not the past.
The instant, therefore. Is its own interpretation, as a dream is, and
any action – a poem, for example. Down with causation and
yrself: you as the only reader and mover of the instant.
(1997, p. 205)
From this moment, the poet operates within ‘the large area of the
whole poem, into the FIELD if you like, where all the syllables and
all the lines must be managed in relation to each other’ (Olson 1997,
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p. 243). The ‘field’ of the poem develops from the ‘instant’, and
potentially incorporates both spaces and times. In ‘Letter 15’ from
the first volume of The Maximus Poems, Olson draws on his childhood memories of the story of how Nathaniel Bowditch brought
a ship into Gloucester harbour in poor weather conditions (Olson
1960, ‘Letter 15’). Written in three paragraphs of prose, the story is
not only the narrative of events, but also the narrative of how the
story is constructed, where the materials come from and how reliable
they may be. The story of the story is an integral part of the story
itself. In a conversation with Paul Blackburn (Butterick 1978, p. 101),
later reproduced in The Maximus Poems, Olson comes up with the
following explanation of how the ‘field’ of the story is constituted:
He sd, ‘You go all around the subject.’ And I sd, ‘I didn’t know
it was a subject.’ He sd, ‘You twist’ and I sd ‘I do.’ He said other
things. And I didn’t say anything.
(Olson 1960, ‘Letter 15’)
Olson’s denial of the subject suggests, in Deleuze and Guattari’s
terms, a rhizomatic approach implicit in the poem as a ‘field’ made
up of various flows or energies. Donald Byrd says in Charles Olson’s
Maximus that, for Olson, ‘Fact is the geometric projection of space
as it appears in the space of human consciousness’ and an ‘order
which emerges [that] is analogous to the order of a map rather than
the order of a scientific law or a periodic sentence’ (Byrd 1980, pp.
15, 34). It is a paratactic order of coincidence and contiguity, where
facts are placed alongside each other within the field, rather than
the logic of determinism and causation and a syntax of subordination to the rules of grammar or logic. The field of the poem is also,
according to Byrd, ‘postrational’, and includes within it both ‘the
data which can be comprehended by human rationalism but also all
that human rationalism excludes as irrational, random or subjective’
(1980, p. 45). ‘Letter 157’ from Maximus Poems IV, V, VI is an example:
an old Indian chief as hant
sat on the rock between Tarantino’s and Mr
Randazza’s and scared the piss out of
Mr Randazza so he ran back into his house
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Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
of the story
told me by
Mr Misuraca, that
his mother, reports
(Olson 1968, Letter 157)
An example of the irreducibility of human experience, it is the ‘The
story you could never get straight’ (Olson 1960, ‘Letter 20’). What
appears to be a straightforward anecdote and a childhood memory,
gets twisted around and passed between times and between speaking
subjects. Olson’s poetic field does not, according to Byrd, prioritize
that which can be reduced to statistical data and thereby implicitly
derogate or ignore that which cannot, but seeks to include the explicable and the inexplicable. In an almost thrown-away line at the end
of ‘A Bibliography for Ed Dorn’ Olson explains his political rationale
for the development of his methodology ‘(and I can’t tell you where
to go for it, simply that I imagine it’s a law that the real power
contemporary to one is kept hidden), one damn well better guess,
at least, and then try to find out, keep asking, how the money or
“ownership” really keeps its hidden hands on the machinery’ (Olson
1997, p. 309). He is not merely developing a new way of representing
the local, but developing poetry as a ‘spatial practice’ that, through
an examination of the production of spaces, can reveal the sources
of cultural, social and economic power and control.
Edward Dorn
Of all the poets I consider in this book, Edward Dorn is probably the
one who most neatly charts the shift from an interest in ideas of place
to an interest in the constructed nature of space, and from a concern
with the essential nature of places, to an understanding and critique
of the alienation and dislocation of an increasingly spatialized postmodern America. An early poem from the 1960s, ‘On the debt my
mother owed Sears Roebuck’, is set in rural America:
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The house I live in, and exactly on the back stairs,
is the sight
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Summer was dry, dry the garden
our beating hearts, on that farm, dry
with the rows of corn the grasshoppers
came happily to strip
(Dorn 1975a, p. 46)
The repetition of the word ‘dry’ around ‘our beating hearts’ emphasizes the human anxiety caused by a dry summer, in contrast to
the careless and relentless nature of the ‘grasshoppers’. The local
perspective focuses on the domestic and family life that is the experience of living on a farm and the everyday concerns that go with it:
my father coming home tired
and grinning down the road, turning in
is the tank full? thinking of the horse
and my lazy arms thinking of the water
so far below the well platform.
(Dorn 1975a, p. 46)
Everything that happens has happened before, and all tasks are repetitive. The physicality of the child’s life is emphasized by his thinking
with his ‘lazy arms’, as if to suggest that there is not much to think
about with the mind. The family’s link to the outside world is via the
‘sears roebuck’ catalogue, to which they are perpetually in debt:
On the debt my mother owed to sears roebuck
we brooded
and man’s ways winged their way to her through the mail
saying so much per month
so many months, this is yours, take it
take it, take it, take it
(Dorn 1975a, p. 46)
The poem’s perspective shifts to the mother as the centre of that
world of the farm, for whom the land is known but ‘vague’, her
domestic position as ‘part of that stay at home army’ compared to the
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fields where ‘tractors chugged, pulling harrows/ pulling discs, pulling
great yields from the earth for the armies in two hemispheres’ (Dorn
1975a, p. 47). The mother is therefore both representative of the
woman who feeds and looks after the family, but also metaphorically
connected to the farms in their role of feeding the distant army. The
farm itself becomes a predominantly feminine space. However, for all
her role as the ‘heart’ of the family, she is also the one who connects
to the outside world through commodity capitalism. Through the
woman, the family and farm are located within global economic relationships through the Sears Roebuck catalogue. Through her desire
for new goods and, to take part in ‘man’s ways’ and become more
involved in what is advertised as normal social life, they are held
within the mesh of commodity capitalism and systems of finance.
There are other connections, the land produces ‘pulse for the armies
in two hemispheres’, a reference to the Second World War – the word
‘pulse’ referring to both the idea of the beating heart earlier in the
poem and to the crop itself.
These broader concerns with space and geography are further
developed in Dorn’s longer poem, Idaho Out, first published by
Fulcrum Press as a chapbook in 1965. The poem has a preface:
History has always seemed to me lying right on the table, forgetful
of age, or not present at all. And geography is not what’s under
your foot, that’s simply the ground. Idaho and Montana are political assumptions surveyed from what was at one time the apple of
someone’s eye. The name never was more than a sign of appropriation, and most people still don’t know where it is or what it
looks like. A poem about such a place is equally arbitrary and no
more apt to confirm it.
(Dorn 1965, Preface)
Dorn is developing two concepts in this preface. The first is a recasting
of history as Walter Benjamin’s ‘present in which time stands still’,
a process that brings space and time together in moments of spacetime within which the historical make up of the landscape can be
studied and, by implication, ‘properly’ understood. The second is
the political significance of the arbitrary relationship between names
(in this case Idaho and Montana) and that to which the names
might refer. The implication is that language, of which poetry is one
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form, is a political construct that also plays its part in constructing
notions of an experience of the real world. His conception of place,
however, still lies to some extent within the tradition of a ‘poetics
of place’ and the prefatory quotation from Carl Sauer states that
the ‘natural landscape becomes known through the totality of its
forms’ (Dorn 1965). The poem itself avoids any such conclusions,
and contests meaning by moving between positions. The different
perspectives adopted in the poem confirm the pivotal position of
this poem in Dorn’s life-work. It shows him moving from what is, in
geographical terms and articulated by the cultural geographer Linda
McDowell, a ‘scientific, rational, view of space’, to ‘an idea of space
that is experienced or imagined’ (McDowell 1994, p. 153), in later
works such as Slinger, Hello, La Jolla and Yellow Lola. Idaho Out moves
between these perspectives: in some ways it follows Sauer’s interests
‘in the ways in which people left their imprints on the landscape
through their productive activities and their settlements’ (McDowell
1994, p. 149), while in other ways it points the way forward to a
use of landscape in the poem which acknowledges ‘contested and
dissenting meanings, and that knowledge itself is provisional and
contested’ (p. 151). This is a difference which McDowell refers to as
‘the key feature that distinguishes the ‘new’ cultural geographer from
the Sauerians’ (p. 151), a difference which echoes Massey’s distinction between structuralist and post-structuralist approaches to space.
Sauerian analysis requires a ‘proper’ position from which all information can be examined and analysed; later studies both suggest that
such a position is impossible and include the observer in the landscape. Dorn, in Idaho Out, does both.
The poem begins with a direct reference to Sauer’s work in ‘The
Morphology of the Landscape’, first published in 1925; ‘Since 1925
there are now no/ negative areas he has ignored’ (all following quotations are from Dorn 1965, no page numbers), reinforcing the idea of
knowing landscape through the ‘totality of its forms’. The position
of the viewer is ‘hopefully Ariel’, a reference to the Shakespearian
character from The Tempest, who is both mischievous and ubiquitous,
able to cross distances in an instant and to change shapes at will; to
‘aerial’, being of the air; and the aerial as a receiver of messages. It
is a ‘bird’s eye view’, although one which is clouded by the pollution from the ‘black and red simplot fertilizer smoke’ which ‘drifts
its excremental way’. The perspective changes as the viewer closes in
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‘past the low rooves’ and ‘in it more quickly/ than its known forms
allow’. The poem continues in typical Sauerian fashion to describe
the various features of the landscape and the ways in which human
activity has left its mark through the ‘flour makers [who] turn the
sides of the citizen’s hills into square documents’, and the way in
which the nature of the landscape had affected the passage of people
through it: ‘From this valley/ there is no leaving by laterals’. Yet
Dorn links both history and geography by distinguishing between the
‘pre-communication/ westerner/ [who] travelled in local segments/
along a line of time/ utterly sequestered’ and the ironically addressed
‘ indian friends/ [who] signalled one another over his head’. The
‘westerner’ has no knowledge of the broader context of the country
through which they are travelling, and reminds me of the story
Donald Wesling tells of Dorn unrolling a map of the United States
criss-crossed with railroads to a group of students and saying ‘this
is our area’. This has an up-to-date corollary. Systems of broadband
Internet via radio waves are being established, a similar system to
the ones used by mobile telephones. Such a system doesn’t have
to follow the same routes as other communication methods. Cablebased systems often followed the road, which had in turn followed
the railway line, and often followed the river at the bottom of the
valley. Radio-based systems, like the signals of the American Indians,
are capable of operating across the valley systems, of establishing the
‘laterals’ Dorn refers to earlier in the poem.
The narrative of the poem, and it is a road narrative, begins on
the fourth page, following the extensive preamble, when the narrator
steps out of the poem to greet the reader: ‘But I was escorting you out
of Pocatello.’ Yet, despite locating the reader in Pocatello, the journey
has still not really begun; we are still only going ‘sort of north’ and
‘Perhaps past the arco desert’. These are real places, and the Arco
desert was used as a nuclear dumping ground, the Bitteroot is a mountain range and Inkom a town with a current population of some
738. As the poem develops, however, the journey does settle down,
and it can be traced on a map with little difficulty, a process that
turns Dorn’s apparently descriptive phrase ‘lost trail pass’ into the
place name ‘Lost Trail Pass’. By leaving out the capitalization Dorn
relocates the name into the landscape and shows how the names
originated; a process he also carries out through the anecdote from
the Lemhi farmer about the ‘soil content of the bitteroot’ which made
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cows ‘skinnier’. In one way, therefore, Dorn suggests he is showing
us the authentic landscape, a landscape from before the process
of naming and the human impact on the landscape. He is doing
this through a process of gathering together a range of data, from
processes of research and from observation, combining ‘local’ knowledge in the form of anecdotes, historical accounts such as that of the
‘explorers’ Lewis and Clark, and the geological in his description of
the Arco desert as a ‘physiographic menace’ where shifting tectonic
plates could reveal the buried nuclear waste. All these activities can
be contained within a Sauerian landscape analysis. Where the poem
hints at Dorn’s future work, in Slinger in particular, is in the way the
narrator of the poem slips in and out, sometimes directly addressing
the reader in order to lead her through the poem and the landscape.
If, in Idaho Out, Dorn is describing the construction of places by
drawing on the idea of the areal as the study of the spatial distribution of, and relationships between, physical and human phenomena,
in his book-length poem Slinger (1975b), he moves out of the physical landscape into a mental landscape. In Slinger, begun some four
years later than Idaho Out in 1969 but not finished until 1975, the
geography is conceptual rather than actual. The action takes place on
a ‘stage’ (a stage coach) on which the actors (a cowboy, a dance-hall
madam, a poet-singer and a stoned horse) perform their roles. The ‘I’
of Idaho Out, the narrator leading the reader through the landscape,
is replaced by an ‘I’ who doesn’t know what is going on, and who
dies only to come back to life when drip-fed five gallons of LSD.
There are precursors of the extended hip narrative of Slinger in
Idaho Out, particularly where the narrator directly addresses the reader
in ‘But I was escorting you out of Pocatello,/ sort of North’ (Dorn
1965), but where Idaho Out is rooted in the physical geography of the
American West, Slinger is performed within an intellectual universe
driven by the imagination:
This is your domain.
Is it the domicile it looks to be
or simply a retinal block
of seats in,
he will flip the phrase
the theatre of impatience.
(Dorn 1975b)
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The Space Age: The 1950s to the 1970s
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
When the horse is asked how far it is from Mesilla to Vegas he replies
‘Across/ two states/ of mind’. The preface to Section 111 contrasts
‘The inside real and the outsidereal’: inner space to outer space. In an
interview with Roy Okada, Dorn refers to ‘a terrain of the mind’, and
later on to Slinger as a ‘psychological drama’ (Dorn [1980], pp. 39,
49). In a discussion with Robert Bertholf he says, ‘I am talking about
the form of Gunslinger in a way not being arbitrary, but registering
just under the fact about society at large’ ([1980], p. 63).
In the development from Idaho Out to Slinger, Dorn shifts from
an interest in locale, the physical landscape that confronts him and
the relationship between that landscape, the words he uses and the
poetic forms he constructs, to the far more deeply spatialized and
synchronous structure of Slinger. Michael Davidson in ‘ “To Eliminate
the Draw”: Narrative and Language in Slinger’, comments:
According to Dorn the local has been lost: in its place is a variable
fiction created by global capitalism and manipulable by those few
who have the cunning and will to use it. The central recognition
in these poems is that man has become a function of a series of
signs, dispersed from distant data banks.
(Davidson 1985, p. 115–16)
This is a critical shift in the relationship between the ‘free’ individual
who travels through America, as if it was a space waiting for something to happen, and the way the individual is produced by the space.
The space of America is now colonized, not by European culture,
but by global capitalism. The subject, the free agent of the American
Dream, is now reduced to a sign on a series of overlapping maps.
Later in the same article Michael Davidson says:
The space of the poem is the West in its largest sense. Not only
is it the West created by television and the movies; it is also the
West of exploration and exploitation.
(1985, p. 118)
In Idaho Out, Dorn is describing the construction of places, in Slinger
he is using the construction of a psychological or intellectual space
to underpin the form of the poem, as well as using the character of
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the Slinger to shoot holes in the simulacra produced by the ‘distant
data banks’.
Dorn unfailingly describes Slinger in terms of a narrative poem yet
there is no internal temporal structure; most of the time of the poem
is outside time. The roads on which the stage travels are not the
roads on which everyone else travels, and the travellers never arrive
at their destination. The journey in Idaho Out can be traced on a
map; to trace the journey in Slinger requires not just a road map, but
a series of overlapping sets of cultural, philosophical, linguistic and
ideological maps.
Dorn’s later work is similarly outside of any particular location. In
his book Hello, La Jolla from 1978, the poems are written ‘on the
hoof’, the Preface comparing their medium of transmission to the
Pony Express. In the prefatory poem he says:
A poet’s occupation
is to compose poetry
The writing of it
is everywhere
(Dorn 1978, Preface)
He has gone from writing a poetry of the places which make up
America, as in ‘On the Debt ’ and the concrete geographical and
geological forms of Idaho Out, to a poetry of a spatialized America. He
tunes into the media-borne messages of that space, and is both critical
of the spatialization of America and the resultant homogeneity of
experience and processes of commodification, as well as documenting
the impact of the process on people and the places they inhabit on
a day-to-day basis. In the poem ‘The Upwardly Mobile and the Backs
which Provide the Ladder’, he says:
Isn’t it ghastly
the way they’ve pilfered
from the workmanship.
They took the sprouts
right out of his mouth
and gave him a quick
rigidly compartmentalized dinner
(Dorn 1978, p. 20)
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The Space Age: The 1950s to the 1970s
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
The opening line mimics the tones of the ‘upwardly mobile’. The
whole poem is a commentary on the impact of people losing their
place and their relationship with what they produce to be replaced
by the consumption of a commodity from which the traces of its
origin have been removed.
The final section of Hello, La Jolla is entitled ‘One O One, that great
Zero/ Resting eternally between parallels’. They are poems written
while driving, as explained in the Preface:
The IOI section was written one
hand tied to the steering wheel,
driving. I mention this not to demonstrate that writing is still capable of
illegality, but that it is necessary
beyond considerations of place and
time.
(Dorn 1978, p. 75)
Being on the road is to be between places. The interstate service
station is the epitome of a non-place, its products unrelated to the
locale and shipped in from outside. The driver’s view is locked on
to the road ahead and the only entertainment is that which comes
over the airwaves; the driver becomes a ‘zero’ between the parallel
sides of the road. Villages and towns are by-passed and everywhere
becomes like everywhere else. While on the road Dorn is ‘beyond
considerations of time and place’, so he creates poems which are
mosaics of the bits and pieces he comes across, hears on the radio,
remembered fragments of news and the occasional road sign. He even
entitles one poem ‘A Sense of Place’:
I’d live on the Moon
if the commute were
a little less.
(Dorn 1978, p. 81)
He confirms the view of the world from the road as ‘like/ a chicken
farm’ (p. Dorn 1978, 82). The traveller/poet as the ‘great zero between
parallels’ becomes emptied out of reference, and it is on the road,
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between places, that Dorn confronts the ‘spatial’ practices that
construct American culture. In these poems from the late 1970s Dorn
is still on the road, but in the space of two decades has travelled a
long way from the child in ‘On the Debt ’ who watches his father
coming down the road after a day in the fields.
The work of these poets demonstrates the increasing process of
spatialization in post-war America. Dorn’s early work has an intense
focus on place, before moving towards poems that explore the ways
in which space is produced, populations are ‘dislocated’ and the local
is invaded by the global. His work from the 1970s onwards is increasingly critical of the role of international capital, the ways in which
power is imposed and sustained and the imperialist ambitions of
new world orders. His work becomes decentred, moving beyond the
organizing principles of the lyric self to produce work that is increasingly rhizomatic and is organized spatially rather than by cause and
effect, and that, freed from recycling the past, his position in the
world becomes increasingly nomadic; between places rather than
stuck within them. I am not suggesting that this process is entirely
positive; none of these poets has a sentimental approach to place,
and none of them looks back to a golden age when self and place
were organically and harmoniously linked. On the other hand neither
do they uncritically enjoy the benefits of a global consumer society.
What they are trying to do is develop new and different relationships
between the self and the world that neither ignore nor embrace what
is happening around them.
The increasing complexity of the relationship to place as the world
became increasingly ‘global’ is reflected in the complexity of the
poetry. With the loss of the lyric ‘I’ to guide the reader the poems
become a more ‘representational space’, a lived experience within
which knowledge is embodied and situated, rather than a representation of space from a particular perspective, The aesthetic becomes
that of contiguity of coincidence, reflected in an increasing experimentation with the visual form of the poem (see Chapter 6, on visual
poetry).
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The Space Age: The 1950s to the 1970s
Histories of Selves: Space, Identity
and Subjectivity
Histories and space
The objectivist concern with placing experience within its context
provides some indications earlier on in the twentieth century of the
kind of poetry that might emerge from reconfigurations of time and
place. The process of contextualization dissolves notions of figure and
ground that identify ground as space and in a supporting role to the
figure as time. In his essay ‘An Objective’, Louis Zukofsky describes
the role of context in poetry:
A poem. Also the materials which are outside (?) the veins and
capillaries – The context – The context necessarily dealing with
a world outside of it – The desire for what is objectively perfect,
inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars – A desire to place everything – everything aptly, perfectly,
belonging within, one with, a context.–
A poem. The context based on a world – The desire for inclusiveness – The desire for an inclusive object.
(Zukofsky 1981, p. 15)
The poem is constructed through the inclusion of context not its
exclusion, and through an engaged and embodied involvement in
the world and everyday life rather than isolation from it. Figure
and ground merge, as do time and space. In the long poem
Paterson (1963a), William Carlos Williams, closely associated with
80
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4
the Objectivists, is trying to write a poem that explores the origins
of the town of the same name, the composition of the community
and how it relates to its own history and to contemporary others.
Williams’s attitude towards history echoes that of Walter Benjamin
who says that:
A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between
major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth:
nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for
history.
(Benjamin 1999a, p. 256)
It is in the ‘remainder’, the bits and pieces of his own life and the lives
of others, that Williams finds the information he uses to make the
poem. The process of constructing the poem (out of ‘particulars’), his
desire to be inclusive and his organization of the material through
processes of coincidence and contiguity as much as any other principle, results in a poem which, in comparison to more ordered ‘verse’,
lacks a defined centre.
Moveless
he envies the men that ran
and could run off
toward the peripheriesto other centres, directfor clarity (if
they found it)
loveliness
and authority in the world
(Williams 1963a, p. 36)
The perspective of the poem towards its materials is located in the
processes of its construction and the forms those processes produce.
It is a particular and inclusive local perspective, which emerges
through collapsing the distinctions between margins and centres,
although with a residual longing for the clarity such distinctions
bring. Authority for Williams is in the local, and in the particulars
that exist within the local, rather than in abstract ‘authority’, an
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Space, Identity and Subjectivity 81
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
approach that led the critic Edward Dahlberg to refer to Paterson as
‘lawless art’ (Dahlberg 1964, p. 24). In Benjamin’s terms Williams
uses a constructive and creative process that combines a variety of
histories into the poem and not a historicism that ‘contents itself
with establishing a causal connection between various moments in
history’ (Benjamin 1999a, p. 255). In Lefebvre’s terms, Williams’s
aim often appears to be that of reclaiming concrete space, the
space of intimate lives, family histories, everyday events, from its
colonization by the abstract space of commodification, an abstract
space that connects places but is never rooted in one locale. The
poem itself becomes a ‘present’ in which the local and the nonlocal, informal and formal, and personal and public collide. He is
describing the social production of space where ‘space is not a thing
among other things, nor a product among other products: rather
it subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and their simultaneity’ (Lefebvre 1991,
p. 73).
Williams’s relationship to history and tradition is complex and is
reflected in both his choice of materials for the poem and its formal
concerns. He would agree with Walter Benjamin when he says, ‘Every
attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from a conformism
that is about to overpower it’ (Benjamin 1999a, p. 247). Williams
wants to ‘make it new’ and says in his autobiography, reproduced in
the ‘Author’s Note’ to Paterson:
He [Whitman] always said that his poems, which had broken the
dominance of the iambic pentameter in English prosody, had only
begun his theme. I agree. It is up to us, in the new dialect, to
continue it by a new construction upon the syllables.
(Williams 1963a, author’s note)
Perhaps Williams’s attitude towards tradition is best located in the
movement from a modernism which represented the ‘shattering of
formal conventions as an expression of the disintegration of traditional values’ (Gelpi 1990), towards a post-modernism which that
fragmentation anticipated.
Yet Paterson is also a poem shot through with the idea of loss;
the loss of surety and of certain ethical, political and aesthetic positions. It simultaneously mourns the loss of contact with nature, and
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Space, Identity and Subjectivity 83
Divorce is
the sign of knowledge in our time,
divorce! divorce!
(Williams 1963a, p. 18)
He begins ‘The Library’, the first section of ‘Book 3’, with a more
complex assertion that relates the imposition of monetary value on
the private experience of perception:
I love the locust tree
the sweet white locust
How much?
How much?
How much does it cost
to love the locust tree
in bloom
(Williams 1963a, p. 95)
The loss is a recognition that while the process of the production
of America is energizing and liberating, and a process that Williams
is very much part of in his desire to write ‘American’ poetry, it is
also part of the process of commodification. Ultimately this is deeply
individualizing; if Williams’s project in Paterson was, in part, to make
public the historical and spatial production of the town, the process
of commodification returns it to the private, making it part of the
development of individual, rather than community identity.
The spatialization implicit in Williams’s poetic processes, that
of combining a variety of perspectives in one space in order to
develop and demonstrate connections, is challenged by David Harvey
when, in The Condition of Postmodernity, he explores the relationship
between representation, time and space. He claims that: ‘Aesthetic
theory is deeply concerned with the ‘spatialization of time’
(Harvey 1990, p. 205). Taking as his examples the architect who
creates space and the writer who uses the written word to ‘abstract[s]
properties from the flux of experience and fix[es] them in spatial
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the security of tradition, while recognizing that tradition limits and
circumscribes. In Section 2 of Paterson ‘Book 1’ he says:
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
form’ (p. 206), he concludes that: ‘Any system of representation
is a spatialization of sorts which automatically freezes the flow
of experience and in so doing distorts what it tries to represent’
(p. 206).
Paterson, in its collage of materials from across space and time,
can be seen as a process of ‘freezing time’ through its method of
combining materials from a range of contemporary and historical
events. If I am arguing for a notion of space that is dynamic and multilayered, with endless unpredictable connections and trajectories,
the link between space and representation made by Harvey is
problematic. It makes forms of representation, and poetry is one,
into a closed system where each stopped moment, each slice through
time, becomes a structure which seeks to explain itself. This is an
approach well represented and better illustrated in shorter modern
and contemporary lyric poetry, and particularly those poems that
specifically draw on the concept of ‘epiphany’, whereby the poem
contains a ‘moment of truth’ arising from a sudden revelation or
insight. In Seamus Heaney’s poem from the late 1970s about the
Irish troubles, ‘The Toome Road’ (Tuma 2001, p. 667), the poem’s
narrator, an unidentified ‘I’, meets a convoy of armoured cars. This
encounter is then related to the immediate surroundings in which
‘a whole country was sleeping’, and its constituent parts are ‘fields,
cattle in my keeping,/ Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,/
Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds/ Of outhouse roofs.’
The narrator is frozen through indecision, although thinking that
some movement is necessary, before realizing that despite the passing
of the ‘powerful tyres’ of the armoured cars, the ‘omphalos’, the still
essential centre of the world, although invisible, remains ‘untoppled’.
There is movement, but it is all seen from one perspective. It is a
notion of ‘stopped time’, of the ‘still centre’ and of ‘living in the now’
and the poem relates a moment of complete awareness, in which
connections that otherwise remain hidden are suddenly made. For
the reader, at least one familiar with events in Northern Ireland in the
second half of the twentieth century, the poem offers an explanation
of itself.
Doreen Massey, on the other hand, argues that although often
characterized in this way, representation is not necessarily a process
of spatialization that produces closed and static spaces. She refers to
the way in which the relationship between space and representation
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84
is frequently characterized: ‘Representation is seen to take on aspects
of spatialization in the latter’s action of setting things down side by
side; of laying them out as a discrete simultaneity. But representation is also, in this argument understood as fixing things, taking the
time out of them’ (Massey 2005, p. 23). As a result, space develops
the ‘character of a discrete multiplicity, and the character of stasis’,
as in Heaney’s retreat to the still centre of the ‘omphalos’. There
are also values attached to this process; ‘hold[ing] the world still
in order to look at it in cross section connects with ideas of
structure and system, of distance and the all seeing eye, of totality and
completeness, of the relation between synchrony and space’ (Massey
2005, p. 36). The problem is not so much the perspective, or the
maligned ‘view from above’, but the assumption that the view from
above reveals some objective truth, which is also the whole truth.
Massey relates these assumed connections to the foregrounding of
synchrony in the development of structuralism. Her argument is that
although the systems produced and exposed by processes of structuralist analysis were often given the characteristics of spaces, of frozen
time, this was more a consequence of a desire to attack the dominance
of narrative, of things happening in sequences of time, rather than
saying anything of interest about space; it was against time rather
than for space. Maintaining an unquestioned link between representation and space, although emphasizing the spatial, can result in
space which in Foucault’s critique is still ‘the dead, the fixed, the
undialectical, the immobile’ (see Massey 2005, p. 49). Space is still ‘in
the realm of closure’ (p. 38), a closure that:
robs ‘the spatial’ of one of its potentially disruptive characteristics:
precisely its juxtaposition, its happenstance arrangementin-relation-to-each-other, of previously unconnected narratives/temporalities; its openness and its condition of always being
made.
(Massey 2005, p. 39)
Tom Raworth, in a 14-line piece beginning ‘in black tunics middle
aged’ from the poem sequence ‘Eternal Sections’ (Tuma 2001, p. 618),
produces a poetry which seems to avoid a sense of closure. It has
a theme running through it, the theme of normalizing behaviour
as both related to growing older and in commercial contexts, in
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Space, Identity and Subjectivity 85
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
other words the ways in which the ‘system’ demands that people
behave in particular ways in order for it to function effectively. The
poem begins ‘in black tunics middle aged/ in the stationery store’. It
provides a location and suggests figures in that location, figures that
are dressed in ways that have military or religious connections. It
continues ‘every gesture, even/ food: to it’; with an apparent break in
the paradigmatic chain between ‘even’ and ‘food’. Yet through this
unexpected shift, Raworth opens up the kind of fault line in the poem
that allows it to stay open to the play of multiple meanings. Through
the use of the line break every gesture is ‘even’, as in even-handed or
smooth, yet the gesture is also related to food, and the gestural and
normative acts related to the production, preparation and consumption of food are some of the most ingrained habits in any culture,
ranging in application from the holy sacrament to the habitual and
regionally specific behaviour described by Michel de Certeau in his
studies of everyday life in Paris. The next line, ‘thought which breaks’,
makes for ‘food for thought’ and leads on to ‘breaks stereotypes’. The
poem therefore links time and space through the horizontal plane,
the reading surface of the poem, with its sequence of overlapping
links. As a reader you go one way then get doubled up, have to track
back and see where the links might be. Yet the poem also pulls you
up short at individual words – and ‘food’ is a good example – and
encourages the reader to draw on links from outside the poem. The
word food becomes a slice through the poem, linking to other words
related to food and ideas related to food. The poem uses lines which
are discrete units such as:
thought which breaks
stereotypes which constitute
extenuated to the point
and lines which run on such as:
the history of our own
stiffness of manner
no longer aligned
to create a fractured structure of comments, impressions and observations which, while related to the ‘theme’, do so in oblique ways.
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This is not to say it is simply a kind of cubist poetry; if that was
the case it would retain the characteristics of closure Massey refers to
above, operating through a process of ‘discrete multiplicity’ as a series
of stopped points and simply exchanging the ‘view from above’ for
the view from a variety of perspectives. The poetry is rather an open
network of language with multiple linkage points to other language
and to the flux of experience. It is rhizomatic. That is, to some
extent, true of all poems of course, and of all language, but the difference between the Heaney and the Raworth is that Heaney is seeking
to represent the moment of illumination when the scene, lit from
above, reveals its meaning through the combination of its elements
from a single, authoritative perspective and in a single moment.
Raworth is writing a poetry where words and lines sometimes seem
to lead off into nowhere, or the link between one line and the next is
neither obviously syntagmatic or paradigmatic, but from contiguity
(see Lines 2–5 in the above quotation). It is a poem which has no
single perspective and more than one direction, sometimes seeming
to lead off from the end of the line and sometimes seeming to link
back to an earlier assertion or suggestion. It is a poem within which
differences coexist and remain unresolved. The poem has a theme,
but crucially it is not a theme into which all elements of the poem
can be collapsed, which is itself a discussion of normative practices
and the ways in which they both include and exclude.
In one way, Raworth could be seen as creating a kind of depthless
post-modern surface, the very kind of representation Massey describes
as lifeless. Yet, by drawing on referential depth and the creation of
three-dimensional texts with a variety of possible futures, Raworth
injects time into the poem, producing a text that has ‘multiple trajectories’ with ‘multiplicities of imaginations, theorizations, understandings, meanings’ (Massey 2005, p. 89). If the poem is a space
it is now the ‘sphere of a dynamic simultaneity, constantly disconnected by new arrivals, constantly waiting to be determined (and
therefore always undetermined) by the construction of new relations.
It is always being made, and always therefore, in a sense, unfinished’ (Massey 2005, p. 107). For Massey a slice through time would
not produce a map of the moment but would be ‘full of holes, of
disconnections, of tentative half formed first encounters’ (p. 107).
This is, crucially, Massey’s first representation in the form of an
image of her dynamic concept of space-time. It is not a moment, as
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Benjamin envisaged in the ‘monad’ or in the Heaney poem, or even
a series of individual moments stacked up one after each other in
a kind of ‘flicker-book’ version of history, or like Duchamp’s ‘Nude
Descending a Staircase’ where the movement becomes a series of
stills, but moments that are linked and connected both horizontally,
through space, and vertically through time. For Massey ‘there are
always connections yet to be made, juxtapositions yet to flower into
interaction, or not, potential links which may never be established.
Loose ends and ongoing stories’ (p. 107). In this conceptualization
of space it ‘can never be that completed simultaneity in which all
interconnections have been established’ (p. 107).
It is hard to think of a better description of the Raworth poem
and in this configuration of space and time the distinctions between
centres and margins, figure and ground, and events and their locations, dissolve into a series of relationships. This is not, however, the
depthless present of post-modernism, but a reconfiguration which
acknowledges interconnectedness, and contains within itself the
means of its own deconstruction. Power structures are revealed as
much as concealed and normative assumptions questioned through
processes of coincidence and juxtaposition.
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88
Space, Place and Identity
If identity is pragmatically linked to our place of origin and of
residence, language, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, then in recent
years identities have become more fluid and impermanent as the
world’s population becomes more mobile and as our experiences
decreasingly take place, through information and communication
technologies, in the places where the self is present. Recent critical
theory has explored the relationship between the idea of an essential identity and one explained by its relationship to others. Gender,
sexuality, age, and ethnic and national identity amongst others are
said to be a series of constructed or performed rather than inherent
characteristics.
A relative and non-essential notion of identity is mirrored in
contemporary notions of place as expressed by Massey and others.
A place is identified through its relationship to other places and,
as a consequence, is unstable. It will shift under different pressures,
change from different perspectives and respond to different contexts.
Identity in literary works is similarly problematized. Terry Eagleton
talks about the way in which, after structuralism, ‘The confident bourgeois belief that the isolated individual was the fount of all meaning
has taken a sharp knock’ (Eagleton 1996, p. 93). Bob Perelman refers
to ‘The lyric I of the voice poem’ as ‘a prime object of attack in
early L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing theory and practice’ (Perelman
1996, p. 109). Somewhat more ironically Rae Armantrout refers to
‘the stifled yawn’ which greets yet another discussion of ‘the speaking
subject in contemporary poetry’ (Armantrout 1999, p. 43) in her essay
on Fanny Howe’s poem ‘Q’ in A Folio for Fanny Howe (Green 1999).
89
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Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
For some writers explorations of the relationship between ideas
of an essential and performed or constructed identity inform both
the form and the content of the poetry and the idea of language
as a form of self-expression. The more spatial practices of ‘language’
writing, for example, draw on a poetics of form that denies notions of
identity as unproblematically expressed through language, and resists
final interpretation and closure through an exploration of concepts
of deferred meaning and signification, and through an examination
of the social function of the language system. In his essay ‘Writing
Social Work and Political Practice’, Bruce Andrews echoes Burroughs
on the ‘cut-up’ when he refers to the way in which, in language
writing ‘the poetics would be those of subversion: an anti-systemic
detonation of settled relations, an anarchic liberation of energy flows.
Such flows are thought to exist underneath and independent from
the system of language. That system entraps them in codes and
grammar’ (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, p. 134).
Yet in denying the expressive norms of the language system, practices that support local and regional identities, they could be said to
embrace those same spatializing processes that support global capitalism, processes of flushing out historical and local meaning through
a process of homogenization. The poet Jeremy Prynne, in a letter
to the Canadian poet Steve McCaffery, also questions the illusion
of freedom that might result from the process of deconstructing the
language system:
But in the political question of reference to a world in which
social action is represented linguistically and its consequences
marked out by economic function and personal access to social
goods the ludic syntax of a language system is mapped on
to determinations and coercions which by invasion cast their
weights and shadows parasitically into the playing fields. I do not
believe that freedom from this aspect of the social order is more
than illusory No free signifiers: no unvalorized process: no free
lunch.
(Prynne 2000, p. 41)
However playfully or procedurally the writer tries to divert the
‘weights and shadows’ cast by the social usage of language in order
to create writing free of the ‘social order’, they still get through. The
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subject may, in part, be the subject of language, but deconstructing
the language does not liberate the subject. The subject, writer or
reader, performs their identity within the constrictions of those
‘weights and shadows’.
In ‘Lure, 1963’ Denise Riley uses a series of cultural references,
drawn from the fashion industry and popular songs, to locate and
identify herself:
Navy near-black cut in with lemon, fruity bright lime green.
I roam around around around around acidic yellows, globe
oranges burning, slashed cream, huge scarlet flowing
anemones barbaric pink singing, radiant weeping When
will I be loved?
(Caddel and Quartermain 1999, p. 211)
She performs her gender within ideologically produced sexualities,
where the ‘I’ in the poem is both subject and object. As a ‘lure’ she is
dressing herself in bright colours to attract others, in the same way
that a fisherman will attach coloured feathers to a hook to make a
‘lure’ for fish. Her expressions of romantic love are constructed via
the language of pop songs that are collaged in the poem, a process
that provides a critical distance for the examination of her own experience. She is testing herself out against the world, the songs suggest,
getting a sense of her identity by comparing it with others in a
series of relationships. There is no sense for Riley that representation
through language is an undistorted process of self-expression. The ‘I’s
in the extract above are both those that are in the pop songs, and the
person that is wearing the ‘Navy near-black ’ yet, as Prynne points
out, there is no sense that the deconstructive process of examining
her own cultural production will free her ‘self’ from those ‘weights
and shadows’.
Judith Butler is similarly ambivalent about the relationship between
language and identity when she says:
I do not believe that poststructuralism entails the death of autobiographical writing, but it draws attention to the difficulty of the
‘I’ to express itself through the language that is available to it. For
this ‘I’ that you read is in part a consequence of the grammar that
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governs the availability of persons in language. I am not outside
the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by
the language that makes this ‘I’ possible. This is the bind of selfexpression, as I understand it.
(Butler 1999, p. xxiv)
It is this tension, between language as a means of self-expression,
the self as a construct of language, and the poem as a constructed
object with an existence independent of the author that provides a
framework of ideas within which contemporary poetry operates. This
is a framework that brings together ideas of authorship, of the lyric
self and of the poem as ‘construct’, ideas of the space of the self and
the space of the text.
Some familiar theoretical texts from the middle of the twentieth
century develop a relationship between writing, space and the self
as author. Roland Barthes in ‘Death of the Author’ refers to writing
as ‘that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips
away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very
identity of the body writing’ (Barthes 1984, p. 142). For Barthes, as it
is for Lefebvre and later Foucault, it is the body in the performative
act of writing, the physical act of writing itself in a specific time
and place, which produces a positive space. Once written, the text
becomes ‘neutral’ and ‘negative’, an abstraction only brought back
to life by the performative act of reading. But while the writing may
begin with the self in a particular time and place, that process, too,
involves others; writing is not ‘original’ but intertextual:
We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a
single theological meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but
a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of
them original, blend and clash.
(Barthes 1984, p. 146)
Writing and reading may involve the situated embodiment of the
text, but they are not solitary activities and are more complex
processes involving each text in a network of relationships with other
texts.
Foucault picks up on Barthes’s reference to negative space when in
‘What is an Author’ he says:
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It is not enough to repeat the empty affirmation that the
author has disappeared. Instead we must locate the space left
empty follow the distribution of gaps and branches, watch for
the openings.
(Foucault 1991, p. 118)
For Foucault the ‘death of the author’ has not resulted in a closed
‘negative’ but opened up a range of possibilities, a series of gaps
within the text where each one provides a potential for ‘travelling’
through the text in different directions. Pierre Joris, in his essay
‘Notes Toward a Nomadic Poetics’, develops the idea of a relationship between identity and language that is in a constant state of
assembling, dissembling and reassembling through the analogy of
travel, producing poetry that is always on the move and resisting location and a fixed identity. He celebrates the multifaceted, the endless
idiolects within any structure of language and, drawing on Deleuze
and Guattari’s idea of the nomad and the rhizome, asserts that all
languages are foreign to people without a place, and that poets need
to free themselves from the ‘prison house of the mother tongue’ by
adopting a multilingualism:
A nomadic poetics will cross languages, not just translate. But
write in all or any of them it is essential now to push this
matter further, again, not as ‘collage’ but as a material flux of
language matter, moving in and out of semantic and non-semantic
spaces a lingo-cubism.
(Joris 2003, p. 38)
He goes on to discuss the matter of identity in poetry more directly:
Barthes’ doleful sense that ‘the author is dead’. Were it so that
would only transcendentalize him or her, for who else is god
but the dead author, deus absconditus? What has happened
is that the author has multiplied, has lost its, his her identity
as singular subject We now have to say ‘I is many others’. A
nomadic poetics will thus explore ways in which to make – and
think about – a poetry that takes into account not only the manifold of languages and locations but also of selves each one of us is
constantly becoming.
(Joris 2003, p. 43)
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The nomadic, and its metaphoric representation as rhizomatic, exists
between space and place and combines both, and Joris proposes an
aesthetic not of collage, but of the rhizome – a root system that
follows its own way and many other possible ways, a system that is
connected but not a closed circuit.
All three writers use spatial metaphors to describe the relationship between a text and its author. For Barthes the shift is from the
serial linear text, issuing from the point of the author’s pen, to a
multi-dimensional space. Foucault perceives the possibility of metaphorically entering that space, as readers, to hook up to the different
possibilities now that the authoritative meaning has been removed.
Joris invokes a more organic metaphor of following a root system,
moving in and out of semantic and non-semantic spaces. What they
also have in common is the idea that one can get inside a text, become
part of it and, by extension, as readers, constructors of an individual
text within the many possibilities that both its spatial construction
and a spatial reading can bring. It is as if the author has been disconnected from the many power points of the text which hang, fizzing
in the air, for the reader to come along and plug themselves into,
in an endless number of different combinations. Works like that of
Tom Raworth’s ‘All Fours’ have a variety of apparent perspectives,
making any link with a stable identity, or time or a place arbitrary
and transitory:
though it might have been chronic
around his neck and shoulders
filled with thick high weeds
the road was lined with stone
almost entranced she started
ordering quantities of everything
down the windows of your station
combed and perfectly normal
bees through blood and perhaps
night air while we rode back
followed him to the front porch
and the chimney bricks were fallen
(Raworth 2003, p. 456)
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The first three stanzas have three different pronouns as their
object or subject. The poem does not inexorably narrow down the
possible meanings of words and phrases but sets up innumerable
new ‘offshoots’, each one containing a variety of possibilities. The
‘I’ within the poem is not simply fragmented but seems to keep
appearing and reappearing in a different guise, often referred to in
the third person. A sense of place is similarly difficult to identify,
despite the architectural references. The title seems to refer to the
form of the poem and that it is written in four-lined stanzas (an
earlier publication had a cover on which there were 16 collages
arranged into a square). It could also be an extended joke running
on from the title of another collection, Tottering State, where the
adult is reduced to the level of the baby on ‘all fours’, a reading
reinforced by a later part of the poem where there is reference
to ‘a lovely little thing with eyes/ / shambling on ’ (Raworth
2003, p. 456). The poem also contains numerous references to a
building, suggesting ‘four walls’. All these references remain possibilities within the poem, but the relationship between the population of the poem and its geography are never resolved. The ‘blown
cell with a dusty bulb’ in the final stanza seems to indicate both a
point of origin for the poem, as if the order of the material is the
order of memory, and the origin of the poem as the dusty cell, until
that meaning is destabilized by the next line in which ‘an instant
to blank shining glass’ (p. 456) suggests the cell might be the cell
of a flash bulb for a camera, and the instant a moment amongst
others.
Sometimes it seems as if there is either no self at all in the poem,
or too many potential selves. Another Raworth poem from the 1990s
appears to have the self written out of it, whether in the first person or
as a third-person character. It is a poetry that lacks consistent names
or pronouns, such as the poem ‘UNABLE TO CREATE CARRIER’ from
the1999 collection MEADOW:
pigeons, explained the supremo, perhaps
basins of attraction and so
easy to identify undefended
footnotes to a moral atom
forced to show traces of serious style
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interacting among enzymes to undergo
ritual sabbaticals for a rush of air
The poem’s neutral voice is not conversation and has only traces of
address, despite the reported speech of the ‘supremo’. Is it someone
talking to the reader? If so, where can they be located in the
text? What is their perspective? A clue comes in the third and
final stanza where someone is ‘guarding time in an overnight bag/
which according to the pronoun you/ surpasses the apprehension of
thought/ represented on screen by a halo’ (Raworth 2003, p. 539).
If there is anyone talking within the poetry, or if there is any mode
of address, then it often seems to be the poetry talking to itself
within a matrix of responses. It is not ‘you’ who suggest(s) that ‘time’
‘surpasses the apprehension of thought’, but the ‘pronoun you’. It
is no single you, but every and all of you as well as the word ‘you’.
The indeterminate nature of the second person is interrogated, as is
the incapacity of thought to retain or perceive time. Thoughts may
be ‘carrier pigeons’ in a ‘rush of air’, but they are also the experience
the thoughts are unable to apprehend, as well as ‘footnotes’ forced
to show traces of ‘serious style’ (which support ‘ritual sabbaticals’).
The mind begins to leap backwards and forwards between the verses,
trying to make links and close them, but the poetry remains stubbornly open: each time an identity begins to be developed it is pushed
aside or broken up in the movement of the poem. Raworth’s point,
of course, is that identity is not stable, and that a lyric poem which
suggests a single perspective from a fixed identity is itself involved in
the manipulation of embodied experience in order to produce a poem
which may ‘capture the moment’ or ‘make sense’ out of a particular
event.
If there is no single and direct relationship, which can transcend
space and time, between language and an empirical reality it is trying
to express, a range of potential relationships exist. Language is not
simply something that reveals an a priori or external truth or fact, a
neutral tool through which ‘we’ express our ‘selves’ but, even when
syntactically arranged, has a number of possible syntagmatic and
paradigmatic relationships in a particular context. Identity, and our
social and cultural identity is at least in part a product of language
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(Raworth 2003, p. 539)
just as our language is a product of that identity, does not naturally
reside within the self, but is located in our historical and spatial
relationships with others and will change according to the context
in which we find ourselves. Identities become fluid. The implication
of this for a poetry of personal expression is that the poem is not,
and never can be, an expression of a pre-existing identity through a
carefully selected vocabulary.
In the 1982 poem ‘Mirror’s Song’ (Tuma 2001, p. 736) Liz Lochhead
describes the way in which she fragments the socially constructed self
through smashing her reflection in the mirror. The mirror, according
to Foucault, is both a utopia, ‘a placeless place an unreal virtual
space that enables me to see myself there where I am absent’ and
a heterotopia as it ‘exerts a sort of counteraction on the position
that I occupy’ (Foucault 1986, p. 24). The mirror confirms absence (I
am over there) and presence (I can see myself and my connections
with the space that surrounds me). Lefebvre talks about the mirror
as representing both repetition and difference; within the mirror the
‘Ego is liable to “recognize” itself in the “other”, but it does not in fact
coincide with it’. It is a ‘reflection which yet generates an extreme
difference’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 185), in which everything within the
reflection is inverted. Lochhead sees her ‘other’ self within the mirror
and sets up an opposition between the two, with the poem told in
the voice of the mirror:
Smash me looking-glass glass
coffin, the one
that keeps your best black self on ice.
(Tuma 2001, p. 736)
The mirror is a ‘glass coffin’, with the body on display but immobile.
Once smashed ‘she’ll whirl out like Kali’, the Indian goddess of
destruction, the new self reducing the old to a list of contents in
her ‘alligator mantrap handbag’. In the final stanza, having fragmented her public image through smashing the mirror and naming
and revealing the objects that constructed her, she enters public
space in her new identity. Her construction as ‘feminine’, by ‘the/
tracts and the adverts, shred/ all the wedding dresses, snap/ all the
spike heeled icicles’ (Tuma 2001, p. 737), while providing her with a
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public persona, also kept her apart from her community of ‘daughters’
and ‘mothers’. Her concerns become the more political interests in
wars and Greenham Common, and Lochhead discovers an essential
feminine self, able to move more effectively into the public space.
Yet Lefebvre is critical of Lacan’s use of the visual reflection in
the mirror as a way of locating the subject in space. For Lacan the
pre-language infant sees itself as complete in the mirror, in contrast
to its physical fragmentation in a ‘real’ world in which it cannot yet
properly explore. The infant’s sense of a ‘real’ embodied experience
is lost during the development of language, a process of abstraction,
and through the ‘law of the father’ as exemplified by the phallus.
This visual and conceptual understanding of the relationship between
subject and space continues, for Lacan, through to the subject’s entry
into the symbolic order of language. For Lefebvre, on the other hand,
it is the body and the body’s movement through the world that
produces space and in which the subject’s knowledge of the world is
situated. To return to another distinction of Lefebvre’s, the reflection
in the mirror is a signifier, not a signified, and therefore a ‘representation of space’; it is not the embodied experience of ‘representational
space’. Similarly, subject formation through the symbolic order of
language is, for Lefebvre, an abstraction which creates a ‘yawning
gap that separates this linguistic mental space from the social space
wherein language becomes practice’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 5).
Lefebvre compares the directly lived and more concrete relationship to space of earlier civilizations (their ‘representational space’)
with the modern tendency to develop visual ‘representations’ of space
through a process of abstraction. This process of abstraction is one in
which the mind, rather than the body, ‘produces’ the space. In premodern society for ‘seasonally migrant herders directions in space
and time were inhabited’ and the ‘networks of paths and roads made
up a space just as concrete as that of the body – of which they were
in fact an extension’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 193). In modern society this
direct relationship with space, according to Lefebvre, becomes lost:
the architectural and urbanistic space of modernity tends precisely
towards this homogenous state of affairs, towards a place of confusion and fusion between geometrical and visual which inspires
a kind of physical discomfort. Everything is alike. Localization –
and lateralization – are no more it is [also] the space of blank
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sheets of paper, drawing boards, plans, sections, elevations, scale
models, geometrical projections and the like. Substituting a verbal,
semantic, or semiological space for such a space only aggravates its shortcomings. A narrow and desiccated rationality of this
kind overlooks the core and foundation of space, the total body,
the brain, gestures and so forth. It forgets that space does not
consist in the projection of an intellectual representation, does
not arise from the visible – readable realm, but that it is first of
all heard (listened to) and enacted (through physical gestures and
movements).
(Lefebvre 1991, p. 200)
Lefebvre puts the body, a body that produces the space around
itself, at the heart of ideas about space and identity. He sees the
reclamation of the body, from the Cartesian mind/body split, as the
key to reclaiming space from the nation-state and its systems and a
global capitalism which seeks to divorce the body from the space it
produces and which has produced it. The pre-verbal gesture is one
way in which he explains this. Gestures, rather than thoughts ‘lie at
the origin of language’ and ‘embody ideology and bind it to practice’
(Lefebvre 1991, pp. 214, 215). Writing itself, the act of moving a
pen across a page, becomes both gestural and a result of abstraction
via the language system. Finally, ‘Bodies themselves generate spaces,
which are produced by and for their gestures’ (p. 216).
For Lefebvre, therefore, the individual produces space through their
senses, that is, what is within hearing, eyesight, touch, smell and
so on. This production of space is from a certain perspective and a
change of position of the self changes the space. As the body moves,
it produces new spaces and objects pass from obscurity into light. The
outer production of space through sensual apprehension is matched
by an inner space, both physical and a state of consciousness, and
this internal space develops from childhood into adulthood. The skin
becomes a surface that, although liable to penetration, acts as both a
barrier between the inner and outer space and provides a closure of
the self. The skin is a boundary. It is also a means of identification and
recognition; appearance is one source of our difference from others
and marks out age, gender, social status and nationality.
The poet Lee Harwood frequently draws on a relationship between
the visual, the optic, and the haptic, the communicative sense of
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touch, in his poems about North Wales. In ‘September Dusk by Nant
Y Geuallt’ (Harwood 2004, p. 397), for example, he moves from ‘The
scent’ of bog myrtle as it is ‘brushed through’ and when it is ‘pressed
between fingers’, before moving to a more visual description of ‘A flat
moor – the colours muted’. Another poem, ‘Cwm Uchaf’ (Harwood
2004, pp. 408–9), begins when ‘someone yells from a window/ down
into the dark street’. This situated and contemporary activity is set
against the imagined space and timescale of the moon where ‘in a
vast barren crater/ a rock very slowly crumbles’. The poem contains
references to the death of Harwood’s friend, Paul Evans, in a climbing
accident with Harwood, and draws comparisons between the importance of the ‘here and now’ and the finality of death. The poem then
moves from ‘A fuzz of stars’ which ‘sweeps across the world’ as a visual
phenomenon which is ‘partly known and unknown’, to the specific
and detailed location of an imagined ‘fragile bone sphere cracked
and shaky’. The fall of the body, ‘tumbling down’, is compared to
the feelings of the survivor and his ‘stumbling descent through the
day’s maze’ and the abstract visual images of the night sky become a
symbol for the acceptance of the dead body into all space and all time
in the ‘stars arms remote embrace’, before the detailed and located
imagery of the drops/ of rich red blood’ and the physicality of the
‘thick orange bag on a hospital trolley’. The sense of physical presence, of the haptic experience of ‘thick’, is immediately set against
the redemptive visual, a necessary removal from the immediate pain
of death, to ‘The faint glitter of the rocks mica the sky/ catching
the eye’. The poem returns to its starting place in Brighton, where
‘the waves’ are ‘going nowhere in particular’, and are compared to the
loss of blood in ‘a gradual leaking away’. Through his combination of
visual distance, and the sense of embodied presence, Harwood is able
to combine both the physicality of the death and the intellectual and
emotional response to that death. He can say ‘this is how it feels’,
and simultaneously ask ‘what does it mean’.
Just as there is an arbitrary relationship and, for poets, a creative
gap, between language and meaning, there exist creative possibilities
in the relationship with others, and one of those others is the self as
it is perceived and represented in poetry. One function of contemporary lyric poetry is to know and represent more about ourselves and
different ways of representing the world. It is the place from which
many poets start, in a process of discovery and loss, a process in which
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self-identification can be both the end point and a consequence of
writing.
Marjorie Perloff describes a lyric as a ‘short verse utterance in which
a single speaker expresses, in figurative language, her/his subjective
vision of the truths of moments, situations and relationships’ (Perloff
1985, p. 173). Thirty years earlier, Olson referred negatively to the
‘lyrical interference of the individual as ego’ (Olson 1997, p. 247)
as a restriction against which ‘open-field’ poetry had to work. The
Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics traces the genealogy of the
contemporary lyric back to Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings’ and Hegel’s idea of the lyric as containing ‘intensively subjective and personal expression’ (Preminger 1975). Within
the contemporary lyric, according to much of the argument, the form
and content of the poetry are fused to form a personal expression of
deeply held feelings. In spatial terms the lyric is described as a closed
form, its practitioners using the poem for ‘self-expression’, as against
the ‘open’ form of more experimental writing.
Lyric expressions of identity are often most clearly demonstrated
in explicitly oppositional work by those whose identity is oppressed,
denied, or under threat. Recent examples run through the work of
women writers from the 1970s and 1980s and the work of writers
from minority cultures, particularly first-generation immigrants into
the United Kingdom. The other indigenous minorities in the United
Kingdom (the Welsh, Scottish and Irish) have all used lyric poetry as
an affirmation of identity, as ways of sustaining, defining and redefining their national and linguistic allegiances. Other poets, particularly those within dominant cultures, are more inclined to speculate
on the nature of their identity and in the case of the more experimental poets, who are often explicitly critical of national or cultural
allegiances, happy to write themselves off the map rather than stake
a claim to their own space. Such distinctions between poetry are,
in the twenty-first century, increasingly difficult to map, and I have
some sympathy for Peter Barry’s view in Contemporary British Poetry
and the City that there is now a ‘widespread preoccupation on the part
of poets of all persuasions today with more-or-less “experimental”
explorations of such things as: linguistic registers, implied voices’
(Barry 2000, p. 12). His conclusion is that ‘To imagine that the
anxious or celebratory meta-poetries of the deconstructed subject are
still the exclusive preserve of an always excluded avant-garde is to be
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twenty years behind the times’ (p. 12). It is a useful reminder that the
circulation of ideas is both faster and more widespread than ever, and
that to stamp your foot and identify your position within an oppositional binary between a mainstream that is assured of its place in
the world and an avant-garde that is critical and experimental almost
certainly means you’ll be either mown down or left in the dust by
more mobile forces.
Jo Shapcott’s poem ‘Phrase Book’ draws on a tension between
invasive external forces and the desire to discover or retain an inner
self as expressed by language. In the poem she uses material from the
phrase book of the title and the language of the Gulf War of the early
1980s to demonstrate the way language itself is contaminated:
I’m standing here inside my human skin,
which will do for a Human Remains Pouch
for the moment. Look down there (up here)
Quickly. Slowly. This is my own front room
where I’m lost in the action, live from a war
on screen. I am an Englishwoman, I don’t understand you.
(Tuma 2001, p. 843)
On the one hand the tension in the poem seems to reside in the way
in which the personal space of the speaker in the poem is invaded,
whether actually, through the media, or potentially, through smart
bombs. Her Englishness, as determined by her language, becomes
open to doubt, and her language, based on random phrases, becomes
fractured and incoherent. On the other hand, Keith Tuma in his
analysis of the poem in Fishing by Obstinate Isles points out the way
in which the reader is drawn into the parody of the ‘Englishwoman’,
the way the reader is ‘flattered, asked to join the poet in mocking the
speaker’ (Tuma 1998, p. 199). The repetition of ‘let me pass’ is significant, referring to the desire of a ‘phrase book’ user to pass herself off
as an Englishwoman, as well as the more mundane meaning of letting
someone pass by. The poem, rather than a discussion of the relationship between language and consciousness and the role of language in
the construction of national identity, becomes an exploration of the
relationship between the implicit author and the person who foolishly tries to ‘pass’ as an ‘Englishwoman’. While there are different
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strands within the poem, its entirety is not located in the more distant
reaches of the discourses it contains. The poem appears inclusive, as
if it is seeking to include those discourses within its frame, but the
phrase-book language and military jargon, rather than being used
as a way of unsettling ideas about relationships between language,
experience and identity, simply become part of the tool box of the
unspoken ‘I’ of the poem, a kind of lyrical ‘implied’ author, who is
distancing those other discourses in order to discover, support and
retain an essential self who understands the ‘real’ Englishwoman.
Catherine Walsh and Eavan Boland
Despite having some sympathy with Barry’s assertion that varieties of
poetry now experiment with the relationship between language and
identity, it is still worthwhile comparing a poem like Eavan Boland’s
‘Distances’ (Boland 1995) with Catherine Walsh’s work ‘from Pitch’
in the Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Tuma
2001). The poems demonstrate the way ideas of the lyric, as a structuring device for the poem and as a set of ideas to be worked with
and against, are used by different practitioners. Boland’s poem immediately identifies time and place, a speaking narrator and a person
addressed:
The radio is playing downstairs in the kitchen.
The clock says eight and the light says
winter. You are pulling up your hood against a bad morning.
(Boland 1995, p. 170)
Through naming a popular song, ‘I Wish I Was in Carrickfergus’,
the poem conjures up images of a past Ireland for the narrator of the
poem. It elides memory and place; ‘the way the streets/ of a small
town open out in/ memory’ (p. 170). The image is that of harmony
through tradition, and the protagonists of the poem, back in Ireland,
see ‘salt-loving fuschias to one side and// a market in full swing on
the other’ as they ‘walk the streets in/ the scentless afternoon of a
ballad measure’ (p. 170). All the images conjure up the idea of an
ongoing rhythm, of a continuation of a life that is measured in the
time of tradition and with the ballad measure a symbol of the way in
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which language itself can be ordered to represent a continuing story.
But the poem reminds us of ‘how// restless we would be, you and I,
inside the perfect/ music of that basalt and sandstone/ coastal town’
and uses references to a number of objects to explore the tension
between a nostalgic longing for the perfection of the past and an
awareness that the reality might be somewhat different. The ‘tacky
apples’ become ‘mush inside the crisp sugar shell’ and the ‘spectacles
out of focus’. The poem ultimately questions its own premise, established in the song, that they wish they were back in Carrickfergus.
Despite this ambivalence between image and reality, exacerbated by
the marketing of the Irish lifestyle as a desirable commodity, the
message of the poem is straightforward; that it is better to be at a
distance to the unchanging nature of tradition than part of it.
While Boland’s poem is arranged on the page in eight stanzas of
three lines each, Walsh’s ‘from Pitch’ meanders down the page from
a variety of left-hand margins. The title says it is ‘from’ something,
presumably a longer sequence. So the first difference is that the poem
is not bounded, we don’t know when we’re going to reach the end,
or if it is the end when we get there. The poem’s first few lines set its
conceptual boundaries. Reminiscent of the Objectivist ‘Thinking with
things as they exist’ (Zukofsky 1981, p. 12), Walsh begins the poem:
matter
of fact
poetical
fabulous
(Tuma 2001, p. 926)
The poem is ‘matter of fact’, that is day to day. In addition the poem
is a material object; it may be ‘matter’, made up of ‘facts’, but facts
that are ‘poetical’ and ‘fabulous’. The poem is set in a ‘time’ which is
‘of the mind’, not necessarily in a narrative sequence. The tension is
between the idea of the poem as a record of some event or a process
of speculation, as in the Boland, and a poem such as Walsh’s that also
creates its own experience. It is a fabrication, which may be made
up of occasions or events, but is not a report on those ‘instants’. The
empty open brackets positioned over the word ‘stasis’ also indicate
a preference for a field of possibility over a fixed position. Walsh
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continues this explanation or coda for a few more lines before getting
into the story of the poem, a story not radically different from that of
Eavan Boland. She confirms that ‘this is not memory’ before the next
word, ‘conditions’, both completes the idea of memory as a condition
and forms a link to the next phrase where ‘memory/ conditions/
the state of the subject at/ the moment/ in question’ and then a
slight gap leads to the next word, ‘being’ (Tuma 2001, p. 926). Walsh
is explicitly exploring the construction of her identity within the
psychological space of the poem and the geographical space it refers
to. The next section is a fragmented description of landscape, located
in a real place by the annotations rather than the information in
the poem.
When the poem becomes most expressionistic, however, in its
recollection of another person, Walsh uses repetition to draw attention to the language itself and to question that process of expression. The repetitions are not ‘true’ but a little off-centre, each one
adding a different piece of information and from a slightly different
perspective:
having not forgotten
smell colour
of eye
hair tone
flesh
having not forgotten
there should be
some where eye
hair colour of
voice smell
having not forgotten
etc.
(Tuma 2001, p. 927)
Walsh is not content with conflating place with identity. It is not
enough to remember and name the places of her memories, but she
must work with them in the context of the conceptual space of the
poem, calling into doubt the value of the process of naming: ‘how
can/ what I name anything/ do anything’ (Tuma 2001, p. 929). She
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denies herself the agency or authority to order a structured narrative
out of the events but has to self-consciously reflect on the processes
of the poetry and the structures of language as well as its products
and their relationship with embodied experience.
None of the above is to deny Barry’s account of the differences or
lack of them in the attitude to the lyric ‘I’ in much modern poetry. It
does demonstrate, however, the way in which two Irish women poets
work with relationships between identity and place very differently,
and produce quite different poetry. In other words, the fact that
they both problematize identity does not mean they do it in the
same way and come to the same conclusions. Boland is exploring,
although not without doubts, the nature of an Irish identity located
in a specific place, while Walsh is interrogating the notion of identity
and authority as expressed through poetic language. Similarly, and
this is not to overload the Walsh/Boland contrast and comparison, a
poet writing out of assumptions of normative systems may still seek
to question her identity. This is different from a writer questioning
ideas of the authority of language, of its expressive qualities and the
ways in which cultural and political representations seek to retain
control and authority. More traditional lyric forms seek to identify
a place in which identity can be located and defined, while more
experimental and spatial forms will undercut that certainty in order
to bring relationships between identity and places into question.
Ralph Hawkins
The English poet Ralph Hawkins, for example, uses a range of local
and domestic references in his work while simultaneously locating
other work in more remote and imaginary landscapes. His long poem,
‘Tell Me No More and Tell Me’, consists of 23 pages, with each
page made up of between three and six four-line stanzas with the
occasional couplet. Some themes occur consistently in the poem:
domestic scenes, the landscape seen from inside a house, the scenery
outside the window and the colours of it, and the flora and fauna.
Yet the overwhelming concern of the poem is a construction of the
space of the self. Lefebvre says:
Space – my space – is not the content of which I constitute the
textuality: instead it is first of all my body, and then it is my body’s
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counterpart or other, its mirror image or shadow: it is the shifting
intersection between that which touches, threatens or benefits my
body on the one hand, and all other bodies on the other. Thus we
are concerned, once again, with gaps and tensions, contacts and
separations.
(Lefebvre 1991, p. 184)
Earlier, Lefebvre had referred to objects ‘slipping from the non-visible
realm into the visible, from opacity into transparency’ (Lefebvre 1991,
p. 183). It is through this process, he claims, that the ‘existence of
space is established’. He refers to it as a ‘process of decipherment’
(p. 183). It is common sense that what we can perceive through
vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste becomes our space, or at least
our experience of a space from a particular perspective. Where that
space is also domestic, and is shared with others, then it will also have
its own history. A house, as Bachelard demonstrates in his Poetics
of Space, is a place of accumulated memory and is produced by the
repetition of apparently insignificant actions.
‘Tell Me No More and Tell Me’ is written indoors; the poet describes
both what is around him and what he sees out of the window. There
is a sense of physical presence, of a body produced by, and producing,
the space. The poem is a painstaking search for identity, not with
any apparent hope of completing the task by trawling back through
time or through locating the self in broader spatial structures, but
by picking up the bits and pieces that go to make up that domestic
space, turning them over and examining them:
Yes it comes back to
that finally with an
effort to unfold with
clarity this subject matter
the present voice looped
back to the first line
(Hawkins 1981, p. 17)
and also:
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trying to get it straight
for the poem within the poem
The poem combines immediately perceived phenomena with the
memory of what he has seen before:
birds through the glass
I know a row of trees through
the mist and a room of
feathered bed
(Hawkins 1981, p. 11)
It is in this constant swinging to and fro between his immediate
environment within the house, including that which is outside the
window, and that which comes in from afar, that the poet locates
his search for identity. The poem is not saying these are things that
made me, but rather these are the things that are part of the process
of constructing my identity and a space that my body has produced.
The focus of the poem is the everyday, and it has formal elements
that make it similar to a diary. It reads as if written a page to a day, and
many of the opening lines to each page/section give the impression
of a ‘fresh start’ to the poem, as in the three examples below:
O little life
where is the way forward
(Hawkins 1981, p. 13)
empty day again
you have formed
(Hawkins 1981, p. 17)
morning
then afternoon
(Hawkins 1981, p. 19)
From such beginnings the poems, or particular pages of the sequence,
follow an irregular pattern of inside the house, outside the house, afar
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(Hawkins 1981, p. 15)
(which can involve things coming in from away as well as the poet
moving out of himself) and then an ending which involves either a
folding back into the poem or an opening out from where the poem
is. An example, and all the poems demonstrate differences, is:
no more blue whiles
put away pages of paper
this time keep secret all your brother thoughts
and winter on a horn of light
is sky full
the ash is filled with birds
as the eye wanders
while the birds stream
what are they
in the distance the trick
of light fails
without you and with you
as on a pillow of feathers the mind
glides with electric borders of
light the light now is green
and I have been taken away,
sea voyage, in my own thought I drift
watching winter leaves much to be done
yes chop wood and the air chills
(Hawkins 1981, p. 22)
The ‘story’ of the poem is fairly straightforward. The poet tidies up
his work for the day, his thinking time over. He begins to notice
and describe the winter light, notices the birds but fails to identify
them as the light is failing. He then drifts off into his own thoughts
while simultaneously recognizing there are chores to be done and
the temperature is dropping outside. The poem opens on a space of
work before shifting to a transitory or ‘between space’ of watching
the world outside where ‘the birds stream’, a process which leads into
an inner space of contemplation. This is broken by a realization of
his physical situation, a coming down to earth in the last line and a
half, to the place in which he is located. The ‘other’ is both directly
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addressed as another person, ‘without you ’ and is a reflection of
the self within the poem ‘and I have been taken away’. The spatial
structure of within and without is reflected in the language of the
poem. It begins on a business-like note, ‘no more blue whiles’, and
finishes on a similar tone, ‘yes chop wood and the air chills’. In
between the language becomes increasingly meditative until ‘in my
own thoughts I drift/ watching winter leaves’, where the tone turns
on the pun from ‘leaves’ (as the plural of leaf and as the verb to
leave), and he drops back to earth.
Some of Hawkins’s other poems seem to run counter to the
domestic and ‘everyday’ frames of ‘Tell Me No More ’ and are set
in ‘distant’ or imaginary places. He does not, however, use the exotic
as ‘nostalgia directed towards the distant and the strange for the
sake of novelty’ (Preminger 1975, p. 265) but to question notions of
authenticity through the creation of imaginary spaces. Rather than
resulting from travel, they are products of processes of globalization,
of the ability in a post-modern world to experience other cultures
through cuisine, television and film as simulations of themselves. In
the chapbook Well, You Could Do there is a sequence of some 14
poems entitled ‘China’. In the first poem he clearly describes China as
an alternative reality that refers to, but is not entirely, the geographical reality that is China. It is also a mental construct that he relates
to his immediate surroundings:
China the brain is
too busy for you (Hawkins 1979)
And then later in the same poem:
in Brixton the houses
are made of mud and wattle
very little money called glue
(Hawkins 1979)
Other poems in the sequence are less clear about the status of ‘China’.
In ‘5’ it operates as no more than a pun: ‘I think I’ll buy a china/
blue teapot’. In ‘The Fortune Cookie’ he goes from fried duck to the
duck in the bath and once again combines a reference to cuisine,
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the fried duck, and a more culturally British scene by referring to
‘what it quacked/ in the bath when/ it was yellow’ (Hawkins 1979).
In ‘China’ Hawkins is drawing distant places into the space of the
poem and, through their juxtaposition with his everyday experience,
drawing on the imagery to construct a space other than his location.
As Hawkins says when interviewed, China is for him both ‘imaginary
and real, and a place that isn’t a place’ (Riley 2000, p. 27).
In ‘From the Chinese’, from the 1988 book At Last Away, the title
suggests a translation, but there is nothing to say of what. On the
other hand the title could be a reference to a take-away meal as in
‘get something from the Chinese on your way home’. The poem is in
seven sections, each one containing between four and six unrhymed
couplets and the ‘I’ in the poem is firmly located in the Chinese
landscape. The poetry is sparse, reflecting a clean and uncluttered
landscape which hovers somewhere between willow pattern and the
post-nuclear world that William Burroughs describes in Cities of the
Red Night. In the first couplet of the poem Hawkins uses capitals:
in the Nine Wilds
the People’s Temple
(Hawkins 1988, p. 1)
suggesting the names of real places. The next line appears to deny
that, referring to ‘eight continents’ and an ‘orbit of stars’ as the place
where ‘Chang handed/ me his tracing’. The ‘tracing’ suggests a map;
on the other hand it could be a child in school (Hawkins was a schoolteacher for part of his life) who has completed a piece of work and
is handing it in. As well as a series of exotic descriptions that appear
to make sense but on closer examination do not, there are a series of
biological references to speech and memory. There are ‘towers in the
five coloured air’ and ‘mist hides the fast planets/ from the drained
lowlands’. There are series of numbers that don’t add up, ‘Nine Wilds’,
‘eight continents’, ‘four edges of heaven’, ‘eighth month’ and, finally,
‘nine turns’, to coincide with the ‘Nine Wilds’. Within this off-centre
landscape so carefully depicted, yet not finally constructed, there are
both humans and animals. There is a ‘me’ in the first line who is
handed a tracing by ‘Chang’. In the second section a ‘he’ ‘chose our
planet/ and our stars’ and ‘searched the green/ void’. This might be
Chang from Section 1, it might be a projection of the first person or
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it might be someone different altogether. In Section 3 we are introduced to ‘the brain of the ape’ that is ‘able to summon the powers
of healing’. The poem seems simple enough, and there seem recognizable characters and narratives within it and the landscape seems
plausible but on closer examination the poem spins off and out of
representation into physical impossibilities. It is a place in which the
poet can ‘lose himself’ and construct a complex interplay between
ideas of coherence and clarity. It is, though, a poem in which the poet
can also find himself, a space into which he can project identities. The
poem suggests both the deterministic and structured order of Deleuze
and Guattari’s genetic and biological tracing, and the disorder of a
journey that he makes up as he constructs the map. It is an order
and a structure that eludes him by the intrusion of the messiness of
everyday life.
A later book, The Coiling Dragon (1999), more explicitly combines
the themes of domestic space and the exotic. It is not a poem written
in the poetics of collage in the way that ‘China’ was, a process of
placing the familiar next to the strange or the domestic next to the
foreign, but a poem that combines surfaces and depths, a poem that
takes you down into itself before it throws you back out. One way
Hawkins does this is through that most common of poetic devices,
the metaphoric process of giving one thing the qualities of another.
The city in the poem becomes a wok in which there is ‘simmering,
stewing, deep sea frying’, then a ‘city of radical pronouncements’
(Hawkins [1999]). Yet things do not add up as they should in a metaphor. There is no resolution or synthesis: things seem to go together
but also stay stubbornly apart. An address to the city in Line 4 now
becomes problematized; the relatively straightforward ‘you remain
my favourite’ is complexified by ‘my favourites sell condiments’. Is
there more than one city? Is the favourite in Line 4 nothing to do
with the favourites in Line 12? Or are the condiments the favourites, the syntax distorted? The condiments themselves start off as
unusual, ‘ginger juice, lily buds’, and end up completely fanciful, ‘star
anis on clouds’ before the next line slides into cod mythology, ‘five
immortals/ riding rams’. The rest of the page then slips from the
cooking through Isfahan (a province or town in Iran and a type of
hand-woven rug), through the gut, yanked by the dragon to a meditative chant on city. It is a city of many characteristics and many
perspectives.
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His particular technique is to use words and phrases in combinations that at first appearance seem to follow syntactic and paradigmatic norms, but which on closer examination do not; where readers
think themselves on solid ground before the rug is pulled away from
underneath them, opening out into a space where many connections become possible. On page 1 of The Coiling Dragon, as he makes
the switch from city to cooking and refers to ‘simmering, stewing,
deep sea frying’, he echoes both deep-fat frying and deep-sea fishing,
but says neither. When he uses ‘teeming’ in Line 4, one thinks of a
teeming population, but this is soon to be recast as waters teeming
with fish, and then turned on its head in the penultimate line of the
page in ‘city of teeming rain’. Poem 9 has a ‘Punminister’ and:
brews of wheat and rye
put wriggles into prepositional constructions
have an almost pissed
off effect on the reader
wanting satisfying habits
there must be an axis of selection
bound up with an axis of combination in composition
so many worms like scrambled legs
(Hawkins [1999])
This section illustrates a source of tension in the poem, a movement back and forth between the poem as a construction with no
single point of origin, a grid system into which activities and ideas
can be mapped, and a more organic and rhizomatic structure. There
is a humanist desire for coherence, through the rhythm of time
and history, alongside a post-modern playfulness in which any word
which sounds a bit like another word can take its place along the
paradigmatic axis of the line, thereby discarding any accumulated
meaning. So the poem, and the series of poems, is a construct that
combines the organicist notion of the rhizome and the Euclidean
space of the grid, but one that takes its coordinates from a body
in space, rather than from a predetermined system. These coordinates are always on the move, always seen from different perspectives
within a four-dimensional space that combines the axis of space
with the axes of time and history. Because it is constantly reformed
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with every shift of perspective the ‘grid’ doesn’t limit possibilities
of combination or impose ‘coordinates’ on all words and objects.
The success of the poem is that it keeps a series of dualisms in play,
never allowing them to fall into simple dichotomies. The Punminister
invents the word‘ pallaksch/ which meant either yes or no/ and
served as a means for avoiding yes or no’ (Hawkins [1999]).
The Coiling Dragon is a poem about places, real and imagined,
language and identity. The space of the city in the poem is not a
result of a planning exercise, but occurs because of the movements
of bodies through space and the way they relate to each other. It
uses a version of the techniques of narrative prose: bits of stories, the
odd character that appears and reappears. The first-person narrator
shifts around under the pressure to give it a stable identity but is
located within the contents and contexts Hawkins chooses for his
work. He is resistant to indeterminacy while finding the evidence of
it everywhere. His work over the last 25 years is an exploration of
his identity, from the search for a clarity that never really emerges
in ‘Tell Me No More and Tell Me’, to a desire for coherence amongst
the endless punning of The Coiled Dragon. And this exploration of
identity is not only historical, although it is carried out over time, but
it is also spatial. Not only does he locate himself in different imagined
spaces, he also uses ideas of space, often linking the structures of
language to the structures of space, to inform the space of the poem.
Fanny Howe
The American writer Fanny Howe fails to fit into any of the major
poetic groupings. She comments on the spatial and paratactic nature
of the work of the language writers when she says they:
perform the critical function of putting work into a verbal landscape without judgement (content) which renders the words equal.
I admire this work a great deal and regret that I am unable to free
myself from the language of a charged romantic.
(Brito 1992, p. 102)
She, somewhat ironically, oversimplifies her position. Her poetry, like
language writing, draws on an implicit understanding of relationships
between language, meaning and identity. The ‘I’ in her poems is not
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an unquestioned ‘I’ (or eye) or a fixed perspective. She plays with the
idea of being hidden, of being other, of identifying with others and
of disappearing altogether, and her later work is composed of layers,
of moving in and out of alternative realities, perceived from different
hiding places. In her essay ‘Artobiography’, she says:
words come through me, and, it is only up to me to be
prepared The massive amount of revision I put the words
through is only a way of absolving them from the taint of having
passed through me at all. I want to abolish the personal, or hurl
it to the furthest point; and polish the impersonal, until its dazzle
unfocusses a complete clarity, as with everything good.
(Perelman 1985, p. 206).
It is therefore not only the speaking ‘I’ who hides, successfully or
otherwise, in the content of her poems, but she claims here that she
tries to eradicate the presence of self within the structures of language.
Her description of the process is physical: language becomes tainted
and like other matter it is ‘passed through’ the body. In contrast the
impersonal language ‘dazzles’, freed of the clumsy gesture of the body
writing.
Rae Armantrout, writing about Howe’s poem ‘Q’ in A Folio for Fanny
Howe (Green 1999), relates Howe’s writing to ideas of the nomadic,
quoting the poem which begins ‘the neo-neolithic urban nomad
school of poetry’ (Howe 1999, p. 32). That line is a satirical critique
of schools of modernist poetics, and the end of the poem a plea for
collectivity where ‘we’re lost at last/ and can really see through words
including “me”/ to the other side that multiplies/ the interior matter’
(p. 32). As Armantout says, Howe’s ‘nomadic anarchic collective’
is ultimately embodied in the form of the serial poem itself where
‘sequential we’s [are] the shape of these poems’ (Armantrout 1999,
p. 45). Howe moves through the isolation of the individual to a
communitarian collectiveness.
While Howe is drawing on the idea of the nomad to describe the
wandering of her ‘characters’, her irony should not be lost. Within
the context of the poem ‘Q’, and particularly its many references to
war, Howe is making a distinction between the nomad, who moves
because she wants to, and the refugee who moves because she must.
In her essay ‘Purgatory and Other Places’ she says: ‘To choose to
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leave home is one thing. To be forced – by political or economic
realities – is another. If you have to leave home and inhabit a place
where you don’t want to be, you reach the very lowest point in uncertainty’ (Howe 2003, p. 103). Her critique is of the more romantic
configuration of the nomadic and a rhetoric of globalization which
preferences the mobile over the static; a configuration in which the
global population is able to move at will and be at home anywhere
and everywhere, capable of shifting between multiple identities and
multiple languages. Refugees (Deleuze and Guattari use the more
neutral term ‘migrant’), by way of contrast, are lost and bewildered
in their new surroundings. They have only a few bits and pieces
of their old life with which to demonstrate their identity and the
land and landscape itself are not just ‘unknown’, but ‘alien’. Even
the weather itself becomes ‘menacing’, and the climate ‘lack[s] any
corresponding climate from your own past’ (Howe 2003, p. 102).
Out of their homeland they are unutterably and often abjectly other,
needing to either band together with other refugees to maintain their
identity or become assimilated into their new culture and surroundings and therefore change their identity. As Deleuze and Guattari say:
the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if
the second point is uncertain, unforeseen or not well localized.
But the nomad goes from point to point as a consequence and as
a factual necessity: in principle points for him are relays along a
trajectory.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 50)
For Howe the refugee needs to adopt the strategy of the nomad: ‘Our
task is to read the Bedouins/ now that we’re lost at last’ (Howe 1999,
p. 32). The poem ‘Q’ begins: ‘We moved to be happy’ (p. 7). This
movement is in the context of global urbanization and where they
move to the ‘crash that we call a city’ (p. 7). There is an element of
compulsion to this movement though, an unstoppable force of the
water going ‘south for the winter’ that carried them ‘down like storm
driven gulls’ (p. 7). In the second poem in ‘Q’, ‘we’ are referred to as
‘A lost tribe searching for new digs’ (p. 8).
As the poem progresses its atmosphere becomes uneasier. In the
sixth poem ‘Everyone lacks reassurance’, in the seventh ‘Outside’s a
gray and wasted place./ Sleet slides into grease and trees/ into black
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Space and Identity 117
I was talking about a person
who was a place.
The place had one name
and infinite ways to get there.
One way was by speech.
When lost person is a lost place
first the word stays
in the voice. But then the ear
has disappeared.
You have a choice.
Relief – or fear.
(Howe 1999, p. 14)
The poem describes the trauma of people losing their ‘place’, and the
relationship between the language they speak and the place they live
in. The place was the centre, with ‘one name and infinite ways to get
there’, a sense which is lost. They become marginal and have to ‘fit
in’, to develop an appropriate voice. The ‘word stays/ in the voice’,
but there is no one who understands as ‘the ear has disappeared’.
In the fragmentation of communities through movement around
the world (often communities of resistance and subversion), individuals and groups become potentially more exposed to the exploitative nature of international capital and better suited to its needs.
The final couplet turns on the word ‘choice’, and the choice of the
refugee is relief: both freedom from fear of violent death and relief as
charity or parish relief. In the context of this stanza the ‘neo-neolithic
urban nomad school of poetry’ becomes not merely a witty jibe,
but an attack on a carelessness that fails to engage with the realities
of people’s lives. The nomad becomes a convenient metaphor for
the subversion of global colonization and a lifestyle choice for the
socially mobile. It works out differently for those who have no choice
but to move and whose lives are violently fragmented. Yet Howe is
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needles eyelass lace/ till alienation becomes delirium’ (Howe 1999,
pp. 12, 13). It is in the eighth poem that the theme of the refugee and
the relationship between identity and place becomes more explicit:
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
not simply calling for a nostalgic unity, a reassertion of place and
identity neither possible nor desirable, rather she is creating a poetry
in which abstract or theoretical assumptions are called into question
and examined against the harsh test of practice. Towards the end of
the sequence she outlines ‘home’, which is down:
The path I will never find
leads me to a farm
by the sea with a donkey
(Howe 1999, p. 35)
before going on to question its construction:
But what is a birthright?
Does it help me to write poems and live in a shoe?
(Howe 1999, p. 35)
Beginning with the word ‘we’, the poem ends with the assertion, ‘I’m
being split into the longitude of one’ (Howe 1999, p. 37), suggesting
both a development of identity over time and a splitting of that
identity by lateral movements and pressures.
Another collection from 1997, One Crossed Out, expresses its ambivalence in its title, simultaneously referring to the number ‘one’
crossed out, the letter ‘I’ as an alternative form of that number
or ‘one’ as a pronoun, crossed out. Howe sustains this ambivalence to the end, and the penultimate prose poem in the collection
begins:
One is my lucky number? Her sneakers were wearing down to two
gnarled scoops, but she was never surprised that the vertical
pronoun was also a number.
(Howe 1997, p. 60)
As well as the word ‘one’ referring to a pronoun and a number, the
figure ‘1’ and the letter ‘I’ become interchangeable. The blurb on the
back cover claims that:
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118
the poems speak in the voice of May, the girl crossed out, the
bad girl, the mad and drunk girl, the jailed and drugged girl. May
is swirling in language, and the language convinces us that we
really are deep in the core of human consciousness, near the foul
rag and bone shop of the heart. May is a neonomad, bringing to
the world the opposite of worldliness, offering a glimpse of the
invisible.
(Howe 1997)
May is also conditional: she may or she may not. Blurbs are meant to
help sell books, so it is not surprising that it tries to sell to the reader
a simplicity of expression that is not present in the poems. A reader
certainly doesn’t get one unified voice, but a number of voices; voices
which themselves question their own right to be voices. The poem
is an examination by Howe of more than the ‘character’ of May, it is
also an exploration of both the spaces that have produced May and
of the spaces she produces, including the hospital, the jail, the refuge
and the street. Sometimes the poem is difficult to locate, as in the
beginning of the title poem of the collection:
The walk up La Breaking to the Hills,
then a shortcut to rosemary and wild foresight. Walked her
burning around.
(Howe 1997, p. 46)
The sequence of two sentences, but three blocks of meaning, appears
paratactic in its structure. The first line leads you in gently, assuming
that it is possible to consider La Breaking and the capitalized ‘Hills’
as real places, but it doesn’t lead anywhere. The poem goes from
the ‘walk up’, to the ‘shortcut’ and then ‘around’. The first sentence
ends on a pun, and I keep reading forsythia for foresight. Rosemary
is probably a bush; a bush which ‘her’ is walked around and which
is either burning or the ‘her’ is burning in the sun. God speaks from
a burning bush.
The poems are not all this complex, but this speed of reference is
evident in many cases, introducing a bewildering range of images,
events and voices, and simultaneously presenting information and
obliterating it. A reader will struggle sometimes to find May in the
urban and rural landscapes Howe describes, as well as within the
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language of the poem. This is a key element of One Crossed Out, which
reflects Howe’s interest in the ‘Apophatic’ (see Romana Huk’s essay
in A Folio for Fanny Howe (1999) for a further discussion on this), a
theological concept of describing and expressing knowledge of God
by the use of negative, rather than positive attributes. God is therefore
described as infinite, invisible, incomparable, immortal and so on. The
final poem in One Crossed Out is called ‘The Apophatic Path’. It begins:
What isn’t what is
not Discover me
or try to find me.
If being is finding,
can you find me?
Who to, this address?
(Howe 1997, p. 61)
The poem ends, ‘even the base of me being, unknown’ (Howe 1997,
p. 62). May is therefore not simply some ‘other’ that we discover via
Howe’s descriptions of her actions and locations, but one also defined
by negation. This emphasizes both her economic and social marginalization as well as her humanity as someone created in God’s image. She
is unknowable. Huk draws on Derrida in describing Howe as ‘pursuing
a linguistic faultline alongside otherness that eschews hidden teleological ends in exchange for “a certain difference, a certain trembling,
a certain decentring that is not the position of an other centre”’ (Huk
1999, p. 68).
May exists within the language of the poem. Like the ‘I’ within the
poem ‘Q’, she also questions that existence and how the language is
a representation of it:
This time of year reminds me of the dot that
completes my name.
The dot over the letter that pertains to the first person
singular is a symbol for me of my head.
I always put on my dot when I’m already out of the word.
(Howe 1997, p. 10)
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120
The capital ‘I’ emphasizes the importance of ‘the first person/
singular’, yet May compares herself to the lower case ‘i’, which functions as a hieroglyph with the dot forming the head on the upright
body. Because of its process of negation, the poem does not define an
‘other’, but asks questions about how we know some ‘other’ and how
they can be represented. Lefebvre says, while describing the relationship between the body and space, that ‘we are concerned once again
with gaps and tensions, contacts and separations’ (Lefebvre 1991, p.
184). Although Howe works within a spatial aesthetic of simultaneity
and contiguity, and May exists where ‘past, present, and future exist
simultaneously’ (Howe 1997, p. 24), the poems also works within
social spaces where some are invisible, and refused their allotted space
and time:
No one asked ‘who’s there?’
Not not.
‘Not what? Not who?’
Not not you, but not not me neither. Here or then.
(Howe 1997, p. 52)
The negatives spin their own tale, denying the person, crossed out,
deleted but still there. Another poem also begins with a negative,
‘Nobody wants crossed-out girls around’ (Howe 1997, p. 53). A few
lines further on she says: ‘They only know how to wisecrack’. They go
with the flow of whatever is happening, ride the juggernaut, ‘make a
pact’ with ‘whatever happens to be the meaning of their days’ (p. 53).
When asked, ‘are you who’s who in America’, May, if that is the
speaker in this poem, replies with gallows humour, ‘No, I’m just here
with my corpse’.
Howe sets the dispossessed and the homeless (negatives to set
alongside immortal, infinite, etc.) in a variety of spaces, but draws
on their desire to be found inside their own history. Many of
the people in Howe’s poems ‘Q’ and ‘One Crossed Out’ seem to
be inhabiting barren landscapes and marginal spaces, with Howe
working creatively in the tension between the positive elements of
nomadism, the way in which it can question and subvert a desire for
control and homogeneity, and the despair of the homeless and the
refugee.
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Space and Identity 121
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I began this chapter by restating the pragmatic relationship between
place and identity. I demonstrated previously that Deleuze and
Guattari embrace the liberationist potential of the breakdown of
that relationship, and assert that people must step outside of the
striated space of the comfort zone of family and state in order to
experience freedom. They give Antonin Artaud, a surrealist poet who
suffered mental breakdown, as a literary example of the ‘schizo’ and
as someone who has ‘broken through the wall’ to ‘smooth space’. In
his poem ‘All Writing is Garbage’, Artaud attacks those who write as
if there is certainty between the word and what it means or signifies:
All those who come out of nowhere to try and put into
words any part of what goes
on in their minds are pigs.
All those who have points of reference in their minds in well localized areas of
their brains, all those who are masters of their language,
all those for whom words
have meanings – are pigs.
(Rothenberg and Joris 1995, p. 515)
Deleuze and Guattari claim that:
few accomplish the breakthrough of this schizophrenic wall or
limit the majority draw near the wall and back away horrified.
Better to fall back under the law of the signifier, marked by castration, triangulated in Oedipus.
(Deleuze and Guattari 1984, p. 135)
For some, of course, that journey through the wall will be a oneway trip, and I’m obviously not alone in feeling some irritation at
Deleuze and Guattari’s enthusiasm for an acutely painful condition.
Yet, in any discussion of the relationship between language, the
culture that produces it and the culture it produces, the schizophrenic
condition is undoubtedly fascinating. Sufferers of schizophrenia are
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Old endings and new beginnings
equally distributed across space and time, between gender and race,
and apparently unaffected by environmental conditions. Anthropologists have recently argued that schizophrenia is, in fact, a condition
coterminous with the development of language. The split between
reality and the representation of reality caused, for some, a condition
of confusion; the abstract and arbitrary nature of language always
seemed to have an oblique relationship to embodied experience.
Janusz Wróbel in his book Language and Schizophrenia (1990) argues
convincingly that schizophrenia is a semiotic illness, characterized
by a failure to understand the role of language in everyday communication and the relationship between language and experience.
The result is a language usage by schizophrenics that is fragmented
(crazed) and apparently unrelated to the here and now. R. D. Laing
in his study of schizophrenia in Sanity, Madness and the Family (1970)
emphasizes the anti-establishment nature of schizophrenic behaviour
and the way those he studied were often attracted to underground
and cult activities of 1960s Britain in preference to the stultifying
family environments.
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Space and Identity 123
Now You See It: Visual Poetry and
the Space of the Page
Histories of visual and concrete poetry
Despite its marginal status on an experimental wing of the literary
world, ‘concrete’ or ‘visual’ poetry, work that emphasizes the materiality of language and the visual elements of the poem, has been an
important presence in avant-garde movements throughout the twentieth century. The possibilities of digital technologies and the Internet
as ways of constructing and distributing work have increased interest.
Visual poetry is, of course, more concerned with space than linear
poetry, with the way in which the material of the poem is distributed
within its chosen medium, the space within which the text exists
and, particularly where the work’s performance is outside the pages
of a book, the spatial context in which it finds itself. The space that is
between the words in some visual poetry is not, therefore, necessarily
the space of the page within the context of the book or magazine. In
the ‘Poetry Plastique’ exhibition, for example, in 2001, text appears
written in the sky by David Antin, John Cage’s work consists of letters
printed on plexiglass, while Michael Snow produces a film made up of
words (see Sanders and Bernstein 2001). More recently the development of ‘web art’, distributed via the Internet, has drawn on the practices of visual and concrete poetry (see <http://www.ubuweb.com>
for example). If I’m arguing that the ‘spatial turn’ in social and
cultural theory has influenced the form and content of poetry, then
both the concepts and practices of visual poetry should be increasingly important to a range of practices.
124
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6
Interest in the visual in all poetry is nothing new. In the anthology Word Score Utterance, Choreography, in Verbal and Visual Poetry
the English poet Bob Cobbing says, ‘all poetry has a visual aspect’
(Cobbing and Upton 1998, Preface). In the same book Edwin
Morgan says:
Since most written or printed poetry already has a visual element,
it is probably wrong to regard visual or concrete poetry as a totally
new departure. A page of The Faerie Queene looks different from
a page of Paradise Lost, to say nothing of a page of ‘The Waste
Land’. These things hit the eye right away and affect our reading of
the work concerned. What ‘visual poetry’ does is foreground and
specialise and extend and sharpen something which has always
been there.
(Cobbing and Upton 1998)
We know a poem is a poem, first of all, because it looks like one. A
poem is (usually) made up of lines which, often arranged into verses,
normally stop before the right-hand margin. The arrangement of the
lines within a poem also affects the sound of the poem by emphasizing certain words or syllables and suggesting particular rhythms
and pauses. In a postscript to Kob Bok (Cobbing 1999a), a book which
includes a combination of visual and verbal texts, Cobbing again says
‘Concrete poetry is for me a return to an emphasis on the physical
structure of language – the sign made by the voice and the symbol
for that sign made on paper or in other material and visible form’
(Cobbing 1999a, Postscript).
Defining visual poetry is difficult; its practitioners were not only
explicitly internationalist and impatient of national boundaries, but
also challenged boundaries between art forms. Dick Higgins’s ‘Intermedia Chart’ (see Figure 6.1) (Rothenberg and Joris 1998, p. 428)
is a Venn diagram of a range of possible relationships between
visual poetry, conceptual art, happenings, mail art and other related
activities. Hopelessly complex at first glance it reveals itself as an
attempt visually to represent a series of relationships that do exist
or have existed in the past. As a diagram it is able to represent
that complexity without engaging in a reductive process of trying to
categorize the different art forms. On the other hand it doesn’t tell
us anything about what those different labels for art practices refer
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Visual Poetry and the Space of the Page 125
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
Figure 6.1 ‘Intermedia’, Dick Higgins (1995)
to. The American poet, artist and critic Johanna Drucker is equally
aware of the difficulties of categorization:
In the twentieth century the explorations of various typographic, calligraphic, and even sculptural manifestations contributes to a widespread proliferation of formal innovations. At
the end of the twentieth century there is a fully developed, very
complex, continually reinterrogated, and highly varied range of
work being produced in which visual and verbal distinctions are
difficult to sustain.
(Jackson, Voss and Drucker 1996, p. 39)
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126
She traces influence on contemporary visual poetry through the
Russian and Italian Futurists, Dada and the Noigandres group from
Brazil. Lines of influence criss-cross, some going back to literary
modernism in Pound, Stein and Joyce, while others operate in a more
interdisciplinary tradition through Dada and the Futurists. Many of
the practitioners were unaware of contemporary work going on in
other parts of the world and it is not until the 1950s and the production of a variety of manifestos that ideas of concrete poetry begin to
coalesce. These are soon fragmented again by an enormous variety of
activity including Burroughs’s and Gysin’s ‘cut-ups’, the typewriter
experimentation of poets like Charles Olson and the interest in the
material nature of texts by the language poets in the United States and
Canada. Meanwhile in England, poets such as Bob Cobbing began
to subvert the ‘official’ use of office machinery to produce a variety
of work that often had no words at all. Others produced ‘art books’,
one-off visual objects, while two-dimensional and three-dimensional
visual art increasingly incorporated text within it, and text-based sitespecific work found its way into the discourses and practices of arts
policy makers and civic planners.
There are earlier examples. Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de Dés jamais
n’abolira le Hasard’ from the 1890s is a poem which implicitly asks
questions about how the appearance of a poem affects its reading. In
their commentary to ‘Un Coup de Dés’ in Poems for the Millennium,
Rothenberg and Joris stress the importance of Mallarmé’s work to
twentieth-century poetics and author theory by referring to the way
in which:
These visual/musical inventions prefigured most of the important
moves by poets after him, as did his explorations of ‘chance’ and
open-ended meaning, both of which gave to language & process a
share of the authority/authorship previously reserved for the poet.
(Rothenberg and Joris 1995, p. 76)
David Scott in Pictorialist Poetics and Penny Florence in Mallarmé,
Manet and Redon, on the other hand, usefully relocate Mallarmé’s
poem in the historical context of France of the nineteenth century,
and as a work that arises from the links between visual art and poetry
at that time. For Florence the integration of text into visual, or the
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Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
in pictorialist poetry, the poem asserts itself not only as a text to be
read as in conventional discourse, but also, like the painting, as an
artistic arrangement of signifiers. Its language functions primarily
on an aesthetic level, the communication of meaning sometimes
playing a merely subsidiary role.
(Florence 1986, p. 2)
This is a sensible conclusion to arrive at, and it is certainly the case
that the idea of ‘meaning’ in visual texts needs to be approached
with even more caution than in others, but I am not sure that I
entirely agree. The use of text in work that is designed according
to a visual aesthetic will break down conventional syntax and will
place words in new contexts, but the result is more often a dialogue
between the ‘meanings’ a word carries around with it and the visual
apprehension of that word in the context of the poem. It is in this
type of correspondence that the density and breadth of meaning in
visual poetry can be found.
‘Un Coup de Dés’ is a long poem made up of a title page followed
by 11 two-page spreads. The title runs through the poem, with words
from it appearing in capital letters, sometimes isolated on a single
page. The poem is ‘composed by the page’, with each two-page
spread making a ‘picture’ through the use of eight different typefaces.
I have immediate access to three book versions and one internet
version (in Rothenberg and Joris 1995, p. 76; Scott 1988; Florence
1986; and at <http://www.poetes.com/mallarme/coup_de.htm>).
The book versions have the spine dividing each page, forcing the lines
on to one page or another and suggesting two left-hand margins,
one on each page. This is absent from the internet version which
has, in effect, a single left hand margin from which all the lines are
measured off. This is a more satisfying representation, probably closer
to Mallarmé’s original vision of the poem (see Scott 1988, p. 142).
There are a number of analyses of the content of the poem (see, for
example, Florence 1986, pp. 84–126 and Scott 1988, pp. 138–46), but
I want to try to draw out the implications of Mallarmé’s procedural
and formal interests and try to explain why Rothenberg and Joris
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arrangement of text according to a visual aesthetic, results in the
referential qualities of the text becoming ‘subisidiary’:
would see him as having ‘prefigured most of the important moves by
poets after him’.
As well as the usual formal considerations of stanza, line, syntax
and sound, the poem uses the page as a site for the visual construction
of the poem out of the material of language, combining the effect
of the arrangement of the material on the page with the referential
qualities of the words and their syntactical relationships. The arrangement of lines, shifting left-hand margins and the use of white space
all affect the rhythmic aspects of the language, the pace of reading,
and the way attention is given to particular words. Scott also refers
to the way:
The page thus asserts itself both as an ironic denial of language’s
positive rational gestures and as a potentially symbolic field,
capable, silently, of reverberating, extending, or enlarging the irrational or unconscious implications of the text.
(Scott 1988, p. 139)
While the poem is a picture, it is an abstract one, and as such is
‘potentially symbolic’. It is perceived both synchronically, all at once
in a form of gestalt experience, and diachronically, in that it is ‘read’
over a period of time. Scott’s point is that the visual arrangement and
the fragmented syntax potentially transmits a range of non-verbal
meanings which add to the verbal material and that, together, they
produce a variety of readings and a variety of potential meanings.
When I read the page headed ‘LE NOMBRE (THE NUMBER)’, I am
not sure how to read the lines. The eye is thrown backwards and
forwards across the page, moving from capitals to italics in tiny font
size. The final words of the title, ‘LE HASARD (CHANCE)’ is in bold
capitals and cuts across the lower section of the right-hand page
(Figure 6.2). I’m not sure whether this is to be read as a delay after
the previous section of the title some three pages back or as part of
the text on that page. It is both of course, a fact that opens the word
out to multiple possibilities, see-sawing between reference points. It
is both ‘as indifferent as CHANCE’ and a continuation of ‘NEVER
WILL ABOLISH’.
Crucially, the poem plays with ideas of poetic time through its
spatial arrangement. Spreading the title over four pages dispersed
throughout the poem, for example, interferes with the flow of the
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Visual Poetry and the Space of the Page 129
‘Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard’, Stéphane Mallarmé
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130
Figure 6.2
reading process. I am not always sure in what order to read the lines,
whether some should have more emphasis than others and how I
should pace the reading. Given a Shakespearean sonnet, as a crude
example, most readers would produce an identical reading in terms
of word order, and a broadly similar reading in terms of duration
through stress, rhythm and pace. Faced with ‘Un Coup de Dés’ it is
highly unlikely that this would be the case, and this is not simply the
result of a deficiency in understanding or experience to be overcome
by further study. The poem, through its form, challenges the idea
that there is a sense of a final, complete or correct reading somewhere
within the text. The poem lends itself to, and encourages, diverse
readings or performances, and it is through this idea of a reading,
whether private or public, as a performance, as something with a
particular duration and process, that I can approach visual poetry. To
do so, otherwise, would mean either simply expressing bafflement at
the variety of possible interpretations, or only dealing with the poem
at a conceptual level and failing to grapple with the complexities of
the referential nature of the text. The idea of each reading, whether
out loud and in public or silently to oneself, as being a different
performance, enables a more detailed engagement with the material
of the poetry in the absence of a determined word order or any sense
of duration.
Visual poetry and the poetic line
Free verse on a page is initially identified by the use of the line that
breaks before the right-hand margin. The line brings together the idea
of the poem as a unit of ‘time’, in the way it creates rhythm within
the poem, and as the primary influence on the spatial organization
of the poem. The importance of the line can be simply illustrated. If
a poem were reprinted in different versions, the lines would remain
the same. Almost anything else about its appearance could change,
the typeface and the numbers of lines to particular pages, but the line
would remain as the principal structuring device of free verse. The
poet Steve McCaffery stresses a relationship between time and space
in the line:
At the outset let me say that I don’t consider linear and visual
as antinomial. The line is, and always has been both visual
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Others are more cautious, and in his book Free Verse, Charles O.
Hartman distinguishes between the way poetry is organized on the
page (which he calls the spatial element), and the temporal factors
in its measure and pace and the duration of its reading:
But we can at least learn more about poetry by considering
its relationship to space and time Certainly both space and
time are involved, but it seems to me that the spatial characteristics of poetry have always been secondary. Our poetic
conventions derive from a time when poetry was not only aural
but oral Some critics now interest themselves in ecriture,
in books as books and not as records of speech. If this idea
should gain ascendancy over the way we read, the spatial element
in poetry might take on a greater importance written verse
always involves some admixture of spatial organization. The
shape on the page of metered stanzas creates a presumption of
order Nevertheless for the present we continue to think of
language, and thus verse, as a temporal medium.
(Hartman 1980, p. 12)
Time and space, for Hartman, are related to the sound of the poem
as heard, a process which occurs over time, and the poem as visual
arrangement, an act of perception which occurs in a spatialized
‘moment’, when all the material is spread out before the reader. He
goes on to emphasize:
The prosody of a poem is the poet’s method of controlling the
reader’s temporal experience of the poem, especially his attention
to that experience.
(Hartman 1980, p. 13)
For Hartman, poetry is experienced (performed) over time and its
organization and arrangement control the ‘time’ of the poem and the
reader’s/performer’s experience. Syntax and prosody all play their part.
Regular (quantitatively measured) verse provides blocks of poetry on
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and temporal, appearing as radial, vertical, diagonal, as well as
horizontal.
(Cobbing and Upton 1998)
Figure 6.3 ‘Silencio’, Eugen Gomringer (1954)
the page, its regularity in space matched by its metrical regularity
in time (its measure). In free verse the turn of the line provides the
shape of the poem on the page.
Visual poetry implicitly and explicitly challenges this. It is in
the main non-linear, or uses the line in such a way that the
reading becomes ambiguous. Time becomes arbitrary or absent and
a reading could take a fraction of a second or forever. How is time
present in a classic concrete poem such as Gomringer’s ‘Silencio’?
(Figure 6.3). What ‘timing’ is indicated in Steve McCaffery’s Carnival
with its collage of words, letters and graphic images palimpsestically arranged over and under each other? (Figure 6.4). The word
order, weighting of each word and the stress patterns within a line
are absent from most visual poems and while individual ‘performances’ of the poems will each have a duration, this is not necessarily
derived from any sense of timing contained within the prosody of the
poem.
Other ways of suggesting or controlling readings emerged. The
proliferation of the typewriter as a tool for the composition of poetry
further allowed free-verse poets to easily locate words with accuracy
on the page. Poets could simultaneously pay attention to the appearance of a poem and use that appearance to ‘score’ a reading of the
poem according to their individual physical characteristics. This was
done through exploiting the typographical possibilities of the typewriter, by leaving spaces between words, between lines, altering line
length and changing both right- and left-hand margins with some
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Visual Poetry and the Space of the Page 133
(a) Carnival – Panel 1 : 2
Figure 6.4 Carnival, Steve McCaffery (1999). Panel 1: 2, 3, 4 and Panel 2:
CHANGE OF ADDRESS
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134
(b) Carnival – Panel 1 : 3
Figure 6.4 (Continued)
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(c) Carnival – Panel 1 : 4
Figure 6.4 (Continued)
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(d) Carnival – Panel 2: CHANGE OF ADDRESS
Figure 6.4 (Continued)
accuracy and consistency, and the way a poet can ‘indicate exactly
the breath, the pauses, the suspension even of syllables’ (Olson 1997,
p. 245). If a gap was so long, as here for example, then the voice
would pause for a certain length of time. The space on the page
becomes part of the rhythm of the reading or performing of the poem.
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In her essay ‘After Free Verse’, Marjorie Perloff refers to a ‘a poetics
of postlinearity or multilinearity’ (Perloff 1998, p. 156). Just as free
verse celebrated breaking down the restrictions of metrical verse,
visual or non-linear poetics celebrates the freedom that comes from
refusing to stay ‘in line’. She goes on to say:
Who would have thought that less than forty years after Olson
celebrated the ‘LINE’ as the embodiment of the breath and the
signifier of the heart the line would be perceived as a boundary, a
confining border, a form of packaging.
(Perloff 1998, p. 156)
In an afterword to the anthology of ‘experimental’ poetry by women,
Out of Everywhere, Wendy Mulford refers to ‘texts which have been
generated on different principles, which are multi and non-linear’
(O’Sullivan 1996, p. 239). If, in the movement towards modernism,
metrically structured poetry gave way to free verse, with the line as
the key characteristic of the ‘poetic’ and sustaining the difference
between free verse and prose, then linear free verse has, in some
respects and at the experimental edge, given way to post-linear or
multi-linear verse. Reading Out of Everywhere reveals work in ‘prose’
lines, some of which fill the page, others of which leave large gaps.
Some combine the graphic with the verbal, others use a range of fonts
or shift around the left- and right-hand margins or use capitals out of
their ordinary usage. Some of the poems do look like contemporary
free verse with a solid left-hand margin, but surprisingly few. The
time of the line, it appears from the evidence of this anthology, is
replaced by the space of the page.
The 1950s and 1960s
It is worth keeping Out of Everywhere in mind when reading an earlier
book, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, edited by Emmett Williams
and published by Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press; an anthology which is in many ways a defining moment in the history of
concrete poetry and a kind of summation of the work from the 1950s
and 1960s. The careful use of the indefinite article (‘An’) suggests
that the editor and publisher did not want it to be seen as ‘The’
defining collection, but its cast list includes the key figures involved
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in the international development of visual poetry in the middle of the
twentieth century and includes not only Emmett Williams himself,
but Henri Chopin, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Ian Hamilton
Finlay, Bob Cobbing and many others.
The anthology is explicitly internationalist. Not until the appearance in 1995 of Poems for the Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg
and Pierre Joris, have so many different nationalities been represented between two covers. If one purpose of an anthology is to
create a national ‘treasure house’ or ‘show case’ of poetry, then An
Anthology of Concrete Poetry has no national agenda or allegiance and
implicitly questions the relevance of national identity as an organizing feature of a poetic movement. In the introduction Williams
comments on how, in concrete poetry, ‘the confused geography of
its beginnings reflects the universality of its roots’ (E. Williams 1967).
There is a relatively simple explanation for the anthology’s international perspective. Because it implicitly questions the referential
nature of language, visual poetry can bring together poetry from
different languages relatively easily. Words become visual objects
and are interpreted as such. Their meanings, and their syntagmatic
and paradigmatic relationships to other words within the language
system, become only one function amongst others. Max Bense talks
about ‘poetry on a level of metalanguage, poetry in a world of its
own’ and ‘the grey haze of meanings that hovers over each surface’
(E. Williams 1967). Augusto de Campos talks about ‘Concrete Poetry:
tension of things-words in space-time’ (E. Williams 1967). The word
is therefore a ‘thing’ in its own right, a mark within the visual space of
the poem. What it refers to, and its part within a particular language
system, is only one role within the poem.
The works of Bob Cobbing, in the books Shreiks and Hisses and Kob
Bok, for example, are often visual texts without an identifiable word
in them. In these the eye roams around the page, looking at both
the overall composition of the page and possible references of individual shapes or textures. There are layers and folds, and things permanently hidden within those folds, the three-dimensional appearance
never unfolding on the two-dimensional surface. In an earlier poem,
‘WOWROMWRORMM’ (Figure 6.5), from An Anthology of Concrete
Poetry, the poem is made out of words, but their blurring turns them into
the shape of the worm the title nearly says in a verbal and visual response
to Apollinaire’s poem of ‘Pleut’, which it both resembles and reverses
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Figure 6.5 ‘WORM’, Bob Cobbing (1966)
to indicate that worms come after rain. Dom Sylvester Houedard talks
of ‘wobble’ and ‘interweave’ in the poem, where the poem, while
static, gives the illusion of movement to produce a text that is only
semi-legible. A number of poems in Kob Bok use the same technique.
Some words are blurred until they become indistinguishable, others
are letters that look like words but are not, while others are lists of
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140
slang or anagrams reflecting each other across the centre of the page.
Another looks like it has been juddered out of the printer, the same line
repeated a number of times before the paper is passed through again.
Concrete poetry of the 1950s and 1960s implicitly allied itself to a
politics of the Left and, through links to Situationism and Fluxus, to
processes of subversion. In much of the work there is an implicit anticonsumerist or anti-capitalist message. A political excitement comes
off the pages of An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, a kind of homemade localized radicalism (many of the poets talk about ways in
which their poems could become public art and exist outside literary
spaces) within a global movement. It is reminiscent of Situationism
in its aims of retaking public space both through the intrusion of
artworks (concrete poems) and the colonization of language itself,
subverting its forms and structures. ‘Writers Forum’ a London-based
workshop and press that focuses on visual and concrete poetry and
has published over one thousand works since 1963, is an example
of this ‘grassroots’ approach. The publications are often simple,
photocopied reproductions. There is no marketing department, no
commercial distribution network. It is a cottage industry that gives
the participants control over the means and ways of production, its
roots closer to protest groups and the anarchist movement than more
literary circles.
Graffiti artists: from clean concrete to dirty visuals
In An Anthology of Concrete Poetry the majority of the works demonstrates a continuation of the typographical experimentation of the
Futurists and Dadaists. They emphasize the two-dimensional surface
of the page and work in blocks of text which create a particular design.
Well known examples include Gomringer’s ‘Silencio’ (Figure 6.3) and
Pignatari’s ‘beba coca cola’ (Figure 6.6), in which the poem and
the page are constructed by clearly delineated blocks of text, the
page cut up into the black of the text and the white of the paper.
Within this majority there are some significantly different examples.
Emmett Williams produces a ‘rubber-stamp poem, from a genre I
called “universal poems”, probably because I furnished spectators
with rubber stamps and let them construct the poems’ (E. Williams
1967) (Figure 6.7). In a poem such as this, the letters and the words
they may make up are obliterated by the repeated use of rubber
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Figure 6.6 ‘beba coca cola’, Décio Pignatari (1957)
stamps. A number of other poets either overtype or type words so
close to each other they lose their individual identity and become
part of a patterned chain demonstrating a shift from the ‘clean’ twodimensional typographical experimentation to what McCaffery calls
the more ‘dirty’ process of layering and obliteration. Describing the
‘range of difference within the products of concretism’ (Jackson, Voss
and Drucker 1996, p. 400) McCaffery refers to:
the presence of two fundamental tendencies. One towards the
clean and the other towards the dirty. Dirty concrete characterises much of the British scene (for instance the work of Bob
Cobbing, Paula Claire, Bill Griffiths, Clive Fencott, cris cheek,
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Figure 6.7 ‘rubber-stamp poem’, Emmett Williams (1958)
and Lawrence Upton). Which can be described as a preference
for textual obliteration rather than manifestation, and the use of
found objects as notation for sound performance In contrast
‘clean’ concrete is epitomised in the spatialist texts of Pierre and Ilse
Garnier, Gomringer’s konstellationen, the semiotic texts of Décio
Pignatari, and in much of the earlier work of the Campos brothers.
(Jackson, Voss and Drucker 1996, p. 400)
He suggests that ‘dirty’ concrete poetry engaged with and interrogated the tendency of ‘clean’ poetry towards the ‘closure’ of the text
and the production of a ‘reified condition as object’ (Jackson, Voss
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and Drucker 1996, p. 400). There are other connected differences. The
first is the further development of ideas of the architectural, and a
subsequent interest in ‘three dimensional’ or layered work as against
work which is fundamentally two dimensional. This introduces the
idea of the work as a lived space, like a building one inhabits and
which one constructs by moving through it. The second is the relationship between dirty concrete and ideas of the ‘baroque’. These
find their most complex expression in Gilles Deleuze’s work in The
Fold (2001), where he uses the ideas of Leibniz to develop the idea of
the baroque in visual art through an examination of the ‘fold’ and
the ‘pleat’.
Ideas about space that have changed, and that change, is reflected
in the poetry. Rather than space being envisaged as a pre-existing
surface or container within which the material of the poem is
arranged, the space of the poem is now produced by the writer and
reader in the act or performance of writing and reading. Perspective is
no longer fixed, as it was for much earlier graphically based concrete
poetry, but shifts according to viewpoint. Architectural form acts as a
useful analogy. It is three dimensional and designed to be seen from
without and within. The person enters the building and, as she moves
through it, creates a series of spaces defined both by the boundaries
of the building and their sensory perception. It can be seen all at
once, from a distance, but it also has to be seen in bits, experienced
from the inside. The complexity of ‘dirty’ concrete suggests a similar
reading process. The reader has to move about within the poem in
order to produce a range of different spaces.
The relationship between ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ concrete poetry can
also, in part, be illuminated by relationships between classical and
baroque architectural styles. The baroque is celebratory, energetic and
playful, and contains ornament and decoration beyond notions of
function which rarely give up their entire significance in one glance
or if viewed from one perspective. In his book Reflections on Baroque,
Robert Harbison says:
Baroque buildings have has never ceased to annoy the purists
because they strive after the impossible, aiming to suggest to
viewers that they are watching an unfolding process rather than a
fixed and finished composition.
(Harbison 2000, p. 1)
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Visual Poetry and the Space of the Page 145
impressionistic grammar, so fertile in spreading confusion or at
least uncertainty about whether the word at the end of a line is a
noun or a verb, about when the hovering or suspended sense will
be allowed to find temporary rest or final closure.
(Harbison 2000, p. 6)
Although he draws in references from across the arts, Harbison is
ultimately coy about the relationship between the baroque and literature, saying that even writers like Milton are ‘not exactly Baroque
but like Baroque by a kind of metaphorical extension’ (2000, p. 227).
Frank J. Warnke, on the other hand, in his 1972 book Versions of
Baroque: European Literature in the Seventeenth Century, is clearer about
the role of the baroque in the literary arts. For Warnke the baroque is
typified by contradictions, by the conceit, the paradox, the antithesis
and the oxymoron. It is a reaction to the Elizabethan use of ‘the fixed
form of the sonnet, and the fixed stanzaic patterns of rhyme royal
and ottava rima (which) operate as pre-existent containers into
which the poetic material may be poured’ (Warnke 1972, p. 33). He
continues:
For most typical Baroque poets, on the other hand, material makes
form, and the individual poetic utterance, particularly in the lyric,
assumes a unique prosodic form, suitable for it and for it only.
(Warnke 1972, p. 33)
In the same way that for Lefebvre space is ‘produced’ by spatial practice, the form of the poetry (its space in both a formative and a
psychological sense) is produced by the baroque twists and turns.
The readers of baroque literature, or those who experience baroque
architectural space, get lost; there are no viewpoints from which the
totality of the artwork can be perceived. This complexity and the
open-ended nature of baroque art, and poetry in particular, mean that
baroque literature can present difficulties when the works are paraphrased. Owing to their ‘dramatization of the experience of contradiction’ and their ‘thoroughgoing subversion of logic’, Warnke is led
to the conclusion that a poem of Marvell’s, for example, ‘is not really
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From a literary point of view he talks about the way Milton in ‘Paradise Lost’ uses:
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
a poem that conveys a meaning; it is a poem that constitutes an experience – the imaginative experience of the validity of contradictory
truths’ (Warnke 1972, p. 59).
The baroque is therefore characterized as being with multiple
perspectives. It is an experience that draws ‘reader’ and ‘read’ into
the same frame and which breaks down borders between viewer and
viewed. In her work on the baroque, neo-baroque and modern entertainment media, Angel Ndalianis refers to the ‘seventeenth and late
twentieth centuries’ shared fascination with spectacle, illusionism,
and the baroque formal principle of the collapse of the frame’
(Ndalianis 2000). According to Ndalianis, the ‘classical’ concerns itself
with ‘closure’, a closure which comes about via a perception of space
as ‘ordered’ and which has the sense of a ‘centre’, both of which
give the work a particular perspective. Baroque, on the other hand,
‘suggest(s) worlds of infinity that lose the sense of a centre’. The
‘polycentric and multiple’ centre is now determined by the spectator, with each new position setting up a new focus and new spatial
arrangement. As well as this shifting relationship to perspective, the
‘baroque’s difference to classical systems lies in its refusal to respect
the limits of the frame’ (Ndalianis 2000). The work will spill over
established borders and boundaries.
In Lefebvrian terms the ‘dirty’ concrete poems emphasize the attributes of representational spaces, those that are lived and experienced.
As baroque spaces are constructed by the indeterminate wanderings of the body and the gaze, the poetry of a piece like Steve
McCaffery’s Carnival is constructed by the reader (see Figure 6.4). The
reader/viewer sees it as a map or a diagram, as a representation of
space, but must also enter it through the text to experience the piece.
Carnival is made up of two ‘panels’, and each panel is made up of 16
sections, each one a ‘page’ within a chapbook. The chapbook has to
be dismantled to construct the panel. There is also a much smaller
scale representation or ‘map’ of the piece, so the individual sections
can be located within a bigger picture. Each panel is made up of a
shape, a little like part of a coastline of a map. The shape is made
up of typewritten letters (although other tools for mark-making are
introduced in ‘Panel 2’), sometimes in discernible words or phrases
but in other cases illegible or not arranged into words. As they lose
legibility the letters simply become the dots that go to make up
the overall shape of the panel. Like baroque, the Carnival panels are
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designed ‘in order to put the reader, as perceptual participant, within
the centre of his language’ (McCaffery 1999). McCaffery continues
in his introduction to the pieces to refer to a ‘structure of strategic
counter-communication designed to draw a reader inward to a locus
where text surrounds her’. There is no privileged perspective from
which the ‘text’ is to be perceived. ‘The panel when read is entered
’, an experience like entering a labyrinth or maze or even the
‘body’ of the text. The way out is not clear but the reader must travel
along ‘countless reading paths’ and ‘through zones of familiar sense
into the opaque regions of the unintelligible’ (McCaffery 1999). Once
in the maze the reader loses a sense of the way out.
In ‘reading’ the second page of Carnival ‘Panel 1’ (Figure 6.4 (a)) the
‘reader’ will first of all take in the whole shape. As a geographical map
it looks like a coastline with a long sandbank leading away to the left,
something like a lake coming in from the right and a river cutting
across about a third of the way up. The coastline is all curves, folding
back on itself and the two colours are generally in horizontal bands,
giving a layering effect. Most of the words are indecipherable while
others stand out. So the words have two functions: as referents, but
also as material objects that take up space in the image and form the
shapes within it. Reading from the top left we get a number of words
and phrases. The first is ‘just think of and say’, an encouragement
to act on impulse, to give in to the chance of consciousness and an
echo of Ginsberg’s ‘first thought best thought’. The next discernible
text is mainly in capitals – ‘EVE’S ENDING EVERrrrrr ’ – whether
a reference to Eve of the Bible, some other Eve or the eve of the
day we do not, at this stage, know. There follows a series of lines
that overlap and cross each other. Some bits are impossible to work
out while others are clear. The first lines are in red type, and are
the only bits of red type with legible words. They are ‘t was late
it was a black form wit ’. The ‘m’ of form is not clearly an ‘m’.
It may be another letter crossed out. Crushed in underneath that is
‘sort of homely muscle and comely’, although ‘comely’ has a couple
of letters disfigured. So even when there are words to be made out,
there is no certainty that those are the words. And there is no clue as
to whether these words are significant or not. If they are fragments,
are they chipped off something of which we should be able to guess
the whole? Or are they remnants, bits left over? We have to assume
they have some significance, even if that only comes about through
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chance. An aesthetic decision was made to leave these words as legible
words.
A further clue as to the significance of individual words is in
whether they reappear in different sections of the panel. A series of
biblical allusions occurs throughout the poem: to Eve, Adam and on
the last page to Babel. On the third page (Figure 6.4 (b)) the lines
‘WITH THE WORD I AM TO BE DISCOVERED/ EVE WILL LEAD ME
BACK TO/ THE PULSE OF PURITY’ appear in different forms across
the ‘map’. On the fourth page (Figure 6.4 (c)), the religious theme
continues when the words ‘i have the word then i can call this world
a lie’ run broken down the page. In her essay on McCaffery, ‘Inner
Tension/ In Attention’, Marjorie Perloff quotes McCaffery as saying
‘I built the text around certain biblical allusions. Adam as the power
of nomination; Babel as the source of polyglossia and so on. All of
this I would now scrap’ (Perloff 1998, p. 268). Although his views
on language may have changed and the references may not add
up to any current concerns of McCaffery, the image of Eve which
runs through the poem, and other religious references, do provide
sources of stability and recognition as the reader goes through the
text. Another page refers to ‘THE PATTERN OF EVE/ THE PATTERN OF
EVENT’. They develop an interrogation of the relationship between
language and meaning, between language and the world it might
describe, and do so within the context of the Christian myth which
states that ‘In the beginning was the word’.
‘Panel 2’ continues this exploration. The principal instrument is
the typewriter but McCaffery also adds ‘other forms of scription:
xerography, xerography within xerography (i.e. metaxerography and
disintegrative seriality) electrostasis, rubber-stamp, tissue texts, hand
lettering and stencil’ (McCaffery 1999). Within this more diverse
visual field, a series of statements reflect the process of constructing
the visual poem and the relationship between the ‘figure’ of the
text and the ‘ground’ of the paper. The first page has the phrase
‘penetration to the white experience between the words’, the second
‘you must writ/ upon it you must write/ upon the page that there
is/ white upon the page’ and includes the pun about the constipated mathematician who worked it out with a pencil. A rubber
stamp of ‘CHANGE OF ADDRESS’ (Figure 6.4 (d)) and (I think)
‘NO EXCHANGE REQUIRED ON CHEQUES’ form a repeated motif
throughout the poem. These, I presume found texts, are stamped
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over and over again around an axis that sometimes shifts to make
flower-like forms across the piece. They give a sense of movement and
provide the ‘centres’, frequently referred to in ‘Panel 1’, but centres
that keep getting thrown off centre. The ‘CHANGE OF ADDRESS’
suggests both geographical mobility of a population as well as the
different ways a poem might address its readership. ‘NO EXCHANGE
REQUIRED ON CHEQUES’ links to McCaffery’s idea of a ‘textual
economy’, which would ‘concern itself not with the order of forms
and sites but with the order-disorder of circulations and distributions’
(McCaffery 1998, p. 201).
Other phrases continue and develop the ‘language’ theme such as
‘permanent signifier/ of place’ on page 4, and the change of address
on page 6 where the poem has extended blocks of fragmented prose
in which the reader is directly ‘addressed’ in both meanings of the
word; ‘where do you live and why/ because I am about to tell you’ and
finishes on an extended repetition of the phrase ‘her name remained
on every tongue after they all had forgotten her name remained’.
The riff ends with a reference to ideas of figure and ground when
‘returning home I plunged deep into the black words of my/ book
long after I forgot the whiteness of the white’ (McCaffery 1999).
Issues of meaning, of address, of identity and of tension between
the materiality and referentiality of language combine the concerns
of the concrete poets and the language poets. I have used McCaffery’s
Carnival as an example of that and as an example of the way in which
a turn to a more ‘dirty’ concrete, a concrete inscribed with the ‘social
utterance’ (Perloff 1998, p. 269) that earlier producers of concrete
poetry, according to McCaffery, failed to engage with, connects to
more text-based visual poetry.
Pages and spaces
I began this chapter by emphasizing the importance of the visual
nature of the poem to all poetry and want to end it by describing
the way two very different poets, Caroline Bergvall and Ed Dorn,
have used the space of the page to develop and emphasize particular
aspects of their poetry. Bergvall is European and would trace the roots
of her work back through Surrealism and Dada, while Dorn is American and ‘Black Mountain’ in origin, although he has spent a significant amount of time working in Europe. Bergvall is well known as a
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performer of her poetry and for her site-specific sound and text works
as well as a commentator and theorist of contemporary poetry. Dorn,
while he would have developed a concern for the visual aspects of
poetry through his association with Olson, would not be considered
a ‘visual’ poet or have any obvious connections with concrete poetry.
In a late text however, ‘Languedoc Variorum’ (in Dorn 1996), he
develops meaning closely linked to the process of composition by
the page, rather than the ‘line’.
In her poem ‘in situ’, and the title itself reflects something of
Bergvall’s aspiration to make the text have something of the qualities
of an ‘installation’ or site-specific artwork, Bergvall creates three fields
across the page through the insertion of an imaginary vertical line to
left and right about where one would expect to find the margins of
a schoolbook (Figure 6.8). Dorn splits the page of ‘Languedoc Variorum’ (Figure 6.9) through the addition of a horizontal line of the
character ‘¶’ about half the way down the page and another of the
character ‘†’ about 20 mm up from the bottom of the page. The
different sections of the page are reinforced by the use of a different
typeface and font size. These divisions and differences are consistent
throughout the poem.
The effect of the three ‘fields’ in ‘in situ’ serves to increase its
dynamic, to give a sense of something always going on. There are
three distinct voices, a central voice and two out in the margins,
but some blurring of this distinction occurs as the poem reaches its
end. The poem seems to echo Gertrude Stein’s ‘Lifting Belly’ in places
where it emphasizes performativity through repetition, ultimately
calling attention to the structure of the language itself as when Stein
writes:
Kiss my lips. She did.
Kiss my lips again she did.
Kiss my lips over and over and over again and she did.
(Rothenberg and Joris 1995, p. 104)
Like Stein, Bergvall questions structures of language and meaning
through including non-verbal elements within the poem and through
denaturalizing the reading process. As a reader I hunt for a satisfactory
procedure for the format, trying to read it as a play, as a sound poem
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Figure 6.8
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‘in situ’, Caroline Bergvall
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Figure 6.9 ‘Languedoc Variorum’, High West Rendezvous, Ed Dorn (1996)
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and as a three-part text. None is entirely satisfactory but entails me
moving between the different reading processes.
The time of the poem is distorted through the division of the
space of the page. Its distortion is increased by the different qualities
of work within the three sections. Within the left-hand margin are
what appear to be characters, ‘kisser 1’ and ‘kisser 2’, and beyond the
right-hand margin are what appear to be footnotes or diary entries,
in a small, italicized typeface, each one preceded by a date making
the poem a combination of stage, which characters enter, and script,
through which the activity is recorded. The dates in the right-hand
margin are chronological and run from 1993 to 1995, suggesting that
the poem describes a sequence of events over a specific period of
time. Each entry begins ‘on’ something, giving the text the quality
of a pronouncement, a philosophical treatise or a quasi-scientific feel
of some previous century. The central block of text is made up of a
combination of words and repeated, patterned punctuation marks.
The number of words increases as the text progresses until the leftand right-hand margins fall away leaving just the block of text in the
centre made up of words. The central block describes one, or many,
sexual acts.
The spatial distribution of the material on the page disrupts the
timing of the performance of the poem and creates a text that specifically and explicitly disrupts the reading process in a structured way.
If read aloud, does one read, for example, the words ‘kisser 1’ and
‘kisser 2’, and if so, is there a gap just after them? The font size of the
journal entries suggests they should be said in a whisper. The punctuation marks suggest a score while the italicized statements in the
far-right margin have the appearance of stage directions, but they are
not. The number of words, as against punctuation marks, increases
as the poem goes on. It suggests a process of ‘tuning in’, like the dial
on a radio moving and the static slowly clearing.
If the first impact of the way in which the space of the page is
used is on the reading of the poem, its timing, the second is on the
role of the subject within the poem. In some ways this is the most
personal of poetry, describing sexual activity in great detail, while
on the other hand its structure distances the subject author. We do
not know where to locate her, what voice she might have. Is she one
of the kissers in Column 1, the narrator or originator of the work
in Column 2, or the diarist in Column 3, cool and collected and
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commenting from a distance? The author is, of course, all three – the
subject, the object and the chronicler. The distribution of the text(s)
on the page suggests multiple identities at work within the poem and
provides a number of perspectives. The absorption of the left- and
right-hand margins into the centre suggests a process of resolution,
of focusing, and a process of colonization and silencing, of absorbing
those identities within the subject/author.
Some of these diverse reading practices can be further examined
through ideas of performance. In an interview with John Stammers,
Bergvall questions her role as writer and as a producer of ‘readable’
texts, or at least texts that bear a resemblance to other book-based
writing:
the more I write and the more I’m involved as a practitioner and
thinking about it the more complicated and complex it gets and
therefore the more open I get to various situations in which I could
involve my becoming a writer. So that it becomes less and less
clear that to be a writer for me is to generate books.
(Bergvall 1999b)
She sees writing as something which ‘questions the authority of
language with language’ and its performance as an ‘observation’
which ‘locate(s) expressedly the context and means for writing whether these be activated for and through a stage, for and through a
site, a time frame, a performer’s body, the body of a voice or the body
of a page’ (Bergvall 1996). For Bergvall writing is a performance, yet
she also produces writing that explicitly demands an active performance by the reader, whether the individual spelling it out to himself or
the performer in front of the public. The writing appears incomplete
and shattered across the page, the body of the text broken up. It is
dismembered, with not only the syntax disarranged but also language
taken apart at the level of the syllable. The idea of the body is further
explored through Goan Atom. In the interview with Stammers again,
she says:
My motivation has been very much to do with gender and with
sexuality. These are very strong motivators which to me are to
do with how would you use language to construct or destructure
assumptions about gender, about sexuality, about female gender.
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Where do you situate the use of language within that so that you
don’t fall into a kind of identity based writing, or identity based
art, but so that the whole question of identity becomes questioned.
You can only question identity through questioning yourself There are other writers who have developed ways of trying to deal
with language in a conceptual manner so that they could find a
language that might bring those aspects of the body of sexualised
unstraightened bodies into language. I’m interested in the whole
notion of what you do with the flesh in language.
(Bergvall 1996)
In the first part of her poem Goan Atom, the image of the doll runs
through the poem, a doll made up of parts, and which is always
falling apart. The idea for the doll comes from the ‘Poupée’, the work
of Hans Bellmer, a surrealist artist who constructed dolls made up of
a variety of parts of the body, but which never form complete bodies.
In an implicit criticism of the body fetishism of the Nazi regime in
Germany, Bellmer produced dolls made up of four legs arranged in a
Swastika and other poses where figures are deranged or compressed.
The first part of Goan Atom is called ‘Jets Poupée’, a throw away or
disposable doll, suggesting both the disposable nature of the girl or
woman as commodity and the way in which we should throw away
childish things.
This idea of a doll that could be dismantled provides Bergvall with
a metaphor of articulation and disarticulation, a metaphor she carries
through to the language itself. Just as the body can be articulated, so
too can language; broken down at the level of the syllable, it becomes
inarticulate. As Bergvall says in the interview:
In the same way the articulation or dis-articulation of language
in the way that I was talking about it, though coming at it from
different angles, becomes problematized. So the Doll project for
me was a way of playing with language of disarticulating language
at the level of syllable very often.
(Bergvall 1999b)
To add to the metaphor, the use of different languages dislocates the
reader (languages are associated with places and to switch languages
is to locate the reader somewhere else) in the same way the limbs of
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the doll are dislocated and the bits of syllables are dislocated from
that which they complete or completes them. Bergvall emphasizes
the concrete nature of language for her when she says in the same
interview that she ‘cannot forget she is using verbal material’ and this
material is spread across the pages. The phrases are disjointed, often
at the level of the word, and the unfinished or incomplete words lose
their signification and become graphic marks on the page. The end
of one page goes:
li
kemy dolly’s knees t
Hey I full of joins
they’re full of joi
(Bergvall 1999a)
before you have to turn the page to get the ‘n’, which has a page to
itself, as does the ‘s’ which completes the words.
Bergvall’s is a mechanical world in which bodies can be taken apart
to see how they work and then put back together again. Drew Milne
comments in his review of Goan Atom on the way in which ‘the
book’s alternatively erotic games also foreground the performative
slipperiness of the subject’ (Milne 2000). Within Bergvall’s work there
is a sense of a body in performance, flesh in language, represented by
the doll and reinforced by the stuttering voice that always seems to
be either just ahead of itself or just behind:
Enters the EVERY HOST
dragging a badl Eg
Finally I
So that the inspiration for such thoughts
becomes visible through the navel (Bergvall 1999a)
The stage direction in Line 1 is echoed through the poem. The characters come into view, then recede or just fall apart. On the next
page there is ‘Enter DOLLY’, and later on ‘Enter HEADSTURGEONS/
followed by/ Enter FISHMONGRELS’. The body of the text, or the
body in the text, or the body that makes up the text, or the body
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the text makes up, is never far away. The space of the page is also
a performance space, a stage. The section following ‘DOLLY’ reinforces the dual reference to ‘enter’ as a stage direction and to ‘enter’
sexually:
Enter DOLLY
Entered enters
Enters entered
Enter entre
en train en trail
(Bergvall 1999a)
The language, disarticulated at the level of the syllable, and the use
of more than one language give the reader many entry points into
the text, in the way that the disarticulation of the body, represented
by DOLLY, provides many entry points:
sgot a wides slit
down the lily
sgot avide slot
(Bergvall 1999a)
In performance it is the word made flesh, but it is a word that is always
unsure of its own construction and context rather than a word that
lays down the law. The language is tuned in and out as she searches
across the waveband, syllables and words remain half completed for
some duration before a turn of the page finds the final letters. The
language games and the spatial disorientation of the reader are part
of the way the poem is presented, its form and its subject. Metaphors
of disjointedness and dislocation, both forms of spatial separation
where things are held apart, run through Goan Atom.
Dorn’s poem, ‘Languedoc Variorum: A Defense of Heresy and
Heretics’, from the ‘sampler’ High West Rendezvous (Dorn 1996), is
similarly reticent in helping readers to locate themselves. The title
itself, a ‘variorum’, is a word used to describe the different versions
of a poem and emphasizes the instability of the text and the possibility of multiple and diverse versions. If Dorn’s work through the
1970s and 1980s, from Hello, La Jolla to Abhorrences, dislocates a
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reader from her place in America, as I demonstrated in Chapter 3,
‘Languedoc Variorum’ dislocates at the level of the page. Each page
is split three ways, with two horizontal lines. The top portion of the
page is entitled ‘Jerusalem’. The lower part, which is split by a row of
crosses, is entitled ‘SUBTEXTS & NAZDAKS’. The ‘NAZDAK’ is both a
character in Star Trek and also a slang term for the Nasdaq, a stock
exchange dealing in high-tech stocks. On each page there is therefore
a ‘main’ text at the top, followed by a subtext and then a ‘NAZDAK’.
The ‘main’ text is a series of poems about heresy and persecution, the
next text down is a commentary (a subtext) in a different font and a
smaller size, and the third section is the ‘NAZDAK’, written in capital
letters in the style of a stock exchange report (Figure 6.9).
There appear to be three continuous texts running from page to
page, independent yet with intersections. So it should be possible
to read a full page at a time, and try to keep all three poems going
at the same time, or to follow one poem through by reading the
relevant section on each page. Readers are presented with a series
of options in the way they construct the text. In some cases, and
the lower section is an example of this, the syntax continues from
page to page; in other cases the work is bracketed off and seems to
conclude on a single page. Within this complex matrix Dorn sets
out to cause further disruption. No one section is allowed to settle.
The top section seems to get going before it is interrupted by a poem
based on work by D. H. Lawrence, and the line spacing goes from 1.5
down to 1. This is followed by a poem about the Bogomil, a dualist
religious sect from the Balkans (Dorn’s interest is in their heresy),
which believed that the visible and material world was created by the
devil. The rest of the section is made up of a short poem on Shoko
Ashara, the cult leader responsible for the sarin attacks in Japan in the
mid-1990s, a longer one on Tomas Torquemada, the first Inquisitor
General, and a poem about Simon de Montfort, called ‘Notes on
Beziers: the past as cauchemar’ (nightmare). The themes of all the
pieces in this top section are the relationship between religion and
heresy and organized religion and the nation-state, with resulting
oppression and, frequently, mass murder, ending on the slaughter of
the Cathars by Simon de Montfort in the Cathedral de Saint Nazaire.
Dorn approaches this by isolating events and individuals within the
poems, creating poetry out of the history. The discursive prose of the
middle section adds, as Dorn sees it, to this corruption and collusion
between the Abrahamic faiths:
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¶ The struggle between the three dominant one-god systems has
a great deal to do with class and economic oppression and very
little or nothing to do with religion and theology. And in fact the
hierarchs of each system conspire at the top. They show up at one
another’s funerals and they all participate equally in the satellite
auctioning of the public’s ‘privatized’ property.
The Sheiks of the Gulf have long rendezvoued in the Riviera
and the Seychelles, the domain of Romanist dopers and drinkers.
And they collect in the floating capitols of transnational capital –
it’s really the one and only culture. However, the non-empowered
just try to get on with their Jihads or the daily reading of the Bible
as a realtor’s prospectus to the Holy Lands. Unlike the hierarchs,
they haven’t got theirs, have never had and won’t ever have. To
them, ‘Peace Brother’ is just another exhortation to cease and desist
from messy and disruptive attempts to take a little weight off the
other end of the balance. Hijack a Concorde with a kitchenknife
would be the ultimate lo-tech solution. So it is, so it increaseth.
The police proliferate, the prisons multiply. Monotheism grows
ever more desperately cruel and bloody and implacable, battering
the countless hapless against the stone wall of its singular
will.
(Dorn 1996, p. 36)
Unlike the top section, the middle section is not divided into separate
poems but into sections or paragraphs, each one beginning with
a ‘¶’ and combining personal comment and invective, aphorism,
historical information and memory. Dorn inserts himself, through a
combination of acid commentary and personal memory, between the
religious wars of the top section and the gibberish of international
capital in the bottom section, forming links in some cases, but inconsistently. The different parts seem to leak or bleed into each other,
mixing and muddying, rather than one section being explicatory or
illustrative of the other. On page 38 (Figure 6.9), the middle section
begins with an aphorism that could come straight out of Yellow Lola
before turning into a parody of rap:
¶ The Virtues are far less interesting than the Sins and therefore far
less widely practised. Putcha condom on, takeya condom off, Sow
Bellies down a nickel, palmolive up a dime, putcha condom in the
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The next paragraph in the middle section is written as straight
history:
¶ In 1621 (Plymouth Colony, 1620) George Calvert, Lord Baltimore
went out to Newfoundland under a proprietary patent from James
I but the climate drove him off (Dorn 1996, p. 38)
The bottom part of the middle section on that page goes back to:
¶ The majority is nearly always against and at odds with the
policies, oeconomic, social and political they invariably say
Fuck you, take a Haiku;
(Dorn 1996, p. 38)
Dorn is using a variety of voices, the personal and the apparently
objective, to present both history and ‘his story’. Compare this cacophony to the steady beat of the poetry in the top section:
After that the story gets practical. God’s firstborn
they taught, was Satanael,
the highest spiritual being
the universal viceregent.
That position gave him enough pride
to set up his own empire
and recruit a number of angels.
(Dorn 1996, p. 38)
In the more fragmented middle section, Dorn roams through history,
pulling together evidence to support his thesis that state-organized
religion is the cause of the most bloodthirsty wars in history.
In contrast to the other two sections of the page, the third section is
a stream of apparently off-the-cuff and hyped-up statements couched
in the discourse of the stock exchange, the Nasdaq. It is written in
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pouch ov yo sweat shirt for yo bitch. Come on putcha condom
on/ come on putcha condom on.
(Dorn 1996, p. 38)
bold capitals with no lineation and the use of the dash, ‘–’, as the
main punctuation mark in imitation of the ‘tickertape’ language.
Simultaneously funny, horrific and offensive, they mock a language
that seeks to dissociate cause from effect. If the history in his previous
sections, whether the measured poetic history of the top section or
the personal sideswiping of the middle, is about tracing cause and
effect, then the international finance of the stock exchange is about
denying that cause and effect. It is hell, which is down below and at
the bottom of the page. For example:
—PIG HOCKS GLUT THE MARKET—GET OUT—BODY PIERCING UP A QUARTER—BACTERIA COUNT SHARP INCLINE—
VIRUS BURST STEADY—HOLY VIRGIN UP A NICKLE—
(Dorn 1996, pp. 38–9)
It is language, running ceaselessly off the machine. Critical of the
ahistorical tendencies of post-modernism, yet equally scathing of
conservative attempts to retain control through simple appeals to
tradition, Dorn develops a historical understanding of heresy and
subsequent oppression and massacre by examples from across the last
ten centuries.
Different analyses or typologies are suggested by this structure, yet
when they are followed through each reveals instabilities. The top
section is history from historical sources, and about countries and
peoples, the middle is the subjective history of the individual and
the bottom section is the base, the economic underpinnings. The
structure also suggests heaven, purgatory and hell. The visual aspects
of the poetry, the space of the page and the use of different typefaces
and font sizes, allow him to keep these different perspectives in play,
to retain a ‘poetic’ analysis of the diversity of material that comes his
way. As Dorn says in the introduction to High West Rendezvous:
Writing such a book as Langue d’Oc and its variations has afforded
me the opportunity to think widely, if not deeply, about the
synchronizations and parallels and correspondences the new times
have with the old, the dark mass of flitting realizations emerging
at dusk like bats from the cave of the Medieval demi-millennium.
(Dorn 1996, p. 1)
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He can simultaneously present and interrogate particular positions,
ideas and information. He can sustain ambiguity while expressing
outrage; he can play seer and analyst at the same time.
Neither Bergvall’s nor Dorn’s work would normally be called visual
or concrete poetry. Yet both have used the space of the page as
a site on which to build their poems, using the visual element to
reflect concepts and ideas in the poetry and set up referential systems
that would otherwise not be present. Bergvall’s use of the ‘dramatic’
format for her poem sets up expectations in the reader she both
fulfils and denies. Dorn is able to intertwine personal, social and
economic material through the use of the split page, allowing him to
demonstrate different functions of languages and the uses to which
different discourses can be put. He is using the page as a sort of
map or a plan into which he can locate his different poems. The
page becomes a diagrammatic representation of the different spaces
language might inhabit as well as a representational, lived space, and
one that the reader enters and uses. In use, during the process of
reading, the crude distinctions of the mapping exercise break down
and the discourses begin to jump the barriers.
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162
Through the Looking Glass:
Poetry in Virtual Worlds
Writing about the relationship between the Internet, digital technologies and poetry and poetics within the context of changing ideas of
space can be both a beguiling and a baffling process. It is beguiling in
the sense that the spaces produced by the Internet and digital technologies are both a symbol of the spatial turn and a significant part of its
production. The Internet redefines relationships between space and
place, changes relationships between people and places, breaks down
relationships between space and time and supports processes of globalization. The body may be in one place while the mind is in another
and experience decreasingly takes place in the place in which the
body is located. Surfing the Internet applies ideas of the ‘nomadic’ in
the way one can apparently move freely around the Internet without
a home and where home is always with you. The structure of the
Internet itself is ‘rhizomatic’; it can be broken into at any point and
has no centre or periphery. The Internet and digital technologies also
produce spaces within which a variety of ideas about literature and
‘literary theory’ can be applied and examined; hypertext is both an
application and a demonstration of intertextuality and of the importance of context to the production and reception of texts. Digital
works distributed via the Internet can demonstrate and apply ideas
of the performative, whereby within virtual space the texts ‘play’
themselves, turning text into performer and reader into audience.
They provide a means and a space for interaction, making author and
reader, or actor and audience, co-producers of the text.
Yet to write about these relationships is also baffling. While one
senses that the Internet is new and different, it is difficult to locate
163
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Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
exactly where that difference lies, and particularly whether that
difference is conceptual or simply different procedures. The Internet
and digital technologies are difficult to locate within a framework of
historical development; there is no obvious starting point. If we are
saying that the Internet is new and different, then new and different
from what? Is the history of the Internet, for literature, part of the
history of the development of the book, and the development of
printing technologies? This is where Jerome McGann locates it in
his book, Radiant Textuality, and he also makes a convincing case for
comparing the ‘open’ concept of the library to that of the Internet.
Summarily expressed this would locate digital technologies and the
Internet in a history which began with the oral transmission of texts,
through the handwritten manuscript to the printed book and its
distribution. The Internet, in this analysis, represents a next stage, in
which restrictions of the publishing industry are removed, and texts
freely circulate in the virtual space of the Internet.
Yet the history of the Internet is also part of the history of electronic
mass media, of radio, film and television, and could be located in the
development of ideas of the ‘global village’ and the ‘society of the
spectacle’ through the works of Marshall McLuhan and Guy-Ernest
Debord. In this context the Internet represents a further development of the communicative facilities of mass media, providing both
a means of storing and transmitting information by transnational
‘media providers’, yet also turning anyone with a personal computer
into a media provider. If, as post Second World War commentators
have said, the ways political power, social norms, national identities
and the consumer society are asserted and maintained is through the
ability of the mass media to construct and transmit texts and images,
then the way in which the Internet and digital technologies allow
anyone with a personal computer to contribute is its most democratizing or revolutionary potential. The Internet and digital technologies
potentially provide a free space, free of the control that accompanies
official media sources, and within which a bewildering diversity of
images can be constructed, manipulated and distributed.
The visual nature of the Internet and virtual space, leaving aside
fringe experiments in tactility, means that tracing ideas of visual
perspective from the Renaissance, through Cubism and to the present
might provide a further context in which they can be described. If
the development of perspective in the Renaissance was about the
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development of the viewing subject as much as it was about that
which was being viewed, and the fragmented subject of the Cubist
painting represented the fragmentation of the subject viewing the
painting, then peering through a screen into a ‘virtual’ space without
scale or fixed perspective will similarly construct a different subject;
performative, inclusive, constructive and slippery.
The history of the Internet and digital technologies must also lie
in the more general history of culture and society, and more recently
in the shift from a modernism to a postmodernism, and in the
changes in relationships between language, geography, nationality
and identity and subjectivity of which the Internet is both product
and producer. The universality of the Internet and digital technologies, and the way it can be pressed into the service of a variety of social
and political agendas including the anarchic (see the work of Hakim
Bey for example), the development of regional and community identities, globalization and the homogenization of cultures, internationalism and mutual respect for cultures, subversion of state ideologies
and the construction of the individual as a consumer, adds to the
difficulties of analysing and examining its relationship to current
poetry practices.
It is therefore, within this range of possibilities, difficult to know
where to start. On the one hand to write about the Internet risks
trying to redefine all cultural and social relationships, while on the
other it is simply an addition to the ongoing development of interactive information and communication technology such as the radio,
television and telephone. The questions seem both wide reaching
and epistemological; what do we know about the world, how do we
know it and how do we represent that knowing back to ourselves?
They can also be simplistic and pragmatic; how fast can it communicate, how much information can it hold, and what can I do with
that information? It is for these reasons that I am electing to take a
more stranded approach, untwining some elements of activity and
examining them in temporary isolation (an approach that, ironically, is somewhat anti-spatial), in an attempt to break through the
mirror effect of the Internet and the way it reflects back a distorted
but complete image of the world. In isolation the links to other and
previous practices become more evident, and within these histories
minor narratives more closely related to poetry practice emerge; of
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the development of visual poetry for example and the relationship
of the Internet to small-press publication.
I’ll give an example of one of these strands. For the contemporary
poet the Internet and digital technologies provide, simultaneously
and collectively, a place of writing, a means of manipulating and
editing text, a means of distribution and a place of storage. In his
essay ‘What is the History of Books’, Robert Darnton outlines his
‘model circuit’ between author and reader for the book, a circuit
made up of author, publisher, printer, shipper, bookseller and reader
as the ‘elements that work[ed] together for the transmitting of texts’
(2002, p. 18). The writer on the Internet can create a ‘short circuit’,
linking directly from author to reader and missing out publisher,
printer, shipper and bookseller. There are different responses to this,
ranging from celebration that the power of the publishers is broken
and new and more imaginative forms of writing can be freely available, to concern that the ‘market’ will be flooded with unedited and
indiscriminate bad writing.
I am not, however, forecasting the death of the book. From the
evidence so far the only printing activity related to poetry that
seems to have reduced in the United Kingdom in recent years is
the low-circulation specialist poetry magazine (which I’ll come back
to). Internet publication has simply become another option in the
possibilities for publication, alongside the more specialist paper-based
publication, the small magazine and the self-published pamphlet.
And as far as the book is concerned, the development of printon-demand publishing and the Internet as a marketplace seem to
have secured the immediate future of the poetry book, and two major
new poetry lists in the United Kingdom have been established via
Salt and Shearsman. The usual limitations to maintaining a substantial catalogue of poetry, the need for a significant financial outlay
at the time of printing, for an initial print run in the hundreds and
the need to store the books have gone, to be replaced by a ‘justin-time’ service that can respond to fluctuating sales. Similarly, as
bricks and mortar bookshops struggle to give half a shelf to the more
bland poetry from the more mainstream publishers, online bookshops such as Amazon can maintain a long list of books on a virtual
bookshelf. Their only outlay is the entry on their database. The shortrun stapled poetry pamphlet can sit alongside the bestseller and be
available anywhere in the world at 24 hours a day. This example of
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the ‘digital economy’ means that books that would have been previously unpublished as uneconomic can now become economic, and
that books that would have struggled to be distributed outside of
a small number of the cognoscenti, can be available to all. This is
not to suggest that any publisher does not want to print a bestseller,
they do, but that a publisher can, through the use of new technologies, sustain a diverse list of books, some of which might only
sell in relatively small numbers in the early years. Economically the
publisher is no longer dependent on a small number of books selling
a large number of copies, but can alternatively have a longer list.
Income is dependent on the list as a whole, mirroring the situation
of the online bookseller. The methods of production and distribution
don’t change other relationships between poet and reader, and poets
and publishers still have to work to develop an audience for their
work, but it does mean that more poetry in book form is more easily
available.
There are other changes for writers and readers. More stable
low-cost digital technologies that can be operated intuitively, and
increasing bandwidths, mean that online writers can add sound
and vision to their work. In isolation, none of these features were
impossible by previous means. Internationally committed groups
such as the ‘lettrists’ and the ‘concrete’ poets of the 1950s produced
and distributed their work internationally and outside formal channels of publication, and Dadaists produced ‘multi-media’ works incorporating text, sound and visual art, but digital technologies and the
Internet, because of the way they combine information and communication, mean that it can be done easily and quickly, producing a
surface of rapid activities.
There is, however, one further danger to my historicist approach,
that in seeking to distinguish between the book and Internet I will
seem to imply that all paper-based books share the same processes
and procedures, and that all digital works have a common genealogy and use similar methods. This is nonsense of course, and there
are significant differences between the best-selling novel and the
limited-run ‘art’ book to use another crude distinction, and the online
digital text or work can vary from that which imitates the page of
a book to highly performative pieces. I therefore want to make one
further distinction between the poetic text which uses a simulation
of the page to imitate the paper-based presentation of texts, and the
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‘digital’ text, which might use a range of technological features to
‘perform’ or present the work. While many poems will sit between the
two, using features from both the historical practices of paper-based
printing and publishing and the more performative spaces produced
by digital technologies, there is a distinction between the poem
that, although written on a word processor and existing in digital
form, follows the usual conventions of print and publication, and
the ‘poem’ (although that word itself becomes contested) which can
only exist within digital environments (see, for example, ‘Baila’ by
Loss Glazier at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/, a work which
combines textual and non-textual visual images).
Examined from within the history of publishing and the book, the
impact of such digitally produced performative texts (texts which
may move, make noise, feature animation and which may have a
specific duration for their performance) is contradictory. On the one
hand it could be written as a narrative of increasing alienation, reducing the embodied experience of language to the visual apprehension
of surfaces. With online publishing and reading work on screens even
the tactility of the object of the book has gone, and a picture of a real
object replaces a real object (yet, of course, with a book, one doesn’t
touch the text, but the paper which bears the imprint of the text and
both book and computer are simply media for the transmission of
the texts). I’m not sure whether I’m reading or watching, and some of
the elements I normally have under my control, such as the ability to
read more slowly or quickly, or to go back over something I’ve read,
or the ability to read the work in a different order (what McGann
calls ‘Deformation’) is taken out of my hands.
When Guy Debord says in The Society of the Spectacle that:
‘Everything that has directly lived has moved away into a representation’ (Debord 1967, Section 1), he seems to prefigure virtual worlds.
The spectacle is the ‘existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about
itself’ (Section 24) and a process which privileges vision, producing a
‘tendency to see the world by various specialized mediations (it can
no longer be grasped directly)’ (Section 18). In language that echoes
Lefebvre’s description of the way that modern capitalist processes
of production have alienated the subject from a physical knowledge of ‘concrete space’ (and this is no coincidence as Lefebvre and
Debord were closely associated in the 1960s), Debord is revealing
the role of technology in creating a surface that conceals processes
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of power and control. This is a further development of the social
impact of the book, which itself can be seen as reducing the shared
and collaborative process of reading out loud or storytelling, where
teller and listener shared a specific context in time and space, to
that of visual apprehension. With the book and the individualized
practice of silent reading, the experience of the text (as Michel de
Certeau says in his essay ‘Reading as Poaching’, 1988, pp. 165–76)
becomes visual, whereby ‘the text no longer imposes its own rhythm
on the subject’ and ‘reading frees itself from the soil that determined it’ (p. 176). The contact between reader and text becomes visual,
and the eye, rather than the voice, becomes the principal instrument. This is a problem exacerbated by the technology of printing
and a developing literate population who shift from the extended
appreciation of a small number of books to moving fairly quickly
over a large numbers of texts. Anyone familiar with browsing the
Internet will easily recognize the parallel with Internet surfing, where
apparently unlimited numbers of texts are often scanned quickly,
barely read, as the mouse hovers over the next link. The Internet
and digitalization therefore further distances the reader from the
text, and the physical object of the book is reduced to dots on a
screen. This is a process mirrored in other aspects of contemporary
life, and Rob Shields, in his work on urban space, develops the notion
of ‘visualicity’, and the ‘glance’ as a way of apprehending urban
space. According to Shields, the glance ‘ruptures’ the continuity of
the gaze, takes it out of serial time, can simultaneously connect the
past in the form of memory with the future and reveals the inarticulable (http://www.spaceandculture.org/robshields). While Shields
has developed his idea of the glance in order to find new ways of
‘grasping’ or articulating urban spaces, it is tempting to apply it to
the virtual space of digital technologies and the Internet.
There is a counter argument that digital technologies and the
Internet, rather than continuing the process of abstraction that the
book is responsible for, reintroduce some of the elements of the oral
transmission of poetry. They can reintroduce the voice, and there
are various archives of spoken poetry currently being developed (see
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/ and the Brunel University ‘Archive of the Now’). Performance via digital technologies and
distributed via the Internet can give the poem duration and a rhythm
and share characteristics of time-based art, such as film or music.
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The technology can introduce a variety of extra semantic elements,
some of which might stand in for the body language of the live
performer, and they can combine work from different art-forms.
Increased bandwidths and increasingly intuitive digital tools mean
that transmission of information does not simply mean the verbal,
even for the relative amateur, but can include still and moving
images and sound. Other technologies (and wikis and blogs are a
good example) support collaborative and communal processes of
writing. Any visitor to a wiki can change a text, providing a shared,
communal space of activity. The combination of these facilities could
be said to reintroduce to texts some characteristics of a shared human
experience.
If the aesthetic and creative elements are contradictory in terms of
describing the impact of the Internet, so too are aspects of literary
scholarship. I am not referring to the way in which digital technologies can enhance the development of scholarly editions of previously
existing texts through the use of hypertext links and sound files.
That seems indisputable. I am referring to the process of producing
critical scholarly readings of texts that only exist in online form.
Digital technology, like the mass-produced printed book, is supposed
to provide perfect copies, and I’m going to use a work by Loss Glazier,
Director of the Electronic Poetry Center (http://epc.buffalo.edu/)
at the State University of New York at Buffalo and an established
digital and book-based poet and commentator on digital poetry, as
an example. The work, ‘A Revolution Is Worth A Thousand Words’
(http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/glazier/viz/revolution/revolution.html), is programmed, it cannot exist in any other form or
outside the context of the computer-derived performance. A copy
is impossible. A ‘traditional’ poem can exist in a variety of formats;
in books, on the wall, carved in stone, written in a notebook, on
the computer screen and so on. While these different contexts will
provide different frameworks for the readings, the text itself, as an
arrangement of words into lines and stanzas, remains the same. It
is portable between and within media in a way that a programmed
poem is not. There are other implications for scholarship. I watched
Loss Glaziers ‘digital’ poem ‘A Revolution ’. I then lost this poem
on the web for some weeks. I can now, at the time of writing,
locate it once more following a web search that took me back
to the ‘Electronic Poetry Centre’ at Buffalo University, but it has
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‘(new version)’ in brackets. Since I couldn’t make a copy of the
old version, I don’t know what’s different about the new version.
Part of the context of experiencing artworks via the Internet is
that a work can be seen one day, with free and democratic access,
only to be removed or changed the next. Different versions of
paper-based texts exist, and are the subject of considerable scholarly
enquiry, but the production of one new text does not overwrite
another. Those different versions can be gathered together and
compared. And one principal feature of the printing press and
the published book was the ability to reproduce an identical text
across space and time. This is not the case with digital works where
the new or amended text overwrites previous texts, versions that
become untraceable without a forensic examination of the hard
disk of the author. I will describe in some detail my experience of
‘reading’ the Loss Glazier poem and try to draw out some of the
implications.
‘A Revolution Is Worth A Thousand Words’ consists of four pages,
each one with lines of text arranged vertically, horizontally and diagonally, and with images. It is palimpsestic and some of the text goes
on top of other text, partially obscuring it. It has an opening page
that presents the three historical characters, Che Guevara, Karl Marx
and Emiliano Zapata. There is then a subsequent page made up of
images and text for each character. The images are of the characters, although Karl Marx’s head is part of a landscape reminiscent
of Stonehenge. The verbal text is made up of apparent fragments,
some of which reappear on different pages. The poetic is that of the
‘cut-up’ or ‘open field’, producing an open text that encourages a
variety of interpretations as the words shift into different combinations. The aesthetics of fragmentation and of collage and montage
are, of course, further complications in determining whether the
total poem is being displayed, or whether some elements are being
left out.
Once opened the poem performs itself, and runs through its four
‘pages’ without any interference from the reader, although clicking
on some bits did seem to affect the speed of operation. At the first iteration on my computer, the original version had no sound. Someone
came into my room and began talking to me and unattended it went
through a further iteration and sound came. I let it run through
and the sound seemed different every time. Sometimes it faded at
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different places. I still don’t know whether the first silent iteration
was meant to be silent or whether it was a blip in the technology.
I don’t know whether the new version should have sound all the way
through or whether it doesn’t work properly. On yet another machine
the original version refused to perform as before, repeating the same
indecipherable phrase over and over again and presenting only a
half-completed screen. I didn’t know whether the poem had been
set up to be radically different each time it was accessed or whether
it was the machinery or the software playing up. This is an extreme
example, and a problem of the variety of home computers I used to
access the Internet rather than the work itself, but it brings us to our
first problem when reading poetry in virtual spaces; different technologies for accessing poetry in virtual space will provide different
‘performances’. I regularly use three machines, two with a very similar
specification, although one has a better network connection and the
other has more advanced graphics. It is rare to get the same ‘performance’ of any particular text; the timing of a performance can be
affected by a modem running slow, the visual emphasis changed
by the capability of a graphics card, and different browsers provide
different frames.
My experience with the Glazier text demonstrates a clear distinction between digital, online works and book-based works. If I buy a
poem in a book I have it forever in a particular form, or at least as long
as the material of the book holds together. I can see a poem on the
web and then never be able to see it again in that precise form, or in
any form for that matter. In many cases, particularly more complex
works, it is impossible to make a copy of the work. Servers go down,
search engines lose links, links get broken and authors or others can
remove or change the works. Caroline Bergvall, whose digital work
‘Ambient Fish’ I examine later in this chapter, makes a distinction
between the temporary Internet performance and print culture when
she says in an interview with Marjorie Perloff:
I don’t worry about the ephemerality of work placed on the net.
Due to the nature of the beast, work is likely to disappear. In
fact, more and more artists present temporary projects on the net
which are up only for a particular amount of time and then get
removed. This interest in duration as a dynamic form of publishing
is certainly connected to performance. I develop my pieces across
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a range of environments, some less ephemeral than others so my basic understanding has always been that work disappears
after a brief delay. This is shaping the way I consider the so-called
permanence of print and the way I play with it.
(Perloff 2000)
The characteristics of the technology become part of the nature of the
performance. While the reception of a poem through any medium,
whether read live, communicated by the page or mediated via the
computer, is determined by the context in which it is received in a
written text, it is assumed that the poet and publisher have control
over the way the poem is laid out, when the lines end and what
is apparent on each page at a time. Even within the variables and
limitations of the context of a live reading, it is assumed that we
get what s/he wants us to hear and see. In virtual spaces accessed by
the Internet, or even with work distributed via a compact disc, the
technology (hardware, software and the means of distribution) all
become part of the context. This is not to say glibly that the medium
is the message, but those elements in writing which we assume to be
capable of reiteration, line length, stanza length, even the particular
words themselves, stop being so.
I will look briefly at two more online digital texts. Jim Andrews’s
‘Seattle Drift’ (http://www.vispo.com/animisms/SeattleDrift.html) is
a short interactive piece where the first line of the work itself
reflects something of the tension in simply calling such a work
a poem:
SEATTLE DRIFT
I’m a bad text.
I used to be a poem
but drifted from the scene.
Do me.
I just want you to do me.
There are three buttons at the top of the screen: ‘Do the text’, ‘Stop
the text’ and ‘Discipline the text’. If you press the first one the
text starts to fall apart and drift slightly jerkily down the screen.
‘Stop the text’ freezes it in a new position and ‘Discipline the text’
takes it back to its original position. If allowed to continue, the text
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expands the space ‘behind’ the screen, with some words floating
free of the original syntactic connections and becoming isolated and
others forming clusters, some with new syntactic relationships. The
‘drift’ of the text can only be followed by manipulating the sliders
in the browser to catch glimpses of it as it fragments in the larger
space it produces during that process of fragmentation. ‘Drift’ refers
to the situationist notion of drift as a process of wandering which
sought both to reclaim urban spaces and to find new ways through
them by subverting usual and official patterns of movement. It could
also suggest movement in a geological sense, a ‘continental drift’,
closely linked through plate tectonics to the Seattle Fault, a fault in
the North American Plate, which runs under the city. The phrase ‘to
get someone’s drift’ means to understand what they are implying or
hinting at, suggesting a ‘subtext’ to the poem, and the drifter is an
iconic figure in American western mythology, moving from place to
place without establishing roots. The poem therefore has an uncertain geography and shaky foundations, and the name prepares us for
the way the poem might behave. By drifting off the screen, and disintegrating into new patterns that lose both the discipline of the line
and word order, the poem questions its own claim to being a poem,
and implicitly criticizes the categorization of artworks at a time when
digitalization allows varieties of media to be brought together in new
combinations. It suggests, particularly through its playfulness, that
such discipline is unnecessary, but could be pleasurable. The language
echoes that of a sex worker or a pornographic film; it’s a voice heavy
with desire but passive and emphasizes the role of the Internet in
the sex industry, as a distributor of ‘pornographic’ material. Much
of the success of Andrews’s poem lies in its apparent simplicity, and
the ways in which that simplicity is simultaneously manifested in a
number of ways and produces a rich diversity of possible responses.
The poem has a single identifiable voice that the actions of the poem
disintegrate, a process that puts the attention on to individual words
or phrases as they become isolated. The ‘voice’ turns to ‘graphic’
as the language loses its syntactic order and accumulated meaning,
with the word ‘text’ being the final one to move cautiously out
of frame.
Caroline Bergvall’s work ‘Ambient Fish’ (Bergvall 1999c) opens on
to a screen with two small buttons, which have the appearance of
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I thought that the humorous and crude animation would amuse
as well as focus the reading. It was also an allusion to the work
done on The Doll [a reference to Hans Bellmer’s Poupée which is a
key figure in the book Goan Atom] where the refrain features. The
first green nipple or button which you have to click on replicates
Bellmer’s drawing of a finger clicking on a breast to reveal other
sexual worlds, which was the starting-point for his Poupée projects.
In print, it seemed important to retain the sense of spectacle and
viewing pleasure of the animation.
(Perloff 2000)
From this point the work is not interactive but is programmed to
‘perform’ itself, and once started the viewer sees a grid of 16 green
buttons, whose similarity to breasts echo Bergvall’s interest in the
relationship between the body and writing. These blink to reveal
words or phrases. The voice is broken up and fragmented. Some of
the words revealed under the buttons are the same as those said by
the voice while others morph into different phrases. The work comes
to a halt with the voice still continuing. This is a performed work
with a duration of only a few seconds with the language embodied
through the recording of the author’s voice (although the body is
only heard and not seen) that, as Bergvall says, demonstrates: ‘the
way mixed media digital technologies enable the creation of time
based textualities, unthinkable in book form’ (Bergvall 1996). The use
of graphics, the timing of the voice and the visual effects could only
be achieved through the use of digital technologies and can only
lend themselves to distribution via the virtual space created through
digitalization. The words flash on and off the screen at a pace just
beyond the legible and the reader, unable to turn back the pages or
slow down the performance, must play it over and over again.
There are similarities between the works in the way that both
of them refer to the relationship between the body, language and
the technology, as if in recognition of the way that the technology
renegotiates that relationship. Andrews’s ‘bad text’ is a body that
needs both ‘doing’, and the program literally dismantles the text,
and ‘disciplining’, in order to be pulled back together. The voice of
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human nipples, one of which does nothing, while the other begins
the performance of the piece. Bergvall says:
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
Bergvall’s ‘Doll’ poem is broken up and fragmented, as if the ‘fuckflowers’ that ‘bloom in the mouth’ in the opening line are then
responsible for breaking up the rest of the poem into fragments. There
are important differences. Andrews’s work has a sense of knowing
irony, and we’re invited to laugh at ourselves and the text, while
Bergvall’s has a more integrated and absorbed relationship between
text, image and voice, and the apparent intimacy of the spoken voice
does not allow us the critical distance the Andrews piece explicitly sets
up. Both works are programmed to perform themselves, and while
Andrews allows some measure of interactivity, the important process
of ‘drift’, as the words move across the screen, cannot be interfered
with in terms of either velocity or trajectory. This programming
turns reader into viewer, albeit an active viewer who can replay the
performance at will, yet also a viewer dependent on the technology
to perform the work. The relationship between body, technology and
language becomes complex. In some ways the technology involves
the body in a way that a page-based text cannot, providing either
auditory or visual stimulus, while in other ways the programmable
technology limits the involvement of the reader, unable to hold the
book or turn the pages, to read the poem backwards looking for links,
copy extracts from the poem into a notebook or memorize it.
If the virtual space of the Internet can be characterized as
‘open’ and rhizomatic, then this is nowhere more evident than
in the development of the online poetry magazine. Digital technologies and the Internet have meant that more books are more
easily available; they have also brought about more significant
changes in the form and function of the ‘little magazine’. Paperbased poetry magazines are varied in their intentions. The can
seek to represent a national or regional identity (Poetry Wales for
example), a particular approach or set of ideas (see the early history
of Harriet Monroe’s magazine Poetry and its role in the development of Imagism and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal), to
develop a community of writers and readers, or simply to provide
a space which seeks to publish the best work it can find. There
is, however, a clear sense throughout the twentieth century that
magazines have provided an avenue of publication for Modernist
and experimental writing that would struggle to get accepted by
more established publishing houses, as well as supporting new writers
in developing a track record that may result in a first collection.
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The number of magazines that have existed even in recent years is
bewildering (see http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/magazines, and the
‘Little Magazines Project’ at http://www2.ntu.ac.uk/littlemagazines/).
Some have only lasted an issue or two while others go on for
decades. They range from the glossy and perfectly bound to the
temporary and the stapled. From the 1960s to the 1980s the advent
of low-cost reproduction techniques led to a spate of publications, often modelled on political flyers, and operating in a ‘gift
economy’ in which poets were not paid for their work and income
from the magazine, if any, simply paid for reproducing the next
issue. These were distributed outside of conventional literary circles,
and were as often linked to art schools as literature departments
in universities. The advent of personal computing and desktop
publishing software in the 1980s meant that magazines could be
produced which were indistinguishable from more ‘professional’
products. Despite these technological advances, the difficulties of
selling and distributing magazines meant that many in the United
Kingdom were dependent on grant aid from Arts Councils, and
they found difficulty in sustaining themselves on a more permanent
basis.
This imperfect history conceals a rich tradition of diverse practices, but does serve as a background to the role of the Internet
and digital technology in the ‘poetry magazine’. In some ways the
Internet and digital technologies seemed to provide all the answers.
Unlimited space meant that the restrictions on the amount of poetry
in each issue could be lifted, and distribution through the Internet
was free. There was a downside, that there was no real way of charging money for the magazine, but given that, in many cases, in
a paper-based world this simply paid for printing and distribution
and contributed little or nothing to the published writer or the
editor, this was not necessarily the barrier it might at first appear.
As John Tranter, the editor of the Internet magazine Jacket puts
it: ‘magazine subscribers subscribe; that is, they pay money. My
readers get Jacket for free. Obviously I’ll never get rich that way.
But it sure beats trying to edit, print, publish, distribute and sell a
print edition of a literary magazine. I’ve been there, and done that’
(http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr89-1/jacket.htm). In the
same article Tranter describes the Internet as a ‘paradigm shift’ in
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I enjoy editing the poems and articles and taking photos of people
and designing the pages, and I even enjoy writing the HTML
(hypertext markup language) typesetting code that underlies the
pages. Jacket exercises all my various talents – and it’s fun. It has
also enlarged my circle of friends by a factor of about ten. And
I feel I’ve enabled a lot of writers to find a wider international
audience for their work, especially younger poets. I received a lot
of generous support and assistance when I was a young writer, and
it’s good to be able to give something back.
This location of the Internet magazine within the internationalist and
communitarian counter-culture or alternative politics of the 1960s
and 1970s is important. Its development is more difficult to explain
within a consumer or market-driven economy.
While the ethos of online publishing might have similarities
with more radical paper-based magazines of previous decades, the
product, the online magazine, has significant differences. The alternative poetry magazine of the 1960s and 1970s was characterized by
impermanence, limited space and low circulation, while the online
magazine is characterized by unlimited space, permanent availability
and potential worldwide circulation. Not only will the current issue
be available to anyone with an Internet connection, but all back
issues will be archived and available to anyone, all over the world
at all times. John Tranter’s Jacket (http://www.jacketmagazine.com)
is a good example. Since first appearing in October 1997 there have
been some 30 copies (by 2006) with no sign of any letting up. What
is remarkable is not only the longevity and regularity, but also the
scale of each issue. Although early issues contain what would be
expected in a substantial print magazine, say a couple of articles, a
selection of poems and reviews, later issues have contained, by paper
and print standards, significant quantities of materials. In issue 11 for
example there are three separate features on individual poets, each
made up of a number of articles, a ‘special’ feature and two conference
reports as well as poems and reviews. By issue 28, the latest complete
issue at the time of writing (and the concept of complete appears
to be at the whim of the editor), there are another three features,
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magazine publishing and he gives his motivation for editing and
publishing Jacket:
each made up of about a dozen articles, three interviews, around
35 items under ‘Reviews and Articles’ and poems from around 32
poets.
This is a scale and a diversity impossible to imagine in print,
yet it is also work, given freely by poets and critics of some reputation, and who have published extensively through conventional
routes. This is not a magazine for beginners and, in fact, unsolicited
poetry submissions are not accepted, but contains work by and about
some of the major figures in Modernist and post-modern writing.
Jacket, and the name itself is an ironic gesture towards the magazine’s
virtual existence, echoing the phrase ‘don’t judge a book by its
jacket’, seems to combine qualities of both the concrete and virtual
worlds, enjoying the space that the technology offers yet also monitoring that space carefully through the editing process. Although the
paper-based world is mimicked in the way work is collected into
‘issues’, each with a date and with a standardized layout. There is,
of course, no practical reason why the material couldn’t be organized thematically into ‘interviews’, ‘reviews’, ‘poetry’ and so on rather
than dated issues. The ‘search’ function allows a reader to draw out
particular themes or locate work by specific authors across issues
and turns the archive into an infinitely expandable online library.
Hibbard, in his review of the online magazine Big Bridge, talks of
the way in which ‘one continuous issue is to some degree the main
attraction of ejournals’ and how ‘with hypertext, limitless billows of
virtual space and links reaching to links, ejournals can connect to
an infinity of material’ (Hibbard 2006). I know what he means but
perhaps the notion of continuous is not the right one. As a reader
in the archives of these magazines I tend to cut across their seriality, linking between first and last issues by virtue of one in the
middle and then doubling back to take another route through. The
search engines and databases that make up the archives have no
notion of the issue, and search on terms that sit outside time. The
organization of the material becomes entirely spatial, as categories of
works by individual writers and themes in articles and reviews form
new patterns in the material. In this case, once it is past its sell-by
date and archived (although in the case of Jacket they are presented
as a living archive), for the online magazine the issue number
becomes irrelevant. For the paper-based version it is all important,
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of course, and the only way that elusive articles can be tracked
down.
If online magazines are firmly rooted in the language of their
previous and contemporary paper-based counterparts, the author
web site would seem to have no precursor or current comparison in a paper-based world. The web site of the poet Peter
Howard (http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/poetry), a well-known
‘digital’ poet and columnist on online poetry for Poetry Review
in the late 1990s, opens up on a page that includes a selection of his poems, some audio recordings, links to his hypertext
poems, his ‘famous’ links page and a page about Howard and his
work (Figure 7.1).
It is clear that Howard is using the web as more than a performance
space for individual poems, although within his site the hypertext
and javascript poems do just that; he is also using it as a stage for
the performance of the self. His work ‘Portrait of the Artist’, which
Figure 7.1 Peter Howard’s website – ‘Low Probability of Racoons’
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180
he describes as ‘very weird by my standards’, opens on to an ornate
picture frame across which the text ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ is written
and underneath this a series of other statements appear one at a time
before being replaced by the next:
as an old joke
with mild depression
with self indulgent gloom
absent from society
little different from everyone else
unable to make up his mind.
The title echoes both James Joyce and Dylan Thomas while the
series of statements about the image or idea of the poet locates
him within a poetic tradition that foregrounds the lyric poem as a
form of self-expression. This series of statements occurs while the
rest of the work is loading and forms a framework of ideas through
which the poem is read. On completion there is a series of industrial warning signs. Clicking on these in turn produces a further
small work behind the sign. Reading the work from top left, behind
the first sign is ‘The weasel goes pop’, followed by the word ‘pop’,
popping. The second has the phrase ‘The words are the important
things’ dissolving into the background, the third a picture of the
poet with a group of friends from the late 1960s or 1970s with the
title ‘Once upon a time’, and the fourth a reworking of ‘Oh, to be in
England, now that April’s there’ into ‘Oh, to be in April, now that
England’s there’. Through this distortion of traditional associations
and word order Howard is subverting tradition, and he continues this
with a series of puns which comment on the form and function of
poetry and through which the reader is invited to share the writer’s
understanding of the process of subversion he is engaged in. With
frequency, although not with complete regularity, the word ‘sublime’
appears and is then changed to ‘subliminal’, as does ‘fragment’
which changes to ‘fragmeant’. Another frequently recurring frame is
a set of credits for a home movie, with the accompanying hiss of
Super 8.
Howard is presenting bits of information, within an aesthetic of
collage, and using the ability of flash software to create fluidity
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Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
between the different parts, to construct a biography. The word
‘subliminal’ indicates the desire and intention of the poet to present
something of himself he thinks he has previously kept hidden, and
the word ‘fragment’ and its corruption ‘fragmeant’ to indicate something of the method, that these bits and pieces do add up to something. The ‘craft’ is exemplary; the poem is well constructed, with
immaculate timing and a good sense of design, yet ultimately the
poem never does anything more than collapse back in on itself. If
the Internet has the potential for the rhizomatic and the nomadic,
then, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, Howard does not move from
the arborescent. The self is central to the poem, and rather than each
new point in the system of the poem being a further node which can
form its own centre and move out into a new set of connections, the
self becomes the centre to which all points return. The poem recognizes the fragmentary nature of modern life but is finally, despite its
appearance of modernity, nostalgic. The self becomes the place where
meaning is revealed through the fragments of available history, the
credits for an old film and photographs from the past, and, despite
the spatial potential of the medium, the poem finally depends on an
understanding of self as the product of history.
If one aspect of the lyric poem is about the poet selling the poetic
persona to a readership, then Howard’s site is set out as a stall. Of all
the sites I’ve considered so far his is most clearly using the structure
of the site as a way to sell himself and his work and the communicative functions of the digital economy in ways that obviously arise
from the systems and processes of the old economy. For Howard the
web, the Internet and digital technologies have not given rise to new
epistemologies, new ways of knowing and representing the world,
or brought about a process of reflection on the role of the poet or
artist. What they have allowed him to do is distribute and advertise
his work and to use new digital media to present his work in both
impressive and attractive formats beyond that of the written page,
and to integrate elements of design and staging.
Peter Manson is a poet and editor from Scotland, and for 2006
was the Judith E. Wilson fellow at Cambridge. His web site, ‘Freebase Accordion’ at http://www.petermanson.com/, seems to be operating in much the same territory as Howard’s. Its index of contents
includes lists of publications, reviews, a ‘portrait of the artist as a
baby’, a series of images entitled ‘fractals’ and sections of a long,
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apparently autobiographical piece called ‘Adjunct: An Undigest’. Both
sites contain collections of work that make up the home site of
the poets, and it is as if we see into someone’s house and the
clutter that is there. Both sites also contain works that tell us something about the poet through articles and the links they select and
locate them in a broader poetic field. Yet I can locate in Manson’s
work a number of ways in which he responds to the ‘spatial turn’
and draws on a variety of ideas related to space in the poetics
of the work itself. In ‘Fractal Self Portrait’ and other ‘fractalized’
figures the blurred features such as eyes, nose and mouth seem
to remain but the borders are stretched as the fractal reproduces
itself. If it is a self portrait, it is timeless and a further mocking
representation of Manson along with the animation of a picture of
the child Manson which morphs into the adult Manson. This is a
theme echoed by the punning title of his 1997 pamphlet, me generation (http://www.petermanson.com/megen.htm). While Manson’s
approach to the production of the self involves the historical, it is
also located in the spatial.
The web site also contains extracts from his book-length work
Adjunct: An Undigest, a book he describes as ‘an attempt to
gather together those interesting or funny examples of found
language to which my reading habits had begun to sensitise me, and which I felt were in danger of passing me by’
(http://www.petermanson.com/Letitbe.htm). In the process of putting the book together he deliberately avoided the serial nature of
the diary by choosing a page for each entry using ‘a system whereby
each new entry would be written on a page selected by a random
number generator’ in order that the book didn’t ‘imply too linear
a narrative’. In the following section Manson begins with a reference to the American poet Ted Berrigan, before moving to sample an
entry on the ‘Manson Crater’ (a crater caused by an asteroid some
believe was responsible for destroying the dinosaurs) from the web
site: http://www.adelphiasophism.com/awwls/00/wls1485.html. The
repeated references to ‘Manson’ make the reader flick backwards and
forwards between the Manson as crater and the Manson as poet,
creating a flickering amusement:
Bed Teragon. Potato explodes, shattering microwave bulb. Hooded
concave. Poultice a self-induced wave of irritation. Sounds like
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Poetry in Virtual Worlds 183
Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry
Lou Reed. I PROMISE: Forsyth moves to help stroke man.
Asteroidal bombardment destroyed the dinosaurs the Manson
Crater, Iowa the Manson Crater was 65.4 million years old,
give or take 0.4 million years most Manson rocks have
normal polarity the Manson impact could have occurred either
200000 to 300000 years before or after Chicxulub alternatively,
Manson could have occurred during a brief and previously
unknown interval of normal polarity during the reversed polarity
period Manson-sized impacts should occur every few million
years, so it is suspicious that the Manson Crater is so close to the
Chicxulub. He maketh me to lie down in green waters. I wonder
what the first entry was.
Adjunct is made up of blocks of text containing a quick-fire collection of everyday ephemera, gags, recollections of a poet and editor,
and offbeat language he picks up in everyday situations. ‘Adjunct’
is a grammatical term for ‘any word or words expanding the essential parts of the sentence; an amplification or “enlargement” of the
subject, predicate, etc.’ (OED), and therefore serves as both a description of the writer, as an adjunct to everyday life, and a description
of the poetic process in which the subject is ‘amplified’. The second
part of the title suggests that the material is ‘undigested’, and therefore kept outside of the body, as well as being the opposite of a
digest, defined by the OED as ‘A digested collection of statements or
information; a methodically arranged compendium or summary of
literary, historical, legal, scientific, or other written matter’. The title
does, of course, suggest all those things in the definition, but through
conflating noun and verb keeps them ‘undigested’.
The space of the Internet has allowed Howard and Manson to
produce a collection of linked texts in a way that no print publication ever could. It is an archive while they are still alive. They
have included verbal and visual pictures of themselves, collections
of material, lists of books published and links to their favourite sites.
It is poetry, poetics and biography all in one. It is historical, while
providing a simultaneous surface of contemporaneous links to other
places. Poetics and aesthetics overlap at times, but Manson is more
resolutely experimental than the cautious nod of Howard towards
the aesthetics of modernism. Yet both have, more than anything,
used the material to produce a space for themselves, and a space that
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speaks directly to a supposed public without the mediation of the
literary industry.
In tracing the impact of the Internet and digital technologies
through the history of the book, the poetry magazine, the poetic
works themselves and the ‘home site’, I have tried to draw together
the ways in which they both mirror or develop the past and indicate
the future. If spatialization is a process which foregrounds a ‘spatial
awareness’ over a ‘historical consciousness’, then the Internet plays
a major part in the way it structures and distributes knowledge, and
the archives of poetry magazines are a good example, supports the
manipulation of knowledge into new forms, and supports rapid and
complex forms of communication. In poetic terms it is more ‘open
field’ than ‘closed lyric’, and, to repeat Doreen Massey, ‘there are
always connections yet to be made, juxtapositions yet to flower into
interaction, or not, potential links which may never be established.
Loose ends and ongoing stories’ (Massey 2005, p. 107).
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Poetry in Virtual Worlds 185
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An Anthology of Concrete Poetry,
138–9, 141
Andrews, Bruce, 16, 17, 18, 22, 90
Andrews, Jim, 173–4, 175–6
Antin, David, 124
Apollinaire, Guillaume, 139
Armantrout, Rae, 89
Artaud, Antoin, 122
Attridge, Derek, 15
avant-garde, 7
Bachelard, Gaston, 48, 107
baroque, 144–7
Barry, Peter, 101, 106
Barthes, Roland
‘Death of the Author’, 92, 93, 94
Belmer, Hans, 155
Benjamin, Walter, 6, 7, 67, 72, 81,
82, 88
Bergvall, Caroline, 4, 149, 162,
172–3
‘Ambient Fish’, 172, 174–5, 176
Goan Atom, 154–7
‘in situ’, 150–1, 153–4
Bernstein, Charles, 16, 17, 18
Berrigan, Ted, 183
Black Mountain College, 12, 149
body, 26, 48–57, 99–100, 154–7
Body without Organs, 56–7
Boland, Eavan, 106
‘Distances’, 103–4
book history, 166
British Poetry Revival, 12
Burroughs, William, 10–11, 12, 127
Butler, Judith, 49, 91–2
Cage, John, 124
Cantos, The, 7, 13, 14
Certeau, Michel de, 3, 26, 36, 63–4,
86, 169
city, 27, 36, 61–3, 114, 169
Cixous, Hélène, 49
Cobbing, Bob
Kob Bok, 125
‘Worm’, 139–41
collage, 4, 6–8, 13, 14, 23, 39, 93
composition by field, 12, 69
concrete poetry, 124, 125, 126,
127, 138, 139, 141, 144, 149,
150, 162
Condition of Postmodernity, The, 83–4
Cubism, 6, 7, 23, 87, 164
Dada, 8–10, 127, 149
Dahlberg, Edward, 82
Darnton, Robert, 166
Davie, Donald, 60, 65
Debord, Guy-Ernest 13, 164, 168
Deleuze, Gilles, 144
Deleuze and Guattari, 3, 25, 27, 56,
64–5, 93, 112, 116, 122–3
diachronic, 15, 129
Dorn, Edward, 3, 59, 60, 149–50
Hello La Jolla, 77–9
Idaho Out, 72–5
‘Languedoc Variorum’, 150, 152,
157–62
‘On the debt my mother owed
Sears Roebuck’, 70–2
Slinger, 75–7
Drift, 13, 174, 176
Drucker, Johanna, 126
Eliot, T. S.
Waste Land, The, 7, 13, 14
Fast Speaking Woman, 50–2
Foucault, Michel, 26, 27, 48, 53
‘What is an Author’, 92–3
free verse, 4, 131–2, 133, 138
193
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Index
Index
Gender Trouble, 49
Giddens, Anthony, 26
Glazier, Loss
‘A Revolution is Worth a
Thousand Words’, 170–2
‘Baila’, 168
globalization, 23, 26, 27, 76, 110,
116
Gomringer, Eugen, 133, 141
Greenberg, Clement, 7
Gregory, Derek, 25, 60–1
Griffiths, Bill, 42
Bikers, 45–7
War w/ Windsor, 43–5
Harbison, Robert, 144–5
Hartman, Geoffrey, 132–3
Harvey, David, 27, 28, 83–4
Harwood, Lee, 99–100
‘Cwm Uchaf’, 100
‘September Dusk by Nant Y
Geuallt’, 100
Hawkins, Ralph
At Last Away, 111–12
‘China’, 110–11
‘From the Chinese’, 111–12
‘Tell Me No More and Tell Me’,
106–10
The Coiling Dragon, 112–14
Well You Could Do, 110–11
Heaney, Seamus
‘The Toome Road’, 84
Hejinian, Lyn
My Life, 20–2
Hell’s Angels, 45–7
Higgins, Dick, 125, 138
history, 14, 15, 17, 67, 80–2
Hooker, Jeremy, 31
Houedard, Dom Sylvester, 140
Howard, Peter, 180–2
Howe, Fanny, 89, 114–16, 121–3
One Crossed Out, 118–21
‘Q’, 116–18
identity, 32, 89–90, 96–7, 105, 107–9
intermedia, 125–6
Jacket, 177–80
Jameson, Fredric, 3, 14–15, 26,
63, 64
Joris, Pierre, 39
‘Notes Towards a Nomadic
Poetics’, 93–4
Karawane, 9, 10
Lacan, Jaques, 98
language, 26, 90–1, 98, 102–3,
155–6
language poetry, 14–22, 89, 114,
127
Larkin, Philip, 30
Lefebvre, Henri, 2–3, 25, 26, 27, 29,
33–5, 36, 37, 38, 40, 56, 60, 63,
65, 82, 92, 97, 98–9, 106–7, 121,
145, 146, 168
line, 131–8
lines of flight, 40, 41, 65
Lochead, Liz
‘Mirror’s Song’, 97–8
lyric, 100–1, 103
MacSweeney, Barry
Ode Long Kesh, 53–5
Mallarmé, Stéphane
‘Un Coup de Dés jamais, n’abolira
le Hasard’, 127–31
Manson, Peter, 182–4, 185
map, 26, 35, 41, 60–5, 67, 76, 112
Massey, Doreen, 2–3, 25, 27, 28–33,
35, 40, 73, 84–5, 87–8, 185
Mayer, Bernadette, 18
McCaffery, Steve, 90, 131–2, 133,
134–7, 142–4
Carnival, 146–9
McDowell, Linda, 73
McGann, Jerome, 164, 168
McLuhan, Marshall, 164
Monk, Geraldine
‘James Device Replies’, 52–3
Morgan, Edwin, 125
Mottram, Eric, 12
Mulford, Wendy, 138
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Ndalianis, Angel, 146
nomadic, 39–48, 79, 93, 94, 115,
117, 182
Notley, Alice, 31–2
Riley, Peter
Alstonefield, 37–9
Riley, Denise
‘Lure, 1963’, 91
O’Hara, Frank, 12, 59, 60, 61–3
Objectivism, 80
Olson, Charles, 3, 48, 101, 127,
137
Maximus Poems, The, 59, 60,
65–70
‘Projective Verse’, 65–6
Out of Everywhere, 138
Sauer, Carl, 74
Morphology of the Landscape,
73
schizophrenic, 122–3
Scott, David, 127, 129
Shapcott, Jo
‘Phrase Book’, 102–3
Shields, Rob, 27, 169
Silliman, Ron, 18, 20
Situationism, 13
Slinger, 75–7
Snow, Michael, 124
space, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22,
26, 59, 67, 69, 73, 82, 88, 144,
145, 146
conceived, 34–5
concepts of, 3, 4, 25, 29
lived, 34–5
perceived, 34–5
virtual space, 163–5, 169, 172–6,
179
and the body, 25, 48–57, 64, 92,
98–9, 106–7, 121
and place, 25, 28–33, 59–60,
70, 76, 82, 94, 95, 97, 105,
163
and time, 3, 4, 6, 12, 14, 18,
21, 24, 25, 27, 32, 57, 59,
64, 65, 66–7, 78, 82–5, 87–8,
92, 100, 113, 129–33, 163,
169, 179
spatial practice, 23, 24–5, 33–9,
70
Stein, Gertrude, 12, 20, 150
structuralism, 3, 8, 73, 85
synchronic, 15, 129
Penny, Florence, 127–8
Perelman, Bob, 89
‘Chronic Meanings’, 18–20
performance, 131, 154–7
Perloff, Marjorie, 15, 101, 138, 148,
172
Pignatari, Décio, 141, 142
Piombino, Nick, 18
place, 28–33, 59–60
and identity 32, 60
postmodernism, 14, 23, 27, 82,
87–8, 165
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism, 63
post-structuralism, 3, 8, 14, 61, 73
Pound, Ezra, 7
Practice of Everyday Life,
The, 63
Prynne, Jeremy, 90–1
Raworth, Tom
‘All Fours’, 94–5
‘Eternal Sections’, 85–8
‘Unable to Create Carrier’,
95–6
representation, 83–5
representational space, 25, 28, 33–9,
65, 79, 98–9, 146, 162
representations of space, 23, 25, 28,
33–9, 63, 65, 98–9
rhizomatic, 39–48, 64, 79, 87, 93–4,
113, 182
Thousand Plateaus, A, 40, 56
tracing, 64–5
Tranter, John, 177–8
Tzara, Tristan, 8–9
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Index
Waldman, Anne
Fast Speaking Woman, 50–2
Iovis, 50
Walsh, Catherine, 103–6
Warnke, Frank, 145–6
Williams, Emmett, 138, 141, 143
Williams, William Carlos, 12,
84
Paterson, 80–3
Writer’s Forum, 141
Zukofsky, Louis, 7, 80, 104
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