The essays in Nathaniel Mackey's Discrepant Engagement continue to challenge, engage and influence my thinking, my writing, my criticism--hell, even the way I conceive of reality--as do other products of his creative and creating mind, chiefly his poems and other, almost unclassifiable books (hello, Bedouin Hornbook!). As my mind has been like a sieve lately, and as I'm rather out of practice critically speaking, the following are just some brief notes gleaned from the essays in this volume as I encounter (or re-encounter) them, in hopes that they will deepen my understanding of the formal properties that distinguish the fugitive, marginal, "Othering" writing he discusses in the seminal essay, "Other: From Noun to Verb." This article galvanized my thinking about not only the work of African-American fiction, but about Modernism as well (especially the extent to which some of the most celebrated Modernist authors are indebted to black authors who were "doing it first," so to speak); it inspired me to examine my favorite texts carefully in order to locate and identify how the artists might be formally enacting or performing the fluidity and non-containment mandated by their transformative visions of a more socially just world--ones that run counter to this synchronic plane of modernity and perforce require forms that gesture toward something beyond its closure, certainty and insistence on a certain relationship between form, content and meaning.
"To Define an Ulitmate Dimness: The Poetry of Clarence Major"
Before encountering this essay, I'm not sure I was even aware of the work of Clarence Major, whose aesthetic Mackey links to "an ethic best expressed in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: 'The mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived." According to Mackey's analysis, in his poetry especially, Major "seeks to be [both thematically and technically] some such bearing in mind of 'chaos'... a gesture on behalf of the repressed or ignored areas of experience and awareness, on behalf of civilization's discontents" (49). Mackey effectively chronicles the thematic insistence on these subjects, but that is not what concerns me here; I'm much more interested in where he locates and how he identifies what he calls the "technical disruptions" and "'creative brutality'" at work Major's poetry, formal properties that take aim at the various "institutionalized blindnesses that buttress consensus," which is more often built on what we exclude from view than on what we decide to recognize.
Mackey classifies Major's creative impulse as a dissociative one, insofar "as it seeks to dissociate itself from the seductions of a hegemonic world-view, to loosen the syntactical and grammatical threads that knit that world-view together" via a process of "'manipulation and derangement of ordinary language'" (55). The ideal at work here is one in which the deformed word/sentence/syntactical unit can have the power to transform the "'conditioned world,'" by weakening of associative links of the sort that allow unconscious consensus to cohere. (Quotes here are taken from the "prefix" to Robert Kelly's The Mill of Particulars). To deform language is to question its access to reality, insofar as doing so exposes language as "an essentially self-appointing arrangement of correspondences, projected onto in order to be retrieved from the world or reality it thereby claims to be reporting" (56); the work of dissociation is to undermine language's apparent referentiality so as to frustrate the reader's drive to master the text by forcing its language to yield whatever "meaning" it contains.
Mackey is as suspicious of the motivations behind a reader's drive to find meaning--and langauge's concomitant promise to contain it--as are the artists he writes about. "Meaning," he dismisses as "that peculiarly linguistic imposition upon the world":
It provides an assurance of certain rules of order having been complied with, certain maneuvers known as grammar having been successfully completed, but possibly nothing more. To the extent that the ordinary notion of "meaning" reifies the successful passage of through permissible channels, thereby elevating the skillful negotiation of the grammar's resistances to the status of truth, it entails another eclipsing of reality by convention (56).In Major's poetry, Mackey argues, "meaning" is among the lies that "sanitize" reality and purge it of its unwelcome traces of unruliness. If ultimately, language consists of arbitrarily prearranged equations that conjure impressions of a physical world, then Major wishes to occupy that place of arbitrariness and generate his poetry from within it. When we read, when we converse, we remain as unaware of the arbitrariness of conventional linguistic arrangements as we do of the arbitrary nature of the meanings they supposedly produce; these arrangements are transparent to us because we've grown so accustomed to them.
In his poems, Major not only critiques but also tries to conquer this tendency through "highly idiosyncratic arrangements, their idiosyncrasies--grammatical, syntactical, and typographical--not only defying convention but serving to make their "arrangedness" harder to overlook or to take for granted; indeed, blatant. His typographical peculiarities and apparently random deployment of unexpected punctuation "raise arbitrariness to the level of an ethic" (58). In other words, Major's arbitrary gestures send up the "deceptively referential transparency" of conventional language by "insist[ing] on a certain density, the opaqueness of a network of signs more likely to block than facilitate access to an 'outside world'"; this density, in turn, can either "dissect" ("interrupting or cutting up the flow of an utterance by the insertion of periods, commas, colons and other such marks of punctuation where one doesn't usually expect them"--or by representing the gaps between words quite literally on the page) or "jam" (a run-on effect that "dismantles the notion of the sentence as a completed thought showing the sentence thus conceived to be at best an artificial holding action"--it disregards grammatical obstructions in an attempt "to more accurately graph the quickness of thought") discourse and its "'lubricants'"--the rules of grammar, syntax and semantics (59).
Keeping "Other: From Noun to Verb" in mind, it is worth pausing over (and quoting at length) Mackey's attributing to this run-on quality of "jamming" a "'verb' quality" or "'verb quiver,'"
an ongoingness that makes a point of the kinetic nature of the world and of consciousness, the primacy of flux... The sense of dispersal and agitation to which this "quiver" gives rise is reinforced by the occurrence in the poem of such words as infected, perturbation, cluttered, excitement, devilment, breakdown, delirium, reel, scattered, and thrills. The "verb" quality makes for a murkiness or lack of definition, a promiscuous overlap of one thing with another which erases clear demarcations. This is said to give a more accurate, "more loyal" picture than do the discriminations language normally affords (60-1).The linguistic dirsputions of "dissecting," by contrast, seem more to "embody a desire to unspeak--to silence, to make 'tacit'--the polarities that normally govern behavior and thought" (62). I can't help but think of the poetry in M. NourbeSe Philip's She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks when I read these words, and wonder if there might not be a connection in the African American tradition between what might be considered unspeakable and what is composed in such a way as to complicate or frustrate vocal expression--in such a way, that is, as at least partly to require the reader to encounter it visually on the page (to this end, Philip's readings of her poetry seem particularly rich).
"The World-Poem in Microcosm: Robert Duncan's 'The Continent'" AND "Urboros: Robert Duncan's Dante and A Seventeenth Century Suite"
"The World Poem in Microcosm"
I'll start off by saying that, as with Clarence Major's poetry, I am not entirely familiar with Robert Duncan's oeuvre (I have to confess, I'm actually rather shamefully unfamiliar with most luminaries of the Black Mountain poets... this is something I should immediately rectify). I do know that he was adopted by devout Theosophists who chose him based on very particular astrological and social factors; he was perpetually immersed in the occult (a fact that makes him a potentially pertinent subject based on my interest in the occult's role in jostling the fabric of what seems to be with another plane of what might also be--a different system of ordering and understanding the universe that by its very existence calls Enlightenment rationality and its attendant institutions into question. Though this variation on the occult seems more a decadent outgrowth of Enlightenment rationality than a critique of or alternative to it, it does seem to tie into an emergent theme among these authors--seeing double, seeing more than what is supposedly, conventionally considered to be "there"). Also, Duncan had an injury as a young child that affected his eyesight, quite literally causing him to see double, as though he could "see" a "visual echo." In Roots and Branches, he explains, "I had the double reminder always, the vertical and horizontal displacement in vision that later became separated, specialized into a near and a far sight. One image to the right and above the other. Reach out and touch. Point to the one that is really there."
Perhaps it was his double vision--in conjunction, surely, with his status as outsider and iconoclast in his personal life--that gave rise to what Mackey terms his "inclusionist aspiration" in composing his world-poem (and response to Paterson and Cantos), "The Continent." Having not read it myself, I can't comment on the validity of Mackey's reading of this poem, but, as with the other essays in Discrepant Engagement, what concerns me most is Mackey's location, identification and explication of the formal maneuvers that drive home the thematic and artistic agendas in a given work--in this case, exploring how this particular "artist of the margin/ works abundancies." To that end, it's worth quoting Mackey's major insight into "The Continent" at length (as he, in turn, quotes Duncan at length):
[The formal problematic to which the inclusionist aspiration gives rise] has to do with the fact that the inclusiveness to which the world-poem aspires, the unity to which it seeks to lend itself, exists not as a state but as a process, is dynamic rather than static, an ongoing, not-yet-accomplished fact. The inclusionist aspiration is then at odds with what form is normally taken to be. It relates to form in the same way that the infinite relates to the finite, the unbounded to the bounded, eternity to time.... This is the lesson Williams learned in his inability to end Paterson, as did Pound in the Cantos. Duncan, finding precedent in these two works, has sought to redefine form, to think of it not as containment but as flow. In his essay "Changing Perspectives in Reading Whitman," he argues for what he terms a totalism or ensemblism and contrasts this with the more conventional notion of form:
"For the New Criticism of the 1930's and 1940s, it was most important that the poet not put on airs. The dominant school of that time thought of form not as a mystery but as a manner of containing ideas and feelings; of content not as the meaning of form but as a commodity packaged in form. It was the grand age of container design, and critics became consumer researchers, wary of pretentious claims and seeking solid values. Ideas were thought of as products on the market.
But Whitman's ideas flow as his words flow. He knows that thought is a melody and not something you manufacture" (82).Formally, then, Duncan puts into practice the formative properties of that for which the poem is named: continents as they pull apart or come together, "moving in rifts, churning, enjambing, / drifting feature from feature." That the very ground beneath our feet is constantly undergoing a process of revision as the result of certain "under-earth currents" suggests that transformation is not only possible, but inevitable; at the heart of any formation is a "fluidity that opposes containment" (82). The poem's "openness to inconclusiveness and fragmentation" is "one manifestation... of both the worldliness of the world-poem (the fact that it conforms to rather than transcends the fate to which all earthly things are prone) and the cosmicity to which it can do no more than allude" (83). The formal consequences of this openness are:
- heterogeneity (the poem is open to whatever makes it way in, experiences are not homogenized)--collage-like properties, poem as bric-a-brac, a piecing together of what is at hand
- a dispersiveness linked to that heterogeneity (a richness of echoes and anticipations (subject to resonances from other poems and those of other poets, reverberations/ repetitions with variations so insistent that they serve to dissolve the boundaries between poems, thereby letting go of the self-contained, discrete poem in favor of the "field concept," "a practice meant to give inklings of synchronicity" (84)
- "Field concept" seems to be a conception of time and space in which these are not measured or quantified--all events are one event, all time is one time
"Uroboros"
Once more, I think I better let the man speak for himself, this time advancing the theme he began in the previous chapter regarding Duncan's dispersive allusiveness, his reverence for "tradition" and its incorporation into his work in the form of resonances and reverberations (I think that possibly, at the time of writing this essay, Mackey might have equated this to a form of ancestor worship, creating yet another line of correspondence between the Black Mountain poets and the African American critical tradition as it had developed):
His strenuous foregrounding of tradition answers Adamic presence [and its typically post-colonial insistence on abolishing cultural inheritances as mediating, subjugating presences] by insisting upon the presence of tradition, the problematics of tradition, as inescapable... He proceeds with a post-colonial resolve of another sort, one that demystifies tradition not by avoiding it but by engaging it head on. He shows tradition to be porous rather than impermeable, to be fissured and incomplete rather than comprehensive and monolithic. He shows that its fissures and its incompleteness leave room for variation and invention, the intervention of contemporary energy and inspiration. Diverging from triumphalist, monumentalist uses of tradition, he stresses its acknowledgment of frailty and fallibility, "our mortality at last made evident" (98).And again, this time working with the idea of "reverberation" in its different, more literally musical sense:
One of the cornerstones of Duncan's poetics is the idea of language, both written and spoken, as a communal, community-making act. "To write at all," he remarks in "Rites of Participation," "is to dwell in the illusion of language, the rapture of communication that comes as we surrender our individual, isolated experiences to the communal consciousness." However, the commune instituted and maintained by the rules of grammar, syntax and semantics constructs the non-anthropomorphic commonality to which a more primal, "vulgar" eloquence offers access. In the course of an unpublished interview conducted by L.S. Dembo in 1967, Duncan observed that the concern with meaning from which these rules derive has the effect of binding us to an adult, oppressively human order, the social order. But rapt attention to sound, the music or utterance-impact in words... moves us into the animal, cosmic realm of the child (93).Mackey does not explore this musicality as a formal preoccupation of Duncan's work, or at least not to any great extent, but this passage is noteworthy considering the extent to which musicality will later figure into his understanding of the fluid, fugitive, and non-discursive of writing.
"Robert Creeley's The Gold Diggers: Projective Prose"
Though Robert Creeley is primarily known as a poet of the Black Mountain group, Mackey concentrates this chapter on his prose, particularly his book of short stories, The Gold Diggers, which was written in the early 1950's when Creeley was living with his family in Mallorca (he also wrote a novel during the period he was there, aptly entitled The Island). Despite his enduring legacy as a poet, these experiments in prose have all but been forgotten, yet it seems that even his Black Mountain cohorts found these to be among the most exciting elements in his oeuvre. In his letters to Cid Corman, Charles Olson insisted that Creeley was "the most important narrative writer to come on in a hell of a time," an heir and successor to D.H. Lawrence whose work had the potential to serve as "the push beyond the fictive." In this chapter, Mackey considers the question of whether narrative prose might have been at least an apt, if not more effective, vehicle for the open poetics that Olson calls for in his 1950 artistic manifesto, "Projective Verse."
Before getting into Mackey's analysis of the projective elements of Creeley's short stories, I want to spend a little time establishing the tactics and aims of projective verse as I understand them. The poetry of Olson's contemporaries, according to his diagnosis, suffered from a disease that had infected the genre in the Elizabethan period and had been intensifying ever since: a problem of scope and energy, an enervation of content and form that had its roots in the dawn of the printing press. "What we have suffered from," he explains, "is manuscript, press, the removal of verse from its producer and its reproducer, the voice, a removal by one, by two removes from its place of origin and its destination." He believes that the cure for this otherwise fatal infection lies in restoring the status of both the ear (via the syllable) and the breath (via the line) in poetry. The result would ideally be poems that function as "energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader." Such poetry, one could say, has a hand in its own composition, because "the going energy of the content" so completely "pushes" toward its form--at every moment bringing about an instantiation of its ideal composition. And such poetry, Olson insists, would be the key to eliminating the vice-like, energy-congealing grip in which reproducibility and commodification had held the printed word since books became a proper industry. Furthermore, since Olson conceives the projective poem almost as a live wire that creates itself anew as new energy travels through it, or as a process by which energy is conveyed from one noun (the poet) to another (the reader), the word "poem" in this context could almost be considered a VERB.
Non-projective poetry has its base in "inherited line, stanza, over-all form"; Olson calls upon poets to practice instead an open poetics, a "composition by field." The challenge to a poet who would practice such a poetics lies in determining HOW, formally, to create a poem that is kinetic. Olson explains that
the poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent of the energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, also different from the energy which the reader, who is the third term, will take away?The poet who practices an open poetics quite literally puts himself "out in the open," ditching the familiar signposts and boundaries of closed form to enter a field in which the elements have a force and an energy that, if attended to closely by the poet who himself is one of these elements, will declare for itself a form suited precisely and uniquely to the poem under hand (this is my understanding of what Olson means by "field composition"). Kinesis, then, could potentially be conveyed if the poem stands as the process by which the poem's content gives itself shape--if the poet follows, that is, the "principle, the law which presides conspicuously over such composition, and, when obeyed, is the reason why a projective poem can come into being... FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT" (Olson actually credits this credo to Creeley).
The "process of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished" can be summed up, conveniently enough, in another pithy dictum, this one courtesy of Edward Dahlberg: "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION." There's no room for deadweight in a projective poem, no space for descriptions, for similes, for mere observations that should have been made prior to the poem, or for anything that might be a "drain on the energy which composition by field allows into a poem." The poet must rather "at all points... get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, their perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business...USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always, always one perception must must must MOVE, INSTANTER, ON ANOTHER!"
Olson's guide to "how projective verse is made" revises and extends Pound's injunction to "compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome," stressing that "that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath." By "the acquisitions of his ear," Olson means the smallest particle of sound, the syllable. Syllables allows words to pleasantly juxtapose, and in spontaneously choosing the syllables appropriate to the field, the poet grants the syllable primacy of the ear, rather than rhyme and meter, sense and sound. The syllable is the evidence of the HEAD in the poem--the dance of the intellect, the play of the mind. "The pressure of the breath," on the other hand, gives birth to the length and shape of the line:
the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to, termination."Contemporary workers [Olson calls poets workers, classing them together with homo faber) go lazy RIGHT WHERE THE LINE IS BORN." Counteracting such laziness, breath vivifies, allowing "all the speech force of language back in." Ironically, though Olson locates the source of poetry's decline in the printing press, he celebrates another writing-related "machine," the typewriter, for the compositional possibilities it opens up for the projective poet:
It is the advantage of the typewriter that, due to its rigidity and its space precisions, it can, for a poet, indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspensions even of syllables, the juxtapositions even of parts of phrases, which he intends. For the first time the poet has the stave and the bar a musician has had. For the first time he can, without the convention of rime and meter, record the listening he has done to his own speech and by that one act indicate how he would want any reader, silently or otherwise, to voice his work.Oddly enough, then, it is the possibilities opened up in the visual dimension of the poem as printed that can restore the oral dimension of poetry that Olson feels has been all but eclipsed by the visual, allowing a poem to be, like a musical score, reproduced--brought to life, or, one could even say, played--by the instrument of the reader's voice. (To get the potential projective versifier started, Olson even includes a brief primer on common spacing techniques and what kinds of pauses they signify. His own relationship with the visual reproduction of orality in his poems was complicated, because printing conventions often resulted in his poems' spacing being altered by ignorant publishers. Mackey gets into this issue in his chapter on Olson, "That Words Can Be on the Page: The Graphic Aspect of Charles Olson's Poetics," but as I've spent so much time on Olson here, I will likely not treat that chapter separately). And he feels that the revolution to be brought about by projective verse had already begun:
But what I want to emphasize here, by this emphasis on the typewriter as the personal and instantaneous recorder of the poet’s work, is the already projective nature of verse as the sons of Pound and Williams are practicing it. Already they are composing as though verse was to have the reading its writing involved, as though not the eye but the ear was to be its measurer, as though the intervals of its composition could be so carefully put down as to be precisely the intervals of its registration. For the ear, which once had the burden of memory to quicken it (rime & regular cadence were its aids and have merely lived on in print after the oral necessities were ended) can now again, that the poet has his means, be the threshold of projective verse (italics mine).Before I leave Olson and get back to Creeley, I'd like to point out a few things about projective verse that make me a little uncomfortable. The first is, I'm not sure what the political--as opposed to the artistic--payoff of such a revolution in poetics was supposed to be. Olson genuinely believed that projective poetics was the key to restoring to poetry the power it had in the classical age--epic poetry on the level of Homer, epic drama on the level of Euripedes. But I'm not sure what kind of transformation--cathartic or otherwise--the poem could bring about in the reader or undergo en route to the reader. Despite Olson's protestations that such poetry was aimed at allowing "objects to keep their proper confusions," the content seems pretty fixed, right down to the manner in which it is meant to be read. Add to this the propulsive thrust demanded by projective poetics--all this going, going, going, all this emphasis on speed, reminds me alarmingly of the Futurists--and you seem to have a recipe for a poetics that encourages a kind of passivity on the part of the reader--a brand of poetry that sweeps you up with a kinetic force, but that does not seem to provide a space for reflection and thought.
Alright, I think that's just about enough Charles Olson for the time being. Now back to Creeley.
In "Notes for a New Prose," a 1951 essay that appeared in the second issue of Origin, Creeley argues that prose has poetic potentialities that realism stymied, because it conceived of reality to narrowly to "accent the mind's play" within its composition. "[P]rose, no less than poetry, is the projection of ideas" (107). Creeley, then, valued prose that emphasized not only conjecture (and so could be considered projective in the epistemological and psychological senses), but also openness in the sense of resisting closure. Unlike poetry, which tends toward stasis in its ability to condense and compress content, "prose eschews conclusion, moves for a furtherance of content, extends it:
Poetry, as the formulation of content, in stasis; prose, as the formulation of content, in a progression, like that of time. This is a simple way of putting it. But sufficient to show that while poetry depends on the flux contained, held within the form, in stasis, prose may intend such a limiting but cannot justify one. It has no beginning or end. It has only the length it happens to have... Just here is the key to its possible reach, that, in spite of itself, it has to continue, keep going--cannot stop... it is, by nature, against conclusions (107).As Mackey puts it, it seems Creeley found prose more amenable than poetry for the demands of an open poetics.
In Creeley's stories, Mackey argues, the enormity of feelings dwarfs the facts to which they attach themselves; he insists "upon the diffuseness of feelings and of possible sources of feelings," using a "field rather than a focal approach" (113). His narratives have a "certain syncopated, 'offbeat' quality in that their emphases and accents tend to fall other than where one would expect"--a quality that Mackey chalks up to the influence his musical tastes might have had on his thinking and writing. Familiar with the music of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis and other bebop musicians, Creeley might have been inspired by the way such music "altered the rhythmic order and the habits of expectation it inherited, cultivating a variability of accent and emphasis, introducing new patterns and possibilities of insistence" (113). In Creeley's prose, ostensible subjects sometimes appear to be all but ignored; "unexpected transitions" and "abrupt changes of reference" disrupt the expected flow of narrative (113). Things are not always where we look for them, nor are they altogether where we find them.
This diffuseness of focus is complemented and intensified by the discomfort many of Creeley's speakers feel toward certainty and consensus--they express themselves tentatively and with an abundance of qualifiers ("I think," "so to speak," "like they say," etc.) that foreground the provisional nature of any assertion being made and "tend to deny themselves the comforts and numbing assurances of any presumed or ready-made coherence" (114). Creeley's use of the comma intensifies this aspect of his characters, creating a stuttering effect that both provokes and points to a kind of nervousness, a diffuse anxiety. This rejection of too-easy closure or any sense of mastery that comes from "knowing," from being "sure," underscores a certain obduracy at the heart of the objects, human and otherwise, that populate our fields of experience; Creeley's stories respect a certain inappropriable otherness on the part of that which lies beyond--and even within--ourselves:
The allowance he makes for the sensibilities of his audience exemplifies a decentralizing impulse, a field approach, his admission that not only other things but also other minds exist. This making evident of the impact and impingement of otherness upon consciousness, of a space occupied by other people, other things, even other places and other times, is what Warren Tallman means when he says of Creeley that "rather than think thoughts he thinks the world" (120).
