Rachel Blau DuPlessis remarks, “Like translations, poems / say the unsayable twice, once to another language.” Where types propose a reification of sense (author into authority, logos into lexis), tropes propound an anarchy of sense and sensation, abridgment of book into conjugal detours, hot fertilities;
the work of Art to set words
jiving breaking into crises
—where, in Robert Duncan’s practice, “the line / [is] a trial” and “each element a crisis of attention.”* The tropes of a text tell tales of how things are turned into words, events into beliefs, and how all are blackened, sealed in the furnace of reduction.
The common air includes
Events listening to their own tremors,
Beings and no more than breath
between them,
Histories, differences, walls,
And the words which bind them no more than
“So that,” “and” …
As William James claims in A Pluralistic Universe, “the word ‘or’ names a genuine reality” (777–78).
Of and Or are snails, repeat vegetable lessons, roaring
a new will that lifts its horn into the heart of Man.
“Language obeyd flares tongues in obscure matter.” These are the dicta of a poetics attentive to (and retentive of) crumplings of discourse into folds and redundancies, vulvic recesses and hollows, fluency become granular, textured. Verbalized, vocally strummed.
Language, framed by the rivalry of law and desire, feeds on its own dispersal into elementary functions and particles (“eye net / / quoin own me”*), liberated into an elegiac plenitude, a funereal measure plying identity into the coign holding the type in place. If “The unconscious is totally unaware of persons as such” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 46), poetry is language becoming unconscious of itself, developing its own propinquity in what André Breton memorably called convulsive beauty.
Jack Spicer’s poetics of disturbance is a lesson in the somnolent helplessness of the will when it lets itself to be animated by linguistic involuntarism in puns and slips of the tongue.
For example
The poem does not know
Who you refers to.
Even in the thought of Being, “Our image shrinks to a morpheme, an -ing word. Death / Is an image of syllables.” “For the blue wash of sound drawn back to its shores. A shell appears, is rolld under, comes up again the ash Hell shadows, melts and divides into ash and shell from which the grave black tides of hell recede.” The ash and shell are siftings, instructions from the inner lava that language mumbles in our heads all the time, a subliminal vocality.
Hello and goodbye
in some languages are one word.
Each exits for the other. Why, then,
are not the living the dead?
See, you know me.
In the plutonian realm of Spicer’s The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, intentionality decomposes at any moment, exposing phonemes, morphemes, and graphemes working like grubs. In the poet’s descent, there is a precarious affiliation of self with parts of speech (“The verb divides us evenly into two objects”); and to venture unequivocal speech in Hades is to risk the condition in which you or / might crack on the lips like an egg : “the touch breaks / who touches.” In Spicer’s underworld—in which the pronouns are emancipated into a composting ensemble—an “Ontological Proof Of The Existence of Rimbaud” makes it clear that a poet would not have to be “he” or “she” but “would have to be mmmmm, and nnnnn, and ooooo, and ppppp”;
A design Thoreau saw in
the flowing thaw
of bodies, leaves & lobes
of a hand, &
lichen of an ear.
‘No wonder the earth expresses
itself outwardly in leaves
it so labors with
the idea inwardly : lobe, a word
especially applicable to
the liver & lungs & the leaves of fat,
externally,
a dry thin leaf, even
as the f & ν
are a pressed & dried b.’
Ronald Johnson here literally takes Thoreau at his word, sampling a text (“Spring” in Walden) in which Thoreau in turn takes Nature at her letter; and as Thoreau himself has sponged off Charles Kraitsir. In The Significance of the Alphabet (1846), Kraitsir prepared the conceptual template from which Thoreau’s global vision of lobes and labors derived.
… crp, glb, grp, grb, blk, glm, krp, kip, are roots of corpus, globe, grope, crop, block, bulk, bulge, grab, group, conglomerate, and words of similar meanings. These roots are essentially the same. So an object or action, which expresses free outward motion, or that in thought, which is naturally symbolized by free outward motion, will need labials and the liquids, thus : lb, lv, lp, lf, fr, fl, pl, pr, are roots, (or different forms of a root,) which vegetate into the words labia, live, lip, liber, love, laub, life, free, flow, blow, bear, fare, plane, flat, pluvia, flamma, fire. If the object or thing moves from within its own being, which implies deep, internal, essential action, we have a gutteral and the liquid, thus gl, ql, cl, gr, cr, which are roots of glide, globe, glare, glance, vogel, eagle, volucris, creo, gradior, cylinder, columna, columba, aquila, circle, &c. (in Michael West, 268–69)
These texts by Kraitsir, Thoreau, and Johnson are conjoined, coupled like serpents, and for several lines it’s as if they overlap word for word in undulant mutuality.
Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s translation of Catullus performs a salutary enactment of this condition at the limit of semantic accessibility. In their copulation of rival tongues, the Zukofskys roll Latin phonemes over into English, shaping a material reserve that comes to inform on the incipient meaning at every point (as if to say were to concede : everything testifies, all is incriminated).
denique testis erit morti quoque reddita praeda,
cum teres excelso coacervatum aggere bustum
excipiet niveos percussae virginis artus.
Then ache cue test his air earth mortal booty ready to pride ah
coom earth’s ash excels so combustible heap round barrow burns now
she is given as new white snow pierced corpse by him virgin odd truce.
Like the oral epic mode of recitation that assigns to Athena the epithet “grey eyed” as a handy metrical mannequin, syllables so transposed are fateful preparations, ontological graffiti—discerning the composition of one text in the decomposition of another.
Song’s fateful. Crime
fulfills the law. Oedipus is a
ravishing order in itself.
His tearing out his eyes—
a phrase, secretly prepared,
that satisfies.
Clearly, as in the premonitions of old myths as well as new poetry, “language obeyd flares tongues in obscure matter.”