ploughing sense to the surface of the mind’s muddy fields.‘The poem is always a record of failure.’ This sad logic is derived via Allen Grossman’s story about ‘the song of the infinite’ being ‘compromised by the finitude of its terms’. There’s conflict between the poet’s desire to make an alternative world and ‘resistance […] inherent in the materials of which any world must be composed’. At the most basic level, these materials are the ink and paper that constitute the two-dimensional presentation of language. No matter how imaginative or original the usage, words can never extend beyond the bracken-fringed thicket of thought to overcome the flatness of the page, and represent with genuine authenticity the multi-dimensional complexity of existence.
This ‘record of failure’ lamented by Ben Lerner comes into focus, in the case of these poems, when crafting a representation of the self and the lyric ‘I’ (identity; a performative illusion that adapts according to environment and entourage). In Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, Rankine writes about the lyric ‘I’ falling short of its intention; striving to flatpack the endless contradictions of identity into one single neat space, yet ultimately failing to ‘hold the person together’. As Denise Riley writes, each time a poet chooses to package their identity into the narrow confines of the lyric ‘I’, they are ‘subjecting [themselves] to subjectification’; choosing to portray one of their potential identities over another.
In terms of gender identity, Hélène Cixous argues that ‘woman’ has always occupied a position of otherness and alterity in Western phallogocentric culture. I would argue that this position becomes further removed into alterity when selfhood is plagued by a similar phenomenon, linked, for example, to complex relations with notions of race or class.
In French, ‘être en décalage’, as referenced in these poems, means to be out of phase with something, though here I advance the notion of being out of phase (or othered) from oneself. Mixed-race, multicultural and multi-lingual, constantly moving between countries, cultures and languages in search of ‘home’, I relate to this coining more than any English equivalent; the ‘dé’ emphasising the sense of dislodgement these poems seek to convey.
The compulsively neat, box-like poetic form aims to create an aesthetically satisfying organisation (categorisation; exercise of power) that is robotically at odds with the organic nature of human bodies, their ‘home’ and, specifically, these chaotic self-portraits; in order to emphasise the dissonance in selfhood that drives their creation.
My creative impulse snags on the edges of each ‘I’; that unshakeable anchor, scudding along its sentence, until the contradictions of lyric integrity are exposed. As I set about casting the lyric ‘I’ away from the crowd of words that keep it warm; blindly bowing down beneath its totemic authority, to interrogate the real standing of the lyric ‘I’ left stranded and shivering without a script, I become more interested in exploring self-expression as a medium; interrogating its limits and its lies.
In the extract from the alphabet sequence, the metaphorical organisation of each poem is based around the history of one letter from the alphabet. This metaphor is then transmuted into a situation that corresponds to the story I want to tell. The aim is to examine the impact of colonial language, how it is tamed to suit people’s purposes but does not suit people’s purposes equally. As Riley writes, ‘There’s a terrific and cheerfully direct statement of this intimacy between shame and song.’
In a similar vein to the French poet Henri Michaux’s expedition into his internal ‘espace du dedans’: ‘travelling in myself – that is the adventure of being alive’, I work to unlock hidden dimensions of identity; unravelling the unruly self, most often, through the lens of ecopoetic language.
The Korean poet Kim Kyung Ju has offered an illuminating entry into how such ideas can be explored through ecopoetry. This poet’s manifold layering of landscapes – corporeal onto countryside, compiled as though composed of tracing paper – creates ‘a shared sense of the death / of our singular selves’, a concept at which my poems converge.
In mapping external and internal landscapes together, I pursue an extended sense of self that buffers and scrapes against surroundings. I work to redraft the notion of the ecotone, where habitats merge (Clifford; King), until topography extends to include mixed-race emotion and experience, and place becomes porous and relational (Massey; Lippard) to psychological realms. The sprawling sinister subplot in these poems works to redraft expectations surrounding the aesthetically sublime, challenging the notion that nature must always be a tranquil place of retreat, when used to map complex self-portraits distorted by restrictive notions of race, gender and class.
I would even argue that ecopoetry’s ability to illuminate hidden aspects of identity is actually coded beyond content into the fundamental stratigraphical properties of poetic form. Beneath the surface decoration of ecopoetic language, lies a formal framework whose diverse layers invite a foraging approach to the extraction of meaning. I see the process of entering such ecopoems; foraging through its layers for meaning, for answers, then re-emerging with a renewed sense of awareness, as deeply nourishing and vital.
*
I am thistle and bone – occupied by weeds, those anxious warriors no one wants to grow; unyielding, they wield a sharp-edged tongue even I am pained to swallow. Sieged by feuding shoots, we wrestle, one stalk yanked by sun, the other by shade - a limb-tearing punishment worthy of medieval applause. Even those spindly rosy-cheekers are scheming between themselves; I can hear the clasp of flesh, roots tangle, plotting to upend the patio; the clothes line swings its noose, pegs ready to pounce – a bucket turns its back on me and the crime I’m about to commit; hoe in hand, I scrape. The filthy shawl falls away. I’ve begged my spikes to soften to silk, scrubbed the sap and its sticky chaos, but a prickle is a prickle and I am soiled to the bone.
I sent my heart to the slaughterhouse, but it ended up at the meatworks, the place where scraps unfit for human consumption go. The knacker’s yard. Knowing men in bloody overalls will peg me up to their podium with all the other gristle trophies, stripped back to the pink blush of meat kept in line by the knife’s edge. A moulin rouge of frenzy, spinning poses of panic in neat and naked rows, a salle de spectacle that enthrals but not enough, destined for the freezer, awaiting permission to thaw. But then I changed my mind about the whole putain de cabaret and requested my heart be sent back first-class, which it was, a little shaken and peg-grazed but still intact, barely a bruise despite its pirouettes. I’ll pick away the sores but I worry that once I start I won’t be able to stop like how maggots given half a chance will chew their way through marrow until all that’s left is a string of holes only the wind blows through.
If skin is supposed to hang neatly off the shoulders, snug as a summer blouse with room to breathe and barter, delicate as a décolleté (not to be confused with decollate which means ‘to behead’) then I think mine needs sending back. It has started to snag around the elbows and split; spindles poking through to tamper with the day, wire framework rusting in the sunlight. Sometimes these bones gallop at such a speed it’s difficult to keep up. I’ve forgotten my skin on a train seat more than once, sized up by a stranger who smiles then hands it back, mademoiselle? I’ve left it slung across the back seat of a taxi, dumped at a soirée, in cloakrooms and countless métros but it’s always sent straight back to my front door. This décalage between my bones and its business leaves me hors de soi: not quite here, not quite there, voyaging on an out of date passeporte, eyes like two moons shunted out of orbit, rolling back into their sockets to search for clues.
I wish I could shell myself: strip myself back to the fibrous husk I truly am, lift up the skull, scrape out the gunk, smear the walls for everyone to see, so that when beckoned back into myself, I might finally have reason to refuse.
se-décortiqué
se-décortiqué
A
‘A’ first reared its ox-head and two horns under the crack of a whip around 1800 BC in ancient Semitic ploughing sense to the surface of the mind’s muddy fields.
***
It took millennia for to muster the courage to run away, still became ‘A’ and my tongue – obediently waiting orders at the end of a lengthy chain – twists wildly in excitement.
***
Ah barely used t’ no’ice ‘t, m’ tongue, slumped ‘neath a blank’t a’ spit an’ short Yorkshuh vowels. ‘D’y wan’ owt from t’ chippy?’ But then ‘t eight’een ‘t was ripped out, m’ tongue, pinned t’ whiteboard an’ measured ‘gainst those a’ m’ class.
***
A*AAAB. Hats off, young lady, welcome to Cambridge, your new abode. Hinc lucem et pocula sacra. How frightfully infra dig to read lingua et litteris anywhere else. Please, I pray, do try to make yourself feel at home.
***
Assessed on average saliva production, I scored higher than my peers: 1.5 litres a day as words retreated silently down my throat. But lagging behind in length, it was the English vowel span I couldn’t master.
***
Together, m’ tongue an’ I, epiglottis t’t tip, w’ strained t’ build a /
/ t’wards a better version a’ m’ self; stretching my [a] into /
:/ we pr/:/cticed the eleg/:/nt pirouettes of the prim/:/ ballerin/ɑ:/, performing the C/:/mbridge edition of ‘Oxford English’ to /:/ crowd that couldn’t c/:/re less.
But where are you really from?
***
We pulled many muscles trying to prove this skin a shawl, a layer of mud I could lose in the wash, beneath which a well-educated white girl would be keeping warm: a Kinder Surprise translated into human form 
***
It’s not my tongue that lacks temper: intelligent domesticated beast, like the runway ox ‘ts sick t’ back teeth a’ pullin’ carts whose cargo in’t ‘ts own.
B
The scaffolding for ‘B’ was first assembled around 4,000 years ago in Egypt as a hieroglyph signifying ‘home’ or 
‘shelter’.
***
Flip ‘B’ on its side and you can still make out the two windows, but do not press your nose against the glass. I tossed a stone through when language, rigid and reticent, wouldn’t bend with my tongue.
***
The vowels I stole were too bulky to speak or swallow. They j/:/mmed open my j/:/w as if with sticks and like a window stuck on a rusty latch for days I couldn’t close.
***
Neighbours talked as neighbours do, so I prised the sticks out // and papered over the cuts. The inside of my cheeks are still so r/:/w.
***
I know that language is no place for crime and disorder: it should be a shelter not a shattering, but I can no longer call this mouth my home.
***
So much has been replaced! Chandeliers and chairs and doorknobs and coffee tables and lamps and coatracks and bookshelves … switched for the latest models.
***
I am tenant after tenant hauling in new furniture: curling into the slick of the ‘’ only to fold into le fauteuil crapaud of the ‘ê’. This mouth is not my own.
***
What else can I do but pick up a pen, pitch a tent upon the page and crawl inside? I’ve locked myself out, deeds and documents prove nothing.
***
I peg down the punctuation then gather flint to make a fire, but my language will no longer light. It refuses to welcome these unlawful, thieving hands.
C
The first ‘C’ shape was carved in Phoenician and stood for a ‘hunter’s stick’ or ‘boomerang’ 
. Hanging somewhere between a salute and a slump, its angle of inclination was adjusted by the Greeks and the Etruscans depending on the danger at hand 
. When thrown correctly, towards prey with purposeful spin, a boomerang whizzes horizontally and can strike a target dead. I try to do the same with my tongue, not so much to attack as to defend my place in the conversation, excuse the skin on my bones. But pivoting the point with rapid almost reckless spin, I lose my tongue in the /rs/.
D
‘D’ first opened around 800 BC as a tent door flapping wildly in the wind 
The Greeks renamed it ‘delta’ Δ whilst the Romans tamed its unruly edges. As I whip out my Delta Sander 280W and set about sanding down a door that no longer fits its frame I think about how my language rarely opens as smoothly as it should. I’ve been silent so long my jaw warps in its jamb. I’m left stranded on the wrong side of words: looking in I think about ripping the door from its frame and building a better house, tearing my tongue from its throat and building a better body, but I can’t master the tools to do justice to the task.
H
‘H’ was first erected in Egyptian hieroglyphics as a ‘fence’ or ‘barrier’ 
whose insurmountable boundary was built for keeping enemies out.
***
Later deemed a waste of natural resources, ‘H’ was disassembled from the alphabet in 500 AD when the danger was thought to have passed.
***
Sluggish an’ sloppy ‘anded, ‘m ‘appy to ‘ear ‘bout ‘ow t’ alphabet gorrid ‘f its ‘aitch; I ‘ardly saw where y’d use it anyways, ‘cept f’ job int’views an’ radio an’ seminars an’ stuff. But still ah’m sceptic an’ got m’ suspicions…
***
I’ve lived the barrier of language too long to think that enemies are always external: often, like this tongue, they grow and fester within.
***
[A]h cl[a]mbuh over’t Yorkshuh vowels [a]h used t’know so well, dr[a]m[a]tisin’ m’ desp’r[a]te se[a]rch for s[a]fe [a]n’ st[a]ble ground. But sn[a]ggin’ ‘pon their sh[a]rp wire edges, [a]m nor’[a]llowed t’come b[a]ck in.
***
Mistaken for enemy forces, I’ve fenced myself out my mouth and into a minefield. Each word I choose is an insult against the truth, and threatens to blow the cover on who I really am.
I
‘I’ was called ‘yodh’ in 1000 BC and grew from the Egyptian hieroglyph for an ‘arm’ or ‘hand’, 
, the palm of which, like my own, has always read a future of fatal entwinement.
***
As body and language, hand and hieroglyph, root and reroute into each other, it’s a silent painful love-affair that never ends well.
***
My skeleton, like any other, is a place of scripture with death scrawled into its walls. Each day its echo grows louder, but even in the flesh, the spectacle of self-expression is a mortifying task.
***
I am terrified of answering the phone: coughing up mud into the ears of strangers. When it rings, I line my teeth up like a dry stone wall † cheeks blaze in cremation † spit-roast my tongue † whilst palms shovel pockets deep as graves.
***
My language grows a back bone the world seeks to break: hear it crunch between my teeth if I clench down too hard.
Z
Three-thousand years ago the Phoenicians carved out the sharp double-edged tool of ‘Z’ in the name of ‘zayin’ 
meaning ‘axe’.
***
Hacked from a block of silence and measured up against a lump of thought, ‘Z’ was hewed into shape by the Greeks around 800 BC. Renamed ‘zeta’, it didn’t meet the minimum industry standard: the design fell short as language always does.
***
My language is a work in progress rippled with shallow, parallel grooves: run a finger down the middle and you’ll feel the cracks. Ask me a question and I’ll chip away the words outside of what I really want to say. When all the unwanted marble is gone, you might almost understand.
*
JADE CUTTLE is Arts Commissioning Editor at The Times. Her criticism and reviews have been published in the The Times, TLS, the Telegraph, and the Guardian. She has been commissioned to write poetry for BBC Radio 3, BBC Contains Strong Language and the BBC Proms, winning competitions run by Ledbury Poetry Festival, the Poetry Society and Poetry Book Society. As a songwriter fusing metaphor with melody, Jade released an eco-themed album of poem-songs Algal Bloom through Warren Records with funding from the PRS foundation and Make Noise, performing across the BBC network and at festivals such as Latitude. Previously, she was a poetry editor at Ambit, worked at the Poetry Society and tutored at the Poetry School where she devised a poetry course for adults; judging the Costa Book Awards (both Poetry, and the Costa Book of the Year) and later the Gingko Prize alongside Simon Armitage. Her plant-whispering poetry workshops have been programmed at festivals, schools and universities and filmed for BBC One. She holds a first-class degree in Modern and Medieval Languages and Literature (Russian and French) from Cambridge University (Homerton College), and graduated with Distinction from the MA in Poetry at the University of East Anglia. (www.jadecuttle.com)