Building upon my “Pulled from my Shelves” series which I recently completed for Sina Queyras’s Lemon Hound site (indexed here) this “an irresponsible act of imaginative license” series will explore concrete and conceptual literary projects. These occasional columns will be a place for discussion (and I encourage comments), reviews and interviews around books that I think deserve increased attention.
“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett
The traditional poetic impulse is a refutation of language’s inherent failures. It is the attempt to make language perform the impossible; to lucidly reconnoiter the ineffable. Metaphorical language is an acknowledgement of language’s inherent downfall. Language is too tied to thingness, to objects and gestures (as Robbe-Grillet argues) to plumb the depths of the “human soul.” This is not to say that metaphorical language does not have moments of beauty and grace, but those moments are the result of a larger failure. As poets, we attempt to bend language to our lyrical will. What results is inevitably a failure, but the poem lies in the degree to which the poem fails.
kevin mcpherson eckhoff’s Rhapsodomancy (Toronto: Coach House, 2010) explores language’s inherent failures and surveys how those failures become poetic. Through the use of two abandoned languages—Shorthand (created by Sir Isaac Pitman in 1837) and Unifon (created by John Malone in the 1950s)—Rhapsodomancy visually ties concrete poetry (a ostracized poetic form) to other marginalized spaces: slight-of-hand, comic strips, optical illusions and apantomancy (the divination of the future through scattered objects).
Rhapsodomancy’s “Disavowals: Optical Allusions” recreate traditional optical illusions with Unifon characters. Each of the fourteen visual poems playful challenge the reader to define their own poetic foreground/background relationship; the pillar of “I” warps, one of the arms of “E” falls into emptiness, the “O” is a linguistic Gordian knot. The “optical allusions” in “Disavowals” belie the illusion of poetry; strain your eyes as much as you’d like, vertigo is inevitable.
As hopeful as apantomancy (the divination of the future from astrology, palm-reading, tea-leaf reading revealing more about the reader than the read) may be, poetry is just as naïvely optimistic. Poets have become literary palm-readers, not because they can divine or influence the future (gone are the days when poets were members of the court or endowed by the ruling classes to celebrate and immortalize their accomplishments), but because they are the literary equivalent of tarot-reader in a secluded tent at a creative anachronist fair. Poetry has become Shorthand and Unifon, one more language largely abandoned to specialist and anachronists who pine for a return to an imagined poetic heyday.
Rhapsodomancy revels in the exuberant, playful poetics of failure. The meaning we have “stamped on [the] lifeless things” of poetry is merely an illusion, a “now you see it, now you don’t.” No longer is poetry the beautiful expression of an emotive truth; it has become the archæological re-arrangement of the remains of an ancient civilization. Faced with the “two vast and trunkless legs of stone” of Shorthand and Unifon (and by extension of poetry itself), mcpherson eckhoff realizes that “[r]ound the decay / of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away” and sits down to make sandcastles in the rubble.
rob mclennan has interviewed me about my NO PRESS imprint for his blog as part of his “12 or 20 questions” series.
It seems hardly reasonable at first glance to suppose that an entirely new literature might one day—now, for instance—be possible. The many attempts made these last thirty years to drag literature out of its ruts have resulted at best, in no more than isolated works. And—we are often told—none of these works, whatever its interest, has gained the adherence of a public comparable to that of the bourgeois novel. The only conception of the novel to have currency today is, in fact, that of Dickens.
Or that of Charlotte Brontë. Already sacrosanct in her day, psychological analysis constituted the basis of all prose: it governed the conception of the book, the description of the characters, the development of its plot. A “good” novel, ever since, has remained the study of a passion—or of a conflict of passions, or of an absence of passion—in a given milieu. Most of our contemporary novelists of the traditional sort—those, that is, who manage to gain the approval of their readers—could insert long passages from Jane Eyre or Great Expectations into their own books without awakening the suspicions of the enormous public which devours whatever they turn out. They would merely need to change a phrase here and there, simplify certain constructions, afford an occasional glimpse of their own “manner” by means of a word, a daring image, the rhythm of a sentence …. But all acknowledge, without seeing anything peculiar about it, that their own preoccupations as writers date back several centuries.
What is so surprising about this, after all? The raw material—the English language—has undergone only very slight modifications for three hundred years; and if society has been gradually transformed, if industrial techniques have made considerable progress, our intellectual civilization has remained much the same. We live by essentially the same habits and the same prohibitions—moral, alimentary, religious, sexual, hygienic, etc. And of course there is always the human “heart,” which as everyone knows is eternal. There’s nothing new under the sun, it’s all been said before, we’ve come on the scene too late, etc., etc.
The risk of such rebuffs is merely increased if one dares claim that this new literature is not only possible in the future, but is already being written, and that it will represent—in its fulfillment—a revolution more complete than those which in the past produced such movements as romanticism or naturalism.
There is, of course, something ridiculous about such a promise as “Now things are going to be different!” How will they be different? In what direction will they change? And, especially, why are they going to change now?
The art of literature, however, has fallen into such a state of stagnation—a lassitude acknowledged and discussed by the whole of critical opinion—that it is hard to imagine such an art can survive for long without some radical change. To many, the solution seems simple enough: such a change being impossible, the art of the literature is dying. This is far from certain. History will reveal, in a few decades, whether the various fits and starts which have been recorded are signs of a death agony or of a rebirth.
Avenue Magazine has an article on my work in the January 2011 issue. The article focuses on my Letraset visual poetry, and can be accessed here.
Taking inspiration from Sina Queyras’s “most engaging books of 2010” blogpost, I thought I would throw my ring into the hat with a similar – though divergent – list of my own. There’s lots I haven’t yet read, but of what I have read so far this year, this is the cream of the crop….
THE TOP (Baker’s) DOZEN FOR POETRY
Backer, Heimrad. transcript. London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2010.
Ball, Jonathan. Clockfire. Toronto: Coach House, 2010.
Fiorentino, Jon Paul. Indexical Elegies. Toronto: Coach House, 2010.
Goldstein, Mark. Tracelanguage: A Shared Breath. Toronto: Bookthug, 2010.
Hajnoczky, Helen. Poets and Killers. Montreal: Snare, 2010.
Kennedy, Jake. The Lateral. Montreal: Snare, 2010.
Laliberte, Mark. brickbrickbrick. Toronto: Bookthug, 2010.
mcpherson eckhoff, kevin. Rhapsodomancy. Toronto: Coach House, 2010.
Murray, George. Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms. Toronto: ECW, 2010.
Place, Vanessa. Tragodia: 1. Statement of Facts. Los Angeles, Blanc Press, 2010.
Truscott, Mark. Nature. Toronto: Bookthug, 2010.
Wershler, Darren and Bill Kennedy. Update. Montreal: Snare, 2010.
Zolf, Rachel. Neighbour Procedure. Toronto: Coach House, 2010.
A COUPLE OF FICTION
Mason, Zackary. The Lost Books of the Odyssey. New York: FS&G, 2010.
Morris, Simon. Getting Inside Kerouac’s Head. York: Information as Material, 2010.
A COUPLE OF NON-FICTION/ THEORY
Dworkin, Craig. The Perverse Library. York: Information as Material, 2010.
Perloff, Marjorie. Unoriginal Genius: poetry by other means in the new century. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.
COLLECTIONS / SELECTEDS / COLLECTEDS
Bernstein, Charles. All the Whiskey in Heaven. New York: FS&G, 2010.
Walser, Robert. Microscripts. New York: New Directions, 2010.
No press is proud to announce the publication of FOR KURT SCHWITTERS by Andrei Molotiu
Two great tastes that taste great together — Molotui’s abstract comic interpretation of Schwitter’s asemic sound poem!
Published in an edition of 50 copies (25 of which are for sale), this leaflet sells for $1.50
To order, please contact derek beaulieu.
I recently reviewed Mark Laliberte’s brickbrickbrick (Toronto: Bookthug, 2010) at the advent book blog.
As my “Pulled off my Shelves” column for Lemonhound has drawn to a close, i have collected all of the columns here.
No press is proud to announce the publication of SPELLES by Oana Avasilichioaei.
Published in an edition of 50 handbound copies (25 of which are for sale), each copy includes a CD of Avasilichioaei’s multitracked performance of SPELLES.
SPELLES is available for $10 (shipping included). To order, please contact derek beaulieu.
The latest column in my “Pulled of my Shelves” series — the last in a baker’s dozen all graciously hosted by Lemonhound — is “A library is print in its gaseous state.”
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