‘Rios de Cisnes [Rivers of Swans]’ is the dramatic result of a material collision between a territory [Southern Chile], a voice who defends it, and the variety of energies on which the voice draws. Within this collision, a rich collection of materiality has accumulated to a particular intensity before bifurcating. The change in the value of d, therefore, is enormous.

Speed is of particular concern in the following poem. We are concerned with a rapid resolution of the ongoing injustices suffered by the people of whom Paulo Huirimilla speaks. In this instance, then, to achieve the highest quantity of v, to allow for the complete, positive transference of energy which generated the enormous flux of d, we will be reducing t to its smallest possible value:

Incorporeal transformation, not petrification, is the essence of language. A linguistic expression presupposes a continuum of variation between and across thresholds. Any given language is a dialect among others, in a network of power relations marked by grammatical formations standing as signposts to a site of everyday conflict. Translation adds another level of definition to an event’s dynamism. It re-invigorates it, makes it repeatable, multiplies it. I stole everything in this paragraph from Brian Massumi.

If you see a gap it’s because you’ve missed the bifurcation; the war has moved on to the next valley.

8 January, 2008
Somewhere en el Evil, oops, Inland Imperio de Califas

For Laura Gutiérrez, Elaine S. Brooks, Raphael Kadushin y Florence Moorhead-Rosenberg,Tauruses all, con amor y sangre

Well, mi colega y amigo el José C-2 accompanied me to the hospie yesterday for a biopsy. It was extremely unpleasant, to say the least, and, as could be predicted, my BP was off the radar, que digamos Richter (more el upper que el lower numerito, pero I forget which way is more dire, lo cual me hace stress out even more, OB-vio…) en los momentos just before the “procedure”. I am trying not to be too alarmed about THAT, since the arribas and abajos of my BP are intimately related to my emo state, and I’ve been faithfully using my new Resperate machine, que te hace una especie de biofeedback pa’ aletargarte la breathing. Plus, he seguido con el estúpido sécate-toda diuretic, los health walks, y bla bla (ay, todo tan boring).

Anygüey, I won’t go into detalle about el procedimiento mismo: it was unnerving, demoralising and mega-estresante, even bajo los efectos del Xanax and local lidocane (the installation of which was maybe even casi casi lo PEOR). Por suerte, the pathologist who performed the stereotactic biopsy era un puertorriqueño who appreciated the bizarre humor I was somehow able to muster cuando, mientras yacía, boca abajo, en ese heartlessly cold metal table (images of la parrilla–como le decían al torture table que usaban durante la dictadura en Argentina—kept popping into my admittedly paranoid and hyperbolic imaginación), le pregunté, apropos of a teensy titanium CLIP (?) they inserted into my buhto—AND LEFT THERE—supuestamente at the precise site of the microcalcificaciones, if I was now officially some sort of Sci Fi Alien. El tipo, cool as a pepino, hasta me hizo un little quip patrás, “why, are you an unofficial alien now?”

Actually, it is the thought of having that tiny “clip” inside me, in such an intimate locus of my geografía interior, that I find most unsettling and yet (bueno, you know how genuinely STRANGE I am)… also somehow intriguing. En la X-ray que me mostró el médico, it looks a bit like a tiny (we’re talking, about the size of a pen point) antenna, or a blue ribbon (as the Chicana nurse, Melissa, cheerfully prompted me to appreciate). To me, it looks most like the glyph for the astrological sign Taurus, el signo de varios de mis MAXimos carnales. And so, I will hold on to the idea of this semaphor. Me reconforta, de alguna manera, la idea de shevarlo a Uds. tan close to my too-excitable heart, entangled con mis entrañas…and in imminent danger (aunque el patólogo assured me this would not happen!) of setting off los detectores de metal en los aeropuertos.

Can you imagine? First my 24 South African bracelets—que eventualmente tuve que dejar de llevar, por el tema del beefed-up security en los aeropuertos, post 9/11, después de más de 20 años, so much jingle jangle and weight on that left side; I even gave birth in them, coño!–and now un Taurean titanium clip, marking off the site of former microcalcificaciones busteriles.

Mientras me hacían la jodida biopsia, the nurse had to call in una über-enfermera, porque aparentemente, there was a blood vessel too close to the site of the little chips de calcio, and they had to do this most uncomfy manipulating operación to get it (la vesícula) out of the way.

Bueno, al regresar a casa entré al cobalt blue guest bath, abajo. I took in the fantastic, little-girl-lost Camille Rose García prints, the beautiful caldera-colored mosaic-tiled counter, the gorgeously Goth, black, drippy-looking wrought iron light fixture, worthy of the Addams Family manse, installed by Pierre en las últimas refacciones del 2006. I took off my ancient (according to fashion’s ever-fickle seasons) black Prada ski jacket (second-hand regalo de mi hermana Wiggue, before I went to Buenos Aires for the first time, en el ‘99—y creo que estaba past-season even then!). In that penumbral, Alice in Wonderland a lo Chicana luz, I saw three sort of beautiful pero definitely crimson spots flowering on my chest, left side. I wriggled out of the left side of my grey American Apparel raglan-sleeved, tissueweight cotton sweatshirt, cupped my breast instinctively and my hand came away filled with blood.

Como en una película de horror, like in “Carrie,” la sangre saturaba el petite round ice pack que las enfermeras me habían insertado en el sexy yet sort of stern black Olga bra (my good-luck corpiño). Todavía pathetically clutching my breast, con la bahtante menos eficaz diestra, I stripped off the top, y el bra; los tiré al sink con ese crimson icepack, les eché agua fría encima and watched it bloom scarlet. Just like ese Easter egg dye que nos preparaba mamá, musité. El espejo me devolvió una imagen espectral, oddly placid. Blood covered the left side of my torso. How could so much blood emerge from a tiny nick, pensé, y luego, immediately, pensé en ese famoso cuadro de Frida Kahlo, “Unos cuantos piquetitos.” Can you imagine? Typical me: there I am, dripping, pulsing, coursing sangre, pensando en la moda, en películas, paintings.

I unzipped my grey-green Levi pinwale stretch cords; I was intensely conscious I would drip blood all over the floor; me preocupaban las gatas, Esmeralda y Alejandra, que ya maullaban, worried (bueno OK, also hungry, a decir verdad…). I remembered about pressure. Aplicar presión. I held my breast more insistently, con la mano derecha, pero somehow, I couldn’t believe that only that would staunch the flow. Llamé a Pierre al trabajo, porque conoce un chingo de First Aid, pero to my horror, he was barely even conscious himself, having been stricken con un fast-moving stomach flu. Apenitas tenía la fuerza, as it turned out, to drive himself home.

Para cuando llegó, I’d already spoken to the enfermera, y al mere mere Puerto Rican pathologist, quien me dijo que (natuurlik) lo que me pasó was “unusual,” pero that there can always be some little artery or vesícula “in the way,” invisible. A fount of unexpected blood. He told me, bien matter of fact, que hasta en el peor de los casos (cutting “a major artery”, dijo, creo) if you apply pressure “for about an hour”, it will stop.

Bueno gente, apreté like there was no tomorrow; I set the little red, retro timer en la blood-red, PoMo, retro cocina, and pressed, 20 minutos, como si fuera uno de los trials de Hércules.

It stopped.

By the time it stopped, había blood spatters on the made-in-Argentina (it’s true, el downstairs floor tile hasta se shama “Pampa”), faux-Spanish–or faux-Mexican—Saltillo tile; blood had soaked through the rolled up paper tower I was clutching; it caked my hand, la axila, streaked my torso y hasta trickled down into my chonies. El full-length espejo en el living, donde generalmente chequeo mi look antes de salir al mundo, me devolvió una imagen espeluznante. Somehow ghoulish y compellingly erotic a la vez.

OK, OK, sha sé. Leave it to me.

Y bueno, it’s Kaiser Permanente. It’s an HMO mundo we inhabit (digo, those of us even lucky enough to have healthcare coverage), so I won’t know anything for up to 10 days, can you believe it? Y eso que sólo me van a llamar para hacer una cita for me to return, again, to that rasquache Kaiser Permanente hospital in the heart of the Evil, qiue digamos Inland Empire, en Fontana, Califas, para que me den los resultados in person. Me dijeron: whether the news is good or bad, they have to give it to you in person. Es la ley.

So now, a esperar. Tic tac tic tac. Um, not something my grand trine in Fuego personality excels at, pero you already know that. Y… qué remedio, no?

So, les escribo esto, Tauruses, seeking comfort, seeking…que sé sho, connection. Sigh. As usual. My words looking for your words, wishing it were your eyes, your mouth I could see talking, reassuring, laughing with me. Pero for now, heme aquí, a la espera. This is it.

Writing about your experiences is a difficult and unnatural act. Despite this writers believe and strive ever onwards. Perhaps they even take a course. Yes, I personally have (after much struggle) found some merit in engaging with my life. The enterprise involved a focus on (and unravelling of) the subject of my ‘self’, the idea, and I admit there has been some crafty gain. So I will continue to do it I suppose. But I am prepared to spend more time entertaining other notions. What I like to think of as natural, game-like options. This project is more textual; therefore it aims at achieving more. Let’s hazard a use of the word experimental.

A pause: simply uttering certain words can invoke bizarre notions. Consider Eduardo Kac and his dabblings in various forms of experimental bio-poetry. His ideas – amongst other things – include nanopoetry, xenographics, and dynamic biochromatic composition (Kac, 2005). All of these directions he labels experimental. Imagine telling a non-literary friend you were practicing in one of these three fields. To them such experimental work may seem incomprehensible. They may come to equate the two terms. You could rightly argue this non-literary friend will never understand much anyway, and that’s true, but the attitude can be seen elsewhere. Dr. Coral Hull told me once ‘…people (when I say people, I mean the public) really do like poetry that they can understand’ (2006, pers. Comm.., 31^st March); and of course I know others that would never write with that kind of public in mind, calling it ‘populism’. It’s been going on for years. In the early twentieth century Christopher Brennan famously disagreed with anyone who thought his work should be more accessible – Musicopoematographoscope was his brilliantly confusing poetic response. So, difficult or easy? Maybe, experimental or lyric?

In response I’m taking the middle-ground. ‘Experimental’ doesn’t equal ‘incomprehensible’. And sometimes it does, to some people. Sometimes it needs to (the unraveling of an awkwardly fictional ‘self’ is often necessary). Of course Kac’s work reaches beyond textual experimentation; Brennan doggedly refused to push his experimenting as far as he could have. I am limiting myself by citing their work. Here and everywhere, I am very interested in a textual push. Goodbye Eduardo and Chris.

I am saying then (or writing) that defining your own text as ‘experimental’ is not labeling it ‘difficult’ or ‘weird’. But, in some instances application of the term can obfuscate what is happening. Writing that a reviewer has found intriguing but incomprehensible can expect to attract the comment, often with ‘single inverted commas’ around it. Yes, writing should not be unreadable, rendered in invisible-ink. And any writing that involves concerted play with the elements of poetry – think rhythm, language, typography, syntax, semantics, or diction – could be called experimental. So any writing that is overly difficult and confusing, should belong in a different category. Michael Farrell (2006) previously discussed these basic elements of poetry on Reading Revival. His view was that the act of labeling writing ‘experimental’ is lazy, and that often not all of these elements are being played with. I agree with him. The word ‘experimental’ needs interrogation. And if it has been subject to this already, well, I was not doing the interrogating. One must be selfish to create a self.

A quick google reminds me that traditional scientific method involves observation, hypothesis and testing. But science relies on replication. Is a poetic experiment feasible? Perhaps the end-product of poetry is however, more repeatable than we might imagine. I don’t think it amounts to style, voice, et cetera. What is needed is simply a set of personal limits: what do you want to achieve? If you desire a ‘focused spontaneity’ (Dobrez (1999) thinks Dransfield did – I think you probably should too), you might practice readiness then save the heuristic. I could draw a musical analogy here: tonal scales and improvisation, that sort of thing. But instead I like to imagine I am the boy who could fly, thinking, preparing, ready to take off. Because I can imagine it’s never been done before.

In any field experimentation will lead to further work, or new directions. And so it is possible poetic experimentation is inevitable. All unsatisfied poets should experiment – we are then continually testing out new things, developing new writings, avoiding brick-walls. Some poets will not do this. They are satisfied with the weight of history upon their shoulders. They might spend a life testing only new subject matter. We should not disregard their work, but instead take our own very seriously. When I trial a new approach in my writing (for whatever reason) more often than not a good result follows. It is a consistent result, replicable even. The result is not necessarily a great poem. Depending on the way you think, this is a great poem:

talk is better than write

(it is curiously anachronistic)
i speak with an accent (one round of applause round)& i
know i don’t (however a spontaneous) how far does that go?
in the end all dignitaries waver & fall (they accuse me)
as i deliver a fading speech (& it rolls, a barrel madly scrawled)
over the table of contents (a podium all eyes spy me at it) i won’t subject
you to it (severed heads down the aisle) my motives are, how would you
put it, niggardly or meta (emission, a ‘one-off’ universal) that’s right, i am not any old
descriptivist (check the program) the dog whines at the chamber (one treacherous) a
door only because i tend to reinforce this behaviour (drowning out the dog nobody
spoke) & i must speak to him about it ((this morning; this occasional))
privilege my thought (another age & there in the glare)

there comes only one round of applause that is signally round (& i speak to him)
(this morning; this occasional no i don’t ) & it rolls like a barrel of severed heads
down the aisle (dignitaries waver & fall) for an instant drowning (privilege my
thought) out the dog (the dog whines at the chamber)
nobody (not any old descriptivist) spoke however (a fading speech madly scrawled) it
was a spontaneous emission, a ‘one-off’ symptom of the universe (over the table of
contents / subject) i check the program (my motives are)
it is curiously anachronistic: speak with an accent & of another age (i reinforce it)
& there in the glare of a podium all eyes spy me at it (niggardly or meta) right
they accuse me as one treacherous

(how far does that go?)

How far does it go? An experimental process can be just that little bit more than not worth the effort. A minor victory. In the case of the preceding poem I tested repetition, using it to create the ‘immersive’ feel in this poem. I have some confidence that this method has possibilities for further application. The point is that the small victories of ambition have to be emphasized, and experimenting does help the poet develop new cognitions. Small methods are filed away. When the unwritten words call for something, needling your mind with the need for a perfect vehicle, past experimentation can provide options. An array of options is vital to continued and interesting writing. It’s your unexpected lift on the long and lonely highway of cliché. So we can push experimentation further. It can get scientific. Rather than accidental play I seek to turn experimentation into a consistent and useful tool, a heuristic generator.

Michael Farrell (2006a) once said he began using chance and limitation in order to ‘escape a reliance on instinct (which often means convention).’ His methods – among other things – involve sometimes using dice to determine line-length, and I think using constraint has worked for him. This is perhaps an example of making one’s instinct encompass a drive to write with the potentiality of the unconventional. A heuristically based method of experimentation requires the calling into play of that which is unconventional and distant, that which is liminal. It is just as likely one might become reliant on chance procedures to disrupt a flow of conventional poetic notions; chance may then become the ‘centre’ of instinct. But instead short spurts of disruption can break up any conventional monotony. This is what I have found.

I have made use of chance procedures to determine aspects of some of my pieces, for instance ‘where is silicon valley?’ was self-generating: lines were progressively fed into internet search engines to produce new lines (Motion, 2005). Overall though, it is enough that these strategies are considered as possibilities. A progressively unconventional line does not always suit my purposes or your purposes. I see merit in a fluidity of purpose and approach. It can equal something to offer the poetic conversation. Many things can be used to disrupt instinct, and therefore there must be change: no one approach should become instinctual. Or more accurately, no one experimental approach should become instinctual.

John Kinsella advocates disruption quite a bit. He fancies it perhaps, in its many forms. In an article on ‘back-drafting’ he writes:

… through a process of drafting de-lineation, often in fact relying on the physical measurement of a line in a particular font (which often changes when the poem is published) by way of ‘weighting’, using the centre of the line not so much as caesura but as pivot, I distract or displace the expected measurements.

(Kinsella, 2005)

The re-working in question is a typographical disruption, based around the way text looks on the page, but also the display and output of a computer screen. It is something I think a writer can develop a feel for. There is an aesthetic judgement that can be made when viewing a poem on the screen. The typography (the font-size, the spacing et cetera) is an element one can isolate, and play with. An aesthetic decision I make with nearly all of my poetry is to write using one and a half unit spacing. Yet when pieces are published it is true, as Kinsella observes, that your own typographical feel is often changed. This can be a surprising positive or it can be a disappointment. Either way, I am always made aware of the visual presentation of text. It is there, an element of poetry.

Some of my poems demonstrate how I attempt to experiment with typography: the unpublished ‘holiday’ almost eliminates spacing, and (importantly for me) foregrounds typographical strangeness. This is a fragment:

damnkafka’ssisteriscryingatmydooragain

whatamisupposedtocareidon’twantto

gotoworktoday ifonlythepressureswould

stopgettingtomeidon’tanswerthephone&so

And so it goes on. ‘barcode 9 311532 071002’ (also published in Cordite) utilises a more subtle disruptive spacing schema (Motion, 2006). Here the large spaces in between words and phrases were originally going to serve as full-stops, but the piece evolved with a form of Kinsella’s ‘back-drafting’; the large spaces remained but with punctuation, for a stilted and intentional effect. A good isolated example is the line:

only the messages                          they continue.

This is a poem where the content tells a story. The elements of this story are accentuated by typographical obstruction – the interplay of form and content is energised thereby. The ‘barcode’ is but one symbol of meaning, order, and mystery. All tools a writer can harness and hardwire.

But ‘meaning is evil and escapes over trees’. (It’s from an unpublished poem of mine). One can look at and study the meanings of words and find the gradations infinite: for example one can look for meanings in clauses, statements, even entire poems: and then beyond this and below. A way to experiment with meaning (or semantics) is to eliminate other foci – forget form for instance. A scientific ‘control’. As mentioned meaning can be observed in units of varying size. Playing with the meaning of single words is interesting; as is playing with lines full of meaning, or even a poem full of meaning. The semantic manipulation might be obvious in the following poem. The ‘experimental’ nature of this poem was not wholly retained (further editing was applied – the piece called for it) but there is evidence of what the process achieved. Meaning relates to perception and even truth. ‘lacrimosus’ began – as I saw it – as a completely ‘untrue’ poem, where meaning is twisted throughout into a state of falsity. I tried to write something I considered ‘bad’. But failure in this attempt is the stuff of paradox. By strengthening craft, heuristic readiness, one makes writing badly more difficult.

lacrimosus

murky

bad poem full of unrequite

enfolding

grievous hurt of aloneness

deep black hole solituded me

dark abyssed me

&poles opposite

anonymous

you move all haloed bliss / laughter & light

unknowing your eyes follow chirping sounds

i crouch & suffer

here: singular, tangled, despairing

emotion tormented me

clouded spite & eviled me

me bedevilled

you

read sunlit of unrequite then

not at all – my love a slow & ghostly creature

shut away cruelly romantic

grievous hurt of aloneness

& permeating deeper each

torturous second

poles opposite reflect black

deep blacknessed me

me pitch sentiment shrouded

empty world me

Even when attempting to write in a semantically ‘untrue’ mode (this piece admits and celebrates many elements of poetry I dislike) a creative purpose emerged. The syntactic distortion of expected word-placement is poetically interesting. As such the meaning even moves closer toward an emotional truth: the poem takes on a life of its own! ‘lacrimosus’ shows off an intriguing ambiguity of meaning (or tone?) as well as a fresh syntax. Once again, something was filed away.

Pi O is a writer who has also (but more famously) altered the syntactical arrangement of English in his poetry:

On my first book I had on the back cover ‘F… the spelling’ and that was really important because as long as I was being forced to speak in proper English and write proper English sentences there was no way to express… my experiences…

(Adie, 2004)

(The ‘F…’ word was not removed by me – we must hazard a guess as to its meaning). To create a language better able to express his particular meanings (circling the migrant aspect of his experience) Pi O also relates how he began to break up ‘…the position of the verb, noun and adjective in a sentence…’ This process was then, a process of experimenting with syntax, whether conscious or not. Furthermore it was a successful process for Pi O. By expanding his grasp of English to include syntactical arrangements that challenged Colonial English, he was able to successfully poeticise his experience and his particular community. Might this then be an experiment other poets should undertake – even if they do not have the particular aim of bringing an ethnic vernacular into their poetry?

If so the first step to take is to examine the patterns, and then to break them apart. Since the rules of grammar are so embedded, the first step must be to make the syntax strange. This is an overstatement – of course poetry does take liberties with syntax already – but to really try something new the syntax needs to be messed up until it seems very strange / confusing / even hard to read. Shklovsky (1991) felt this was what writing was all about – the purpose of art is to ‘enstrange’ objects and experiences, to re-awaken a reader’s senses; indeed he wrote ‘[a]utomatization eats away at things, at clothes, at furniture, at our wives, and at our fear of war’ (p. 5). And through his formal analyses Shklovsky highlighted one real power writing has. It can reawaken sensory pleasure in the reader, by making them see things anew. Although it may seem difficult to attempt to define or capture this ‘enstrangement’, one of my experiments was a relatively straightforward process, and it does illustrate that confusion can be used positively – to at least gesture towards a sensory newness.

‘couch’ began as a simple observational piece, written very quickly. Because the piece was simple to begin with it was useful for some concerted play – the outcomes would then be fairly easy to observe, and evaluate. I first reordered all the lines so the last line was now first, and so on. This resulted in a disjointed feel. The main ideas were presented backwards and one line wouldn’t easily flow into the next; but each line still retained a grammatical coherency, like the traditional ‘unit of thought’. To further play I then rearranged the words in each line, trying to force the maximum ‘strangeness’ into the lines with unlikely syntax (unlikely combinations of nouns, adjectives, verbs et cetera). So a first line that started out as a prosaic:

earlier on during the day i move the couch outside

(which is already slightly grammatically inconsistent) became the last line of the piece. This shook up any sense of narrative flow in the piece. But then after re-arrangement this line ended up as:

outside couch earlier during the on day i move

Also, the first line, that began as:

the recliner never finer; the times humdrum.

ended up as:

humdrum the like never recliner finer times

and this is a line that is not only more interesting and beautiful, but also contains allusions to something more complex – something about the experience of writing about an experience. This may be accidental, but I don’t think so: the arrangement of words simply brings out this more nuanced theme. This theme, plus the way it is put, I believe makes the piece engaging. And it goes like this:

couch

humdrum the like never recliner finer times

the elements people the sometimes that past to walk their purposes

the not comfort was remiss quite but not absolute juxtaposing the of me

stoned suitably sparkles for the of the night the anyway

the & to the whatever summit

went across out & began i the journey armrests

i the later couch there put then now

found places lush suitable grass the amongst sun &

outside couch earlier during the on day i move

So one poem ends up more intriguing than it originally was. There is a sense of images roaming free, rather than being forcibly ordered into a coherent piece of writing. ‘couch’ began as a pedestrian piece, one that dealt with the particular feelings of sitting on a couch in a garden. It probably would have been thrown out but with some play it became unusual. More importantly though, this process demonstrates that even though intentionally poetic writing might sometimes subvert the imbedded structures of language, it also relies on them a great deal to generate interest. The ‘strangeness’ of syntax in ‘couch’ is certainly not something to work into all writing, but it is a difference that I find intriguing. Slight reworking makes words new – just look at any snippet of poem by e.e. cummings, for example:

i like my body when it is with your

body. It is so quite a new thing.

Muscles better and nerves more.

(1977)

There are many untried possibilities for the arrangement of words; there are many poems to write. Arrangement is an important act (the most important?) but some might argue there is still the matter of choosing the right words to arrange.

Word-choice is surely problematic; it is not so easily experimented with. It is possible to write with certain ‘meta’ ideas of diction in mind – for instance writing with an elevated tone, writing in a curious vernacular or slang – although these experiments are rather light, and do enable a sort of reading that assumes the ‘finding’ of the character, or author within a poem is possible. I find simple scrambling of diction with a thesaurus more interesting. Because my ‘self’ will not be revealed with any close reading of my work. Only the self I have built. Writing, or construction, precedes the ‘self’. Indeed I might argue that the ‘jubilant assumption’ of one’s ‘specular image’ – the way Lacan (2001, p.1286) describes the process of an individual identifying their self – might be indefinitely postponed with the act of writing The profound sense of loss Lacan proposed we experience when assuming our imago (in the Mirror Stage) need not be so bad. There is a freedom that comes with escaping certainty, or at least with deciding on one’s own limitations. The words will just come.

Will the lines just come though? Control of line is perhaps the one unique tool a poet has that other writers do not. Deciding where your lines end and how your stanzas are grouped is an important element of poetics. One thing more specific research into my own work has revealed (embarrassingly) is that it can be easy to relax and fall into a particular habit of lineation. Geoff Page (2005) once said at a reading that he now finds it natural to write regularly metered lines; but I don’t think this can happen for all writers. I don’t think it should either. To have a competent grasp of poetic tools it is necessary to experiment with line, and to keep experimenting (Page may well have done this – he seems content with his style). The poems I have previously discussed show that marrying the use of line with a particular purpose is one of the best ways to come to terms with it. This purpose may be to aid clarity; kinetic movement; a visual aspect; even a movement of emotion, or focus. The aim is to develop one’s confidence with line and to be able to adapt it to whatever purpose arises: line manipulation becomes a tool, just as the other elements that have been focussed on become tools. There is heuristic analysis at play as the poet writes and it is most certainly mediated by the tools the poet possesses, or even invents.

Now I draw near to the end of this work, even though I can see so much ground that hasn’t been covered. And now is probably the time when the title of this essay should make some impact. Well, I’ve heard many a conservative voter say ‘Should we really change, just for change’s sake?’ And I think, no, surely we should keep what is worthwhile. Yet there is a need to continually try new things, if only in order to know what is worth keeping. I’ve found I do need to keep what works in place – to file it away as a flexible heuristic. I also sense the need to continually add to the processes. Like artificial intelligence, but not artificial, not too artificial.

So it must be re-observed that the formal methods employed mirror Lacan’s fictional self. I build structures – neither real nor fictive. But always jubilant. And it is paradoxical (the escape from experiential writing leads to the constriction of self?) but, I think anything of true worth tends to have a hint of paradox. I did find on review that this essay seemed too prosaic, too straight-forward: it lacks a lot of what I value in poetry. And yet on completion I feel like it had to be done. This somewhat transparent type of meta-writing helps clarify part of what is important to me. It makes things clear to myself and then perhaps to some others. The procedures and thought outlined here is a small sample of what I do. A lot of the time when thinking about experimentation and method, all you have to go on is the poem. As in this conclusion:

a talking paul auster

for & after fay zwicky

previous to being born alive, i was read aloud to a scruff man
by the candlelight & cold of sarajevo. the surrounding sky
such a clear aqua for winter, myself the kernel of an idea
softly glowing, a devastating & interesting point

that will sadly never exist. all around me the world
only beginning to resolve like a good movie,
diverting attention from complexities. i saw myself pacing
over non-coloured lines toward the sea, half a figure at best,

one step away from communicating, dumb. of heightened
clarity now & cockled, i feel sure i am able to pursue triggers.
just one or a stretching twenty weighted sentences always
loaded with stories, anger, & my selves.

‘hey paul!’ people say to me, tones jostling for an opening,
some time too. these sidelong shufflers all summed up
by rebellion & intellectualism, all of them – you can see
it in the way the eyes work & how every look counts

for a bit. asking questions about what things
were like too, for them, before they lived. i never
answer absurdities. for me ‘now’ is a simple mid-
point: there is only distinct phasings & the two

parts equal: ‘poetry’ & then ‘get up & dance’.
my night-time song is pure & referential, it balloons
in other writer’s dreams, where most profound things
belong. of course, can all stragglers maintain strength

while competently putting their finger on it? no, they
speak in interview & are not imagined by the whimsy
of a hirsute woman in the andes; words still summarise
only my classic jab at the repetition of being human.

ah the lyricism in walking & talking like this. see
this fable twisting as smoke, a slippery curlicue
to blind. if i could ever reach people it would
be like that, dripping through a paratactic summation

of insubstantial intent. i like that, feel other
minds sigh in complicity. even outside the
boring slats of brooklyn bodies let things go,
for brief moments. unguarded.

i once said the novel is the closest you can get
to another’s mind & i like the way i said that. i often
feel very close to the image i present, what i do.
inject, if you want, my thoughts that are forever.

* The thumbnail picture that this essay is linked to is a detail from a drawing in Lucas Ihlein’s series ‘Hands Open Like Eyes Open Like Hands’.

References

Adie, K. (2004). ‘Revolutionary now poet in residence’, in Illawarra Mercury,
22^nd September. Fairfax Holdings.

Brennan, C. (1981). Musicopoematographoscope. Hale & Iremonger: Sydney.

cummings, e.e. (1977). ‘i like my body when it is with your’, in selected poems:
1923 – 1958. Faber & Faber: London.

Dobrez, P. (1999). Michael Dransfield’s Lives: A Sixties Biography. Carlton
South, Victoria: Melbourne University Press.

Farrell, M. (2006a). ‘interview with michael farrell by richard lopez’, in
e-x-c-h-a-n -g- e-v-a-l-u-e-s. Beckett, T. (ed.)
http://willtoexchange.blogspot.com/

Farrell, M. (2006b). ‘Monday, June 12^th, 2006’, in Reading Revival.
http://readingrevival.blogspot.com/

Kac, E. (2005). ‘Biopoetry’, in Technoetic Arts 3: 1, pp. 13–17.

Kinsella, J. (2005). ‘Line Breaks and Back-Drafts: Not a Defence of a Poem’, in
Poetry Review, vol. 95, no. 4.
http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr95-4/kinsella.htm

Lacan, J. (2001). ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the as
revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience’, In Leitch, V. B. (ed.) The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Norton: New York, pp. 1285-1290.

Motion, D. (2005). ‘where is silicon valley?’, in Cordite Poetry Review #23
(writing as Baz Malley)
http://www.cordite.org.au/archives/001069.html

Motion, D. (2006). ‘barcode 9 311532 071002’, in Cordite Poetry Review #25
http://www.cordite.org.au/archives/001218.html

Page, G. (2005). Reading at the Riverine Club, Wagga Wagga.

Shklovsky, V. (1991). Theory of Prose. Sher, B (trans.) Dalkey Archive Press:
Illinois

Amanda Stewart’s poetry collection I/T Selected Poems 1980-1996 comprises two parts: a disc with readings and performances of the poems, and a book of text and visual poems. The disjunction and potential for dialogue between these forms of inscription is a concern that constantly informs Stewart’s practice. Her aural inscription uses distinctive, extended vocal techniques and looped, multiple tracks. It is a vocabulary which values stutters, utterances, half-swallowed sounds and breaths, as much as words. On the page, vocal acrobatics are exchanged for visual poetry. Her graphic poems are thick with punctuation; words scatter and intersect pages, they are cut off, overwritten and allowed to bleed into each other. To view her aural poems as mere readings of text, or equally, the text as something akin to dutifully inserted lyrics in the liner notes of a record, is to make simplistic reductions. Together both fields function as expansions of possibility, rather than guides to either experience. Neither exists to make perfect sense of the other, yet they make sense together in a ‘parallel, integrally related but also distinct’ manner (Stewart 1998b, liner notes para.1).

Anne Carson traces a consciousness of the way aural and textual fields differently shape linguistic experiences to Greek lyric poets writing as the Greek alphabet system first developed. These classical writers witnessed the transition of their society from an ‘audio tactile world of oral culture’ to ‘a world of words on paper where vision is the principal conveyor of information’ (Carson 2003, p.g.43). The writing and poetry of this time records the changes to perceptual abilities that the development of alphabetic systems triggered. The Greek lyricists, like Stewart, are ‘…poets exploring the edge between oral and literal procedure, probing forward to see what kind of thing writing is, reading is, poetry can be’ (Carson 2003, p.g.78). The space Stewart creates for aural and visual poetic inscription to interact draws attention to the materiality of language, which we perceive both visually and sonically. In calling attention to the varied forms of language inscription Stewart reminds us that our modes and methods of communication were born of process, interaction and development, and are not arbitrary or inherent to human experience. I/T strives for synthesis and expression of the relations between multiple poetic fields, demonstrating concerns for distinctions and disjunctions of form, performance, sound, text, speech, meaning and transmitted message. It is this complexity of opposing forces, inscribed beside and within each other, and possibly brought into some loose harmony, which creates such an interesting discursive space around Stewart’s work.

Concrete poetry is one useful touchstone for Stewart. This post World War II movement aimed to emphasise the materiality of language, with poets producing graphic, sound and kinetic poems under the banner of concrete poetry. These different approaches for finding new ways to move through language produced variable results and triggered debates around the composition and form of poetry, as much as content. Visual poetry of the movement was underpinned by an easily discerned, sharp materialist, structural agenda and was, at times, in contrast to concrete sound poems composed with a more organic sensibility. Stewart’s work across multiple registers of poetic inscription moves in the space left between different approaches to composition in concrete poetry.

Concrete poetry remains a nebulous term, but can be seen to refer to poetry that sought to ‘clean up language’ (Solt 1968, para.2) using reduction and simplification. Meaning is transferred through form and structure rather than expressive language. Words are concrete because abstracted meanings conveyed through poetic metaphor cease to function. Language is employed for its sound and shape. Beaulieu mentions Mary Ellen Solt and Eugen Gomringer as figures whose work encapsulates the almost purist underpinnings of modernist concrete poetry from the 1950s. Solt and Gomringer ‘sought simplicity & clarity in their materialist use of semantic particles’ (Beaulieu online, p.g.2). Solt, in her 1966 ‘Flowers in Concrete’ series used typography to emphasise and experiment with the aesthetic qualities written language. The poems are pictograms of the flowers they take their name, and graphic appearance from. Gomringer’s 1954 ‘Silencio’ similarly embeds the central motif of the poem in a material, graphic way:

         (Gomringer 1954, online)

The visual effect of the space in the poem, the absence of the word, becomes the primary way the idea of silence is suggested, just as Solt cultivates her flowers and branches with the curves and slants of alphabetic forms.

For Gomringer the re-introduction of an awareness of the visual in language contained the potential for ‘realizing the idea of a universal poetry’, uniting different languages, as well as different concepts of language. Concrete poetry could ‘unite the view of the world expressed in the mother tongue with physical reality’ (Gomringer 1968, para.4). Beaulieu finds the early ‘tightly modernist clean concrete’ poems limiting, suggesting they rely on ‘a dictatorial author-function’ that ‘limits & sanctions the role of the reader according to strict formulations’ (Beaulieu online, p.g.2).

Öyvind Fahlström offers the notion of concrete poems as processes of ‘magic with linguistic means’ (1952 -55, para.26), where words are arranged according to ‘the intuitive logic of likeness’ (1952 -55 para.22). For him the best tool for for reconstructing language is wordplay, which offers a deceptively simple, instinctive way to initiate complex and even radical changes in language structure. Fahlström proposes a broader scope for concrete poetry than the strict, ruled lines of clean-language concrete poetry. Concrete poems as zones of play can be experienced as enjoyable moments of interruption, or interjection into typical language structures. This connects well to Beaulieu’s view of contemporary concrete poetry as a poetic without direct one-to-one signification (Beaulieu online, p.g.3), which ‘distances itself from a universal language of sloganeering’ and instead aims to disrupt the capitalist structure of language; where the close reading of texts is driven by the desire for the reward of a hidden, or signified meaning through ‘dis-assembly & re-assembly of the mark & the grapheme’ (Beaulieu online, p.g.10).

Beaulieu suggests that contemporary concrete poetry is writing that maps connections, rather than signifies meaning. He borrows the idea of writing as mapping through motion from Deleuze & Guattari, where written works become ‘…a momentarily non-signifying map [that] is an always impossible system of inarticulation, caught in double bind of the creation of meaning’ (Beaulieu p.g.10). Such a statement, alongside Fahlström’s concept of concrete poetry as an instance of play, which disrupts typical linguistic encounters, clouds the original, ‘clean’ intentions of visual, concrete poetry. Beaulieu prefers to view new developments in concrete poetry as ‘inarticulate marks’, (Beaulieu online, p.g.1) where language cannot be entirely reduced to sound and form. Concrete poetry composed with a regard for sonic structure and a view to performance, as well a graphic sensibility, can be seen to offer avenues of expression beyond the materiality of language. The use of a vocal register, even one of arbitrary utterance such as breath and murmur, is unavoidably implicated in codified registers of communication. There may be attempts to ‘clean’ or reduce words on a page, but it remains far more difficult to strip speech into pure sound, even a mute silence is an expressive zone in performance. The question of how strictly materialist concrete poetry can truly be, and whether graphic and aural modes of inscription have an effect on this, are concerns at the heart of the movement. They are also encapsulated in Stewart’s work, which positions visual and sonic poetry in parallel and promotes an awareness of how communication is structured by our experience of language.

The work of Stéphane Mallarmé is central in tracing the concrete poetry movement. His 1897 work Un Coup de Dés, clearly demonstrates an aesthetic approach to poetic composition, but he also links his work to music, noting in the preface, ‘Music, as it is heard at a concert; several of its methods, which seemed to me to apply to literature, are to be found here’ (Bessa online, para.10). Mallarmé’s notion of the constellation of words is extremely pervasive, particularly in visual/structural poems, so-called constellations in space (Solt 1968, para.7). Bense views a constellation as an arrangement, or (word)play-area dictated by the poet, where something is brought into the world, ‘the constellation is an invitation’ (Bense 1965, para.5). Stewart takes up this invitation, both prescriptively in terms of graphic structure, but also in a more ambiguous sense through an active awareness of the way poetry brings things to the world. Her poem ‘The Thing of It’ (Stewart 1998a, p.g.53-58) is a good example, making extensive use of space on the page, gaps and columns and different densities of textual placement. The poem concerns, amongst other things, notions of gender and identity and offers something of a post-colonial and feminist critique of white male gaze through history:

        (Stewart 1998a, p.g.54)

Stewart creates a constellation which enacts a Heideggarian notion of poetry imbued with an ability to name things, calling them into ‘thinging’ and through this ‘thinging’ to carry out the world (Heidegger 1971, p.g.200). At the same time she introduces certain feminist concerns to this line of thought. Her own identity as a female poet with a philosophical/intellectual bent is a challenge to the historical dominance of countless, white men like Heidegger in the canon of celebrated academics and writers. Stewart engages with archetypal poetic and philosophical concerns using an authority-questioning female voice. ‘The Thing of It’ is an offhand acknowledgement of Heidegger’s concern with the abilities (and inabilities) of language to express and create lived experience. The words of the poem are split on the page, the world of action and people, dealing with words and experience – ‘White the Dad’ and ‘mother’ are positioned on one side of the page. On the other floats ‘things’, the objects they are engaged in bringing into being. Between there is space, perhaps an evocation of the distance between word and thing which language constantly grapples with. Stewart has also capitalised White and Dad, the syntax of the sentence they appear in is definite and not problematic. It is only as she starts to speak of mother that we encounter absence and uncertain words. She introduces a stutter when talking about female experience in language, history and lived experience. The section that follows the above excerpt presents a gridlock arrangement of words: primitive, mystic, dark, feminine, exotic, emotional, intuitive, irrational, inarticulate, contradictory. Visually they are tangled, tripping the eye and confusing our understanding of these terms and their general use in relation to characterising women. Stewart allows the page, and her placement of certain words, to demonstrate the paradoxes of the real and projected female experience.

Throughout Stewart’s poems there are many such occurrences of visual poems that use ‘graphic space as structural agent’ (De Campos et al 1958, para.1). This is consistent with ideas of the Brazilian concrete poets the Noigandres Group, who created poems that dwelled exclusively on the page. The structural power the Noigrandres poets ascribed to language, and their belief that graphic, constructed words were the most direct way of representing their contemporary experience, is strongly linked to new ideas of modernist architecture and urban planning which were emerging in Brazil in the 1950s and 60s. The most significant example of this was the construction of Brazil’s capital Brasília. The city was designed and built from scratch between 1956 and 1960 following a directive from Brazil’s president Juscelino Kubitschek, who hoped to develop the interior of the country and ‘integrate the sprawling country into a modern industrial nation’ (Cornish 1991, p.g.29) by constructing a capital that was geographically central. Brasília was the project of urban planner Lúcio Costa and architect Oscar Niemeyer, both of whom were aligned with Le Corbusier and the burgeoning, modernist architecture ideals that were developing at this time. Buildings were of uniform design and zoned to encourage efficient car travel and the city was navigated by numbers and letters in a grid system, rather than named streets. Brasília was underpinned by a belief that ‘…a city should be an exemplar or blueprint of changes and could produce a new society on the base of the values motivating the city’s design’ (Cornish 1991, p.g.30). This faith in structures and planned, urban environments, as a means to develop a society is supported by the preference of Noigandres group for visual design on the page, as a way of emphasising the materiality of language and using it to re-construct society.

Bessa locates some echoes between the Noigandres poet’s structuralist language values and Heidegger’s notions of dwelling as a state of being, located and built with language, where ‘it is language that tells us about the nature of a thing, provided that we respect language’s own nature’ (Heidegger 1971, p.g.146). Bessa, however, also acknowledges the rigidity of structuralist poems, something which Stewart, in emphasising sound as much as structure, seeks to manoeuvre away from. I/T finds more parallels with the concrete poetry manifesto of Fahlström, who ties the movement to music and acknowledges the necessity of voice in poetry. Stewart’s aural poetic inscription is a strong, autonomous element in her work. Her audio poetry is not an echo of the graphic or a creaking girder in a written construction. Sound is entwined within her work as a new field for language to flex itself in and a simultaneous enrichment of her expression.

Her recordings suggest the physicality, as well as the temporality of poetry, a nod to Rothenberg’s view of poetry as ‘the domain of the body and breath, voice and gesture, time and place’ (Rothenberg 2005. p.g.8). For John Cage the potential for introduction of musical elements, such as sound and time, within a world of words, is the very definition of a poem (Rothenberg 2005, p.g.1). Stewart’s use of sound and breath and her exploration of expression of phonemes, the sounds not words that constitute our communication framework, indicate a ‘…recapturing of a more primitive form of language…when the voice was richer in vibrations, more mightily physical’ (Cobbing 1978, para.1). I/T enacts Fahlström’s call for the ‘kneading’ of language material, starting with the smallest elements (Fahlström 1952 -55, para.33). The result is an architectural structure infused with life ‘pulsating, secretory, always evolving’ (Bessa 1997, para.18). This moves towards a forgotten, ancient or essential sense of language, when ‘the poem was truly carried by the voice and only by the voice’ (Rothenberg 2005. p.g.1).

Fahlström connects rhythm and repetition with organic functions; ‘the pulsation of breathing, the blood, ejaculation’ (Fahlström 1952-55, para.19). The repetitive structure of Stewart’s ‘Sound and Sense’ evokes this organic repetition as well as tying acts of poetic inscription into creation of cognitive and perceptual systems:

         (Stewart 1998 p.g. 40, trk 15)

The successive tunings are realised in performance of the poem. Stewart chants these monosyllabic pairs of carefully juxtaposed words, gradually increasing the vocal tracks so that the aural impact of the words is as significant as the word themselves. It is the sounding of sound, as a word, concept and experience – sound and sense. The way these different modes of understanding combine in the experience of the poem is not stable and Stewart acknowledges this, concluding:

         
           (Stewart 1998 p.g. 41, trk 15)

Her performance is fortified in echoes, making use of multiple tracks, overlapping rhythmically and becoming incomprehensible. The poem is also an instance of technology allowing for allusion to a primordial language. Solt mentions the way in which technologies such as the tape recorder allow for the rediscovery of the human voice, (1968, para.4) while Rothenberg advances the case for a merging of poetic methods where, ‘…neither advanced technology (electronically produced sound and image, etc) nor hypothetically primitive devices (pulse and breath, the sound of rock on rock, of hand on water) are closed to the artist willing to employ them’ (Rothenberg 2005, p.g. 10). An understanding of the possibilities of technologies in innovative composition is well articulated in ‘Sound and Sense’ and informs Stewart’s general approach to her work.

Stewart positions the most elemental and significant human communication within the voice, enacting Dadaist Tristan Tzara’s idea that thought is ‘made in the mouth’ (Rothenberg 2005. p.g.8). The voice and the modes of address and registers of intention it expresses, even before a word is uttered, represent an ‘ability to synthesise semantic, musical, analytical and emotional structures’ (Stewart 2004, para.2). The poem ‘Absence’ starts with an extended movement of phonetic sounds, pointing to the idea that we create and are created not through signifying words but with something more elemental and all together bodily. They are sounds that we express ourselves with before our word-forming apparatus has, itself, formed:

         (Stewart 1998, p.g. 65, trk 21)

These sounds represent our most elemental sense of self-conception and our sounding of them can serve as an enactment of this moment:

        (Stewart 1998, p.g. 67, trk 21)

As well as the pre-speech significance of sound, as a bodily communication not grounded in words, we can also consider the historical link to oral cultures and the development of alphabetic systems which symbolised ‘…not objects in the real world but the very process in which sounds act to construct speech’ (Carson 2003, p.g.61). Carson ascribes a state of ‘openness’ to existence in oral cultures, which is necessary to link people to the world (Carson 2003, p.g.43). Literacy requires restraint of the senses, so that thought may be trained to concentrate on written words, while an individual in an oral society functions with ‘…continual fluent interchange of sensual impressions and responses between the environment and himself’ (Carson 2003, p.g.43-44). This perpetual receptiveness to the vibrations of the world can be likened to breathing, an analogy derived from pre-Socratic philosopher Empedokles’ doctrine of emanations. The doctrine constructs the universe through the idea that everything within it is constantly inhaling and exhaling small particles (aporrhoai), which are mediators of perception and allow everything in the universe to be in touch everything else (Carson 2003, p.g.50).

In her sound poem ‘First Verb’ (Stewart 1998b, trk.20) Stewart delivers a constant stream of half-discernable, whispered words beneath the amplified sound of distorted breathing and throat contractions. The gasps and inhalations are breath of the body as well as the world, a breath in the ear or wind echoing amongst rocks. The words in ‘First Verb’ follow and blend with breath, evoking Carson’s idea of breath in oral cultures being ‘…primary insofar as the spoken word is’ (2003, p.g.49). The sound environment is necessarily open, ‘breath is everywhere. There are no edges’ (Carson 2003, p.g.49) and, as in ‘First Verb’, spoken and heard words are breathable, they ‘…may have no edges, or varying edges’ (Carson 2003, p.g.50). The introduction of a visualisation of speech then, introduces edges to sonorous openness. Stewart’s poetic inscriptions, which operate simultaneously in different fields of inscription, bring us to the point where edges are conceived. Her poems are on the ‘edge of distinction’ (Stewart 2004, para.2). They occur in a zone where, to borrow from Jean Luc Nancy and his notions of sensing through touch, modes of perception touch one another, touch the world and ‘in touching, in all the touches of touching that do not touch each other…the two sides of the one sense do not cease to come towards each other, acceding without access, touching on the untouchable, intact, spacing of sense’ (Nancy 1997, p.g.83).

There are, however, points in I/T where sonic and graphic do not seem to touch. James Stuart observes that a significant concern in Stewart’s work is a desire to ‘…engage with the materiality of language, itself, to crack open aural and visual signifiers and to make an intervention at the basis of our listening and reading processes and the cultural assumptions that they embody’ (2007, p.g.245). It is an intervention because these instances of broken or processed language and speech returned to atomic sounds are not brought into perfect correspondence across written and sonic registers. There are several sound poems, including ‘First Verb’, which are aural inscriptions without a text or graphic reference, and ‘The Photocopy Poem Series’ (Stewart 1998a, p.g.28-29, 42-43, 51-52, 61-62) function solely as visual forms. As has been emphasised, the various components of Stewart’s works, whilst being inextricably interrelated to one another, do not strive to make sense of the other. The poems that straddle graphic and sonic field of inscription do so in order for language, and our varied ways of experiencing it, to be interrogated. We also see though, that there are also discrete moments of linguistic experience in aural and written fields that are specific to the mode of inscription. Often in I/T the edges of sonic and graphic fields pull apart when language becomes less recognisably itself, existing as a memory or premonition, an inarticulate mark. Stewart’s ‘Photocopy Poems’ are the result of language that has been repeatedly processed through technology (the photocopier) so that the shapes we are left to examine can only be an imprint, a warped photogram that makes neat print into ambiguous light and dark forms. ‘The Photocopy Poems’ are the after-effects, the excess, of language in use.

Stewart’s sound poems like ‘Residue’ and ‘First Verb’, both recordings of live improvisation, are also documents of moments of linguistic experience. They suggest a mark of language, left after performance, as well as a pre-linguistic communication carried in sound and body alone. ‘First Verb’ reminds us that it is breath which ‘enables the act of speech and life’ (Stewart 1998a, liner notes para.7). The poem is a partial articulation of the realisation of speech; ‘the first distinction’ (Stewart 1998a, liner notes para.7). ‘Residue’ highlights the ability of voice to carry various tuning systems in speech whose use inform assumed, ‘particular musical and semantic structures’ (Stewart 1998a, liner notes para.3). The pitch, vibration and movement of the voice remains a powerful agent in the poem, even when speech is not present, has been lost in processing, or is in the process of becoming.

For Fahlström, witnessing the west’s cultural revolution, the voice in concrete poetry was a sensory tool and a powerful instrument to ‘analyse our wretched human condition’ (Bessa 1997, para.16). The human element is contained in language through its organic relation to lived reality, where words are ‘not at all in opposition to their surroundings’ (Bessa 1997, para.16). Fahlström conceives the systematic as organic and the organic as a system (Bessa 1997, para.17). Language is inextricably bound into the world, it is cognitive and experiential, graphic and sonorous – sound and sense. Nancy extends the idea of a world without a unity of sense, a world of touching edges that is a ‘…differential articulation of singularities that make sense in articulating themselves, along the edges of articulation’ (Nancy 1997, p.g.78). For Fahlström, words necessarily have the power to communicate something of the world they are of. Sound, as an organic experience and sound/speech as an act with a political intention are one and the same, and require a voice.

Stewart’s performances experiment with vocal delivery – exaggerated ocker accents or authorative voice-over styles – and intonation. She mixes in fragments of popular song, casual speech, adopted mannerisms and media jargon, with a critical sensibility. These linguistic fragments become presentations of pure sound and deliberately collected refractions of our codified registers of communication. Early into her performance of ‘Absence’ she asks ‘and whaddaya?’ (Stewart 1998b, trk.21). The colloquial phrase poses the same essential question as the entire poem, but does so incongruously and humorously. It is at odds with the proceeding movements of abstract stutters and conjoined words. Stewart plays on the typical, pejorative connotations of this common phrase, usually used to imply a lack of macho backbone, and turns the question back to the listener, with different motives. In everyday usage ‘whaddaya’ is a closed question, the answer comes in the asking, the phrase automatically evokes a perceived lack of ability and bravado. Stewart opens the question out so that we recognise it and are prompted to consider the implications of the phrase and the way it is used in common speech. She interrogates precisely how the Australian vernacular she employs in the poem constructs Australian identity. We begin to realise how Stewart’s ‘whaddaya’ speaks to the ontological and perceptual themes of the poem – the issue of how we speak and what we say constructs what we are. For Bessa the concession that even in a concrete poetic system words retain a power to influence or structure experience, as in Stewart’s poems, is what saves the poems from being mere ‘formalistic exercises’ (Bessa 1997, para.10).

Barthes heralded the typographical agraphia of Mallarmé as the suicide of literary language (Bessa 1997, para.10). This notion when infused with organic sound structure becomes an opening of poetic fields of inscription. If words cease to signify their imposed meaning, perhaps we need to look to silences and pre-linguistic utterances, ‘the flux of complex oral and propositional codes that recombine at the edge of distinction’ (Stewart 2004, para.2) in order to re-connect our lived reality with language. Spaces on the page, glitches and stumbles in the voice are not sites that indicate communicative inability. They represent a different field of communication, where humans’ experience of being attempts to map a way to meet language, in an elemental, pre-linguistic and sometimes inexpressible way. I/T is an escape from empirical speech, where it is impossible to present and free ‘meaning captive in the thing’ (Merleau-Ponty 1964, pg. 44). Stewart’s poems are both of and about the world:

           

          (Stewart 1998, p.g. 63, trk 21)

Expanding on the ability of poetry to speak through the absence between experience and language leads us to the ontological ideas of Merleau-Ponty. Like Fahlström, Merleau-Ponty understood language organically, so that ‘the thickness of the body, far from rivalling that of the world, is on the contrary the sole means I have to go unto the heart of the things, by making myself a world and by making them flesh’ (Merleau-Ponty 1968 p.g. 135). Speaking of the world and being of the world are concerns that encounter each other in Stewart’s work. Her use of voice is a clear reminder of the necessity of acknowledging our bodies when considering our way of being in the world. In the same way that seeing our world means we are possessed by it, movements of phonation and hearing make sonorous inscriptions, which contain their motor echo in the body. This reflexivity of listening and speaking experiences is the point where speech and thought enter the world of silence (Merleau-Ponty 1968 p.g. 144). Merleau-Ponty cites Malraux who writes elegantly and sensuously of the coming together of these bifurcated elements:

…those strange movements of the throat and mouth that form the cry and the voice. Those movements end in sounds and I hear them. Like crystal, like metal and many other substances, I am a sonorous being, but I hear my own vibration from within…I hear myself with my throat.
(Merleau-Ponty 1968 p.g.144)

The poetic flesh of our world is contained in the flesh of ourselves and speaking is yet another reflexive, inwardly doubled and externally opened way of re-communing with this constant connectivity. For Stewart, in ‘Absence’ this

                  

         (Stewart 1998, p.g. 66, trk 21)

She speaks and brings the world forward, from within herself, it is the matter in our mouth that in being made ‘makes ethos/us’ (Stewart 1998, p.g. 65, 67, trk 21). Nancy discusses way the sonorous register is at once the most interior and exterior of the senses. A body, even in a state of sensory deprivation will hear its own breath and blood, yet sound is the least incorporated matter in our environment, sound is pervasive, the totality of an open world, it ‘…resonates elsewhere, at a distance, in an exteriority that is spaced out in all the other directions and that the ear hears along with the sound, as the opening of the world’ (Nancy 1997, p.g.85). I/T shows modes of perception and multiple sense experience, sound and speech, listening and reading, in a state of constant flux – breathing. Stewart articulates these complex, intricately related concerns with a practice that is a ‘process of engagement with overlapping fields in notation’ (2004, para.4). The double identity of the poems in I/T, residing in text and sound, parallel the dualities of language and organic experience. To understand the way the two speak to one another can bring us closer to a deepened ontological understanding of ourselves. In sounding her ideas Stewart opens up what it is to speak and to speak with a voice that issues from a body that dwells in language and sense. She refuses to contain her work in singular fields of poetic inscription. I/T allows organic sound and systematic language, elements which perhaps are never truly separate, to emulsify. The viscous poetic field her work inhabits is not fully integrated, the elements exist to enrich, rather than subsume one another. We are left, enlightened, but only to our own bewilderment, at the cusp of function and able to examine

      
          (Stewart 1998, p.g. 67, trk 21)

References

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Bessa, Sérgio. 1997, ‘Architecture Versus Sound in Concrete Poetry’, Ubuweb: Visual/Concrete/Sound Poetry [online], http://www.ubu.com/papers/bessa.html, [accessed 20.04.08]

Carson, Anne. 2003, Eros: The Bittersweet, Dalkey Archive Press, United States of America

Cobbing, Bob. 1978, ‘Some Statements on Sound Poetry’ in Sound Poetry: A Catalogue, ed McCaffery, Steve., bpNichol., Underwich Editions, Toronto, [online], http://www.ubu.com/papers/cobbing.html, [accessed 20.04.08]

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