News of Two Worlds
Daniel Barbiero
Like any artwork, a poem can disclose a world. By a “world” I just mean a way of being, or an existential coming to terms with one’s position within the given, both social and natural, in which one finds oneself situated. A world is always someone’s world, an interpretive stance taken from a unique perspective within a collective form of life. That an artwork can disclose a world is an idea I borrow from the late Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo. From Pound I borrow the idea that poetry is news that stays news. If that is so, then the news it brings is the news of a world. With Heikki Huotari’s Optimal or Not and Other Poems and Mark DuCharme’s Here, Which Is Also a Place, we get news of two very different worlds.
***
Huotari’s Optimal or Not and Other Poems (Buttonhook Press) is a sequence containing concatenations of semantically shape-shifting sentences. Here, for example, are the opening lines of “Wherein I Check My Intellect”:
PROVE ME WRONG. If it’s not grammar then it’s syntax and the alley cat is walking down the aisle but to be born again. Among the underprivileged I give my point zero zero one percent. The interval of confidence is imposed on the data and the senses have their seasons. Visit plagues of frogs upon me twice and shame on me. It’s neither time that’s passing nor the old-and-in-the-way.
With their straightforward, declarative language, these sentences are exemplary of what we find throughout the book. What Huotari apparently is doing with words is setting out “facts,” but when we take a closer look the “facts” begin to fishtail and escape us. Their grammar doesn’t quite add up, their meaning is elusive; they’re often made up of discontinuous phrases that bear no overt relation to each other. They are antecedents without logically entailed consequents, set-ups whose pay-off is the striking non sequitur. Reading them, we head off in one direction and then suddenly run into a roadblock or a hairpin turn. Their supposed conjunctions are disjunctive. I’m reminded of Lyotard’s idea of the phrase as an independent entity standing in perpetual isolation relative to its surrounding phrases. “Prove me wrong” is a challenge we can’t take up, since the statements to be proven or disproven are non sequiturs; the phrases linked by a “then” or an “and” won’t speak to each other. Huotari leaves us no logical grounds on which a proof can rest. And just as his phrases maintain a certain refusal to resolve into one another, his sentences resist summation to a unitary discourse. But like the shards of glass in a kaleidoscope they stand apart while working together to create a colorful composition through contrasts of tone and topicality. Reading them, we get the impression of overhearing a polyphonic monologue.
It turns out that our monologist is a skillful parodist. Optimal or Not reads like a catalog of artfully twisted clichés, derailed adages, misremembered proverbs, and wayward wisdom sayings. “If it ain’t one thing, it’s another” becomes “if it’s not grammar then it’s syntax”; “the heart has its reasons” becomes “the senses have their seasons”; “fool me twice, shame on me” becomes “visit a plague of frogs upon my twice and shame on me.” Huotari here treats an old saw or cliché as a kind of equation in which the pre-given referents serve as variables that can be replaced with other referents. At other times he free-associates to combine sayings into unlikely hybrids, such as “If Simon says to optimize take twenty baby steps then stop and smell the roses,” or subjects them to recursion for comic effect, as in “Teach a man to teach a man to fish and he'll be happy for two lifetimes, i.e., be reincarnated as an author.”
I take what Huotari is doing here is to be offering a deft parody of a particular world – the speakerless spoken world of conventional wisdom voiced by the anonymous and ubiquitous “They” of “they say…” In effect, what “they say” serves as the ur-text for Huotari’s reworkings, an ur-text that provides the occasion for his deliberate and directed misreading. Through his misreading, Huotari subverts this world by pulling off the neat trick of appropriating the anonymous voice and making it properly his own, converting the speakerless-spoken discourse of everyone and no one in particular into the wry commentary of a sharply individuated voice. Huotari turns the cliché inside-out and creates an event in which the language of the anonymous “They” is absorbed, assimilated, and remade as the idiolect of a concrete sensibility. If the common language of the “They” – the koiné -- is like Mallarmé’s worn coin, then Huotari has counterstamped it with his own distinctive imprint.
***
DuCharme’s Here, Which Is Also a Place (Unlikely Books) gives us a very different kind of world. The philosophically inclined poems making up the book’s five long sequences offer a highly intelligent and nuanced meditation on the ecology of meaning that arises when the poetic mind encounters the environment.
As the book’s title suggests, “environment” is the given of place as the horizon within which we find our place, as beings implicated in a thick network of relationships originally revealing themselves through participation rather than contemplation. Consider these lines:
And so going on
In the order one is given
To know these things wholly
In the depths of the body
A gaze or recurrence
Held up to mirror
To let the light enter
Corners of the given
Knowing it putting it
Up to reflected knowing
The edges of your mouth
An intimacy with the gravest sparrows
To know the things implicated in our world is to know them first with the intimacy of what we might call the wisdom of the body – the tacit, participatory knowledge of embodied practice, which may or may not rise to the level of an explicitly articulated knowledge in which “corners of the given” are illuminated by the light of “reflected knowing.” The given thus isn’t a plain empirical fact or chimerical thing-in-itself, but rather the world as already interpreted and known implicitly, through the bodily necessity of our acting within it. What I believe DuCharme is saying is that we live the world before we think it, that the moment of “reflected knowing” and the movement from tacit presence to self-consciousness and representation in language, is a secondary way of being in the here in which we are. To get from the one to the other requires bridging a discontinuity – a discontinuity created with the upsurge of language:
To be folded into twilight
Where all the lightning surged
Indiscriminate as a bolt or a flicker
Until we start describing
Lightning is initially intuited as an undifferentiated flicker of light. And then we give it shape with the specificity of words – break it down into determinate qualities in order to describe it with accuracy and to get the words to fit the world. Which inevitably means getting the world to fit the words.
There are many passages in Here, Which Is Also a Place in which DuCharme shows an exquisite sensitivity to the way in which language makes our environment intelligible – indeed, makes it into a world proper – while at the same time separating us from it with a compelling force of its own. For no matter how lived through the body our world may be, it inevitably finds its way into language just as language finds its way into it. There always comes a point when “[t]he names of things frighten us / Into speech.” Such fright may lie at the heart of poetic speech as we struggle to understand it:
Define “the lyric.” How can you?
I tried once, I suppose, but it was all just
Words on a page. Where an “image” is just a
Figuration
Deftly foregoing the “what” which
Tenderly we leave
Between the “what” as expressed on the page and the “what” we encounter in the moment before we attempt to render it in language a gap opens up – as insubstantial as Duchamp’s infrathin, perhaps, but a gap nevertheless. Separating the “what” we know silently from the “what” we speak is a virtual abyss, “a distance hidden / Between earth & its names.” On one side is “[a] history of speech- / lessness” which is in fact without history because without writing:
Nothing of living imagines that we write
The arid earth cannot conceive a page
Desire usurps word for object
And as the word replaces the object, it transmutes it into something that can be verified or falsified, but that nevertheless resists our attempts to assimilate it entirely within the terms we set out:
Words are facts. Dusk. Butterfly.
Shadow. Umber. Edge. Encampment.
We feel their weight. We hold them
On the tongue
Never to be won.
On the other side of things’ natural agraphia is history proper – as well as poetry, which DuCharme hints may provide a bridge over the abyss that separates us from them. When he declares that
In the stray conditions of what carries
Us forward to delight
The mind thinks in the form of
The poem, not the book
I understand him as suggesting that the poem’s way of framing its meaning -- through sound, sensation, association, analogy, imagery, and affect – is close to (simulates? replicates?) the way the mind originally locates itself in its world, indeed, constitutes its world as its world, before translating it into the terms of discursive reason.
***
And so it is that with Huotari and DuCharme we obtain news of two different worlds. Different, but not wholly alien. Both worlds – the world of the impersonal social “They” made personal, and the world of the individuated poetic mind encountering its environment – represent relationships of significance and signification, of otherness and assimilation, while illustrating the way that language gives us entry into our worlds even as it constitutes them as our own ecologies of meaning.
Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Utriculi, London Grip, and elsewhere. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press). Daniel Barbiero is online at https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.