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For those who have been reading my poetry since I started posting it a couple of months ago, you may recollect that initially I tried to encourage people to engage with my work. Even to the extent that I forbade content-less comments along the lines of “it is good”, or “i like it”. However, I soon tired of this attempt at soliciting comments, and relaxed my comment policy in order to accept all kinds of banal one-liners (not that I don’t appreciate being told that my work is the cause of delight). Recently I have made attempts to force people to critically engage with my work with a “Tshirts for comments” scheme, and I am oh so pleased to have received this commentary in the form of a trackback to nicky’s blog. I was so impressed, I’ve declared it worthy of it’s own post. (if you want to read any of nicky’s other writings there is a link on my blogroll). (p.s. – Nicky I love your guts)
here it is:
The Poetry of Embolalia.
In receiving a T-shirt from Embolalia I signed myself up to comment upon the poets work. All the lovely poetry can be viewed here and stuck up in locations across Melbourne’s north. My cash for comments comment will attempt to describe what the poems are about with specific reference to this poem (unfortunately I have made no comment on the relationship between the pictures and the text). Here it is in draft form to ward of those that break legs as part of debt collection efforts:
Most of Embolalia’s poems refer to the work of those that have written on language or the phenomenon of language. Fittingly, most of these poems are about language. They could be seen as a phenomenological analysis of language. An attempt to get the bottom of language. The poems are all various stages of experiments aimed at this goal – the elaboration of language.
The emphatic conclusion they all draw is that language itself is unfathomable, but they do this in such a way that the investigation itself seems ridiculous. They do not proceed from hypothesis to hypothesis, testing and refining various ideas, but remain at an initial conclusion, an initial hypothesis. Repeating it without change. What seems to be tested in the poems is the proposition that language is unfathomable and inevitably this is affirmed.
As a reasoned analysis it is problematic. The initial proposition is, in-itself, infinitely affirmable. Its failure is its success and its success is its failure. It is a sure way to say very important things and nothing at all at the same time. One can say it is an extremely productive enterprise but its usefulness is probably questionable.
Nevertheless there is a point here insofar as the methods of science whilst offering positive statements always pull back by refering to those statements as hypotheses rather than facts.
But the poems are only mostly about language. In so far as they attempt to elaborate language they also affirm what is beyond language. Whilst some people may argue that there is nothing but language, that being is equal to language, this is something that is not sustainable for the word is always accompanied by something that is not the word, whether some ‘real’ referent or simply a presupposition, there is always something. This is referent is what the poems are also about.
It is this outside that means that these meditations on language are not simple repetitions of the same point, or indeed that these meditations are given form other than a rather ponderous silence at all. It is this that in fact explains their productivity.
We can follow the experiments that are these poems in Dress. In this poem the reference to that which is outside language stands as an association with another.
I only hope to
find a god,
that is larger
than yours.
It is the only metaphor that I am
willing to use
If there was ever an exemplary ponderous silent type of creature that would be those things called gods. This leads to an equation that refers god to the outside of language.
Not ones for public speaking gods prefer to address you alone as yourself. In the Christian tradition we find one that enjoys addressing people singularly from behind burning bushes. For Homer they are the impetuous creatures visiting men in their dreams to urge them onto projects against their better judgement. In Ghostbuster’s it is the silent choice that chooses to do battle with the Marshmallow man. Like the best of silences, gods are the ones that talk directly to singular individuals.
Here there are many gods and this implies many things. Firstly the world is a world of individuation. Whilst there may in fact be one God the world is a polytheistic one. It is to individuals that God speaks and their isolation means that there must in fact be many gods one for me and one for you. It also implies that these differing gods can be compared and ranked, that there can indeed be larger ones.
The outside of language presents itself as a singular interpretation tied to our identity. It is in fact the definition of our identity since the definition of the outside of language is the definition of all that is, to grasp it would be to escape the illusions about ourselves that partial knowledge engenders.
The ability for comparison shows us individuation and the flaw in our god. We realise that our understanding is incomplete, lacking in size, it could be larger, it is only a metaphor. That it is in actual fact reasonably blasphemous. But crucially this is a function of speech. It is only in language that we must make do with the blasphemous metaphor, outside of language silence will do quite well.
The link that is made between the will and metaphor here is crucial but I will only elaborate upon that once we have looked at the rest of the poem because it is fundamentally related to its circular structure. For the moment consider it as an important element in the coordinates of you and I, God and metaphor that this first stanza uses to map the filed of language.
Now, lets look at metaphor more closely. Metaphor is like a collision. In between two words something else appears. It is the means by which such a collision occurs that is mapped out in the second stanza of Dress.
Your pretty narratives
Are inviting.
I changed my name
For your pleasure
I changed my dirty
Dress.
The collision that the poet is after is a product of what in another poem she will call a memory trace (a reference to one of the many theorists of language she nominates for us). In this poem it is “narrative”, or more precisely, “Your pretty narratives”. Metaphor is not just the collision of words but whole narratives held by two individuals. It is a clash of civilisations, of gods as backers of individual players.
As with all collisions this collision is an act of change. In Dress this gives us a change in attire. It is here that we observe the productivity of the poems and it is important again to note the role of desire. Although already foreshadowed in the first stanza it is now, clearly, the engine that is pushing things along.
It is a desire to not only find a larger god, or in fact God but also a desire between individuals. The lines for your pleasure suggest that this is a separate desire although it is not clear because it could be reducible to the desire for totality, or God, in so far as that can only realised by the difference between individuals.
So, things could be considered thuswise: through the difference between you and I and the recognition of gods we observe a struggle that has as its goal the name of the one true God. The bearer of that name would win ultimate triumph, the attractiveness of which is born by the difference held between you and I and would be no longer a blasphemous metaphor.
But although a change has occurred the war is far from won. It is but similar to the adaptations of adversaries to each other in a continuing war. In actual fact the goal is something that means things must go awry because that something is in fact nothing. This is what we observe in the poets final stanza. Rather than some victory and the elaboration of language, the enunciation of the sought for name, there is this:
I, Err…
Stumble around
incomplete sentences.
This is the part
Where things get burned to the ground,
With the same seriousness
Blaspheme is resolved in a failure upon a burnt ground. The conflict cannot be reckoned with and cannot be won is the conclusion that is put forward. It is the last step, the victorious step that cannot be made. Reason being, of course: it could only be, because articulated in the world by an individual, blasphemy.
Taken to the end an account of language will fail. This is the story of the poetry. But the failure is not complete it is not one that means that silence must ensue. Silence is ponderous and there is a constant push for it to move to speech, which is where the poem started: “I only hope to/find a god.” It is this that allows a similar search to begin again and it is this that seems to allow us to move on from the poem onto something else that is perhaps foreshadowed in the stumbling on burnt ground.
The desire spoken of in the first and second stanzas remains in the final and is what prompts us to move on to the beginning of the poem and to repeat it again. In The 2nd of October, Or, The Anxiety of Being Thrown By the Obvious this is called “repetition compulsion”. But it is only a formal repetition because whilst desire demands its formal repetition it also generates the metaphors that are to be deployed, as we observe in the first stanza.
In comments surrounding the poems the poet asks for a measure of quality and it is perhaps Dress that serves best as this yardstick. It forms an elaboration of language according to a model that can be described as a perpetual motion desiring machine, devouring and producing desire in equal quantities.
In utilising this as a critical tool it must be noted that it is not the complete cycle that must be present. As the poet points out constantly, comments and interpretations are desired. Such comments would demonstrate the capabilities of a poem, proving their effectiveness as models for the locomotion that they inspire. The key test therefore would be the motivation a poem engenders for its repetition in altered form. As an author once said, the greatest praise that can be given to a writer is if their writing was to inspire others to write.
In the way of negative criticism perhaps the following could be noted. Professionalism itself seems to be anti-thetically to the poetry. To try and find the rules of the game is to miss the attempt to break the barriers and limits that are put forward. That is, the breaking of the limits to language that are necessary to an elaboration of language. To create a profession would amount to finding a closed territory within language in which security from the frontier can be maintained.
But this criticism is said with much trepidation for rules are necessary to the limit itself; to disregard them would be tantamount to breaking the perpetual motion machine. Without some sort of at least provisional rule there would be no measure of the territory to be elaborated and to accept that would be equivalent to forsaking the stakes of the game.
These risks may be of no-concern given the fact of throwness, or the facticity of the desire observed above, but nevertheless it seems like something we should be nervous about – after all there is poetry and non-poetry isn’t there? This may lead to an adequate description of the poetry being found in what Malcolm Turnball, quoting Margret Thatcher, used to describe the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme – ‘risk management’. The risks are infact another way of describing the poetry’s playing out of attempts to render in language that which is beyond language.
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