"how can i say in words things i didn't understand through words?"
"Perhaps my prolificity is due to the fact that my work evolves as my daily life. My life in poetry. Poetry in my life. Afam Akeh is one of the members of my generation of poets that I most respect and listen to. I was so happy when he returned to writing poetry after about a decade or more of silence. He reads my poetry with devotion and close attention. Right from our beginnings in Lagos he has encouraged and supported my work. He may not be wrong in calling me a confessional poet but that is just one aspect of my writing. Other critics and appreciators have seen me as a surrealist poet, political poet, anarchist poet, environmental poet, abstract poet, avant-garde poet, etc. I don’t have a label for myself or what I write. Regarding where I find the energy for work, I guess it resides in my unapologetic love for life and my curiosity about everything." Uche Nduka, from this interview, in which not a few of our topics get called upon.
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"how can i say in words / things i didn't / understand through words?" (87)
We might engage with moments like this as a reckoning-with the poem-impulse, as reaction to the chasm/void left irreparable and shoved between the sensation of sentience and the flimsy fabric that is language; the poem-impulse as our sentientness' means of reaching out, and the reaching out is necessary. As in Jake's reference to Pound re: our workshop of Jean today, Nduka provokes from the silence-granted-space in this question the 'power' (?) to proliferate, grants permission for the image-silence to become conduit for expansive meaning, further-reaching than words can do.
Here, too--as in Meadowslasher--we are propelled by questioning (as in elsewhere, i.e., "does touching make / the flesh row / a boat / of song?" p.35, etc.). and a weaving [in and out] of what could be a 'close-personal' voice (moments in which the 'i' seems to come 'up for air', calling both back-and-to us, as in an earlier, embedded moment ''and us making ducks drunk / by offering them pieces / of bread dipped in vodka / beside the lake;" p. 40, etc etc), and what Kwame describes as "a dense thicket of inscrutable verse" (and "such glorious indulgence, such imaginative excursions--the kind of exercises that make text-worshipping author killers elated") (10). The non-answers resound into overlapping, montaging, fusing strobes of distillations. As Kwame reads into his experience of this: "I also felt a certain unease and disquiet. I was not comfortable with not understanding the poems--not understanding everything in the poems. This unsettled me [...]" (p.11, read on), and in doing so evidently gives the prospective reader 'permission' to be confused...or, permission not to take a Western-centric approach to reading, necessitating what FEELS LIKE patriarchal, homogenizing analysis. Great!
"you danced slaveships into you." (88)
Derek Walcott's "The Sea is History" reverberates in this lucid space. Cut into two stanzas, our move to the second is a move to the 'i'; Nduka incarnates the 'cry' and allows it (and word-sound) to echo through the dimensions, here hovering within an intimate as it reflects aside the unstill waters, a medium of both spiritual buoyancy and inherited scar/holocaust: "perishable is sleep perishable is sleep/ yet i like to fall asleep beside you''.
And I couldn't resist. These bits have been pinging around, hiding under (inside) all these pages (do you see what I mean? I'll write more if not?):
"Without a subject: poem, perhaps there is some, and perhaps it leaves itself, but I never write any. A poem, I never sign(s) it. The other sign(s). The I is only at the coming of this desire: to learn by heart. Stretched, tendered forth to the point of subsuming its own support, thus without external support, without substance, without subject, absolute writing in (it)self, the "by heart" lets itself be elected beyond the body, sex, mouth, and eyes; it erases the borders, slips through the hands, you can barely hear it, but it teaches us the heart.[...] 'What is...?' laments the disappearance of the poem--another catastrophe. By announcing that which is just as it is, a question salutes the birth of prose" --From 'Che cos'è la poesia?', Jacques Derrida tr. Peggy Kamuf
(We do the signing, and the poem is already out of all our hands)
Then in Ayaï, le cri de la littérature, Hélène Cixous describes writing (écrire: so close to crime, containing a cri), as the translation of the sharp, quick cries of reality into the ultrasilence of writing; a right that reality and community (where "we are muffled wolves") otherwise deny. The 'cry' (a polyphonic polyphoenix, a medium of transmigration) of literature (''the uncertain that does not lie, the scene that gives the undecidable its due") is borne (in all space/time directions at once, a hyper-intertextual haunting) from a fracturing, and scribed into literature with the trace-making ashes (and back to eel: ''may the flute remember/ bonehills, red glares / bare barns, / oscillatory oaths / the campaigning needle / after a tonguebath" (39)); these poems, an [near-?]ultimate sublimation of this act.
Some questionspectres:
What does space-pace Do to images that have been decontextualized (or newly textualized, free of predetermined hangups ["a masseuse bestowed / a gamekeeper upon / your gas pipes //" p.38)?
In what ways could (should) the "glorious indulgence" referred to by Kwame be rendered via intent?
I’m going to run with Trish’s second “questionspectre,” since that “glorious indulgence” Kwame Dawes speaks of is exactly what stuck with me while reading Nduka’s work.
ReplyDeleteI fall into the same trap as Dawes by trying to find an “anchor” in Eel on Reef, but I’ll attempt to lessen that blow by way of association (later in this post). For the time being, though, the most oriented I felt during reading arrived in a few lines from page 24, when Nduka writes,
a soundslinger
calls out to dogs.
rascality blinks
between
the feet
of his answerers.
Here is method to the “glorious indulgence” at work in Eel on Reef. At the same time, Nduka showcases what Dawes suggests: “we have an African writer who is willing to defy the sometimes intense pressure to assume the role of griot—a kind of community poet who must write proverb-filled epics rooted in the culture” (18). If we apply the poet-as-soundslinger to the book as a whole, the “griot” no longer speaks to or for what “community” might be other than the dogs and rascals.
In this revision of “griot,” Eel on Reef finds liberation, creating space for the voice of the “i” to enter the scene: “and a voice to burn with arrives / in tripled frenzy / in cyclic precision” (65). The images that Nduka builds into his poetry do burn; they cycle through frenzy and precision—a frenzy through the dizziness, but a precision in the “glorious indulgence.” That sense of precision may be the touchstone for our ongoing consideration of “authenticity” in poetry because of the intent Nduka seems to have and the trust we as readers place being guided through the language and images.
Nduka’s “soundslinger,” however, brings me to my aforementioned association—one that raised some questions about Eel on Reef’s “i” in another light. As a potential counterpoint to Nduka’s “soundslinger,” we have Ed Dorn’s Gunslinger (1968-1975). Gunslinger is another text that could be aptly described via “glorious indulgence,” and while the Wild-West setting of Dorn’s text is rooted in Americana and capitalism, there’s a similar freedom at work in the lyric “I.” Book II of Gunslinger, in fact, contains the following lines:
What happened to I she asked
his eyes dont seem right.
I is dead, the poet said.
That aint grammatical, Poet.
Maybe. However Certain it seems,
look, theres no reaction. (Dorn 56)
The missing reaction to this pronouncement that “I is dead, the poet said” is yet another liberation that Eel on Reef might find compatible with its own devices. In effect, the play and freedom that typifies Nduka’s (and Dorn’s) work is a freedom from an orienting “I” and, thus, a freedom from traditional understanding. Perhaps most resonant, then, is Eel on Reef’s call to search for more than understanding:
don’t just understand.
overstand.
overstand. (139)
Whatever sense (or nonsense) “overstanding” suggests is beside the point—Nduka offers a way beyond “just understand[ing],” and his text enacts what that might look and feel like.
A Post-Script: John Durham Peters' Speaking into the Air has much to say about the limits of "understanding," though were I to cherry-pick the most resonant line to apply to Eel on Reef, I'd have to choose the following: "Instead, the most wonderful thing about our contact with each other is its free dissemination, not its anguished communion" (31). While there's a lot to unpack in all of this, the fluidity of contact that Nduka offers seems in line here.
DeleteJake, I love that you brought up the JDP line on "free dissemination." This, to me, speaks to what Kwame Dawes says on “alarming affirmation," “slippage of meaning” and occasional turns to poetic tradition as “only [seeming] prosaic and accessible because they are planted among a dense ticket of inscrutable verse.”
ReplyDeleteThe third idea prompts me to consider Walter Benjamin’s poetic explication of “bewilderment,” wherein one faces the “inner mountain forest of language itself,” does not enter, and calls “to the original within, at that one point where the echo can produce its own language” (from somewhere within “The Task of the Translator").
I’m excited to be reading this book in conjunction with Trish and Madison’s poetry, too, as much of their hyper-distillations and linguistic alchemies evoke Nduka. Lots of echoes!
Now, trying to carry all of this…
By naming his leaning into discomfort, as Dawes does, the reader is invited to participate in this movement. Nduka’s stream of questions only alarms/affirms – that “erases neither the curious fact of otherness at its core nor the possibility of doing things with words” (JDP). Dawes, and then I suppose Nduka, participate in “the revelation of otherness.”
I (tried to) lean into the never-settling-dust of the question, particularly as it manifests as image. There’s a gesture towards this on p. 25: “there are still oaths to be sung.” Then, we make a big leap to “i do not fold the sky, / i widen it” and: “what is downward / is the encounter” + “what is upward,” and finally: “no path no path no path / to ascend” … “you fly into / the dreamrun / of a cloud.” (92, 101, 115, 150)
The contradiction (met by the opposing notions of ascent/descent, “no path” and flight) is alarming, and the confidence from which these assertions (like prophecy) arise is some kind of affirmation to keep swimming. Each of Nduka’s questions generate a bigger field of motion, of inquiry. Each question/widening suggests a “free dissemination” and a “slippage.”
Perhaps this is like JDP’s analysis of Socrates, the “paradox of writing’s being denounced in a written dialogue . . . [performing] the unity of the piece.”
There’s something to this performed unity in eel on reef, this gesture, this “dreamrun.”
Looking forward to reading/listening to your ideas.
"Questionspectre", I love that! Even in that franken-phrase (which both Trish and I are fond of using in and out of poems) kind of circles around maybe what Kwame felt was so unsettling in reading this collection. The poems aren't just relentless, they take pleasure in being relentless. Which in turn create this manic laughing response when I read them, and like with Meadowshasher, they're easy to read in quick succession.
ReplyDeleteThat tightly-wound and self-contained propulsion is what gives the collection its trajectory without allowing it to be linear, like Kwame said in the intro. Another collection (not sure how many of you are familiar with it?) that has the same momentum but not the same effect is Lisa Jarnot's Ring of Fire. They share a careening, but I didn't find hers nearly as compelling as this one. The difference being that there is a good amount of joy/ecstasy in Eel on Reef, which lends itself to that whole self-indulgence frame Kwame gave. And no small amount of confidence, like AM pointed out.
I mean, the poem on 32? It's just so charming.
"you're moaning again.
no.
you're moaning again.
no. I'm like a cat. i'm
purring. i'm happy."
Something I'd love to hear more people's thoughts on is the quote Trish pulled from p. 87, "how can i say in words / things i didn't / understand through words?" I share that same anxiety over the chasm between the impulse to write poetry and the inevitable failure of language. As Nduka puts it, "my interrogational / abysses and crossings / my attempts to come ashore" (74). Amidst the manic laughter lines (like "your rising penis / is the rising sun" p. 48), I also see intense deprecation that gestures towards that anxiety. Some specific moments include pages 68 ("the prodigy's tongue is / for grilling" , "let's read then the thesis / of a buffoon"), 28 ("idiocy draped / round their guns"), 77 ("i broach again the desecration / of a collegian's quest"), 88 ("i'm a victim of your speech / yet i like to hear you speak") and so on.
The repetition that he does seems to be an acting-out of that language failure, and it's everywhere (pgs. 32, 42, 43, 47, 69.....)
All of these aspects, the confident tone and humor and twisted up image pairings and never-settling dust, it all makes an incredible collection of poems. It makes me want to overstand, but doesn't allow me to be certain that I do.
In his introduction, Dawes identifies the underwater world as the organizing metaphor for this collection, but I think he stops short of carrying that perception to its fullest usefulness in exploring what that organization dis-organizes/dismembers at the level of received forms and poetics. I think where Dawes reports his oscillations between anxiety and unease and enjoyment in reading through these poems might indicate where thesy subvert or elude the impetus to disclose what would quell and satisfy.
ReplyDeleteThese poems take a pleasure in themselves that is irreducible to the expiation of confessionalism or sheer sonic play, because they play freely among these modes and others.
Several of the poems touch or take place in water—the first poem opens in water (“the sentience of a season / quivers in water”), and throughout the poems we encounter: sailors, boats, drowned bodies, rainsnakes and rain, marshy pools, the whistling arse of a river, a river searching for ocean, among others. Water is constantly changing its form, its function, its fear factor and face—it functions as both home base and molecular structure for the book, in that these poems and the themes, substances, images, and registers that circulate through them do so in a way that imitates its fluxes and flows.
As a whole, the collection eschews the boundary markers of sections, titles, punctuation and capitalization—formalisms and impositions that could anchor and track the consistencies, shifts, and developments a reader might identify in. Apart from their sequencing, there’s no structure that would scaffold a hierarchy of ideas—in other words, an argument. So I think the better structural metaphor for the book is right in the title ’Eel On Reef' is kind of like coral itself--an entity at once organism, architecture, and multiplicity. Coral has no body or head—a coral group is a mass of discrete, genetically identical polyps, and reefs are aggregates of many distinct groups—it is, I tentatively say in the Deleuzian sense, rhizomatic. But then who or what is or performs the symbiotic role of the eel?
I think you're right on with the usefulness of reef/coral as a structural metaphor, Jean.
DeleteA glimpse of the rhizomatic did seem apparent in at least one moment of Eel on Reef, even when it was using the (dis)organizing sea metaphor that Dawes points out:
"where's the attic of the sea
forget it. forget it.
flap out and jist
and razz and twist in again" (144)
That lack of orientation in this passage seems significant, largely because any sense of or drive toward directionality is immediately pushed aside in favor of a more local movement and linguistic relish ("flap," "jist," "razz" "twist").
Regarding the "eel," I wonder if its slithering/gliding through the water/reef of the poem might very well be the readerly limitation of linearity?
Keeping the rhizome in mind, and Jake's "lack of orientation," I wonder how the poems operate as plateaus... performed in medias res.
DeleteCommunication barrier occurs in the beginning of the book. “I” insistently inquires “Where is your face?” and demands you to “tuck your hair into a band” and “pat back your hair”. However, no answers and physical actions respond to “my" request. Instead, my vision shifts from “your” face concealed in hair to the shining turtle in “your splashing vista”. Though perceiving a vivacious presence from “your” perspective, my desire for “you” dramatize to an imaginary violent action of estranging your starfish from a pebble. Even though the communication crisis is not resolved and “you" remain opaque, I can sense a presence of you through subtle movements, like “the sentience of a season” that “quivers inside water”.
ReplyDeleteAs Nduka’s poetry progresses, “you” sometimes respond to “I”. However, the conversations/dialogues between them does not lead to understanding. Instead, they lead to confusion and complicate the relationship between “you” and “I”. In the lines “you’re moaning again./no./you’re moaning again./no. i’m like a cat. i’m/purring. i’m happy.”, the repetition of “you are moaning” (based on “my” perceptions) does not make “you” acknowledge his/her misery. “You” reversed the fact by describing his/her own “moaning” as the happy purring sound. Because readers have no access to “your” emotional state other than what the language on the page informs them, the outcome is that communications bring confusion rather than clarity.
In some lines, Nduka draws attention to the miscommunication between two parties, and how it allows the poetic language to unfold in unexpected ways. In the lines “what you call a sprightly stroll/i call a barbituric swagger.”, the joy implied in “sprightly” contrasts with the depression suggested by “barbituric”, signaling conflicting perceptions/ideas. “look at a mismatch” and “simulacra” urges readers to linger on the moment when the communication breaks down. The obscure imagery that ensues including “furrowed choir”, “a rumble in a bramble”, “the lament of a gong” all dwell on the strange texture of sounds, and in the context of communication failure, one interpretation of the imagery is not privileged over another, thereby giving readers the freedom to approach language from diverse angles.
Hey, so like Dawes I also both took pleasure from and was frustrated by poem’s ooziness. Trish's introductory quotes from Nduka, however, alleviated here in so far as 1) his categorical resistance makes me less anxious about pinpointing a taxonomic vector his voice straddles, and 2) he gives others (me) permission to be just as resistant. On the other hand his disappointment re other Nigerian poets seemed, I don’t know, a little flippant and rubbed me the wrong way. Anyway his position reminded me of a quote by Harryette Mullen:
ReplyDelete"At this point in my life, I am more interested in working with language per se than in developing or maintaining my own particular voice or style of writing, although I am aware that my poems may constitute a peculiar idiolect that can be identified as mine."
--Harryette Mullen from Imagining the Unimagined Reader
I think Nduka shares with Mullen an interest in lang. in all of its strangeness/contradiction (Mullen’s inclination “to pursue what is minor, marginal, idiosyncratic, trivial, debased, or aberrant in the language that [she] speak[s] and write[s]" Ibid); an interest that takes priority over an interest in cultivating a particular voice.
[I also agree with AM that there are some resonances with Trish's work -- and mine, though I think it seems closer to what Trish is accomplishing, especially in her piece for this week. Can't pinpoint it right now, but something to do with the rhythms of Abraham Smith. For me, I think the connection also has to do with rhythm, but mostly the connection might be structural/superficial, e.g. line-break, nil punct., and just that he's another black diasporic writer.]
Sometimes the poem has this Artaud(or Cesaire)-like urgency/intensity that rips out into top-most layer/texture of language(/abstraction) like "those are not the bellies / of pumpkins; / those are the narcotics / of their divergencies". Or, dig furiously until the poem strike an air-pocket: "but did he piss on the moon?/ did he boil the breeders / of hydrogen bombs? // was he lefting? / was he righting? // honeycup!" (39)
The language events/occurrences perceived do not read as if they've been narrativized or reported. & they do not recount isolated objects in the world coming in and out of contact with the lyric "I" (or simply the "I" of the poem). Instead, I read multiple shots being super-imposed over each other, here, like a filmic cross-fade, or maybe just someone (an "I") experiencing the simultaneity of moments/memories/visions/senses:
"errors of raillery / spring from / olives grazing / on smiles / of nodding sojourners." (33)
Other times, these ideas seem to chart a path, or chart these "errors of raillery", like JMW's careening logic(s). In another moment, however, the poem's image-arrays feel stratified, arriving as affect(& affecting)-panels: "solipsis. // the cousinly gray / in a goatee. // equipoise." (45) These are flattened, both imaged and un-imaged, each smear in its isolated pictorial values.
There are other lines that seem more evocative/resonant that maybe we could tease out together:
"chants / graze in / our canefields.// to us, / all words / are destinies." (41) & "every crevice / of a tune / surrenders / to the flesh" (35)
If anyone has any familiarity w/ Edouard Glissant (Trish?), probably some talking points there -- something re the non-invading nomad (non-“arrow-shaped”?) – worth thinking about.
addendum: our connection actually isn't mostly structural/surface, but not sure if I can articulate what else is factoring into it at the moment.
Delete(I'm most interested in hearing you / how your understanding evolves vs. positing my own idea, here, but I do see a "confidence"--a currently-un-pin-pointable-ethos--in Freakophone World, too, that permeates much more than its structure/surface. There are definitely more readily available connections to Trish's work, perhaps via "joy" ? I'll be thinking about how I see the ecstatic at play--in wildly different ways--in both of your poetry as I have my morning coffee...)
DeleteAM (and MM) Absolutely posit your ideas - thats what will lead the conversation forward. This is a good line of inquiry, please continue (here and in class tmrrw).
Deleteyessss ah.
ReplyDeleteIt was only in my effort to parse down outside references that I didn't explicitly reference Glissant (pinging between Dawes' intro and the collection--- here within this pinging, his problematizing of the Western-centric and reductive of the "Transparent" mode ("In order to understand and thus accpet you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce", 'On Opacity')--which is why it felt to me that Kwame was enacting a performance On-Behalf-Of the imagined potential audience for this book.
I'm excited, AM, by your observation/connecting-making between our various poetries. I almost feel a kind of recognition, maybe a shared rooting-into of impulse--somewhere within What Drives [My? Our? His? Your?] Language--within the realm of how "I" relate to the language, and how that relating seems to refract//find commonality with some thread in Madison's exploratories. Does it have to do with the compulsion to generatively break? Could it be a breaking that your seeing in-common here? A sense of inherent divorced-ness from the language we're tied to? Evasion, maybe. But then, what/who is the evasive agent?
Jean invoked the Deleuzian rhizome, and we have Glissant's (vis-à-vis the Poetics of Relation), too, from whence we might engage with the detours & camouflage (of memory, enaction, language) resulting from his posited "point of intrication"--but have y'all read Suzanne Césaire's Tropiques? A collection of essays written between 1941-1945 (war, crazy Admiral reign, meeting of Aimé & Breton, Leiris getting up in there...). Her essay on "Camouflage" is specific to a Martinican ecopoetics; she dialogues with/through doudouism and the valences of "pure-bloodS" contextually specific to Martinique (but certainly echoing beyond)...
Pulling all this together, I see a project of both subversion & upheaval in Nduka's work, at once personal and outward-reaching. That play materializes in his dive in/out of these opacities, lucidities, and needs-not prescribe to any pre-ordained standardization--be it time-space, language, or otherwise.
sry, this is a response to that thread right there^
DeleteDawes's introduction focuses much on the (un)necessity of understanding the meaning behind Nduka's poems, using phrases like 'enigma' or 'riddle', which connects with my own approach towards most poetry, and back to my thoughts on the confessional. The tension between the desire to lay bare some sort of truth and the need to obfuscate or elevate the banality of being sincere gives birth to the wealth of language and wordplay that may cause discomfort or frustration when it cannot be decoded. Something is revealed, but the codebook is unavailable, incomplete.
ReplyDeleteDawes mentions Nduka's resistance to context via the lack of titles or sectioning. Context is often a big part of the cipher for me- past workshops, for example, have had the poets clarify or explain their overall project, which makes it much easier to make an attempt to figure out an answer to the puzzle. For Eel on Reef, I have to make do with the introduction, which is quite frank about their struggle of producing a reading. For all their resilience, however, there is something raw that leaks out in moments of sexuality or (political) violence.
"a sword's red track / a bullet's stained blade / The ballad flame of a volcano's / tauntrum ... for they also kill and rape and torture: / those posted to enforce peace / on your shore. // they walk on bones, / transact with blood- / bug, rove, piss." (92)
As the lines are laid down on that page, flowery wordplay gives way to the visceral, then to a grunt-like sequence of single words, as if it's too much to try and conceal, too heavy for black comedy. Perhaps it points to the fundamental universality of violence and sex to humans.