"The voice that broke" -- Jäderlund/Göransson and Tiffany
“The
voice that broke the silence of the forest was the voice of Anon.” – Virginia Woolf
Which Once Had Been Meadow moves
through distillation. In the space of the book, even “anesthesia stiffens the
walls.” Nothing is sedated; everything is charged. Woolf’s “breaking” is vital,
here; the poems possess a simultaneously eruptive and meditative quality, at
once “commanding” and “disorienting.” The space’s image-set—forest, wellspring,
meadow, breast, beam, heart, lake—is singular only in its presentation. Each
image possesses a transformative property, a profundity of scope, and—somehow, in
this vastness—precise delivery.
Resisting
the confessional,* Jäderlund asserts: “The veil does not conceal me now / The
monologue does not conceal me.” Thus, the voice of the book is an impenetrable
and electrified persona, one of prophetic (or banal?) vision. As the image-set
transforms, exchanges, agitates, one sees Ezra Pound’s “sense of sudden growth,”**
and is commanded and disoriented by the speaker’s awareness. Is the voice—the Siren—prophesying
the environmental and bodily transformations, or asserting the already-there/
the known?
“The forest creates its wellspring
“The forest creates its wellspring
The
meadow creates its breast
The
beam creates its heart
The
heart creates its lake”
&
“It is a moon but it is called wax
It
is a garden but it is called moon
It
is the strong beam
But
then it is my sex” (32-3)
This
question of prophecy vs. assertion necessitates a question of activity and
passivity. What—or who—engages the voice? There is a sense of ambivalence in the repetitive structure of the
poems, but the short and self-assured lines bear potency. If “every memory is a
pearl,” “then the pearls disappear,” is the book composed of revelation or ephemera (71)? Or both and?
Which Once Had Been Meadow resists such a reductive reading, instead inviting
binaries to procreate—via Tiffany’s “uncertainty and promiscuity”—in its ambiguous “inner” (59). Throughout the book, the speaker—the “Anon”—breaks through
the silence of the page in impenetrable and affecting song. In its in-between-ness,
its not-quite-active and not-quite-passive, one is invited to resist the temporal
and witness “which once had been” “as it is”— an “unmappable” ache (43).
* “The Sirens’ call opens up a space
of unmappable promiscuities, which exemplify a poetics of nonrelational
relations, of solipsistic communicability.” – Daniel Tiffany, “Fugitive Lyric”
**
“An “Image” is that which
presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time […] It is
the presentation of such a “complex” instantaneously which gives that sense of
sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that
sense of sudden growth.” – Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect”
[This is an annoyingly long post (in several parts), all; I just had a lot of thoughts to work through]
ReplyDeleteAnne-Malin, your characterization of Jäderlund’s Which Once Had Been Meadow as a text that “resists such a reductive reading, instead inviting binaries to procreate—via Tiffany’s ‘uncertainty and promiscuity’ in its ambiguous ‘inner’” is, I think, quite useful in contextualizing both Jäderlund and Tiffany based on the “liminal” spaces that riddles, beggars, and lyrics might dwell in. That uncertainty and liminality was most present in my reading in the poem “Iodine”:
Unfold the leaves
Thrust into the core. There is no core
When you are in the middle
Thrust in between the pitiful leaves
There is no rose. When you are in the rose
Sour folds
There is no reed
When you come with fluid
There is no
fluid,
Giovanni
The “things” in this poem seem like elements of a riddle already—vague, archetypical, abstract—but Jäderlund’s master stroke is in offering up these items before immediately withdrawing them and vice versa: “Thrust into the core. There is no core,” “There is no rose. When you are in the rose,” and “When you come with fluid / There is no / fluid” all perform this kind of bait-and-switch. The “riddle” is set up this way, but the poem complicates all of that (perhaps?) in explicitly breaking the “world” of the poem by calling out another presence—“Giovanni”—both in an accusatory, passive-aggressive way and also in spinning this character seemingly out of thin air. It’s a complex move at work in this poem, but it also typifies the kind of positioning and artifice in Which Once Had Been Meadow as a whole.
The various charms and riddles that abound in WOHBM give Daniel Tiffany’s essay “Fugitive Lyric” a ton for us to consider in light of our class discussion last Tuesday. Because of our investment in this conversation already, I admit I found it hard to be as charitable a reader for Tiffany than I otherwise try to be, so forgive me if I seem like I’m on a rant or tirade. To be clear, I don’t think Tiffany is wrong to suggest that the lyric’s start may very well be in the riddle, charm, or cant: I’m just a little skeptical what he offers by way of a new idea.
DeleteI’m familiar with Tiffany’s usual critical approach—one which ties together philology, the history of ideas, and a genealogical approach to cultural knowledge—through his 2000 study Toy Medium, and this approach is also on full display in our reading for this week. The potential danger of this methodology, however, is that he places himself in conversation with forerunners. Because of this, I struggled with Tiffany’s essay in large part because it seems in some ways to be a variation-on-a-theme of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) , which spoke of the riddle-like qualities of charm and the “classed” similarities between lyric and “work” songs of underground “communities.”
Most striking for me in Tiffany’s argument was the seeming equivalence he assigns to “lyric obscurity” and “lyric communicability”: “Further, through an analysis of the correspondences between slang and poetry, I consider whether lyric obscurity—that is, lyric communicability—may be viewed not as an obstacle to fashioning social relations…but as an element essential to the formation and maintenance of coherent communities” (83-84, my emphasis). This negotiation between obscurity and communicability, which, if we are to take Tiffany’s view, may be different names for the same thing or two sides of the same coin, creates space for the riddle-like exclusivity of WOHBM: “The nature of lyric communicability…depends above all on the solipsistic expression of the canting song—on its capacity to achieve its ends without making sense, to find its mark without losing its hermetic composure” (Tiffany 88). This claim of Tiffany’s was the first to clue me into the potential lineage between his thinking and Northrop Frye’s concepts “babble” and “doodle” (most simply understood as the sonic and visual elements of a poem, respectively; also referred to as melos and opsis in the Aristotelian schema).
I want to provide an excerpt of Frye’s The Anatomy of Criticism from the fourth essay, “Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres,” for reference going forward:
Delete“The two elements of subconscious association which form the basis for lyrical melos and opsis respectively have never been given names. We may call them, if the terms are thought dignified enough, babble and doodle. In babble, rhyme, assonance, alliteration, and puns develop out of sound-associations. The thing that gives shape to the associating is what we have been calling the rhythmical initiative, though in a free verse poem it would be rather a sense of the oscillations of rhythm within an area which gradually becomes defined as the containing form. [….] One can see a clear evolution in children, who start with rhythmical babble and fill in the appropriate words as they go along. The process is also reflected in nursery rhymes, college yells, work songs, and the like, where rhythm is a physical pulsation close to the dance, and is often filled up with nonsense words. […] When babble cannot rise into consciousness, it remains on the level of uncontrolled association.” (Frye 275)
This excerpt seems to be very much in line with what Tiffany suggests in his own essay, particularly the incantatory quality of lyric and the counterparts we see in nursery rhymes, etc., but most intriguing for me comes from Frye’s reluctance to label “babble” and “doodle” as such because the terms may not be “dignified enough.” In actuality, it’s the very terminology Frye uses that gets to the heart of Tiffany’s own ideas, largely because “babble” and “doodle” already seem to be solipsistic activities themselves. I latched on to the solipsistic connotations lurking behind Frye’s phrases due to Tiffany’s essay, but now that I see a connection, I can’t distance myself from them. In line with Tiffany’s obscurity/communicability concept, I associate “babble” with a kind of “talking to one’s self” and, of special importance for Tiffany, the “Tom o’ Bedlam” figures in literature itself. At the same time, when someone “doodles” it’s often derided not just for being a distraction but because it is done, supposedly at least, only for the doodler. It’s that underworld of babble and doodle that I find most compelling in Frye’s theory (with help from Tiffany), and this babbling and doodling did some heavy lifting for me in thinking of Jäderlund’s work in light of the accusation of “riddling” that WOHBM faced.
Which leads me to perhaps a more pressing issue for Tiffany.
DeleteThe “Fugitive Lyric” essay ended much differently from where I thought he was heading. I see his point in using Baudelaire and Benjamin to reach his conclusion: “The formulation of modern anonymity from the specifically lyrical condition of a nameless speaker—located in the historical underworld—bears directly on the social implications of lyric communicability” (94). But in using these thinkers—and, implicitly, their concept of the flâneur—I think Tiffany might be treading on familiar territory and introduces an element of class to the lyric. To elevate the vagabond and vagrant to the flâneur is, no doubt, noteworthy (if problematic for various reasons, most glaring of which is the presupposed masculinity inherent in the flâneur—the feminine flâneuse figure still pops up in critical debates). That said, a more substantive point for my understanding of lyric came a few pages earlier:
“The lyrical incorporation of nonhuman sources calls to mind, though it also inverts, the Sirens’ flawed imitation of the human voice. In addition, anonymity, understood as a condition that is precipitated by poēsis, unites the singing of birds, Sirens, and beggars. One might therefore regard the obscurity of lyric poetry in general and of the canting song in particular as a distant expression, or recollection, of the inhuman voice.” (Tiffany 90)
The anonymous and “inhuman” register of lyric here seems more crucial to Tiffany’s concept of charm and riddle than the alleged origin of modernity that he traces to the end. But on a more significant level for our own discussion, what Tiffany suggests in the passage above might lend a more careful (and simultaneously more dangerous) reading of Jäderlund’s work. Using the figure of the Siren—at once nonhuman and yet gendered—gives the alleged riddles of WOHBM (and the backlash and debate they caused) a vital politics and ethics for how Jäderlund’s poems obscure/communicate to (in spite of) us.
Two Footnotes:
DeleteFrye’s work as a whole may be of tangential interest since its study of genre and archetypes helped lead to the shift away from New Criticism and cleared the ground for structuralist and poststructuralist approaches.
For an online version of Frye’s essay, this link is available: http://northropfrye-theanatomyofcriticism.blogspot.com/2009/02/fourth-essay-rhetorical-criticism.html
This comment has been removed by the author.
Deletere: AM's * ( “The Sirens’ call opens up a space of unmappable promiscuities, which exemplify a poetics of nonrelational relations, of solipsistic communicability.” – Daniel Tiffany, “Fugitive Lyric”)---
DeleteThis made me think of obscurity (opacity?) as a begetting thing. A text-ure in whose Ultimate Meaning evades capture at its outskirts is not static/stagnant in the receiver's mind. It's propensity for fecundity is what grows the latent cult power in/of language--the sacredness generated by/of ambiguity makes of a language-artifact an incantatory sublimated thing; in these moments the language-artifact's ''afterlife'' (via readers) transcends the original context that might wrested it.
There is only one atrium now
But I am in the chamber
And sunlight falls over us
Everything one devours, one devours
To oneself get away
Will the night threat pass unredeemed
And the door beats against the gable
p.91 (deleted to replace with this better example i think)
Relevant anecdote:
Deletemy partner studies early/medieval/renaissance music, a.k.a. "sacred" music. Many of these sacred songs---these days, often performed in cathedrals---are written in the vulgar latins of French, Italian, and Spanish, of their respective eras; and--surprise!--their subject matter is usually raunchy, crude, and toilet-based.
I remember when I first listened to him practice one of these (on a horn, really melodic/beautiful, something from the early 15th century) and read the lyric accompaniment over his shoulder--it was all about some guy dropping his pants and shoving his ass into some other guy's face in protest against the latter guy who'd stolen former guy's lover.
Wow, looking forward to responding to your thoughts, AM & J!
ReplyDeleteBut first I'll reënact the swamp of one of my thought treads for this week:
I'm thinking about the systemic infection of language, its cult of intention which insinuates a need for trajectory, which in turn contains in it the masculine impulse of linearity, the thrust, a colonization. "I" becomes exiled from self and self's experience through the forced/intrinsic/inescapable mediation of language.
Sometimes "I" can reciprocate the language infection, enact a co-infection, at the risk of "communication breakdown;" a familiar (idiomized) phrase (i.e., linguistically commodified by the masculine streamlinedness. Is there a negative connotation implied here?
[Involuntary] Users of this language are borne into the infection. As member-individuals of the whole, infected body, a grip on intention [communicable, transferrable, registerable] is required of us all.
I see a mining, a dismantling-with-the-eye of this system of relation in "Approaching Abjection," a mirroring pulse. When we reach the state of language at its most reduced (the unshaped utterance--invocable here: Cixous' 'cri' I mentioned last week). Even at its most reduced, language remains still too whole (too undissolvable) to enter/breech the self's innermost membrane, and so "self" is fatally/irrevocably (at its 'core') a-part-from language; language and self are co-abject.
I'm thinking about how much of this we perform in our poetry--be it implicit, explicit, subterranean, or otherwise--and how we reckon with our "presence" and mutations here.
One aspect of this collection that stuck with my reading was Jäderlund’s syntactical parallelism, and sometimes pure repetition (usually images or other sensory experiences) which calls attention to itself, especially given the poems’ lengths. The effect is not startling, but it does make us intensely aware of that recycled language and syntax.
ReplyDeleteThe declarative syntax (falling into a pattern of “subject + verb + object” structure) is reminiscent of a chant (intensely in “The Jacob Struggle” on 59), sometimes even a spell (recipe?) when that structure reverses into “command + object” like in “Iodine” (51)
“Unfold the leaves
Thrust into the core…”
Both of those styles seem like a verbal performance somewhere between speech and song, and a lot of these lines are rhythmically structured outside of a melody. The repetition/parallelism helps create that cadence. I read the poems before Tiffany’s essay, but conveniently, charms/spells are one of his first talking points and he says such remedial charms (i.e. riddles) are “characterized by obscurity.”
Our conversations about obscurity vs. opacity make me think of a similar line drawn between melancholia and nostalgia. Obscurity seems to evoke similar reactions as nostalgia, since they are both reaching towards something lost/out of reach but there is inherent hope of recovery. Opacity, though, acts more like melancholia in that what is out of reach is impossible to recover. The frustration Tiffany has with riddles is their “unavoidable obscurity” and the paradox that such a “spectacle of privacy” creates in its effect. What’s missing is the key to the riddle, which says that if recovered, there is hope of communication and understanding. Jäderlund’s language is accessible and her images easily conjurable, so the meaning/message should be just as easily accessible but it’s not. “All the splendor from the inaccessible” is what drives these poems (81). The riddle of the poems is made that much more frustrating to a reader like Tiffany given the repetition and limited word bank. Personally, I read more melancholia in her poems. There is even a line near the end, “I was driven by a curious melancholy,” 115). There is a continual, painful awareness of something lost and irretrievable, called to mind in lines such as:
“It is always so empty
Couldn’t I fill that void
It would also hurt
To swathe one’s arms…” (61)
“It is black and deep in here
The walkways are empty…” (85)
“Nothing will ever bloom again
Nothing has ever bloomed…” (107)
This seems all tied up in Tiffany’s take on the lyric and charm, which Jake has already brought up. Charm being tied to the Latin carmen (meaning song) makes a connection to lyric poetry, and lyricism is strong in Jäderlund’s poems (re: a place between speech and song).
One last not-fully-realized observance I had + subsequent research were the two sequential poems in the “A Garden” section (“Slumber” and “Nerve System”) that had several pseudo portmanteaus: letterfilm, thousandbeauties, beneathbottom.
Moments of visible translator/failure to translate without creating new words? Precursor to the violent penetrating merging that comes in later poems? Maintaining “foreignness” of individual words while forging new connections? IDK! Anyone else have thoughts on those?
this article helped me to contextualize Jake's references to Frye, etc.: http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/melosopsislexis.htm
ReplyDeleteSome of these poems complicate the idea of the boundary. In the poem “A Light Shines On the Border”, “you” seems to occupy in the space that blends in with the environment (“a room that is white”, colorless, and does not stand out). At the same time, “you” also “stand on the stage …. with illuminated edges”, and the illumination marks a boundary within the white room, and make “you” the focal point of the ordinary space.
ReplyDeleteIn the next stanza, the speaker claims that s/he is “the border,/ the girl’s hyacinth,/And who is rocked by God a boy”. In the next line, “God a Boy” is subsumed by the Girl, or “I”, who was being rocked previously, and the action reverses direction (I instead of the boy rock in my restless harbor). “I”, the border, and/or the girl takes a more active position, which signals expansion of the border to converge with other entities.
The relationship between nature and body is another theme in Jaderlund’s poetry. On the eighth page of “Nature”, the natural elements (the meadow and beam) first create body parts (breast and heart). However, in the last line “The heart creates its lake” subverts the expectation by letting the body generated by nature creates its own element of nature. On page 39, the meadow (a form of nature) can’t access to be its bodily creator (both the heart and “I”). The heart’s lake seems to be rendered opaque by the moon’s beams, and appear as a blank surface rather an entity with depth. This might relate to the canting crew/sirens’ songs, because these poems appear like riddles with repetitive phrases, and “nonrelational relations” exhibit in their seeming illogical but interconnected phrases/lines. In addition, the heart’s lake that disguises as a surface with the moon’s beam resembles siren’s songs that both invites to an interaction and leads to danger/risks (i.e. drowning).
Kim, I’m intrigued by the analogy you’re proposing between obscurity and nostalgia (on one hand) and opacity and melancholia (on the other). This comparison gestures towards the idea that there is something hermetic about the object (or subject?) of melancholia that generates a kind of negative attraction, whereas the former affect—nostalgia—is more contingent/sustains itself on the persistent and elusive suggestion of resolution’s possibility. Word(s).
ReplyDeleteThis clicks together with Daniel Tiffany’s idea that the lyric deployment of the vernacular could be (in one sense) seen/understood as a means of foregrounding of the boundaries that obtain between speech communities, signifying community membership and identity through its enactment of shifting accessibility (vis-a-vis the users’ / listeners’ social class, among other contingencies) and secondarily circumventing the model of transmission of information that (I think Tiffany would agree with John Durham Peters) characterizes the conventional view of language’s function in effecting social relations.
Ann Jäderlund’s poems inscribe this configuration of intentionally “obscure” or inscrutable language in their multiplicitous, iterative gestures towards “[filling] that void”, “[eating] the inner” (50)—driving at “all the splendor from the inaccessible” (81)—opening up the muscle, the flowers, to the city within the city itself. These poems at once circulate the materia of “the lyric” (flowers, meadows, lovers, leaves) and short-circuit them, continuously revealing the nullity of their interiors, their bloodless linguistic substance which nevertheless emanates vertiginous abysses—“the colors grow darker and darker” (55). In this sense, I think this book acts as a ramp between obscurity and opacity—a moebius.
Insofar as Jäderlund employs or mimics the riddling quality of canting and produces (what Tiffany describes as) “an erotic space characterized by itinerant relations or skewed itineraries—a queer space” (88), I remain curious about the space that these poetics create or collapse—space in the sense of linguistic habitus, systems of representation, symbolic cultures. Or—what becomes of the lyric that depends on the meadow? After Joshua Marie Wilkinson slashed the meadow, we took a trippy trip to the seafloor and then when we resurfaced, we have found that what was meadow is no longer.
Friends this weekend showed me this wild clip from Blue Planet showing a salt lake *at the bottom of the ocean*—somehow at once within and somehow apart from it—which is so concentrated that sea life that falls into it dies and washes up essentially salt-cured. Other (presumably slightly hardier) animals—the eel in this clip—will then dive into the lake to fish out easy prey—but the salinity gives it toxic shock, causing it to spasm and contort in freakish shapes. Idk, seems relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwuVpNYrKPY
Re: your 2nd paragraph, gets me thinking about a vernacular offering a closer positioning to language (common use should be easier for mass understanding) which gets into cultural/riddle language when the message/meaning is obscured
DeleteMy blog post I think is more of a tour of passages from Tiffany’s text that intrigued me, and how they connect to some other ideas floating around in our class and/or in Jaderlund’s WOHBM.
ReplyDeleteTiffany’s remark that the cant, like a poem, is a kind of “open secret” seems appropriate when talking about Jaderlund, or as T describes in more detail: "The deliberate obscurity of a riddle becomes--when no solution is forthcoming and this unknowing remains at the same time unconcealed--a way of modeling the primary and unavoidable obscurity of the riddle's verbal substance and of poetry in general."
Jaderlund’s:
[35]
Two colors are white/
It is both the blank ones/
In all its splendor/
It is the only tine/"
In many ways this poem is more absent than it is present. To follow the poem, we can make a correlative leap between the first and second lines (via “two”/”both” and “white”/”blank”), but afterwards (for 3 and 4) the poem’s insistent “it” is what ties the poem together—“it” of course being the ‘dummy’ signifier, etc.
[37]
The seeds are not warm/
The poppy does not want to sleep/
In the dark seeds cannot be seen
When seeds become warm in the dark
Seeds want sleep want darkness
The effect of these negations -- “not warm”, “cannot be seen”, “does not want” – sort of creates a photonegative of the idea or image described. There’s a spectral quality here, such that the language almost seems draped or strewn around the thing imagined. While this does reveal what Tiffany describes as “the constant abrasion or clouding of meaning in any verbal act,” I wonder how a reader moves through the poem at all.
Tiffany provides a few options:
"To those outside the company of beggars, the foreignness of the canting song--its whining, almost inhuman sound (as the elite audience perceives it)—evokes the captivating strangeness, the wailing, of the Sirens' song." (87)
This ‘whine’ or ‘wail’ doesn’t resonate with my reading. Actually, thinking more of Abraham Smith's poetry and of Trish's poems than those of Jaderlund.
But the reader’s attention to that sound seems familiar, whereby following the sirens' song "produces an erotic space characterized by itinerant relations or skewed itineraries--a queer space…" (88). As a form of navigation, I wonder how this queerness, this errancy, relates to Joshua Marie Wilkinson’s ‘careening’, and to what I’ve often heard described as the “emotional logic” of a poem.
DeleteThe Virginia Woolf quote that Anne-Malin is excellent, b/c the condition of birdsong seems particularly relevant to my reading of Jaderlund.
"The voice that broke the silence of the forest was the voice of Anon." (89)
the birdsong, from Tiffany: "the singular fact of existence ad infinitum. The bird sings its tune again and again, like an automaton, unto death. Pleasure, for both singer and listener, appears to be an effect of the boundless repetition of cant, conditioned by anonymity."
The cadence, repetition, and then slight variation, seems to mirror birdsong exactly:
[29]
"The meadow is moist and plays that the meadow is moist./
The leaf is blank and plays that the leaf is blank /
The mouth is beautiful and plays that the mouth is beautiful"
Or:
[43]
"As it is parted from the leaf this blank leaf/
As it is parted from the meadow this blank meadow/
As it is parted from the poppy this red poppy/"
& then more frantically:
[43]
"As it is my meadow/
As it is my leaf/
As it is my lake/
As it is my style/
As it is my beam/"
For me, it’s Tiffany’s triangulation of canting, the Siren, and birdsong that really fascinates:
"The lyrical incorporation of nonhuman sources calls to mind, though it also inverts, the Sirens' flawed imitation of the human voice. In addition, anonymity, understood as a condition that is precipitated by poesis, unites the singing of birds, Sirens, and beggars. One might therefore regard the obscurity of lyric poetry in general and of the canting song in particular as a distant expression, or recollection, of the inhuman voice."
This distance, for me doesn’t just signify an etymological genealogy, but also the idea of echolocation and translation. That maybe the poem we’re seeing is one aural response to, or iteration of, an inhuman, pre-linguistic sound—in other words , an artifact of that ‘original’ sound.
DeleteHaving moved the discussion into the inhuman, I can't help but think about the relationship between pre-linguistic utterances and affect; the repetition and permutations of some of these lines makes me think that this specific cant couldn't build meaning by way of clarification, so much as build meaning through iteration--as if the language (as with affect) was already in its most simplified form, and the poem could only express itself in the terms set-up by this form. Again:
"The meadow is moist and plays that the meadow is moist./
The leaf is blank and plays that the leaf is blank /
The mouth is beautiful and plays that the mouth is beautiful"
(29)
& then a permutation on 35:
""The leaf is moist and plays that the leaf is moist./
The meadow is blank and plays that the meadow is blank /
The breast is sweet and plays that the breast is sweet"
Another expression of the pre-linguistic in Jaderlund is in the poem Iodine. Complicating the binary lang. of computer bits (& closer to, say, quantum computing**), the lines present their images' simultaneous presence and absence--the image arriving as both an 'open' and 'closed' gate:
"Thrust into the core. There is no core/.../
There is no rose. When you are in the rose/.../
When you come with fluid / There is no / fluid"
These gestures, as with the riddle, heighten the virtuality of language, or even its spectrality.
Here again ‘image’ seems to return to the discussion. Lastly, I wonder how the non-presence of these images, relates to the undead/phantasmal images Tiffany describes in his essays re Pound.
Tiffany: on Pound, the Dead, & the Image ***
"If, indeed, Images and the phantoms of memory are analogous in Pound's mind (as in the phrase "resurgent EIKONES"), then we should view the poetic Image as the return of a lost or dead object, a moment in which the subject is haunted by reality .The Image is life imaged as death, a living death) as the Egyptian Book of the Dead taught Pound and others (including Yeats and Wyndham Lewis) around the turn of the century."
** https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-googles-quantum-computer-could-change-the-world-1508158847
*** http://www.modernamericanpoetry.org/criticism/daniel-tiffany-station-metro
--excerpted from his 1995 book, Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound.
I'm glad you brought up what you called the photonegative of an idea (which I didn't know was also an "organism tending to move away from light" which maybe not so coincidentally goes to Jean's final sharing of the sea bottom creatures?). That providing the absence of an image reminded me of Schomburg's poem "I Found a Beating Heart Half-Buried In the Woods":
Delete"Is this your beating heart? I asked. She didn't answer. She didn't have a larynx. She
didn't even have a thorax. She didn't have anything. Not even arms or legs or a
head. She really wasn't a woman as much as she was the space between dead
leaves. No, it's yours, she said."
He's more active and slow about giving an image and taking it away while making very intense eye contact, but there's something similar+ that's going on in the last of Jäderlund's lines you quoted about cores and roses. It pushes between giving the reader a non-image (which naturally invokes the image in the mind's eye regardless of being explicitly told "there is no core/rose") and physically putting the reader in the non-image. Such a riddle.
I can see your connection, tho Jäderlund does more moves in her poems. The idea of the negative image is interesting - and it's one Tiffany deals with quite a bit in a chapter in his book on Pound, Radio Corpse. Also that his phd advisor, WJT Mitchell has discussed extensively in his work- Iconology and Picture Theory. It's a good observation. I will see if I can come across some of those essays and give them to you. / J
DeleteAnd aside from Mitchell, I would love for this discussions about negative images to continue. What's the relationship to the "opacity" that we (and Tiffany!) discussed last week.
DeleteI've been thinking about the negative image recently as well, and WJT Mitchell's work is really great for this. While most of the work I've been busy with has been on "wordless woodcut novels" like Lynn Ward's carvings in the 1920s and 1930s, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe's essay in Critical Inquiry might offer some useful talking points in conceptualizing this space of "photonegatives" as well:
DeleteGilbert-Rolfe, Jeremy. “Blankness as a Signifier.” Critical Inquiry 24.1 (Autumn, 1997): 159-175. JSTOR. Web. 8 Oct. 2014.
Body and nature within [Which once had been meadow] are floating in a strange limbo between disease/matter/physicality and sterile/ghostly.
ReplyDeleteThe insistent capitalization on almost every line reinforces the dryness and combats decay. Simplicity or straightforwardness of language that seems to be limiting its vocabulary (to the universal? non-vulgar? hard to find a good way to describe it) keeps it from getting too earthly or physical. Repetition of words and objects and of line structure, immediate contradictions (From pg 51: "Thrust into the core. There is no core" & "There is no rose. When you are in the rose") add an artificial element, On the blurb, Aase Berg comments "(...) beautiful lyrics reveal the shadowy, erotic patterns of body and nature." I feel like shadowy is an excellent word to describe the coolness- the presence of muscles and brownness, growth and transformation that are distanced from the body of the reader.
Perhaps that is only natural when the speaker seems to be distant from their own body as well (81).
Why should one love
The one one can never have
My body isn't made of copper
It is toward the heart you will go
And up in the throat
Everything here on this earth is so strange to me
All the splendor from the inaccessible
Tiffany comments on the duality of obfuscation and communication- how beggars and thieves make themselves incomprehensible to outsiders while making sure the in-group understands each other. It ties in with our discussion on the confessional and the general displeasure towards Dawes's introduction of Nduka's collection. Transformations, negations, contradictions, repetition, and possibly code-like language in Jaderlund serves to create a sense of eeriness from the existence of the two levels of reading and the reader's awareness of them, aided by the sense that the body is on a medical table, where blood and guts are just distant things.
Also, Olivia Cronk wrote a review of Meadow for Critical Flame: http://criticalflame.org/vision-as-palimpsest-on-johannes-goranssons-translations-of-ann-jaderlund/
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