Ideas of space in contemporary poetry

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Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry Ian Davidson

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-21

Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry

10.1057/9780230595569 - Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, Ian Davidson

Also by Ian Davidson AS IF ONLY (Shearsman)

HARSH (Spectacular Diseases) HUMAN REMAINS AND SUDDEN MOVEMENTS (West House Books)



AT A STRETCH (Shearsman)

Ian Davidson




© Ian Davidson 2007 Foreword © Peter Barry 2007

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 9781403997715 hardback ISBN-10: 1403997713 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davidson, Ian, 1957 Ideas of space in contemporary poetry/Ian Davidson. p. cm. ISBN-13: 9781403997715 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1403997713 (cloth) 1. English poetry“21st century“History and criticism. 2. English poetry“20th century“History and criticism. 3. American poetry“21st century“History and criticism. 4. American poetry“20th century“History and ciriticism. 5. Modernism (Literature)“Englishspeaking countries. 6. Postmodernism (Literature)“English-speaking countries. 7. Space and time in literature 8. Materialism in literature. I. Title. PR612.D38 2007 821 .09“dc22 2006052950 10 16

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All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

viii

Foreword by Peter Barry

ix

Introduction

1

1 Aesthetics of Space: Cubism to Language Poetry

6

2 Spatial Theories and Poetic Practices Space and place Spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of representation The rhizomatic and the nomadic Space and the body

24 28

3 The Space Age: The 1950s to the 1970s Poetries of places Maps and mapping Charles Olson Edward Dorn

59 59 60 65 70

4 Histories of Selves: Space, Identity and Subjectivity Histories and space

80 80

5 Space, Place and Identity Catherine Walsh and Eavan Boland Ralph Hawkins Fanny Howe Old endings and new beginnings v


33 39 48

89 103 106 114 122


Contents

Contents

6 Now You See It: Visual Poetry and the Space of the Page Histories of visual and concrete poetry Visual poetry and the poetic line The 1950s and 1960s Graffiti artists: from clean concrete to dirty visuals Pages and spaces

124 124 131 138 141 149

7 Through the Looking Glass: Poetry in Virtual Worlds

163

Works Cited

186

Index

193



vi

1.1 2.1 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 6.9 7.1

‘Karawane’, Hugo Ball (1917) ‘Text 1’, War w/ Windsor, Bill Griffiths (1974) ‘Intermedia’, Dick Higgins (1995) ‘Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard’, Stéphane Mallarmé ‘Silencio’, Eugen Gomringer (1954) Carnival, Steve McCaffery (1999). Panel 1: 2, 3, 4 and Panel 2: CHANGE OF ADDRESS ‘WORM’, Bob Cobbing (1966) ‘beba coca cola’, Décio Pignatari (1957) ‘rubber-stamp poem’, Emmett Williams (1958) ‘in situ’, Caroline Bergvall ‘Languedoc Variorum’, High West Rendezvous, Ed Dorn (1996) Peter Howard’s website – ‘Low Probability of Racoons’

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10 44 126 130 133 134 140 142 143 151 152 180


List of Figures

This book comes out of a long process of engagement with poets and poetry in Britain, Ireland, the United States and Canada. To begin to name all those people who have talked about the ideas in the book, or have talked about their poetry, provided me with new leads or given me more formal feedback through attendance at conference papers or as editors, would be an impossible task. All I can do is register my thanks for their unfailing generosity. Some of the ideas in this book are otherwise explored in papers that have either been published or are forthcoming in Performance Research, The Salt Companion to Lee Harwood, Removed for Further Study: The Poetry of Tom Raworth (The Gig), Additional Apparitions (The Paper) and Poetry Wales. My thanks to the editors. The research and writing of this book has been supported in part by an AHRC/Welsh Academy Creative and Research fellowship, and by research leave from the University of Wales, Bangor. Without that support the book would have been less than it is and I thank them for the opportunities the funding provided. This book takes advantage of the principle of fair dealing in its quotation of copyright material. Every effort has also been made to trace holders of copyright material and permission has been registered below. If any have been overlooked, the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. I would like to thank the following for permission to quote their material in this book: Denise Riley, Jim Bennett, Ralph Hawkins, Geraldine Monk, Peter Riley, Tom Raworth, Carcanet, Bill Griffiths, Fanny Howe.

viii



Acknowledgements

Back in the early 1990s, when I was a lecturer at LSU College in Southampton, I heard on the grapevine that a commissioning editor from Manchester was visiting the University. I managed to get him to call at LSU as well, and we had lunch in the Inner Avenue, just across the road from the college, at a born-again local which was in process of becoming very trendy. The project I wanted to put forward was an edited volume on contemporary avant-garde poetry, a book which I had been plotting with Robert Hampson since the mid-1980s. Over the years, lists of potential contributors and possible topics in Robert’s meticulous handwriting were done (literally) on the backs of envelopes, usually in pubs in the vicinity of Tottenham Court Road after poetry readings or day conferences, as I prepared to head back to Waterloo and the train to Southampton. I used those notes to type up a full-scale ‘proposal’ which I handed over to the Manchester commissioning editor in the half-light of the backroom bar in Inner Avenue (in retrospect, most discussions about contemporary poetry seemed to happen in half-lit backroom bars). The press was interested, and the book was duly commissioned, resulting in New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible, jointly edited by Robert Hampson and Peter Barry, in 1993. It was the first book about contemporary avant-garde, or ‘neo-Modernist’, poetry to appear in the United Kingdon from a major press and designed for a wide readership of academics and practitioners. Before that, the only critical material available was of a much more fugitive kind and was aimed at a coterie readership of the already initiated. Today, the situation is transformed, and the welcome appearance of Ian Davidson’s book is one of the indications of that change. As he says, if there are still ‘distinctions between a mainstream centre and an experimental margin, they are no longer sustained by availability or visibility’. In other words, ‘small press’ (and ‘micro-press’) work today is as widely distributed as the work of poets who are published by Faber or Picador. Information about them is instantly available on the Internet, and new imprints like ‘Salt’ and ‘Shearsman’ maintain extensive lists of poets in print, and publish full-scale critical books ix



Foreword

Foreword

on innovative contemporary poetry. Thus, the existence of a distinct ‘other’ or ‘parallel’ or ‘neo-modernist’ tradition of British poetry is widely recognised, and this work is increasingly taught on courses in contemporary poetry. Widely available anthologies exist in which these writers are fully represented, and Ian has adopted the excellent policy of drawing material from those sources for his main examples (such as Poems for the Millennium from Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris and Keith Tuma’s Oxford University Press Anthology of TwentiethCentury British and Irish Poetry). Likewise, there is increasingly a formal scholarly record of the breadth and nature of all this poetic activity – examples include Wolfgang Gortschacher’s two substantial volumes, Little Magazine Profiles: The Little Magazines in Great Britain, 1939–1993, and Contemporary Views on the Little Magazine Scene (both from University of Salzburg Press) and David Miller and Richard Price’s British Poetry Magazines, 1915–2000: A History and Bibliography of ‘Little Magazines’ (The British Library 2006). My own Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Salt 2006) puts on record a detailed historical account of the now-distant period when the ‘margins’ and the ‘mainstream’ engaged in open hostilities. Recent full-length monographs include Simon Perril’s Contemporary British Poetry and Modernist Innovation (Salt 2006, in the series ‘Salt Studies in Contemporary Poetry’), and Robert Sheppard’s The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents, 1950–2000 (Liverpool University Press 2005). Influential accounts in prestigious volumes of literary record include Peter Middleton’s chapter, ‘Poetry after 1970’ in The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century Literature (ed. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls, Cambridge University Press 2004), and Randall Stevenson’s widely discussed volume, The Last of England?, Volume 12, 1960–2000 in ‘The Oxford English Literary History’ (Oxford University Press 2004), in which ‘Part II Poetry’ (pp. 165–270), has four chapters that contain a good deal of useful and relevant material. Ian’s book, of course, is not confined to UK poetry, nor does it set out to especially foreground the neo-modernists – on the contrary, he is very much committed to furthering ‘the spirit of inclusiveness a more spatial perspective can bring’. He is a practitioner as well as a theorist and critic, and my colleague Matthew Jarvis has written on place in Ian’s own poetry in the 2005 volume of the annual Welsh Writing in English (‘The Poetics of Place in the Poetry of



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Ian Davidson’). Doubtless, the vigour and directness of Ian’s writing about poetry stem in part from that triple identity as poet-critictheorist. I am delighted to have the opportunity of welcoming his book in this Foreword, and of expressing the hope that the Aber and Bangor wings of the University of Wales will be able to collaborate further in the area of contemporary poetry. Peter Barry Aberystwyth



Foreword



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This book explores the impact of ideas of space and spatialization on recent and contemporary poetry and demonstrates the way some poetry, through form and content, engages with some of the most pressing and urgent social and cultural issues. These issues include, but are not limited to, relationships between political, social and cultural structures, between people, language, identity and places, epistemological issues relating to language and ‘reality’ and to the impact of a global economy and environment on everyday lives. Much of the poetry I discovered that tried to deal with these issues is difficult. It does not give you easy answers or solutions, but specifically and implicitly through form and content critiques a culture or cultural products that present themselves as finished. If a shrinkwrapped commodity conceals its materials and processes of production behind a shiny surface, then all too often these poems have their constituent parts on display, telling us how they’re put together. They can seem to have too little ‘meaning’, if meaning is what we take away from a poem, or too much. Some of this poetry has been described as elitist, or intellectual, or academic, or as too interested in theory. What I discovered, to the contrary, were socially concerned poets trying to deal with the complexities of a post-modern world, unwilling to reduce experience to the neatly turned lyric. I took the poetry from wherever I could find it; books, magazines, pamphlets and the Internet. Many of the poets I study have published extensively through small presses, and when I began this work in the mid-1990s, tracking down the work was a major problem. The Internet and digital technologies have solved that problem; 1



Introduction


online book selling now means that the four-page stapled pamphlet by the smallest micropress is available for order alongside books by mainstream publishers. New printing technologies have allowed Shearsman and Salt to become major publishers in the United Kingdom, providing unprecedented access to extended collections of poetry. Online publishing through the best magazines means that a broad variety of new work is always available. If there are distinctions between a mainstream centre and an experimental margin, they are no longer sustained by availability or visibility. In order to help the reader further to track down the poems I discuss I have also used examples from recent anthologies wherever possible, including the two volumes of Poems for the Millennium from Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, and the Oxford University Press Anthology of TwentiethCentury British and Irish Poetry edited by Keith Tuma. The main historical focus of this book is short, not much more than 50 years or so. The relationship between ideas of space and poetry could be set in other and longer historical contexts. Relationships between people, places and broader spatial constructs are not a product of a modern or even a post-modern society and a longer historical reach would provide a different perspective. Similarly its geographical limitations are all too evident, and the poets I refer to are principally from the United Kingdom and the United States, with some excursions to Australia, Canada and Europe. I regret that, but hope, rather than making this book seem limited, it means that this book can be seen as only one part of the broader examination of the role of ‘space’ in contemporary cultures in general and in poetic practices in particular. If this is a point in the book for negatives, for things I do not do, then I must also confess that this book will give no new insights into the study of space or the discipline of human geography. That is not its aim. In common with other interdisciplinary projects it breaks new ground, or goes back over some already tilled ground to see what has been missed in its principal discipline, poetry, while applying more familiar tools and ideas from other disciplines such as human geography. I draw heavily on the intellectual insights and explanations of the work of Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey to provide a theoretical background to the book. In all their theoretical speculations on a ‘spatial turn’ they never lose a concern for the lives of ordinary people. The best poets do this too. Within the process of charting a



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movement from a modernist historical awareness to a post-modern spatial consciousness, they sustain an ethical responsibility to people and to places. Doreen Massey’s latest book, For Space, has been fundamental in my understanding of the importance of space in the differences and similarities between structuralism and post-structuralism. Despite first appearing in French in 1975, and in English in Donald Nicholson’s English translation in 1991, Lefebvre’s best known work, The Production of Space, continues to gather interest. I believe that we are only just beginning to appreciate Lefebvre’s immense contribution to twentieth-century intellectual life through his examination of the relationships between alienation, space and everyday experience. Three recent studies of his work, by Elden, Shields and Merrifield are testimony to this. I have drawn on other theorists too, and the sparks that fly in Deleuze and Guattari’s collision between Marx, Freud and post-modern life have helped to illuminate potential ‘lines of flight’. Fredric Jameson reintroduces a sense of agency into an ahistorical post-modern world of surfaces through the processes of cognitive mapping and Michel de Certeau’s work on everyday life and David Harvey’s economics of space-time compression have similarly helped to identify and explain spatial phenomena. Out of the work of these writers I draw on four main ideas: the relationship between space and place, the relationship between representations of space and lived experience, ideas of the nomadic and the rhizomatic, and the relationship between space and the body. These concerns overlap and inform each other, and any boundaries I may have erected between them are simply for the purposes of aiding explanation and discussion. Some poetic schools or traditions lent themselves more obviously to this project, although I have always chosen to examine poets individually rather than as representatives of any group. The geographical concerns of Charles Olson, and through him to those of Ed Dorn, formed a way into poetic responses to ideas of space in post-war America. Frank O’Hara’s concerns with the urban space of New York and its relationship to sexuality provided another perspective. Eric Mottram’s spatial description of poetic processes in his work defining ‘Open Field’ poetry meant that I followed this up with an examination of the more experimental and innovative examples of British poetry from poets such as Bill Griffiths, Geraldine Monk, Denise Riley, Barry MacSweeney and Peter Riley. Others, and Fanny Howe is



Introduction


an example, see self-identify as being outside of any group. The use of spatial terminology to describe the ‘politics of form’ by those known as ‘language’ writers in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada was a way into that poetry, and through poets from both the United Kingdom and the United States I found ways through to European writing, and particularly the work of those associated with Surrealism, Dada and Situationism. Caroline Bergvall works out of the United Kingdom but is also both French and Norwegian and her work is clearly within a tradition of the European avant-garde, and Peter Manson identifies with Tom Leonard as part of an explicitly internationalist but identifiably Scottish writing. The structure of the book is spatial rather than historical. It does not try to suggest that over a period of time, say from 1950 onwards, the world or social awareness of the world, or poetry, has become increasingly spatial; although a process of space–time compression through both means of travel and new technologies has brought about a new awareness. The book does suggest, and hence the title, that ideas of space have changed, and that space is represented differently in a variety of disciplines. There is evidence in a number of art-forms, and the ‘installation’ and site-specific art so popular in the later decades of the twentieth century are obvious examples, that space is not a container waiting to be filled but is something produced by human activity. In poetry I would trace this idea back to free verse, and the way that the shape on the page is produced by the poem, in comparison to the more regular poetry that fills a preexisting space. In the first chapter I describe a series of relationships between space and aesthetic or poetic movements of the twentieth century, outlining the centrality of collage to modernist aesthetics and its replacement by more post-modern notions of the network and the rhizome. This chapter is paralleled by a second in which I discuss the principal spatial concepts I work with in this book, and their various genealogies, and begin to apply those ideas to different writers. Following a more detailed and historical account of ideas of space and poetry in the ‘space age’ of the 1950s to the 1970s in the third chapter, I give more thematic accounts of relationships of visual poetry and the spatial, of relationships between space, poetry and identity and between poetry and the virtual space of the Internet and digital technologies.



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The book does not seek either to define a particular history of poetry or set out a particular way forward for poetry. The reductive nature of such an approach would only detract from the spirit of inclusiveness a more spatial perspective can bring. Instead, I hope I have demonstrated something of the diversity of poetic practices that are present, albeit in only a small part of the world, and their complex engagement with contemporary political and social concerns.



Introduction

Aesthetics of Space: Cubism to Language Poetry

Cubism and the use of collage techniques are both illustrations of the beginnings of a turn towards the ‘spatial’ in the twentieth century, a turn which was, in part, to escape the over-determination of classical ideas of perspective and historical notions of progress which no longer seemed possible, and to develop artworks which could represent the fragmented nature of modern experience. If this was an experience characterized by an inability to maintain a common perspective over past, present and future, whether that perspective was ideological, ethical or optical, then the freeze-frame of Cubism and the fragmentation of collage provided both the method and the form for its representation. They could simultaneously represent despair at a lack of unity and coherence, while suggesting that coherence might result from a process of rearrangement, as well as demonstrate the increasingly individualized nature of experience. Collage is a visual example of what Walter Benjamin would subsequently refer to as a ‘monad’, ‘time filled by the presence of the now’ (Benjamin 1999b, p. 263), a moment in time in which different perspectives could come together, and his unfinished ‘Arcades’ project uses that method for its construction by combining quotations from a variety of sources. For Benjamin this process was also dialectical; by showing different aspects of an object or an idea, and by placing those different aspects in a construction that the reader could reconstruct in a variety of formulations, he could maintain movement between the objects within the work. Although elements from different periods of the past 6



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were taken out of a continuum and located within a collaged ‘present’, in order to suggest new relationships, they remained in a relationship with the past from which they came and in the continuum of that past. Benjamin’s reason for placing them in a ‘now’, within which new relationships could be formed, was political, and was to develop dialectical relationships between objects which would demonstrate the ways in which narratives of continuity conceal political, economic and social structures of control. In his essay ‘Collage’ the art critic Clement Greenberg refers to collage technique as ‘a major turning point in the evolution of Cubism, and therefore a major turning point in the whole evolution of modernist art in this century’ (Greenberg). Collage featured in the work of the initiators of Cubism very briefly, however, and Braque and Picasso did not begin making collages until 1912 and had stopped making them by 1914. Despite the brevity of its use in Cubism, the ideas of collage and its practice continued to exert an influence and feature in a variety of other art movements, including Dada and Surrealism from the early to mid-century, and late twentieth-century and contemporary site-specific and installation work. There is also a renewed contemporary interest by digital artists, and the principles of collage underlie much digital art. Cubism challenged the fixed viewpoint that had dominated Western Art since the early modern or Renaissance, and introduced the possibility of a number of simultaneous perspectives. The two main approaches to Cubism, the earlier ‘abstract’ Cubism in which the subject was fragmented into its constituent parts, and the later ‘synthetic’ Cubism in which an image was constructed out of preexisting elements or objects, was bridged by collage, which simultaneously introduced into cubist paintings something of the ‘real world’ through its use of found materials, emphasized the plasticity of the work and its sculptural qualities rather than the illusion of the picture surface, and implicitly questioned the relationship between the elements within the work. Literary collage, or collaged texts, drew readily on these ideas. Modernist works by writers such as T. S. Eliot in ‘The Waste Land’, Ezra Pound in The Cantos and Louis Zukofsky in A use collage techniques as do many others, particularly from more international and internationalist avant-gardes. Without wanting to repeat my more extensive treatment of visual





texts and their emphasis on the materiality of language in later chapters, these ideas include some important elements of structuralist and post-structuralist thought. A literary collage, made up of a variety of texts from a variety of sources, makes evident the intertextual nature of all texts. The collage can situate the everyday next to the exotic, and relationships between objects in a collage become paratactic rather than hierarchical. New forms of correspondence between ideas and objects otherwise held apart can form new types of conjunctions and disjunctions; relationships become based on principles of contiguity and coincidence rather than via syntactical structures and more formal logic. Collage provides a mechanism through which the writer, by bringing together a variety of texts within the single space of the work, and often by putting texts from different times and contexts together, can function in a more liberated and liberating present, free of literary ‘history’. Collage can imitate the semiotic overload of the contemporary urban experience, and both provide a means of representing it, and provide a means of reintroducing a sense of agency through the reordering of experience; a process which has its digital counterpart in the ability to ‘drag and drop’ a selection of texts from the seemingly endless supply on the Internet, into a single document. Tristan Tzara made the link between the process of visual collage and the process of writing poetry more explicit. His instructions are: TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem. Cut out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take out each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are – an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd. (Rothenberg and Joris 1995, p. 302)



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The process simultaneously critiques the idea of the poem as the product of an individual, lyric sensibility, while still claiming that the final poem will reflect something of its maker. The method also questions both the authority of the author and the authority of syntax and logic as methods of structuring language. What has been removed by the physical act of cutting up a newspaper article is the conscious intent of the author to give the text meaning, lifting the individual out of their own narrative and their own writing history. Through using Tzara’s methods the language itself becomes material, to be shaken up and physically handled, before being constructed into the poem. By treating language as material, Dadaists could move easily between the visual and verbal arts, and processes and products of collagist activities were an ideal vehicle for bringing together different forms of their work. They ‘designed’ pages with words, made prints with linocuts and carved words into wood. In the ‘sound’ poem ‘Karawane’ written in 1917 (Richter 1978, p. 8), a poem in which the sound of the words rather than their meaning is the primary organizing feature, Hugo Ball uses letters arranged into groups that look like words, apparently in a variety of languages, but which are not words at all (Figure 1.1). This absence of meaning once more emphasizes the materiality of text and its visual surface, an idea reinforced by giving each line a different typeface. Elements of discontinuity disrupt the reading process, denying any illusion of a coherent text arranged according to syntactical or semantic logic. The reader can no longer imagine the text simply refers to some pre-existing reality, and attention is focused on its visual and sonic qualities. The poem, and it is written in lines with each one aligned to a left-hand margin, is therefore both a collage of typefaces, one that can be read as a kind of parody of a poem, but also becomes a collage of words which, because they lack reference, must be read as visual objects, and form a picture of a poem. ‘Karawane’ does, however, contain many of the elements of rhythm, rhyme and repetition which support the reading of the text as a poem, and the performance of similar work had already been the subject of the experimental ‘Poeme Simultane’, written and performed by Richard Huelsenbeck, Marcel Janko and Tristan Tzara in 1916 (Richter 1978, p. 30). This poem, which on the page resembles a dramatic script and a musical score as well as a poem, was performed simultaneously by three voices. The time of





Figure 1.1 ‘Karawane’, Hugo Ball (1917)

the poem, following the lineation and the rhythm, collapses into the moment of the three voices, no one having precedence, as a kind of collage of sound. Further typographical experiments (Richter 1978, p. 130) demonstrate an ongoing interest by Dadaists in the disruption of the linearity of textual presentation and the use of the page as a visual field. In ‘The Cut-Up method of Brion Gysin’, some 40 years after Tzara, William Burroughs describes the ‘cut-up’, a method he developed for



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the reordering of language within texts by cutting the page into a number of sections and then rejoining them in a different sequence. The result is a text which fails to follow the norms of syntax, and sentences are left incomplete or different parts of sentences fail to join up, although themes seem to strangely echo and connect over distance as phrases from the same sentence or paragraph are consigned to different places on the page. Burroughs is explicit about the benefits of the cut-up: The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots, from movie or still cameras, are by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition, cutups The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit – all writing is in fact cut-ups; I will return to this point – had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors. (Burroughs and Gysin 1979, p. 29) Like Dada and surrealist acts of repositioning found objects within different contexts, and later processes of the Situationists in subverting or changing the contexts of objects or events, cutups are a specifically procedural and political activity. Through a process of defamiliarization, cut-ups make the reader re-examine the constituent parts of a text, breaking down established paradigmatic and syntagmatic relationships. According to Burroughs, cutting up and recombining texts releases hidden meanings locked into the familiar structures of the text, meanings which are normalized and naturalized to the point of invisibility. For Burroughs, constructing texts in this way is democratic, and ‘cut-ups are for everyone’ (Burroughs and Gysin 1979, p. 31). The process promises to allow writer and reader to break free from the influence of tradition and the literary canon, from the standard syntax of the language system as a way of presenting knowledge about the world, and to exist in the ‘now’. Many of these ideas of collage and cut-up were to emerge in a variety of other contexts. These include the poetry connected to Black





Mountain College and the idea of a poem constructed in an inclusive ‘open field’, the New York School and particularly O’Hara’s combination of events in his ‘Lunch Poems’(1979), and in the constructivist poetics of the ‘language’ poets. Burroughs also had enthusiastic readers in the United Kingdom, and the poet and critic Eric Mottram, a key figure in the British Poetry Revival of the 1960s who had written extensively on Burroughs, specifically refers to ‘the various effects of cubist and Dadaist dislocations and reassemblages which constitute a resource in innovative literature from the 1920s onwards’ and to the way Ezra Pound ‘began to consider the possibilities of new spatial organization in poetry’ (Mottram 1975, p. 271). Mottram refers to William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein as cubist writers who produce poetry and prose which ‘sees the in and the through/ the four sides’ (1975, p. 289). If the perception of a work of art from a single point of view is a process which emphasizes time, and in a poem the reader moves from line to line, accumulating information, then Stein, Williams and others, Mottram claims, disrupt this linear process to produce a ‘total sound of the poem’, which can be perceived all at once and in different ways (1975, p. 289). Time, the duration of the engagement with the artwork, now has to take into account the spatial distribution of perspective and viewpoint. The method of writing Mottram described as follows: Composition by field combines the forms of lyrics, rhythms, speeches of different kinds, conversation, images, ideograms, paratactical formations and collages of information in various forms. (Mottram 1975, p. 4) Importantly for Mottram, composition by field is more than a poetic process, but also a stance towards the world (1975, p. 10), implying a certain ethical and political approach. Drawing on the work of Williams and Olson, Mottram outlines a poetics which seeks to be inclusive, to see the poet as an object within the field of the poem, not its centre. The poem becomes a representation of the distribution of objects within a landscape, located by a mapping process. In pictorial terms the poet figure in an open-field poem is part of the landscape, rather than a figure that stands out from the ‘ground’ of the painting; they too must negotiate the objects in the ‘space’ of the poem, and can adopt a variety of perspectives in relation to those objects. The



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Situationist drift or ‘dérive’ adopts a similar perspective; it is the view from the ground and not the view from above. For the ‘Situationists’, a group of artists and political activists from the 1950s and 1960s, the dérive was the way in which they sought to defamiliarize the cities they lived and worked in, and encourage citizens to look beyond the design of the urban environment through subverting its determining functions of guiding the population in particular routes, and, by giving themselves up to the Drift, to experience, in the words of Sadie Plant, the way: ‘certain areas, streets, or buildings resonate with states of mind, inclinations, and desires, and to seek out reasons for movement other than those for which an environment was designed’ (Plant 1992, p. 59). It is a collage, but rather than being able to rearrange the order of objects within the city, they change the way they experience those objects. Guy-Ernest Debord, spokesperson of the Situationist Internationale, expands further: In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones. (Debord 1958) While moving through space might promise to provide an undetermined choice of direction and velocity, Debord suggests that the activities of city planners and a state ideology overlay that space with sequences of patterned behaviours. The dérive is not a process that is seeking to introduce choice, but one that is seeking out the ‘alternative’ routes, equally meaningful, but outside the assumed patterns of behaviour. Collagist activities can suggest both undirected play and planned processes of subversion. The relationship between the coincidental nature of collage, the way things happen to be next to each other, and a more planned process that seeks to understand the implications of fragmentation, runs through works from the earlier part of the twentieth century. These include T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and





later work influenced from the last quarter of the century such as that written by the language poets. Both Pound and Eliot use fragments of information from a variety of sources and, although the content is historical, their methodology seems closer to the process of collage, in the way they combine information from a number of sources and use a range of voices and perspectives. Fragmentary though they are, both works still assume a lost and discoverable historical unity existing beyond the poem. Pound’s ‘I cannot make it cohere’ at the end of The Cantos (Pound 1975, p. 796) and Eliot’s use of footnotes at the end of ‘The Waste Land’ both indicate the desire for the existence of an external totality of which their fragmentary poems are a representation; a totality that, if discovered, could give back to society a purpose and an ethical coherence. This is a unity or totality that post-modern and post-structural theory would appear to deny in its identification and, in some cases, celebration, of the partial and inconclusive, the playful rather than the purposive, the multiple rather than the binary and surfaces rather than depths. At its most superficial postmodernism suggests that history, rather than being something that can help to explain our current condition, becomes a collection of styles that can be plundered in order to decorate the present. Rather than an aesthetic developing over time in the development of a tradition, all possible styles are spread out and simultaneously present, allowing a contemporary response to be constructed (see Woods 1999b for example). In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson suggests that post-modernism has arrived when modernism ‘no longer has archaic features and obstacles to overcome and [post-modernism] has triumphantly planted its own autonomous logic’ (Jameson 1991, p. 366). As a consequence of this logic ‘Memory, temporality; the very thrill of the modern are all casualties in this process [and] even classical bourgeois culture of the belle époque is liquidated’ (Jameson 1991, p. 366). Time and space lose both their ontological and their ‘natural’ status and become the ‘consequence and projected afterimages of a certain state or structure of production and appropriation, of the social organization of productivity’ (Jameson 1991, p. 367). The resulting fragmentation and decontextualization of historical narratives leads Jameson to suggest that there is a ‘compartmentalization of reality’ (1991, p. 373) that conceals the truth while providing the facts. His answer lies not in reconfiguring genealogies,



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a kind of rewriting of history, to get at the ‘real’ truth, but in a spatial and collagist process of looking across different media and different narratives and their recombination. He refers to an ‘aesthetic of information in which the generic incompatibilities detected in post-modern fiction now comes into a different kind of force in postmodern reality’ (Jameson 1991, p. 375) and consequently a language usage ever more divorced from reality. In artistic terms this results in work in which language is reduced to ‘an experience of pure material signifiers’, and a ‘breakdown in the signifying chain’ within a continuous present in which the subject is unable to map either their own history as they are lost in a ‘present [which] engulfs the subject with indescribable vividness’ (Jameson 1991, pp. 26–7). Jameson’s example, and he quotes the poem in full, is the poem ‘China’ by the language poet Bob Perelman (1991, p. 416). Jameson is both appalled and fascinated by the cultural products of post-modernism, and in his essay ‘Language as History/History as Language’, Derek Attridge describes the way Jameson (and Terry Eagleton in his book Literary Theory: An Introduction, 1983) implicate Saussure’s emphasis on the synchronic, rather than the diachronic aspects of language and language usage, as one reason for the way in which a spatial awareness has superseded a historical consciousness. If diachrony describes a language as an ‘entity constantly changing over time’ and synchrony as a ‘language as a system existing at a given moment’ (Attridge, Bennington and Young 1987, p. 183), then an emphasis on the latter privileges the spatial over the historical. The histories of particular words, and authentic meanings that can be traced back and identified through patterns of language usage to an ‘origin’, become relativized, and replaced by meanings within particular contexts. The language poets set out to explore this relationship, and the way that the meanings of words are contextually derived from their place in the language system rather than from their correspondence with a ‘real’ or ‘concrete’ world. Marjorie Perloff in her essay entitled ‘Language Poetry in the Early Eighties’ sums up the project as follows: ‘the attempt is not to articulate the curve of a particular experience but to create a formal linguistic construct that itself shapes our perception of the world around us’ (Perloff 1985, p. 230). The poem becomes an object made up of language, and the language poets drew on the idea of language as material, of the





concrete and plastic potential of words in space. It is the construction of the poem itself that is the event, not some occasion or emotion that passes through the poem to the reader, and the poet becomes construction worker, bringing in data from different sources. The relationships between words within the poem, often extracted from a variety of media and sources, are mapped across the page rather than following one another, a page that becomes the ‘construction site’ of the poem. The language writers worked with an arbitrary, multiple and contingent relationship between signifier and signified; the word and its referent. This does not, as Jameson suggests, mean that they deny the referential nature of language in order to turn it into a ‘rubble of signification’. In the introduction to The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, a collection of statements on poetics taken from the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, the editors Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein say: The idea that writing should (or could) be stripped of reference is as bothersome and confusing as the assumption that the primary function of words is to refer, one to one, to an already constructed world of things. (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, p. ix) They go on to refer to the ‘multiple powers and scope of reference (denotative, connotative, associational’ (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, pp. ix–x). The language writers operate within that tension between word without referent and word with direct referent and what they seem to do best is to bring the question of the relationship between language and the world to the fore as the primary question for poets. Therefore, rather than a notion of experience put into words or ideas expressed through language, the poet, in the process of constructing the poem, constructs the experience and constructs the idea. There are multiple references, which are specific to the context of the language that makes up the poem and the context of the reader at the point of reading the poem. The polysemous nature of individual words is stressed through the disruption of ‘normal’ syntax in the construction of the poem, forcing the reader to cast around for the varieties of references that might be present.



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In The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, spatial metaphors are often used in describing the form of the poem and its materials and its process of production. The ‘multiple scope’ of the word is itself a spatial, three-dimensional concept involving an idea of time and history as well as one of surface. Through a process of displacement from the norm of syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships, the word, phrase, sentence and poem seek out a range of different references from past and present, and from the local to the global. The poetry is unreadable if the reader is seeking that ‘one-to-one’ relationship between the words in the poem and an ‘already constructed world of things’. The poem can only be given meaning or reference by the activity of the reader and from the context within which that reader is located, and s/he has to cast around for connections in different temporal and spatial dimensions. The experimental nature of the work of the language poets challenges methods of reading as well as writing. In his essay ‘Text and Context’, Bruce Andrews refers to ‘Unreadability – that which requires new readers and teaches new readings’ (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, p. 31). He makes a connection between ‘referential signification’ and ‘depth’ where the referential nature of the signifier, according to Andrews, brings security, provides a commodity that the reader can take away with them, and continues to talk about ‘the comfort of a semantic presence’, ‘semantic elixirs’ and ‘imagist tonics’. He contrasts this vertical reading, a diving into the security of the past, with ‘horizontal readings’: The vertical axis downwards (as a ladder tempting us) need not structure the reading – for it does not structure the text Horizontal organizing principles, without an insistent (that is to say imposed) depth. Secret meaning is not a hidden layer but a hidden organization of the surface. Meaning is not produced by the sign but by the contexts we bring to the potentials of language (the) hollowing out of lower depths of labyrinthine caves of signification, goes on within the gaps. (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, p. 33) The intersections between the vertical and the horizontal, the historical and synchronous, between a place which can always be explained by reference to somewhere else and the self-referential





space of the surface, produces poetry which refuses a passive reading: ‘READING: not the glazed gaze of the consumer, but the careful attention of a producer, or co-producer Language is not a monologic communication but a spatial interaction’ (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, p. 36). Through this characterization of history or time as the vertical ‘y’ axis and space or geography as the horizontal ‘x’ axis, the vertical axis becomes related to the paradigmatic, a philological process relating meaning to the history of usage of the word, and the horizontal axis the syntagmatic, relating the word to its role within the language system. Other poets associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing make similar references to space and spatialization. Ron Silliman says ‘Reference is a compass’, Nick Piombino refers to his ‘poetic geography’ and Bernadette Mayer to ‘Construct[ing] a poem as though the words were three dimensional objects (like bricks) in space’ (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, pp. 16, 71, 81). In ‘Chronic Meanings’, Bob Perelman creates a poem made out of 25 four-line stanzas. Each line has five words and ends in a full stop, creating a parody of a sentence. It begins: The single matter is fact. Five words can say only. Black sky at night, reasonably. I am, the irrational residue. (Hoover 1994, p. 501) Each line says something about the form and the concept of the poem and its method of construction. The opening line refers to the materiality of the poem; it is not a ‘single matter’, reducible to a single fact, nor is it a pragmatic ‘matter of fact’, although it sounds like one. The second line reflects the poem’s limitations, the third an example of the kind of line those limitations might produce. The final line locates the ‘I’ within the poem as simply an ‘irrational residue’, something which is both left over and of little value and which both cannot be explained and which does not explain the poem. The idea of ‘residue’ within the poem also suggests that rather than being seen to contain too little information to make sense, it contains too much.



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There are tantalizingly incomplete phrases scattered through the poem: ‘She put her cards on.’, ‘I think I had better.’, ‘The weather isn’t all it’s.’ (Hoover 1994, pp. 502–4). The obvious ending to the sentence is left hanging somewhere over in the right-hand margin. There are other lines that appear to be complete phrases; ‘Society has broken into bands.’, ‘In no sense do I.’, ‘So shut the fucking thing.’, but are often made to appear incomplete by the context in which they are placed by preceding or following lines. The lines also appear to refer to a number of different events woven through the poem, none of which arrive at any conclusion. There are domestic references, to the home and to shopping, and there are references to economics and to the process of writing the poem. The form of Perelman’s poem has no precedent in speech or in writing, although the words themselves are ones in common use and the syntax, incomplete though it is, familiar. The poem is heavily structured or patterned, but the patterning appears to obfuscate rather than elucidate, to force the poet into only half explaining himself, leaving the reader to close the gaps. Why would the poet choose this structure, this particular patterning, for the poem? There are a number of possible reasons. In Writing Talks, Perelman refers to the use of a five-word line in ‘Primer’ as: trying to contrast rhythms of units of meaning with units of sound You’re not counting syllables, you’re not counting stress. You’re counting meaning units I want you to hear the grammar, and that a phrase could end here or it could go on and connect and therefore change itself. (Perelman 1985, p. 81) The function of the form is not to impose a ‘timing’ on any reading of the poem, but to set up a tension or a contrast between sound and meaning. Perelman’s is a spatial practice which consists of putting incomplete sentences one after the other and sending the reader into the creative space at the end of each line, a space in which there exists a number of possibilities for the completion of the line. The reader has to actively engage both in the process of completing the half-completed lines, which often seem to be made up of bits of conversation, and ‘found’ material, from films, books or magazines.




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The syllogistic move above the sentence level to an exterior reference is possible, but the nature of the book reverses the direction of this movement. Rather than making the shift in an automatic and gestalt sort of way, the reader is forced to deduce it from the partial views and associations posited in each sentence. (Silliman 1989, p. 84) The new sentence therefore ‘focuses attention at the level of language in front of the reader’ (Silliman 1989, p. 88), echoing Perelman’s phrase ‘I want you to hear the grammar’ from the quotation above. Silliman refers to three levels of reference for the individual sentence; within its own diction, with preceding and succeeding sentences, and with the paragraph as a whole (Silliman 1989, p. 84). By selfconsciously beginning each line with a capital letter and ending it with a full stop, Perelman gives the poem a stop-start momentum, the full stops pulling readers up with a jerk and both returning them to the sentence they’ve just read as well as the sentences before and after it. Yet the reader is not given sufficient information to develop any kind of occasion or location, let alone closure, but is thrown back on the language itself as well as being projected into the space of possibility beyond the right-hand margin. To use Andrews’s terminology, a reader engages in both vertical readings, in the process of picking out the referential signification of each word and sentence, and horizontal readings across the grammatical surface of the poem. The surface is, of course, grammatically incomplete; a reader is never allowed to settle anywhere other than in the poem; that which is exterior to the poem, to which the words appear to sometimes refer, only appears in occasional flashes. The locale and occasion of the poem are the poem itself, into which the poet brings fragments and bits of speech, instructions, observations and information. It is not that the poem has no history; it has multiple histories within apparently endless possibilities. In 1987 the language poet Lyn Hejinian published the booklength sequence My Life, an autobiographical prose poem. The



Some further explanation of the form of the poem can be gleaned from Ron Silliman’s commentary on Gertrude Stein’s ‘Custard’ in The New Sentence:

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poem contains fragments of narrative split into sections, each one with a prefatory line in italic type in a space cut out of the text. Like the Perelman poem (and like much ‘open field’ poetry), the poem combines direct observation (phenomenological) with received information and commentary without necessarily distinguishing between them. The poem also contains many of the elements of narrative, although its flow is constantly disrupted, folding the reader back on that which has gone before and forcing them to cast about for clues to that which is to come. There is more than one perspective on the events being related; that of the child and that of the poet at the time of writing: My mother had climbed into the garbage can in order to stamp down the accumulated trash, but the can was knocked off balance, and when she fell she broke her arm. She could only give a little shrug. The family had little money but plenty of food. At the circus only the elephants were greater than anything I could have imagined. The egg of Columbus, landscape and grammar. She wanted one where the playground was dirt, with grass, shaded by a tree, from which would hang a rubber tire as a swing, and when she found it she sent me. These creatures are compound and nothing they do should surprise us. I don’t mind, or I won’t mind, where the verb ‘to care’ might multiply. (Hoover 1994, p. 387) Hejinian is using ideas of surface (space) and depth (time) in two ways. One is the sense of bringing childhood memories to the surface and putting them alongside the contemporary event of constructing the poem in a collage of past and present; the other in the sense of creating a poetic surface of sound. The tone of the passages is even, and in the majority of the sentences the syntax is standard. While a number of satisfactory readings of the piece can be made, none of them is final, and there are always elements, often tiny, which disrupt the progress of the narrative. What is the ‘one’ that she wants? Is it a school? Or a house? Are the creatures the elephants, or is she referring to language? The answer is both and neither, resulting in a variety of potential readings. In an essay, ‘The Rejection of Closure’, she says:





The progress of a line or sentence, or a series of lines or sentences, has spatial properties as well as temporal properties. The spatial density is both vertical and horizontal. The meaning of a word in its place derives both from the word’s lateral reach, its contact with its neighbours in a statement, and from its reach through and out of the text into the other world, the matrix of its contemporary and historical reference. The very idea of reference is spatial: over here is word, over there is thing at which word is shooting amiable love arrows. (Hoover 1994, p. 654) It is an attractive metaphor, with the word playing cupid to its referent. The relationship between word and referent becomes full of possibility and the poem’s action is within that gap between the two. Reference, as I have claimed throughout this chapter, is also historical, a movement back into the histories of personal, cultural and social language usage. Sometimes Hejinian appears to close the spatial and historical gap, to produce a sentence that can be unproblematically related to some past event, only to throw it all up in the air with the next sentence. At other times the reader is not allowed the luxury of even a single sentence before being derailed. In another part of My Life she says, ‘But a word is a bottomless pit’, echoing Andrews’s metaphor of ‘a vertical dimension acting only as an echo, a nostalgic reverb’ (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, p. 35). The concern of the language writers is language, the forms it takes and its relationship to everyday experience. They use spatial metaphors (ideas of depth, marginal, horizontal, etc.) to describe the relationship between language and the world, the signifier and its signified, and the relationship, or the lack of it, between the poem and an external other. For the writer it is words and their syntactical relationships that are the building blocks of the poem, and they will refer to the ‘architecture’ of a poem. The language writers work within what is, or was at its outset, a specifically political agenda, and operate within the gaps, between the word and its referent, between the subject that is constructed by the poem and the subject that constructs the poem. Ideas about space and its construction are part of the processes of the poetry. A spatial aesthetics will work on a number of different levels. It will be concerned with, and draw upon, ideas of physical space



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and representations of space, and transfer ideas from the concrete to the abstract and the conceptual via the use of spatial metaphors. Artists and writers have used spatial practices in the spaces between, and the cracks around, bureaucratic regulation, working in the space of the multiple possibilities of the relationship between symbol and object and signifier and signified. Their reasons are often political, and the modernist painters and writers at the beginning of the twentieth century used Cubist and collagist techniques to simultaneously express bewilderment at the loss of moral and ethical certainties, as well as to create ‘free’ space in which new ideas could be developed and explored through the combination of ideas and objects otherwise held apart. Simultaneous bewilderment and euphoria is present at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, in a ‘post-modern’ world in which globalization provides a variety of possibilities for increased mobility and the reconstitution of determined histories, as well as the end of history in an homogenized and commodified present. The processes of homogenization produces a world which should be comfortable, where we can travel without leaving our own culture, and, as English speakers, can even reasonably expect that someone can speak our language. The opposite is true, and the flat desert of MacDonaldization and the commmodification of heritage and local difference has produced a world every bit as alienating and frightening as that characterized by ‘difference’, and one in which techniques of collage, of multiple perspectives, the dérive, the open field and the deconstructive activities of the language poets are still both necessary and relevant.




Spatial Theories and Poetic Practices

The ‘spatial turn’ in cultural and social theory is more than simply an increased interest in space or spatial relations brought about by low-cost travel, the development of the Internet and the activities of multinational companies. It is also a result of changed concepts of space and the way that these changed concepts have been disseminated across a variety of academic disciplines. This trans-disciplinarity of spatial concepts has not made the difficult task of describing the concept of space any easier, and each discipline will provide its own emphasis. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary lists 15 definitions and the Oxford English Dictionary some 30 pages of references. These range from ideas of space within time, as an interval, to space as negative and empty distance and its use to describe the ‘stellar depths’. There are numerous references to printing and printed material, to the spacing of words and to space within a book, and to the idea of personal space around the body. The latter half of the twentieth century is also, of course, the ‘space age’, following the first usage of the term in 1946, and defined as ‘the period of human exploration and exploitation of space’. The drug culture of the 1960s and 1970s produced terms such as ‘space cadet’ as ‘a person regarded as out of touch with reality, esp. (as if) as a result of taking drugs; a person prone to flights of fancy or irrational or strange behaviour’, and ‘spaced-out’: ‘To experience a drug-induced state of euphoria; to become disoriented by the use of narcotic stimulus To lose one’s train of thought while under the influence of a drug.’ All these references are in play, and are all part of the ways in which the word is both used and understood in modern and contemporary culture, 24



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and these different understandings of space will emerge in the poetic texts I examine. The proliferation of meanings and references and different contexts within which the term emerges can, as Lefebvre says in his revised preface to The Production of Space, simply serve to avoid a more rigorous analysis of space and its effects, leaving the commentator shifting between space as the cosmos, Euclidean geometry and the idea of an ‘a priori’ space (Lefebvre 2003, p. 206). Lefebvre tries to be more specific; for him space is produced by social activity, but a product that is neither a ‘thing or an object – but a cluster of relationships’ (2003, p. 208). This definition means that for Lefebvre ‘Space can no longer be conceived of as passive or empty’ but neither can it ‘be isolated or remain static’, but is evident in the processes of production and in everyday life. Derek Gregory in The Dictionary of Human Geography echoes Lefebvre when he says: space and time (or space-time) are now seen as being ‘produced’ or ‘constituted’ through action and interaction. According to this view, space and time are not neutral, canonical grids that exist ‘on the outside’, separate from and so enframing and containing everyday life, but are instead folded into the ongoing flows and forms of the world in which we find ourselves. (Johnston, Gregory, Pratt and Watts 2000, p. 771) Within this overall concept of space and time as being produced, rather than having a priori status, I want to identify a number of overlapping key concepts and demonstrate the ways in which these might support and connect to readings of some modern and contemporary poetry. The concepts include: changing ideas of relationships between space and place in the work of Doreen Massey in particular; from Henri Lefebvre the idea of space as socially produced and the ‘triads’ of ‘perceived’, ‘conceived’ and ‘lived’ space and ‘representations of space’, ‘representational spaces’ and ‘spatial practice’; ideas of the nomadic and the rhizomatic, particularly as they appear in the work of Deleuze and Guattari; and relationships between ideas of space and ideas of the human body. In some ways it is all too easy to cherry-pick a number of these ideas, some of which come from very different genealogies, and ‘map’ them on to some ideas from contemporary poetics by developing a series of metaphorical relationships





between notions of simultaneity, coincidence and contiguity. As Lefebvre waspishly points out, though, a metaphor, however helpful in supporting an explanation or providing another perspective, is not a substitute for thought. Bearing this in mind I intend to take a slightly different approach and, rather than simply draw comparisons, illuminating though they often are, between ideas of space and twentieth-century poetry and poetics, I try to integrate the implications of the spatial turn into twentieth-century poetry and poetics through a process of application, thereby creating both an explanation and an example. The location of real world ‘geographies’ and changing geographical imaginings within texts is therefore only one part of my project, although an important one which informs my examination of the work of Charles Olson, Edward Dorn and Frank O’Hara. In other parts of this book I also develop relationships between ideas of space and the form of contemporary poetry through the aesthetics of mapping, including from Fredric Jameson the idea of cognitive mapping; through ideas and methods of collage; the idea of the disciplined, monitored and surveyed body from Michel Foucault; and from Michel de Certeau the idea of city as text and the relationship between a strategy and a tactic. I also attempt to demonstrate, tentatively, a set of relationships between the language of space, the way space is described, and the way poetic language and poetic form are described and used, in order to demonstrate the ways in which there is correspondence. The context for the multi-disciplinary ‘spatial turn’ is the continuing and accelerating process of globalization and spatialization, whereby the relationships between ‘things’ are established and described according to their relative position in space and the connections between them, as well as through historical connections. This is not a new process, and is certainly not simply a consequence of post-modernity. An increasing spatial awareness can be traced through the development of means of transport and exploration from the early modern period, through industrial developments in the Victorian period, and through relationships between scientific and technological developments and modernity. Anthony Giddens in The Consequences of Modernity and Henri Lefebvre in The Production of Space both outline, from a Western perspective, developments and changes in spatial awareness from a feudal population dominated



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by place, to industrial and post-industrial populations with an increasing awareness of space. Although Rob Shields criticizes this genealogy and chronology of a spatial awareness as ‘armchair anthropology’ which ‘draws little on detailed anthropological research’ (Shields 1999, p. 173), it is self-evident that, in recent years, spatial awareness has accelerated. If there is a significant difference between modernity and post-modernity, it can partially be located in the pace of development, and in the process of ‘space-time compression’ as David Harvey calls it. If the context of the multi-disciplinary spatial turn is the accelerating process of globalization, the reason for it is often epistemological and political; it is to ask questions about what we know of the world, how we know it and how we represent that knowing back to ourselves through revealing that which is concealed, and deconstructing naturalized processes of spatialization. For Lefebvre, a turn to matters spatial was a continuation of his explorations into ‘everyday life’, while for Foucault it was an exploration of the ways in which the human body was monitored and controlled and how political power was established and sustained through dispersed processes of surveillance. For Massey it was, in part, to demonstrate how control over space was ‘gendered’, while for Deleuze and Guattari space contained within itself possible ‘lines of flight’, ways of subverting or resisting ‘control’. Michel de Certeau’s depiction of urban space as a text, and walking as being like reading, provides ways of deconstructing that text, and his distinction between strategies and tactics provides ways of subverting and disrupting administrative control over space. For Jameson, a contemporary fascination with surfaces and depthlessness as consequences of a global commodity culture has led to a displaced and dislocated population, who need to engage in processes of ‘cognitive mapping’ in order to relocate themselves. It is no surprise, therefore, that those poets most influenced by the spatial turn are also the most socially or politically engaged, and part of international and specifically internationalist movements, rather than necessarily major figures in national literatures. The most satisfying responses to spatialization and globalization are from those poets who engage with those processes through both the content of their work and through experimentations in poetic form. In the sections that follow in this chapter I outline the four different spatial concepts, of space and place, of the relationship between




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Space and place Traditional, physical geography is the study of places within space, where a ‘place’ is a bounded area set within ‘space’ that is best described through a set of coordinates. Space is therefore ‘a priori’, it was already there and places, such as towns, villages, homesteads, farms, cities, regions and so on, are located within it. Without places, space becomes empty and meaningless, a mathematically calculable desert. Places provide spaces with content, and the populations of those places with identity and security; as well as being geographical locations they are also ‘structures of feeling’. In recent years the world’s population has become more mobile, whether through economic migration by choice or through forced movement as economic or political refugees from their ‘place’. If identity, through language and a shared culture, tradition and history, is linked to a particular place, then leaving that place is a traumatic event. Capitalism has also become increasingly mobile, using the process of ‘MacDonaldization’. Global brands set up franchises around the world and develop new markets for goods that do not originate from the country in which they are sold or consumed. As a consequence populations become further alienated from the means of production and acts of resistance have often been based around a reassertion of place, or an idea of a place. This is true of Aboriginal rights groups in countries such as Australia, as well as working-class movements in the United Kingdom. The miners’ strike of the early 1980s was, for example, a struggle over community and place as much as it was over jobs. Massey notes that ‘the notion of place (usually evoked as local place) has come to have totemic resonance For some it is the sphere of the everyday, of real and valued practices, the geographical source of meaning, vital to hold on to as the ‘global’ spins its ever more powerful and alienating webs’ (Massey 2005, p. 5). However, as David Harvey points out: In clinging, often of necessity, to a place-bound identity, however, such oppositional movements become a part of the very



representations of space and representational space, of the nomadic and the rhizomatic and the idea of the ‘body’ in space, and apply them to work from a variety of poets.


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Resistance, based on the assertion of essential ideas of place (a key element of much British post-war poetry), has other disadvantages. It means that a place, and the community within it, must be constituted as having intrinsic qualities and values different from other places. Through identifying a set of values, place, as well as being a place of inclusion and a place where identity is affirmed, becomes a place of exclusion, where some are included but others are not. Places, domestic, rural or urban, and the communities within them, can conceal injustices, inequalities and abuses. They are not necessarily places of security. Neither formulation of place is therefore satisfactory. In a globalized world, where place is homogenized through processes of commodification, populations became dispossessed and dislocated. Yet to assert the essential characteristics of a place and identify a set of common values is to develop a ‘politically conservative haven one that fails to address the real forces at work’ (Massey 2005, p. 6). If a new formulation of place is required, that in turn requires an appropriate formulation of space. For Massey space is characterized as a ‘dynamic simultaneity constructed out of the multiplicity of social relations across all spatial scales, from the global reach of finance and telecommunications, through the geography of the tentacles of national political power, to the social relations within the town, the settlement, the household and the workplace’ (Massey 1994, p. 4). For Lefebvre ‘the form of social space is encounter, assembly, simultaneity’, a form in which everything is assembled; ‘living beings, things, objects, works, signs and symbols’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 101). Yet a global population still needs places, otherwise maps of the globe would simply identify flows, climatic or tidal, of finance, of information and of people rather than interconnected places with which people identify. This does not mean that such places need to be sites of sentiment and nostalgia, or sites of exclusion in order to maintain their essential identity, and Massey suggests that they might instead be ‘moments’ and ‘particular articulation[s] of those relations’ (Massey 1994, p. 5). The ‘moments’ would not necessarily include the whole place, there could be a remainder, and



fragmentation which a mobile capitalism and flexible accumulation can feed on. (Harvey 1990, p. 303)


any one moment might include relationships between those within the place and those outside it. Representations of rural life often seek to establish a geographical community that ascribe to a common set of values. In the poem ‘Going, Going’, Philip Larkin (Tuma 2001) characterizes English rural life as ‘The shadows, the meadows, the lanes,/ the guildhalls, the carved choirs’, yet also a rural England in which there would ‘always be fields and farms/ where the village louts could climb’. Larkin is identifying a heterogeneous rural population, louts and not-louts, yet one that has a common interest in opposing the ‘spectacled grins’ that ‘approve/ Some takeover bid that entails/ Five per cent profit (and ten/ per cent more in the estuaries):’ and which encourages industry to ‘move your works to the unspoilt Dales’ (Tuma 2001, p. 454). Massey’s definition of place allows for a more heterogeneous local to be linked to the global through an infinite variety of temporary and coincidental connections. As Massey says, a response which dismisses struggles against globalization (and Larkin’s stance to outside capital in the poem could be characterized as a struggle, even if he doesn’t fit the classic eco-warrior model) as ‘only local’, or alternatively ‘romanticizes them for their supposed rootedness and authenticity depend on a notion of the local as effectively closed, self-constitutive’ (Massey 2005, p. 181). This is the way Larkin represents the rural, as a closed and self-sufficient world, in harmony with itself, and threatened by the new roads and industry. Yet a place that is always in process, a kind of open field or threedimensional network with unlimited potential combination and connectivity, can effectively operate within an increasingly spatialized society. It can become more than a place of retreat, of sentiment, nostalgia and opposition to technological development, but a place that also links to the broader environment. I am aware that this reconstruction of place is sounding utopian, as if it can have all the benefits of traditional ideas of place and the economic and cultural benefits of a globalized world. This is not the case, and the casual sideswipe of the tail of global capitalism can disrupt the lives of thousands, but I am claiming, along with Harvey and Massey, that it is no longer possible to pull up the drawbridge and claim immunity from economic, social, cultural and environmental change.



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I would also claim that just as, in an increasingly spatialized world, notions of place have to change, so too will notions of poetry. If a place is traditionally characterized as a bounded community with its own history, then a ‘poetry of place’ frequently sought to identify the nature of a place through an exploration and recovery of its past. The poet and critic Jeremy Hooker refers to a place as ‘a totality all that has created it through the process of time the connection within a single compass of all those living forces’ (1985, p. 203). In his poem ‘Beidiog’ (S. Butler 1985, p. 114) he refers to ‘ stones with red marks/ like cuts of a rusty axe’, where the geology itself is a kind of present surface marked by the past. In another poem, ‘Common Land above Trefenter’ (S. Butler 1985, p. 122), he identifies the traces that human habitation has left after people have lived there, then tried to move on. It was a place where ‘poverty abounded’, and where ‘dwellings’ were ‘built in a night’ and the ‘fields wide as an axe throw/ From the door, patterning/ Moorland with stony patches’. This historical description of the way in which the place was constructed, the remains of the walls that marked out the smallholdings determined by the custom of throwing an axe from the doorway as far as one could (a kind of crude way for the fittest to survive; unable to throw an axe, no food), is not developed by Hooker. For him all that is left is the ‘ bare history/ Under foot – holdings/ Untenable’. Yet some poetry, in the way it refuses a fixed location and shifts between places, seems closer to Massey’s description of place as ‘constructed out of the multiplicity of social relations across all spatial scales’. In Alice Notley’s poem ‘Go In and Out the Window’, from her autobiographical collection Mysteries of Small Houses (1998), there are references to specific locations and to her history, to the ‘shit in our sinking cesspool behind alley house’ and where ‘Momma and Charley stand in 49 or 50/ and look at the collapsing lawn’. But the poem does not, like the Larkin or Hooker poems, provide a single perspective; it shifts around, going to Iowa, Spain and Morocco. Yet more importantly, and within that transnational movement, it shifts according to the perspective of the writer and, ultimately, the reader. The poem is ‘not mine, I/ want it but have to go in order for it to live/ or go in and out/ of it and see what we can see’; it is not an extension of the poet’s self but, through a number of perspectives, examines relationships between place and identity, and author and





poem. As she says at the start of the second stanza ‘the poem is not your name’ and in her recollection of being paranoid on hashish in Marrakech she ‘leave[s] the room’ in order not to be ‘the word paranoid a hippie on hash/ American poet of this or that possession/ American woman in a mini/ / somebody else’s person’. Yet, and importantly, the poem is not simply a process of finding herself amongst this multiplicity, except perhaps in the implied narrator of the poem. The poem ends: There’s nothing in that Woman’s brain out the window – she couldn’t write a poem – who is she, Momma? is she me? She doesn’t know anything. (Notley 1998, p. 29) The poem is about place and identity, yet its conclusions are fluid across both space and time. Identity is never fixed, but is located in the movement in and out of the window, in a transitory space between places, between inside and outside, and even ‘in and out of/ species even tongue of grass or fire’. By refusing to identify herself with any fixed geographical place, yet acknowledging the importance of places, the poem itself becomes the place, albeit one that is conceptual rather than physical. The poem can therefore take on the attributes of a place, ranging from the conservative, historical and bounded notion of place, of a place as a structure of feeling, and Massey’s more dynamic notion of place as ‘time-spaces’ with a ‘global sense of place’(Massey 2005, pp. 179–81). Massey’s proposed ‘relational politics of place involves both the inevitable negotiations presented by throwntogetherness and a politics of the terms of openness and closure’ (2005, p. 181). Massey’s point, and it is a good one, is that: The ‘lived reality of our daily lives’ is utterly dispersed, unlocalized, in its sources and in its repercussions words such as ‘real’, ‘everyday’, ‘lived’, ‘grounded’ are constantly deployed and bound together; they intend to evoke security and implicitly they counterpose themselves to a wider ‘space’ which must be abstract, ungrounded, universal, even threatening If we really think space relationally, then it is the sum of all our connections, and



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It is not enough to simply describe ‘space’ as ‘open’ and ‘abstract’ and ‘place’ as ‘closed’ and ‘concrete’. To do so simply sustains an opposition that does not exist. As I said at the start of this section, space and place are interrelated and coexistent. Nor am I suggesting, although it is tempting, following Michel de Certeau by giving a poem the status of a ‘place’ within the ‘space’ of language (Certeau 1988, p. 117). I am, however, suggesting that to think about the form of a poem as having some of the qualities of a place, as well as a representation of place in its content, allows a broader range of responses to place within a broader range of poetries.

Spatial practice, representations of space, and spaces of representation Space is both lived and conceptualized. In other words, we have an embodied experience of space a well as a mental concept of space. The sense of where we are is a combination of that immediate embodied experience and the concept of our location within a larger picture, shifting our perceptions from the phenomenologically encountered experience to the larger geographical and social structures we are part of. Henri Lefebvre, at the start of his book The Production of Space, is emphatic that mental conceptions of space, and indeed mental conceptions of anything else, should be developed alongside and within practical, real-world experience. Otherwise ‘a powerful ideological tendency, and one much attached to its own would-be scientific credentials, is expressing in an admirably unconscious manner, those dominant ideas which are perforce the ideas of the dominant class’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 6). Ideas or concepts cut off from experience tend to produce a ‘mental space which is apparently extra-ideological’ (p. 6). This process of abstraction to a mental space cut off from social practice ‘creates an abyss between the mental sphere on one side and the social spheres on the other’ (p. 6). The reasons for identifying this ‘abyss’ are political; to demonstrate the ‘kinship between this mental space and the one inhabited by the technocrats in their silent offices’ (p. 6).



in that sense utterly grounded, and those connections may go around the world. (Massey 2005, pp. 184–5)


Lefebvre’s aim in his book is not to produce a ‘discourse on space’, that would simply produce another ‘mental space’, rather his aim is to ‘expose the actual production of space and the modalities of their genesis together within a single theory’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 16). For Lefebvre, any ideas of space need to be grounded in experience and in material reality. It is a spatial materialism, in which knowledge is situated and embodied, rather than an abstracted spatial theory, and is therefore in a constant reflexive relationship between ideas of space, and an experience of space that is also a spatial practice. In order to sustain this relationship, Lefebvre identifies three types of space; physical space, mental space and social space (1991, p. 14). The triad, or three-way relationship, is vital to Lefebvre’s theoretical approach. It avoids a return to the dichotomy of mind and the body, a dichotomy sustained by mapping concepts or abstractions of space on to the mind, and real or concrete space as experienced on to the body. The three-way relationship means that such connections are never allowed to settle, that theory is constantly tested against practice, and practice is located in the context of theory. Lefebvre develops two further three-way relationships. The first is between ‘spatial practice’, that which produces social space, ‘representations of space’ as the conceptualized and abstract space of planners, scientists and so on, and ‘representational spaces’ (as translated by Nicholson) or ‘spaces of representation’ (as translated by Shields) as ‘space as directly lived through its associated images or symbols and hence the space of inhabitants or users’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 39). This third element is simultaneously space as it is, everyday spaces, and space as it might be, as a space of actualization. Lefebvre immediately introduces another three terms, those of the ‘perceived, conceived and lived’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 39). This seems unnecessarily complex, but the reasons become evident. Attempts to define these terms as categories into which different spatial activities, processes and products can be located will fail; both Elden and Shields in their comprehensive studies of Lefebvre are reduced to admitting that the terms in the triads are interchangeable only with some difficulty (‘spatial practice’ for ‘perceived’ space for example) and that the distinctions between the terms within the individual triads are difficult to determine and sustain. I don’t intend to add further definitions. Instead, I want to consider these sets of terms



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as related, but incapable of being satisfactorily mapped on to each other. Lefebvre’s ‘categories’ are therefore possibilities or directions towards definitions, which are always made indeterminate by their application to any event. As Lefebvre says: The perceived – conceived – lived triad (in spatial terms: spatial practice, representations of space, representational spaces) loses all force if it is treated as an abstract ‘model’. If it cannot grasp the concrete then its import is severely limited, amounting to no more than that of one ideological mediation among others. That the lived, conceived and perceived realms should be interconnected, so that the ‘subject’, the individual member of a given social group, may move from one to another without confusion – so much is a logical necessity. (Lefebvre 1991, p. 40) If space, according to Lefebvre, is everything, ‘living beings, things, objects, works, signs and symbols’, and, according to Massey (2005), ‘the sum of all our connections, and in that sense utterly grounded, and those connections may go around the world’, then any moment within space, any coalition of forces and objects, whether we choose to call that a ‘place’ or not, will contain different elements of the triad and connections between the elements. It is the messiness of human existence, and the simultaneity of coincidental events that Lefebvre is trying to grasp. He is not trying to stand back and identify a ‘proper’ place from which to observe and categorize human spatial interaction at whatever level, but is more interested in the human interactions that produce space, and the ways that spatial practices use representations of space and work within and produce representational spaces. As he goes on to say: ‘Representations of space are shot through with a knowledge (savoir) which is always relative and in the process of change’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 41). A map, for example, or a diagram, or an architect’s drawings, are all representations of space, yet are also culturally coded, suggesting modes of spatial practice and the production of spaces of representation. Representations of space are therefore ‘abstract, but they also play a part in social and political practice’ and a ‘specific role in the production of space’ (Lefebvre 1991, pp. 41, 42). Representational spaces on the other hand ‘need obey no rules of consistency or





cohesiveness’. Those who study representational spaces, and Lefebvre names ethnologists, anthropologists and psychoanalysts, ‘forget to set them alongside those representations of space which co-exist, concord or interfere with them; they even more frequently ignore spatial practice’ (p. 41). The need for this interconnectedness can be easily demonstrated. A domestic house is represented by a set of architect’s plans which can be read in the abstract and, like any other text, read in different places and at different times. Yet while the physical plan might cross times and places, the particular reading must be ‘embodied’, and located in a specific time and place. It will be ‘read’ from a particular cultural perspective. Not all readings of the plan will be the same, but will change according to the perspective of the ‘reader’. A person can also physically enter the house that is constructed using the plans, and on approaching will get an idea of its overall shape and construction, as well as picking up a range of cultural signifiers, which will provide them with a set of expectations as to décor, scale and so on. Entering and moving through the house will involve shifting backwards and forwards between the plan and the embodied experience of scale, direction and perspective. The direction of movement through will be based on a combination of overall concept and embodied experience, as well as response and reaction to the symbolic elements of home and domesticity. The movement through the house is therefore a combination of embodied spatial practice, response to a representation of space, and reaction to the symbolism and imagery of representational space. A long-term inhabitant will have a more complex reaction to the representational spaces of the house, such as the kitchen where meals are taken or the living room where the family might have spent their time. The representational space of the house is therefore produced by every individual who enters, and it is a representational space that contains within it representations of space. Michel de Certeau compares walking in a city to writing a text. He describes the walkers as ‘practitioners of the city whose bodies follow the thicks and thins of an urban “text” they write without being able to read it’ (Certeau 1988, p. 93). He notes that people who move through cities do so without knowledge of them, that it is an embodied experience that is not conceptualized. In contrast to the planners and administrators of the city, they ‘compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator’ (p. 93). If I am to relate



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moving through space to processes of writing and reading, I prefer Lefebvre’s account that movement through space is a spatial practice that brings together an embodied process and a conceptual awareness. Experience is located within wider and more abstract discourses, and in the case of moving through space this could include a map or the timetable for the day. Even shopping indicates a teleology, people shop for something and will have some broader plan of action in their head. It also has a history, and items will be checked against a memory of past purchases to see if they’re value for money, witnessing a traffic jam might spark off thoughts about the need to cut down on car use, and stumbling over a street dweller might bring about thoughts on the need to develop a more equal society. The encountered phenomena develop a dialogue with categories and concepts. Comparisons can be made between moving through space and reading a poem, and there are ways in which a poem can be usefully conceptualized as a place within the space of language. I would claim, however, that any attempt to map the processes directly on to each other will result in a reductive set of definitions which fail to engage with the full complexity of either activity. In a poem such as Alstonefield by Peter Riley a number of ideas about space can be identified. First, the poem is about a place: Alstonefield is a village in the North Staffordshire Peak District in the Midlands of England, and the poem is a book-length response to the place. The reader enters the poem as night falls, yet it is as if they are entering a performance space: Again the figured curtain draws across the sky. Daylight shrinks, clinging to the stone walls and rows of graveyard tablets, the moon rising over the tumbling peneplain donates some equity to the charter and the day’s accountant stands among tombs where courtesy dwells. (Riley 2003, p. 5) The description is that of a churchyard at the end of the day. The figured curtain is the night sky, the figures are the stars, and as the curtain closes it fills the space below with darkness before the relationship between dark and light is balanced by the appearance





of the moon over the landscape. The poem contains language that simultaneously adds to the description, yet also distracts from it, opening the poem out to different discourses. The ‘figured curtain’ suggests a stage for the performance of the poem, introducing the dramatic, and more theoretically informed discourses of performativity. The idea of the location of the poem as a stage set is picked up in Stanza 2, where the ‘theatre of eyes flickers and dies’. Further on in Stanza 1 the words ‘equity’, ‘charter’ and ‘accountant’ introduce ideas of value, of profit and loss and commodification. Again, these ideas are picked up in subsequent stanzas. In Stanza 2 the ‘Fallen/ light sets up its booth’ and in Stanza 3 the place is described as ‘unvalued’, suggesting both a place that society does not value as well as a place that is free from commodification. Relationships between representations of space and spaces of representation are complex in this poem. There is a sense in which the whole poem is a representation of the place of Alstonefield, yet the location of the poem is also a representational space: ‘space as directly lived through its associated images and symbols, and hence the space of “inhabitants” and “users” This is the dominated space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 39). If the writer switches back and forth between phenomenological encounter and overview, and between presence and absence in the scene, then the reader does so too. Yet within the description of the location the poem brings in other discourses, and most consistently that of the commodification of rural space. Within its movement forward, as a description of the relationship between landscape and the poetic self, the poem opens up other conceptual spaces that reflect back into the poem. The poem is therefore a representation of space in that it is a verbal description of the landscape, and a representational space in that it is a space the reader inhabits. Within the poem the references to commodification and subjectivity are both their own conceptual spaces, with links into their own discourses, as well as part of the poem. The outcome of an examination of the poem through the framework of Lefebvre’s triad of terms demonstrates that the terms are not categories but ideas, and ideas that can be simultaneously applied, and that overlap and are entangled. So it is not simply that a poem is a representation of space or that it is a representational space, it is both simultaneously. And it is not that the references to commodification and subjectivity within the



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poem are part of representational space and not part of the poem as a representation of space, they are both. The very difficulty in distinguishing between the terms is a further demonstration, in practice, of the way they exist simultaneously yet provide different perspectives. What the terms and the concepts they bring with them provide are different ways of reading the poem through ideas of space. When Riley writes ‘Mirror/ flashes, on the horizon, distances steeped in petrol,/ lives snapped to zero’ (Riley 2003, p. 6) or the hill crests take the surge of territory to its break and mark it as on paper, ink under blue wash. Making clear what I thought I knew, that Truth is at the rim and rings like cash. (Riley 2003, p. 9) Riley is both describing the landscape and inhabiting it. He is also describing the landscape within the context of a variety of discourses, drawing on ideas of visual representation, ideas of ecology and the impact of humans on the landscape as well as his own position to those ideas.

The rhizomatic and the nomadic In his book Nomad Poetics Pierre Joris says: What is needed now is a nomadic poetics. Its method will be rhizomatic which is different from collage, i.e., a rhizomatics is not an aesthetics of the fragment If Pound, HD, Joyce, Stein, Olson and others have shown the way, it is essential now to push this matter further, again, not so much as ‘collage’ but as a material flux of language matter. (Joris 2003, p. 5) By moving from the modernist notion of collage to a more postmodern idea of the rhizome, Joris is moving from the location of objects within a frame to the idea of a system that produces its own space. In preferencing those key terms of ‘rhizomatic’ and ‘nomadic’,





he is referring explicitly to the spatial concerns of Deleuze and Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1988), the second volume of their capitalism and schizophrenia project. Through combining ideas from Freud and Marx, Deleuze and Guattari produce a highly abstract text that seeks to bring together the psychoanalytical and material effects of capitalism. The ongoing appeal of the texts lies in their desire for liberation, to suggest ‘lines of flight’ that might be used to subvert and escape from the monitored and surveyed life of the state and global capitalism, a life that Foucault can only describe. In the first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1984), they describe the schizophrenic as the figure who can escape the Oedipal trap of all psychoanalysis, a trap which sustains the subject in the ‘mommy, daddy, me’ triangle, and who can achieve freedom of and from desire. In the second volume, A Thousand Plateaus, they produce or further develop ideas, however, which have circulated widely amongst arts, humanities and social science disciplines, the most evident being those of the rhizomatic and the nomadic. They develop metaphors that, because of their abstraction, can be applied to a range of contexts, while simultaneously describing them in such a way as to give them sufficient solidity to make them portable. The ‘rhizome’ is the principal figure in A Thousand Plateaus, and can also be applied to the structure of the book and the social space the book describes and analyses. The ‘rhizome’ tries to discard the image of the tree with a main ‘taproot’ and then a network of roots getting smaller and smaller as they are distanced from the taproot, yet implicitly leading back to and supporting the centre. Such a tree exists at a single point; it can be plotted. The rhizome, on the other hand, has no such centre, but exists as a network that produces its own space. It may well have points or nodes in the system, but these are simply stopping-off points rather than a set of points that can provide coordinates. Deleuze and Guattari identify a number of ‘approximate characteristics’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 7). The first are the ‘Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be’ (p. 7). The rhizome does not, however, simply construct or produce space, it also plays a part in deconstruction, in revealing the ‘semantic and pragmatic contents of statements, to collective assemblages of enunciation, to a whole micropolitics of the social field’ (p. 7). Like Lefebvre and Massey, although, despite its biological associations,



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the rhizome is less ‘grounded’ than their spatial models, Deleuze and Guattari are interested in exposing inequalities and concealed or naturalized power structures; in this case those of the relationship between structures of language and the social world. They take this one stage further and seek out ‘lines of flight’ as possible escape routes from the ‘striated’ or ‘sedentary’ space of state capitalism, but I will return to that later in the chapter. The rhizome is not simply passive, it is not a set of ‘dark wires’ waiting for the electronic impulse, but active: ‘A rhizome ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relevant to the arts, the sciences and social struggles’ (p. 7). They continue to outline more characteristics; that it cannot be reduced to either the one or the multiple but is composed of ‘directions in motion’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 21). It is without beginning or end, but is always a middle, like a plateau, and between places. If it is like a map, it is a map that is always in the process of production, that is always ‘detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight’ (p. 21). The rhizomatic is therefore always in the process of construction, and never settled, and contains within itself the possibilities of its own liberation. I began this section with a quotation from Joris where he suggests the need for a ‘nomadic’ poetics. The ‘nomad’ and ideas of the ‘nomadic’, for Deleuze and Guattari, indicate the possibilities of subverting bureaucratic functionalism, and celebrate the synchronic and the situational as against the intrinsic. In spatial terms the nomad inhabits smooth space, a space of flows. In order to avoid surveillance and capture by the state apparatus, those who are nomadic engage in rapid processes of change, both changing the space they inhabit and their location within it through processes of ‘territorializing, deterritorializing’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 353). The nomad has to avoid the coordinates of Euclidean space and the functional grid that would allow the state to get them in their sights. There are other characteristics of the nomadic. Rather than language being a form of self-expression and a way of expressing concepts, they stress ‘The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and bring something incomprehensible into the world’ (p. 378). Processes of language similarly influence processes of thought. Nomad thought





rejects the thinking subject as the producer of truth about the world, locating thought ‘with a singular race’ or tribe, a way of thinking that is neither individual nor emanating from a nation-state, and is deployed in a ‘horizonless milieu that is a smooth space, steppe, desert or sea’ (p. 379). The nomad inhabits a ‘territory’ in which ‘the points are subordinated to the paths’ and the ‘in-between enjoys both an autonomy and a direction of its own’. As a consequence of this privileging of movement through space over residence within a ‘place’, the ‘life of the nomad is the intermezzo. Even the elements of his dwelling are conceived in terms of the trajectory that is forever mobilizing them’ (p. 380). If ‘one of the fundamental tasks of the state is to striate the space over which it reigns’ and to relegate smooth space to a conduit or a means of communication, then the nomad will seek to ‘distribute himself in a smooth space; he occupies, inhabits, holds that space; that is his territorial principle’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 381). If the migrant, forced to move from one country to another, is deterritorialized, in the sense that they lose their territory, then they will seek to reterritorialize themselves in the country they move to. The sedentary will inhabit state-controlled striated space, their experience mediated by the state, while the nomad exists in deterritorialized territory, a territory that is located between striated spaces of state control and a sedentary lifestyle. Ideas of the rhizome and the nomad can provide a reading of Bill Griffiths’s poetry. In his essay on Bill Griffiths’s work in Out of Dissent: A Study of Five Contemporary British Poets, Clive Bush describes Griffiths as someone for whom, although ‘Never seeking disaster, his disassociation from the dullness of British culture is no mere gesture of alterity, but a passion for the differences of actual life actually lived in the British Isles’ (Bush 1997, p. 212). That disassociation has included a lifetime’s commitment to the marginalized and the dispossessed, in particular their mistreatment by the forces of law and order. His publication history is itself an example of the nomadic. Part of the so-called ‘British Revival’ in the 1970s, and associated with Bob Cobbing’s ‘Writers Forum’ in London, many of his publications were pamphlets and chapbooks, hand sewn, stapled or with spiral binding, and distributed via alternative networks. He has had more substantial collections in more conventional bindings, including most recently a collected poems with Salt and collections



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with West House Books, Etruscan and Invisible Books, but there seems a coincidence between the form and content of his pamphlets and more marginal publications which only strengthens connections with the nomadic and the rhizomatic. His pamphlet War w/ Windsor [War w. Windsor] from the mid-1970s is a good example. The cover is paper, hand sewn with coloured thread on to five internal sheets folded once to give 20 unnumbered pages. It looks photocopied, and in places the text is barely legible, and the mixture of typefaces, sometimes on the same page, gives it a ‘cut and paste’ feel. It is a text that by its very material nature distances itself from official ‘literature’. The contents are divided into five ‘texts’, with each text made up of a combination of genres including poems, prose, newspaper reports and ‘visual’ works by Sean O’Huigin. ‘Text 1’ (Figure 2.1) requires the book to be rotated to ‘landscape’ to reveal a text which uses four columns, a simple device that disrupts the reading process, leaving the reader unclear as to whether they should read across each line from left to right, or read each column. Yet even if the reader makes the decision to go one way or another, the columns will suddenly dissolve into each other and form a continuous ‘line’. The syntax similarly gives few clues as to how the poem should be read and the occasional words in capitals rarely seem to indicate the start of a sentence. The poem has the appearance of a ‘cut-up’, as if Griffiths has found a number of texts, cut them into columns and randomly rejoined them. If it is a cut-up, it is one that includes some of Griffiths’s own texts within it. The ‘angels’ in Line 2 are Hell’s Angels and the ‘rat’s fur on ‘is anarack’ links to ‘the scooter awry’ on the next line, where the ‘mod’, who rides a scooter normally wore a ‘parka’ with a fur-lined hood, is scathingly referred to as an ‘anarack’. To say that riding a scooter is like ‘riding a donkey’ is to reinforce the slowness of the scooter in comparison with the motorbike. The image of the broken scooter is also linked to Griffiths’s arrest, and is referred to in the prose account of a violent incident which, along with a number of newspaper cuttings referring to the same incident, makes up ‘Text 5’ of the pamphlet where there are references to prison and to the law, to a row of windows, a ceiling and a floor. The text is also cut through with a series of mythical references, to Yggdrasil, the Norse tree of the world, to Vulcan and Oceanus, and to more obscure figures such as Mettus and Hasdrubal. As well as producing a text which distorts syntax, Griffiths also uses





Figure 2.1 ‘Text 1’, War w/ Windsor, Bill Griffiths (1974)

a vocabulary which combines archaic language with modernist backslashed abbreviations and more standard English. The form of the poem is ‘rhizomatic’. The poem can be cut at any one point and rejoined with other texts or with other points in the poem. Each point in the text can lead off in different directions. The text does not form a coherent whole, in which each piece can, with some shuffling around, be combined with other pieces to



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make a coherent picture. The content of the poem is an attempt by Griffiths, and his most ambitious attempt in this pamphlet, to construct a text that reflects his idea of what it means to be alive in 1970s Britain. It is set within a contemporary time that combines the past with a multiplicity of contiguous presents and, as a scholar of Old and Medieval English, Griffiths combines language from across the history of English. In these texts, and in subsequent poems in Bikers published in 1990, Griffiths examines the idea of the nomadic through the characters of the Hell’s Angels. Although with lives as family men, and having a variety of working-class and labouring jobs, they existed as Angels when they were ‘on the road’ and perpetually between places. Hunter S. Thompson in his book Hell’s Angels says that ‘I have never met an Angel who claimed to have a home town in any sense that people who use that term might understand it’ (Thompson 1967, p. 160) and Bush describes Griffiths as having ‘lived in Germany as a “guest-worker,” returning to England to live on a houseboat in Harrow, London, only to have it accidentally burned while being repaired. He was then homeless for two years and at present he lives in Seaham in the North East of England, still in indigenous circumstances’ (Bush 1997, p. 212). In ‘Five Poems’ from Bikers Griffiths says: I wld jal kiri to the Ace when I wanted a home

[go]

(Griffiths and Muckle 1990, n.p.) The Ace café was a famous meeting place for bikers on the North Circular road around London. This is not to suggest that Griffiths still lives as a Hell’s Angel, as far as I can tell his time spent amongst motorcycle gangs was fairly brief, but it was a time that left him with an interest in the nomadic. For the Angels on a run, the highway becomes a smooth space, the run itself opening out potential lines of flight as an escape from the sedentary space of everyday life. While this highly romanticized view of Hell’s Angels obliterates a number of unpalatable attitudes to gender, sexuality and race, and a predilection for random violence which Griffiths acknowledges without judgement and Thompson tries to explain away, for a certain time in the





1960s and 1970s the anti-establishment stance of the Angels and the iconic lone figure on a motorcycle as a representation of freedom were a part of popular Western culture in books, films and visual images, and Griffiths is one of the few writers able to capture that excitement without a glorification of the lifestyle. He is also not alone in linking them to the ‘nomadic’, and Hell’s Angels often had close links to Romany or Gypsy culture. Various Hell’s Angels chapters have ‘nomad’ in their name, Hunter Thompson refers to the ‘Gypsy Jokers’ and Griffiths frequently describes Angels as ‘Nomads’, as do the press reports he collages in ‘Text 5’ of War w. Windsor. In ‘Five Poems’, from the Bikers pamphlet, Griffiths draws on the freedom of travel and movement in the outdoors: Sat me then on its roads watch its fast – lights – hollowing feeling (Griffiths and Muckle 1990, n.p.) The experience is not just outside striated space but also between languages, as if normative English syntax and vocabulary would be restrictive, and the poems include a variety of words from the Romany language, with English versions in squared brackets at the end of the line: I got my bike sent my wheels running, on the road (I got a hold on my bike, easy – like To where Was teams of patnies

[ducks]

Rockring and dipping on water (clear seeing beaut air), (Griffiths and Muckle 1990, n.p.) Griffiths inhabits this space between languages, yet draws on them all. The bikers are similarly happiest between places, and, on a motorcycle outside the domestic space of the family home, they are only too aware of the weather and the countryside around them. In ‘Five Poems’ each one is set in a particular time of year or a particular state of the weather, and contain acute observations of the landscape, from



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In them tho was the war still in their tempers and the bikes kaulo riddo in that black

[dark jacketed]

or with a great blue, openly just fighting (alone and) kicking like drums. (Griffiths and Muckle 1990, n.p.) Ultimately, for Griffiths the Angels are ‘catastrophic’, suggesting both a disaster, and a revolutionary event as a sudden upheaval or discontinuity. Their roots in a masculinist working-class ideology, their liking for sudden violence, glorification of aspects of fascism and their unpredictability meant that they were always going to be a part of the problem as well as a part of any solution, and their romanticization during the years of the counter-culture has to be put in the context of some fairly brutal crimes in the 1970s. They are, however, particularly apt as an illustration of Deleuze and Guattari’s combination of Marx and Freud. The reason the Angels captured the public imagination was because of their image of freedom, that they didn’t work as ‘wage slaves’, submit to monogamy or respect law and order. Their commitment to excess and to random behaviour means that, in the terms used by Deleuze and Guattari, they are more ‘schizo’ than ‘sedentary’. Their own sexual liberation often involved the debasement of others, and their lack of respect for law and order meant a carelessness towards the safety of others. Deleuze and Guattari often demonstrate a similar carelessness, applauding the schizophrenic, and their image of the nomad as Bedouin is as masculine as a Hell’s Angel on a motorbike. In Griffiths’s work the conjunction of ideas of the nomadic is more striking because of the breadth and depth of Griffiths’s learning and the way he can effortlessly plunder a thousand years of history. By failing to keep to his place, and by bringing together high and low culture, he is able to produce a poetry that celebrates freedom while maintaining a breadth and a depth of perspective.



urban, to suburban and to rural. Arrival at their destination often sends them lurching into meaningless violence:

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Gaston Bachelard, in The Poetics of Space, describes the way the body retains a knowledge of domestic spaces, and that ‘over and beyond our memories, the house we were born in is physically inscribed in us’ (Bachelard 1994, p. 15). In a haunting and affective study he describes an intimate relationship between memory, bodily gestures and habits, and details different responses brought on by changes in scale and perspective. It is a fascinating account, but one that describes, as it says in the title, a ‘poetics of space’, rather than a ‘spatial poetics’. Although Bachelard draws extensively on imaginative literature to develop his ideas, he finally only succeeds in demonstrating the relationship between representations of space in the poems and the spaces themselves. I want to develop a more integrated relationship between ideas of space and both the form and content of the poems as well as the processes of their production and reception. Throughout the 1990s the body has increasingly become a preoccupation for social and cultural theory, particularly in gender theory and post-colonial studies, but also drawing on work such as that by Michel Foucault in describing geographies of power and control, the relationships between the state and the individual body and capitalism and the body. There are two principal approaches to the study of the body; that of the body in space, and the way the body ‘produces’ space through perspective, scale and travel, and that of the space of the body itself, both its internal space and the surface of the skin. Within spatial practice they function coincidentally; the body in space produces the space of the body, and cannot be conceived as existing without it. In the early 1960s Charles Olson explores the relationship between the surface of the body and its inner depths in the process of writing. In his essay ‘Proprioception’ he refers to the way in which information is received and analysed from the ‘proprioceptors’, or, as Olson puts it, ‘SENSIBILITY WITHIN THE ORGANISM BY MOVEMENT OF ITS OWN TISSUES’, and a process whereby the ‘data of depth sensibility/ the body of us as object which spontaneously produces experience of depth’ (Olson 1997, pp. 181–3). Discourses of the body are frequently centred on ideas of difference, otherness and exclusion for reasons of gender, sexuality, age and race,



Space and the body

49

all of which are treated as social constructs. Often from a feminist perspective, they claim knowledge to be situated and embodied rather than decontextualized and disembodied, and that it results from the activities of the body in space rather than from a consciousness of the mind. Hélène Cixous, for example, talks of the way in which ‘my body is active, there is no interruption between the work that my body is actually performing and what is going to happen on the page. I write very near my body and my pulsions’ (Wilcox, Watters, Thompson and Williams 1990, p. 27). I argued strongly in the previous sections of this chapter for the importance of an embodied awareness of concrete space, but also argued that such an embodied awareness includes, in a reflexive relationship, the notion of the decontextualized concept, and that the specific, actual concrete situated experience coexists with more general concepts. This is important, as I also insist that the process of reading a poem, the actual embodied experience of moving from word to word in a particular place and time, is carried out in a more general conceptualization of the overall form of the individual poem, the genre of the poem, concepts of poetry and, within the context of a specific usage of language, consistent with the general rules of language. That the issue of situated knowledge versus the apparently objective or transcendent should arise in discourses of the body is unsurprising. Abstract concepts of gender, sexuality, race and age all act as frameworks through which the biological body is read. Following Judith Butler in Gender Trouble, the characteristics of gender are understood to be constructed and performed rather than essential. We, as social beings, are constructed as masculine or feminine through acting out a set of characteristics rather than having an essential set of biologically derived characteristics that determine behaviour. The process of acting out or performing could include activities that stress a normative relationship to the social construction, or could be subversive or transgressive. Studies of women’s skin, for example, will as often focus on activities such as tattooing or piercing as on the type of ‘skin care’ associated with more ‘normal’ feminine activities. Discussions of body shape will focus on cosmetic surgery, and the activities of artists such as ‘Orlan’, who has had herself remodelled into the ‘perfect woman’ in a series of operations, transmitted as online performances.





The poet Anne Waldman, in the poem ‘Fast Speaking Woman’ from the 1970s, uses a long chant poem over some 40 pages to reflect on her construction within ideas of femininity and womanliness, and simultaneously makes a claim for the knowledge situated in her experience. The majority of the early part of the poem is constructed in short lines following the formula ‘I’m a [something] woman’, with that something ranging from ‘automobile’ to ‘clock’ and to ‘serpent’. Later in the poem the principal formula becomes ‘I’m the [something] woman’, the definite article replacing the indefinite. The poem does sometimes break off into other forms, but these two variations form a kind of skeleton around which the poem is built. In some ways the poem can be dismissed as a relic of its time, with its implicit call to a universal and transcendental idea of woman within a universal sisterhood, albeit one at odds with more traditional histories of the feminine. A paragraph of dedication at the start of the poem refers to her debt to ‘the Indian Shamaness in Mexico guiding persons in magic mushroom ceremony’, further placing it in a self-consciously ‘alternative’ space. Conceptually, therefore, she could be seen to be simply reversing the idea that there are many men and one woman, in order to claim many women, yet still remaining clearly within a role-reversal male–female dichotomy. Yet I think the poem goes beyond this from the multiplicity of its practice. The chant ‘formula’ combines both the physical act of chanting – Waldman refers to ‘reading aloud as intended’ – and an extended meditation on the meaning of the word ‘woman’. In the introduction to her epic poem Iovis, Waldman says: I always feel myself an open system (woman) available to any words or sounds I’m informed by. A name. A date I get up and dance the poem when it sweeps into litany. I gambol with the shaman and the deer. It is a body poetics. (Waldman 1993, pp. 1, 2) The form of ‘Fast Speaking Woman’ follows the trajectory of its sounds and meanings. At the start of the poem there is a loose series of couplets; from ‘ shouting woman’ to ‘ speech woman’ and from ‘ atmosphere woman’ to ‘ airtight woman’. The couplets also spill over, from ‘automobile’ to ‘mobile’ to ‘elastic’ and with elastic referring back to ‘flexible’ a few lines earlier. Following the



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trajectories of these thought processes reveals an interlocking and intersecting pattern of qualities and values that are simultaneously embodied and situated and part of Waldman’s representation of a ‘universal sisterhood’. The chant is both an affirmation of the self and a negation of the self through its repetition. At other times she moves out of the chant ‘formula’ amd literally leaves herself behind: I’m an abalone woman I’m the abandoned woman I’m the woman abashed, the gibberish woman the aborigine woman, the woman absconding (Waldman 1975, p. 3) She hands over centre stage to: the the the the the the

Nubian Woman andeluvian woman absent woman transparent woman absinthe woman woman absorbed, the woman under tyranny

Before returning: I’m the gadget woman I’m the druid woman I’m the Ibo woman etc. (Waldman 1975, p. 4) I’m not suggesting that the poem can be collapsed back into itself to provide a reading which joins up at all points, or that the poem can be disentangled into thematic categories; that is neither the poem’s ambition nor a possibility of its structure. But I am suggesting that the variety of material within the poem builds a relationship between the poet/narrator and the gender she both inhabits and is denied. The form of the poem reinforces the embodied and performative





aspects of the act of writing or composing the poem, and its performance creates a space in which ideas of ‘woman’ are both asserted and explored. For Waldman, the gendered body (and how can it be non-gendered?) has to assert itself in all spaces through an unstoppable voice. The poem ends on a note that is both assertive and ambivalent: I’m I’m I’m I’m

a a a a

fast speaking woman fast rolling woman rolling speech woman rolling water woman

I KNOW HOW TO SHOUT I KNOW HOW TO SING I KNOW HOW TO LIE DOWN Through the use of capitals she asserts her right to a voice, to make art and, simultaneously, to not make art and just lie down and, somewhat ironically, to be submissive. Geraldine Monk similarly addresses issues of identity, the body, space and voice in her poem ‘James Device Replies’ (O’Sullivan 1996, p. 153), part of a series of work based on the execution of witches at Pendle, Lancashire. She chronicles the last minutes of Device before he is hung. The poem begins with a stanza with three columns, thereby providing three left-hand margins or three points at which the voice starts over. The three columns break up the line and the syntax, giving a stuttering feeling through the reversal of short phrases: I wasn’t here here I wasn’t

I was here here I was

I won’t here I

The poem then charts the gradual dissolution of the body from the bitten tongue to the lolling tongue and the lips stitched together as the voice descends into broken words: tongue lollery lip-s-titched to-g where the consonants begin to move between words, not quite part of one or the other. A phrase like ‘part bit’ refers back in the poem



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to ‘bit part’ and then forward to his role in the performance of the hanging and on both occasions to the idea that he has bitten part of his tongue off. The breakdown of the body is the breakdown of the voice, a process described by both the form of the poem and the story it refers to. Like Waldman’s poem, Monk’s ends in the use of capitals, but in a negative exclamation rather than a positive affirmation. Device was ultimately not ‘HEARD’. In ‘Ode Long Kesh’ (Caddel and Quartermain 1999, p. 120), Barry MacSweeney combines what Bryan Turner calls Foucault’s interest in the ‘micro-politics of the regulation of the body and the macropolitics of surveillance of populations’ (Featherstone, Hepworth and Turner 1995, p. 23). The title provides a location, the notorious H blocks in Northern Ireland, where both Republican and Loyalist prisoners were interned (a procedure under which suspects could be held indefinitely without trial) between the early 1970s and 2000. A disused RAF base just outside Belfast that was converted into a prison, Long Kesh was (in)famous for two major incidents: the burning of Long Kesh in 1974 whereby the ‘prisoners’ rioted, burned down a large portion of the camp and had a pitched battle with the guards; and the hunger strikes, which were an attempt to secure ‘special category’ status for the Republican internees as prisoners of war rather than criminals. Special category status would have meant that they would have certain rights: not to wear a prison uniform; not to do prison work; free association with other prisoners; to organize their own educational and recreational facilities; and the right to one visit, one letter and one parcel per week. They would avoid aspects of the regulation of the body, which, in Foucault’s terms, results in a ‘docile body’. The hunger strikers fought back against their treatment with that which they had at their disposal, their own bodies, and refused both food and basic hygiene facilities. Ten of them died before the hunger strike was called off. This followed a period of unrest where hundreds of prisoners had gone ‘on the blanket’ and engaged in a ‘dirty protest’, and remained naked in a cell smeared with their own excrement. The dirty protests and the hunger strikes were also massively symbolic, with pictures of the abject figures of prisoners wrapped in a blanket in an empty cell illustrating the resistance of flesh and bone to the military machinery of the Britain state. Long Kesh continued as a focus for the ‘troubles’, and 19 prisoners broke out in 1983, one of whom was then involved in the ‘Brighton Bombing’ of 1984.





By calling his poem ‘Ode Long Kesh’, MacSweeney is drawing on one of the most potent symbols of the use of the human body in a process of resistance to an implacable and uncaring state apparatus which provided some of the most powerful images of incarceration until the United States established the prison at Guantanamo Bay in early 2000. The poem comes from nowhere, beginning mid-sentence and with an ampersand, as if it was the ending of a longer work. In a rapid, almost playful style, in which syntax and grammar play-off lines of varying length beginning from a variety of positions on the left side of the page, MacSweeney brings together a series of references to incarceration, hunger and sexual desire. There is something almost Elizabethan about the language, reminiscent of the speeches by the Fool in King Lear, particularly in the phrase ‘best uncle, Flapless Man’. A man without flaps is naked, and it is in the ‘Flapless Man’ that MacSweeney constructs a figure to represent the more abstract ideas in the poem. The suffering of the individual body, whether in the fiction of Lear or the history of Long Kesh, makes abstract representations of pain, injustice, suffering and loss real; it gives them concrete form. Everything collapses back into this figure: & tie strings together as the sky falls between the knees, fragrant lard mouth. A planet in decision, but falls sunless towards the best uncle, Flapless Man. (Caddel and Quartermain 1999, p. 120) Flapless Man is never quite complete and all the figures of speech that relate to him don’t quite make sense. Flapless Man is sexual, and the sky falls between his knees, and his name is male, but the sexual reference in flapless is female. Yet the word also suggests flop, the loss of the male erection, a pun that MacSweeney uses when he says ‘Flop goes Flapless’. The desire remains, whatever the condition of the body, and he ‘fails to strangle inclinations/ between those sheeny thighs. Flapless/ never comes’. The desire is never satisfied, there is no climax, and Flapless Man remains in a condition of becoming.



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The body is hungry for food; it has ‘bracken ankles’, suggesting both an archaic version of ‘broken’ and the thin and fragile form of the plant ‘bracken’. Flapless eats ‘digital pie’ and ‘broth of caps’, linking ‘pork pie hat’ to ‘virtual’ pie and the cloth cap of the stereotypical working-class man, and consequently linking the prisoners to the working-class struggle and to famine and hunger in Irish history. This echoes the infamous ‘communiques’ of the revolutionary group ‘The Angry Brigade’, which linked the shipworkers’ industrial action in Clydeside with the IRA in the Bogside. MacSweeney also refers to the Luddites and the Tolpuddle martyrs as reference points in an ongoing working-class struggle, and in the last two lines he savagely satirizes the trend for ‘nouveau cuisine’, in which small portions of expensive food were elegantly arranged on the plate, as well as referring to the idea of ‘nouveau riche’, and ironically forecasting the rise of ‘new labour’: Nouveau Flapless in the garments of rich hunger, living on potatoes & nitro-glycerine. MacSweeney emphasizes the link between hunger and the war for independence, a link made all the more poignant by the subsequent deaths of ten hunger strikers in the early 1980s. He weaves together sexual need, physical hunger and the restraint of the body, locating it all in a series of references to the politics of class and the Republican cause in Northern Ireland. Clive Bush refers to the way in which, in the ‘Odes’: ‘MacSweeney’s poetic world presents the complex interactions of things and mind as lived through the deep structures and patterns of rhythm and language’ (Bush 1997, p. 379). The poem has much of the abstract meaning of music, a meaning which arises as much from the rhythmic arrangement of sound into syntax and lineation as from the references, which often seem some way off the mark. It is a poetics of indeterminacy and accumulation, where to pin down words or phrases to a single reference is to lose the movement of the poem, and a poetics that combines a physical and a mental response. When Flapless is ‘Overliving the skin/ & out for the year’, he is both living too much for his skin and wearing it out, as well as living too far in his skin and out of circulation for the year.





To say that the body is important is an inane truism; it provides perspective, scale and a sensual response to everyday experience. For Lefebvre, however, the body does not just occupy space, but produces space (Lefebvre 1991, p. 170), and, as importantly, provides a ‘route from abstract to concrete which has the great virtue of demonstrating their reciprocal inherence’ (p. 171). Lefebvre’s thought is characterized as a trajectory from a concern with the alienation of everyday life, through an analysis of the production of space, to an interest in the relationships between physical and social ‘rhythm’ in his last work, Rhythmanalysis (2004). The individual human body is central to his concerns. In The Production of Space he historicizes the relationship between the body and space, claiming that: ‘before the analysing, separating intellect, long before formal knowledge, there was an intelligence of the body’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 174). For Lefebvre, if there is an escape from the alienating effects of capital, then it is through a coming together of mind and body; a renegotiation of reasoned knowledge and situated knowledge. In an almost Arcadian conceptualization of the past, he refers to a time when ‘the network of paths and roads made up a space just as concrete as that of the body’ (p. 193), whereas modern space, and its ‘narrow and desiccated rationality, overlooks the core and foundation of space, the total body, the brain, the gestures and so forth. It forgets that space does not consist in the projection of an intellectual representation but that it is first of all heard (listened to) and enacted (through physical gestures and movements)’ (p. 200). He states later that it is not his desire to look backwards to a golden age, but rather to contest the tendencies of contemporary social and economic structures and systems, including language, to metaphorize, abstract and fragment the body through a renegotiation of the relationship between mind and body, and between an embodied and situated experience of space and the conceptualization of space. Deleuze and Guattari develop the idea of the Body without Organs (BwO) in A Thousand Plateaus, an idea of the body capable of providing both freedom from desire and freedom of desire. They draw on a post-modern aesthetic of fragmentation in their description of the process of dismantling the ‘organism’ and repeatedly affirm that the body without organs is not ‘against’ organs, but against organism and against the organization of the individual through processes of signification (saying what something means) and subjec-



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tification. There is a double argument going on in their description of the body without organs. On the one hand it is simply a complex and intellectual take on Zen and Hatha Yoga, on the need to live with the world rather than against it, of the need to open up the body to flows and exist within an immanent now, to balance the external and internal pressure, to removing ‘blockages’ which dam up negative feelings; all ideas that can easily be located in counter-culture literature of the 1960s and subsequent personal development discourses. On the other hand they are continuing their argument with psychoanalysis and its representation of desire as conscious or subconscious fantasy. Psychoanalysis, they assert, simply locates desire in the conscious or subconscious rather than in and through the body. The body without organs does involve danger and, as they say, to reach it through anorexia, masochism or drug use is to court danger of death, but to achieve it through carefully dismantling the self is to achieve freedom from desire and openness to desire, and arrive at a condition where desire flows through the body without organs and does not encounter blockages. It is relatively straightforward to make connections between poetic form and Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the BwO; ideas of open form and of flows and rhythms link easily to more experimental ideas of poetic form. The more difficult process is to demonstrate how the materiality of the body, the space it contains and the space it produces and is produced by, link to the form and content of poetry. A poem is not a body and a body is not a text, yet both exist in a relationship between their materialism (the text as material and the body as material); their conceptualization through processes of representation; and their performance in specific times and places. It is in this complex of relationships that a focus on the body can support various readings of poetry. The four principal concepts in this chapter overlap. The idea of place links to the idea of the body and gender, which subsequently connects to the ways in which places are both represented and experienced. The notion of the rhizomatic implicitly questions the ways in which places function in space. I have taken them separately in order to examine their implications for varieties of poetry and to draw out some particular characteristics. In subsequent





chapters I will be folding these ideas into the work of a number of poets in order to provide further examples. These four ideas are not therefore a limitation of the field of spatial awareness, or even a framework, but rather a more detailed examination of how some of the more widespread ideas of space can be traced through some contemporary poetry, and provide a more detailed context for subsequent chapters.



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The Space Age: The 1950s to the 1970s

In the three volumes of The Maximus Poems Charles Olson constructed a poem based on the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, while in his ‘Lunch Poems’, Frank O’Hara traced his walks through the city of New York. Both these writers spanned the period from the 1950s to the 1970s and, in very different ways, were exploring the production of a mid-century American space. Despite his early death in 1966, Frank O’Hara’s influence has grown as a poet whose methods and poetic procedures relate not simply to people and places, but also to ideas of sexuality and space. Charles Olson, a key figure for the post-war avant-garde, wrote both poetry and a range of critical and theoretical works that describe and explain his methods, and was influential in the development and dissemination of ideas relating to ‘projective verse’ and to ‘open-field’ poetry. The Maximus Poems, in their form and content, deal directly with ideas of place, of space and spatialization, and relationships between the geographical and the historical.

Poetries of places The national and regional poetries of Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England often refer to the idea of ‘place’ as a way of authenticating a local identity discovered via historical processes. Some US-based poets, and Frank O’Hara, Charles Olson and Ed Dorn are only three examples, use a range of information within their poetry that just as often presents the incoherent nature of places and their intersections, and describes ways in which time and space interact in the processes of production of places. Their process is additive 59



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rather than reductive, resulting in sprawling poems that seem to contain swathes of information difficult to reduce to an overall theme. The reason for this difference between American and UK practices might be obvious: America was a place under construction, making up a national identity out of its diverse and still changing population; in Lefebvrian terms the space of America was, from an imperial and colonial perspective at least, still in the early stages of production. The English, Welsh, Scottish and Irish on the other hand had centuries of evidence all around them, but had to use methods of historical analysis to break through the ideological surfaces of a traditionalized, colonized or commodified world in order to discover an identity the modern world was concealing from them. I think the distinction is more complex than that. It doesn’t explain the ways in which Olson, Dorn and O’Hara are, in different ways and amongst other writers, drawing on different conceptualizations of space and relationships between places. They will question the notion that the poem can capture, through the listing of essential ingredients, the ‘true spirit’ of a place and an identity that exists prior to and outside the poem and is expressed by the poem. They suggest that the poem is capable of making many connections, some of which may be back to the geographical place of the poem’s origin, but some of which will also connect in various ways and within different contexts across time and space.

Maps and mapping Donald Davie says of The Maximus Poems that they: ‘aspire to give in language a map, a map of one place, the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts’ (Davie 1970, p. 221) and early editions of Olson’s ‘Maximus’ had a map of Gloucester on the cover. Using a series of signs and symbols on a mathematical grid, a map has a twodimensional surface through which the ‘world’ can be read. Maps assume no perspective and are drawn to a consistent scale rather than being seen from a single viewpoint: they implicitly claim to be neutral. Like other forms of representation, though, they do have an ‘angle’, however explicit or implicit that may be. Maps are both ways in which we represent ourselves as regions and nationalities, and part of the way in which communities and national identities are produced. They may appear fair and objective (a measured picture of a



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concrete reality) yet result from a mapping process which is ‘situated, embodied, partial: like all processes of representation’ (Gregory 1994, p. 17). While suggesting a historical innocence and a mathematical objectivity, maps do combine ‘roots’, providing both a location and a structure for memory and tradition, with ‘routes’, numerous ways of passing through the landscape. One view of the map is that it provides, within boundaries, a series of places, principally arranged according to their congruity rather than causally. The map, because of the two-dimensional nature of its surface, is a ‘slice through time’, and as such can suggest and reveal connections and links which are otherwise concealed. A reading of the map as representative of a particular social and cultural perspective will not only critique the map’s aura of objectivity, but can also identify the reasons for what is included and what has been left out, the significance of the symbolism used, and the scale. A more post-structuralist approach would reveal two other important facets. The first is that the map’s construction is discursive (made up of a number of competing discourses), rather than having an ideological purpose the subject can discover, and second, that through reading the map, or travelling the terrain it represents, the subject position can be various. Instead of a single view from above, however much that view might expose concealed ideologies, there are a number of ways through both map and terrain, and multiple perspectives. The potential complexities can be demonstrated in ‘Personal Poem’ (O’Hara 1974, p. 156), where Frank O’Hara maps out a journey through New York. The poem is made up of a series of overlapping and disjointed physical, social and intellectual ‘maps’ through which O’ Hara moves between the global and local to outline an international, gay sensibility. The poem begins in one ‘place’, the lunchtime walk, yet quickly references Europe through the ‘old Roman coin’ given to him by the artist Mike Kanemitsu, and a ‘bolt-head that broke off a packing case/ when I was in Madrid’. Both these objects are described as ‘charms’, and there are ‘others’. These could also be bank notes or coins, as they ‘keep me in New York against coercion’ and are most likely to be in his pocket at lunchtime. In that first stanza, and sandwiched between the opening and closing lines which both locate him in New York and give some idea of his state of mind (‘happy for a time and interested’), O’Hara sketches out an international world of Rome, Madrid and New York. O’Hara also





calls the poem a ‘personal poem’ and as he worked in MOMA and curated international exhibitions, it is a reasonable assumption that the packing case contained art. The map that has been sketched, economically, is that of the art world O’Hara inhabits. When we next meet him, walking through the streets of New York, this is the context we read him through. The ‘map’ for the rest of the poem might be large scale, with at times an intense detail, but, like the figure in ‘Adieu to Norman, Bonjour to Joan and Jean Paul’ who looked up ‘rue Frémicourt on a map and was happy to find it like a bird/ flying over Paris’, the figure in this poem circles overhead for a while before locating itself in ‘the luminous humidity/ passing the House of Seagram’. The international art references in the opening stanza also prepare the reader for the range of cultural references in the second stanza. As he walks past the House of Seagram, a liquor company, the poem rapidly shifts tone. The detail and ‘cause and effect’ structuring of the description of ‘the construction to/ the left that closed the sidewalk’ is interrupted by a different voice which says ‘if/ I ever get to be a construction worker/ I’d like to have a silver hat please’. It is as if he has gone down a side street, or taken some subterranean route, until he reaches ‘Moriarty’s where I wait for/ Leroi’. During the detour a world of fantasy and sexual potential opens up. The world is the same, that of constructions and construction workers, but the tone is simultaneously naked, childlike and sexually pleading. The poem’s narrator has temporarily entered a coexisting different world, and it is only in coming back to the real world that he has to deal with the incident of Miles Davis being ‘clubbed 12/ times by a cop’. It’s a world that O’Hara, through his mapping processes, wants to make his own, but one in which the repression of people because of their race or sexuality is always evident. Yet the strength of the poem is that it never settles in any one position and does not map oppressions as if they all came from the same source. The light and waspish humour keeps the poem shifting between a variety of maps, including a sketch map of contemporary literature, and where the homoerotic fantasy of the ‘silver hat’ becomes, later on in the poem, an image of wealth and success where ‘we just want to be rich/ and walk on girders in our silver hats’. The poem is as quick as the mind can think as it follows the patterns of shifting and multiple meanings. Rather than establishing simply oppositions between gay and straight, oppressor and oppressed, each with maps of the world



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that are in conflict, he charts the way that one subject position will inhabit a range of maps simultaneously. He goes ‘back to work happy at the thought’ that maybe ‘one person out of the 8,000,000 is thinking of me’, although he undercuts the happy ending with ‘possibly so’. While the movement through the poem seems ‘serial’, things happen one after the other, the manipulation of syntax, repeated motifs and the formal aspects of line length all induce a more circuitous process, in which the readers have to retrace their steps and look again at the map, and, sometimes, work out which map they are on. Maps simultaneously empower and disempower; in crude terms they provide routes through territory and ‘show the way’, but they also show others where you are. Their role in processes of imperialism and colonialism was to show the territory that could be invaded or controlled, and the mapping process was an explicit form of domination with global maps providing representations of empire, allowing the totality to be seen. In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), Fredric Jameson draws on the work of Kevin Lynch in The Image of the City (1970) to develop the idea of cognitive mapping, where the subject, overloaded with information, brings her own location into a relationship with the broader sum of global relations. It is through the process of cognitive mapping, a process that can be seen to be at work in O’Hara’s ‘Personal Poem’, that, for Jameson, the postmodern subject can reclaim a sense of agency and her own history and trajectory in a contradictory world of semiotic excess and simulation. Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life outlines the way that mapping, in the course of its development, has become increasingly divorced from embodied experience, and supports Lefebvre’s view that modernity tends to produce abstract representations of space divorced from the embodied experience of everyday life. This process has happened over time: in the course of the period marked by the birth of scientific discovery (i.e. from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century) the map has slowly disengaged itself from the itineraries that were the condition of its possibility. (Certeau 1988, p. 120)





He describes the way in which the pictorial representation of a journey, what he calls ‘historical operations’, give way to a process in which the map ‘colonizes space’ (Certeau 1988, p. 121). The production of maps is a result of the use of information which is received from previous times and results from embodied experience: ‘the data furnished by a tradition and those that came from navigators’ (p. 121). Ultimately the map becomes: a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form the tableau of a ‘state’ of geographical knowledge, [it] pushes away into its prehistory or its posterity, as if into the wings, the operations of which it is the result or necessary condition. (Certeau 1988, p. 121) The map becomes apparently timeless and conceals the processes of its production. At the same time, while a map might appear to be a spatial construct, Certeau points to how the history of its production from the movement of bodies through space can reveal information about both the mapmakers and the spaces the map represents. Jameson’s vision, which envisages the subject dislocated in the abstractions and simulation of modernity, is typically counteracted by the more celebratory approach of Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the traditional map, with its grid system forming a ‘striated space’ or a ‘sedentary space’ controlled by the state, as a ‘tracing’ or a copy of reality. The tracing is, for them, ‘tree logic’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 12) rather than rhizomatic logic; it is structural and determined: ‘its object is an unconscious that is itself representative laid out along a genetic axis and distributed within a syntagmatic structure’. The map, on the other hand: does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious The map is open and connectable within all of its dimensions; it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation. (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 12)



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For Deleuze and Guattari the map contains within itself potential ‘lines of flight’; it contains ways of escape and ways of living within the condition described by the tracing. Yet the map will always contain the tracing, which is in some ways a precondition. For Deleuze and Guattari map making is a performance involving moving over the tracing, an embodied and situated process in a specific time and place. It is a performance that can provide multiple perspectives, bring together potentially conflicting discourses, and, more importantly for Deleuze and Guattari in their aim of redefining psychoanalysis, frees up ‘blockages’ and permits flows. The psychoanalytic process results in ‘rooting shame and guilt’ and only ever making ‘tracings or photos of the unconscious’. Yet, in a process reminiscent of Lefebvre’s desire to link representations of space with representational space, and abstraction with experience, Deleuze and Guattari want to ‘Plug the tracings back into the map’ in order to bring together both structure and experience. Their ‘performance’ of map making begins to take on the characteristics of a journey; a situated and embodied movement through terrain which is located in the abstract representation of that terrain on the ‘tracing’. This is a movement that can metaphorically be linked to the process of reading; a situated and embodied performance of the text that is simultaneously located in both the structures of literary forms and the structures of language.

Charles Olson Donald Davie describes Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems as ‘geographical, rather than historical, in its focus’ (Davie 1970, p. 221) and the multiple references contained within the term ‘projective’, from the title of Olson’s influential essay ‘Projective verse’, provide a clear indication of the complexity of his response to ideas of space and processes of spatialization. In the title of the essay Olson draws out three of these references – ‘projectile’ (moving forward into the future), ‘percussive’ (as with rhythm) and ‘prospective’ (casting around), each preceded by an unclosed bracket which indicates an unfinished definition. A dictionary search reveals many more. Projective also refers to the act of throwing out or expelling, and has a further range of meanings from other disciplines, each one of which can be folded back into the processes of reading and writing





poetry. In cartography it refers to the act of drawing a map or a plan of a surface or a three-dimensional object. In architecture it refers to a feature on a building that juts out. It has an alchemic reference to throwing or casting a substance on to something to cause its transmutation. There is a psychoanalytic reference to the process of projecting feelings on to another to avoid recognizing them as one’s own, and a projective test is ‘designed to reveal unconscious elements of personality by asking a person to respond freely to words’. In mathematics, projective space is ‘a space obtained by taking a vector space of the next higher dimension, identifying all vectors which are multiples of one another and omitting the origin’ (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). This final mathematical definition sees the poem rising from the physical reality on which it is based to form its own object, yet with an infinity of intersections between the new object (the poem) and the old reality from which it is projected. It is the total of these references, and their combination of time, space, representation and calculation, which opens up the full potential range of a ‘projective’ verse. Writing the poem becomes a project with uncertain consequences, it projects from and into both space and time. In ‘Letter 10’ from The Maximus Poems, Olson speculates on the origins of Gloucester: Letter 10 on John White/ on cod, ling and poor-john on founding: was it Puritanism or was it fish? And how now, to found, with the sacred and the profane-both of them – wore out. The beak’s there. And the pectoral. The fins, for forwarding. But to do it anew, now that even fishing (Olson 1960, ‘Letter 10’) The poem moves out from the historical figure, playing on the word ‘found’ as America as a country that is literally, from a Western



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perspective, found, and that has ‘founding fathers’. The images of the birds and the fish are those of driving forward, but fishing is also the historical economic basis (the foundation) of the communities Olson goes on to name in the next section of the poem. The fishing industry has also ‘foundered’, in the same way, as Olson suggests, the idealism of ‘Puritanism’ has ‘foundered’. Olson continues in the poem to describe the production of the ‘American’ space; the arbitrariness of decisions, the incidents and coincidences that mean that a town is ‘found’ in one place rather than another. He cuts in his own history and says ‘It sat/ where my own house had been (where I am/ founded’ (Olson 1960, ‘Letter 10’). The forward thrust of the poetry, its projection, is emphasized by the shape of the poem, the last section reproduced above has its left-hand margin pushed forward as if under pressure by the ‘beak’ and the need to ‘do it anew’. The alliterative ‘f’ appears in quick succession, and then the reader has to hold on in anticipation before the final ‘f’ in ‘fishing’. In ‘Projective Verse’, Olson describes a collapse of space and time to a single point from which the process of writing the poem can begin. Like Walter Benjamin’s historical materialism which ‘cannot do without the notion of a present which is not a transition, but in which time stands still and has come to a stop’ (Benjamin 1999a, p. 254), Olson’s ‘now’, the beginning point of writing the poem, becomes ‘the practice of space in time’ (Sherman 1978, p. 108). In this structuralist construction all material is spread out in a frozen representation (like a map) before the poet, who can then select material from across times and spaces, form new combinations, and develop new and multiple meanings. In ‘Letter 10’ he collapses his own history and relationship to Gloucester, the historical events that constructed Gloucester and its ‘founding’ theology, and his anxieties and aspirations for the future based on this past, into the moment of the poem. In The Maximus Poems: Volume 3 the material for the poem ‘The Savages, or Voyages of Samuel de Champlain of Brouage’ is visually arranged in order to represent the spatial nature of the relationships between the events in the poem:





Music the night I fell down from the skies upon Cape Ann in Nineteen 65 and of the Norse so well Land of the Bacall [the scene of Cabot’s landfall] a o (Olson 1975, p. 82) George Butterick, in A Guide to the Maximus Poems of Charles Olson, traces the possible personal reference to a flight Olson took in 1965 in the phrase ‘I fell down from the skies’ (Butterick 1978, p. 586). Olson goes on to link the next three references through Newfoundland, itself ‘the scene of Cabot’s Landfall’ and, as Butterick says, the assumed place where Vikings would first land (1978, p. 581). Butterick again quotes William Saville, a citizen of Gloucester and a frequent source of material for Olson, as saying ‘The great island of Newfoundland, the scene of Cabot’s landfall, and the adjacent region appears on the earliest maps as the land of the Bacallao, the Spanish and Portuguese name for codfish’ (Butterick 1978, p. 586). The gaps on the page are indicative of the gaps in Olson’s presentation of the material, the conceptual leaps a reader must make, not least of which is rearranging Bacall and ‘a’ and ‘o’ to make Bacallao, turning iconic movie star into codfish. For Olson, space is not a production of time, although in his theoretical writings he is unable to move beyond the idea of experiencing space by stopping time. In a particularly structuralist formulation of the ‘instant’, Olson says in his essay ‘The Present is the Prologue’: My shift as I take it is that the present is prologue, not the past. The instant, therefore. Is its own interpretation, as a dream is, and any action – a poem, for example. Down with causation and yrself: you as the only reader and mover of the instant. (1997, p. 205) From this moment, the poet operates within ‘the large area of the whole poem, into the FIELD if you like, where all the syllables and all the lines must be managed in relation to each other’ (Olson 1997,



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p. 243). The ‘field’ of the poem develops from the ‘instant’, and potentially incorporates both spaces and times. In ‘Letter 15’ from the first volume of The Maximus Poems, Olson draws on his childhood memories of the story of how Nathaniel Bowditch brought a ship into Gloucester harbour in poor weather conditions (Olson 1960, ‘Letter 15’). Written in three paragraphs of prose, the story is not only the narrative of events, but also the narrative of how the story is constructed, where the materials come from and how reliable they may be. The story of the story is an integral part of the story itself. In a conversation with Paul Blackburn (Butterick 1978, p. 101), later reproduced in The Maximus Poems, Olson comes up with the following explanation of how the ‘field’ of the story is constituted: He sd, ‘You go all around the subject.’ And I sd, ‘I didn’t know it was a subject.’ He sd, ‘You twist’ and I sd ‘I do.’ He said other things. And I didn’t say anything. (Olson 1960, ‘Letter 15’) Olson’s denial of the subject suggests, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, a rhizomatic approach implicit in the poem as a ‘field’ made up of various flows or energies. Donald Byrd says in Charles Olson’s Maximus that, for Olson, ‘Fact is the geometric projection of space as it appears in the space of human consciousness’ and an ‘order which emerges [that] is analogous to the order of a map rather than the order of a scientific law or a periodic sentence’ (Byrd 1980, pp. 15, 34). It is a paratactic order of coincidence and contiguity, where facts are placed alongside each other within the field, rather than the logic of determinism and causation and a syntax of subordination to the rules of grammar or logic. The field of the poem is also, according to Byrd, ‘postrational’, and includes within it both ‘the data which can be comprehended by human rationalism but also all that human rationalism excludes as irrational, random or subjective’ (1980, p. 45). ‘Letter 157’ from Maximus Poems IV, V, VI is an example: an old Indian chief as hant sat on the rock between Tarantino’s and Mr Randazza’s and scared the piss out of Mr Randazza so he ran back into his house




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of the story told me by Mr Misuraca, that his mother, reports (Olson 1968, Letter 157) An example of the irreducibility of human experience, it is the ‘The story you could never get straight’ (Olson 1960, ‘Letter 20’). What appears to be a straightforward anecdote and a childhood memory, gets twisted around and passed between times and between speaking subjects. Olson’s poetic field does not, according to Byrd, prioritize that which can be reduced to statistical data and thereby implicitly derogate or ignore that which cannot, but seeks to include the explicable and the inexplicable. In an almost thrown-away line at the end of ‘A Bibliography for Ed Dorn’ Olson explains his political rationale for the development of his methodology ‘(and I can’t tell you where to go for it, simply that I imagine it’s a law that the real power contemporary to one is kept hidden), one damn well better guess, at least, and then try to find out, keep asking, how the money or “ownership” really keeps its hidden hands on the machinery’ (Olson 1997, p. 309). He is not merely developing a new way of representing the local, but developing poetry as a ‘spatial practice’ that, through an examination of the production of spaces, can reveal the sources of cultural, social and economic power and control.

Edward Dorn Of all the poets I consider in this book, Edward Dorn is probably the one who most neatly charts the shift from an interest in ideas of place to an interest in the constructed nature of space, and from a concern with the essential nature of places, to an understanding and critique of the alienation and dislocation of an increasingly spatialized postmodern America. An early poem from the 1960s, ‘On the debt my mother owed Sears Roebuck’, is set in rural America:



The house I live in, and exactly on the back stairs, is the sight

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Summer was dry, dry the garden our beating hearts, on that farm, dry with the rows of corn the grasshoppers came happily to strip (Dorn 1975a, p. 46) The repetition of the word ‘dry’ around ‘our beating hearts’ emphasizes the human anxiety caused by a dry summer, in contrast to the careless and relentless nature of the ‘grasshoppers’. The local perspective focuses on the domestic and family life that is the experience of living on a farm and the everyday concerns that go with it: my father coming home tired and grinning down the road, turning in is the tank full? thinking of the horse and my lazy arms thinking of the water so far below the well platform. (Dorn 1975a, p. 46) Everything that happens has happened before, and all tasks are repetitive. The physicality of the child’s life is emphasized by his thinking with his ‘lazy arms’, as if to suggest that there is not much to think about with the mind. The family’s link to the outside world is via the ‘sears roebuck’ catalogue, to which they are perpetually in debt: On the debt my mother owed to sears roebuck we brooded and man’s ways winged their way to her through the mail saying so much per month so many months, this is yours, take it take it, take it, take it (Dorn 1975a, p. 46) The poem’s perspective shifts to the mother as the centre of that world of the farm, for whom the land is known but ‘vague’, her domestic position as ‘part of that stay at home army’ compared to the





fields where ‘tractors chugged, pulling harrows/ pulling discs, pulling great yields from the earth for the armies in two hemispheres’ (Dorn 1975a, p. 47). The mother is therefore both representative of the woman who feeds and looks after the family, but also metaphorically connected to the farms in their role of feeding the distant army. The farm itself becomes a predominantly feminine space. However, for all her role as the ‘heart’ of the family, she is also the one who connects to the outside world through commodity capitalism. Through the woman, the family and farm are located within global economic relationships through the Sears Roebuck catalogue. Through her desire for new goods and, to take part in ‘man’s ways’ and become more involved in what is advertised as normal social life, they are held within the mesh of commodity capitalism and systems of finance. There are other connections, the land produces ‘pulse for the armies in two hemispheres’, a reference to the Second World War – the word ‘pulse’ referring to both the idea of the beating heart earlier in the poem and to the crop itself. These broader concerns with space and geography are further developed in Dorn’s longer poem, Idaho Out, first published by Fulcrum Press as a chapbook in 1965. The poem has a preface: History has always seemed to me lying right on the table, forgetful of age, or not present at all. And geography is not what’s under your foot, that’s simply the ground. Idaho and Montana are political assumptions surveyed from what was at one time the apple of someone’s eye. The name never was more than a sign of appropriation, and most people still don’t know where it is or what it looks like. A poem about such a place is equally arbitrary and no more apt to confirm it. (Dorn 1965, Preface) Dorn is developing two concepts in this preface. The first is a recasting of history as Walter Benjamin’s ‘present in which time stands still’, a process that brings space and time together in moments of spacetime within which the historical make up of the landscape can be studied and, by implication, ‘properly’ understood. The second is the political significance of the arbitrary relationship between names (in this case Idaho and Montana) and that to which the names might refer. The implication is that language, of which poetry is one



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form, is a political construct that also plays its part in constructing notions of an experience of the real world. His conception of place, however, still lies to some extent within the tradition of a ‘poetics of place’ and the prefatory quotation from Carl Sauer states that the ‘natural landscape becomes known through the totality of its forms’ (Dorn 1965). The poem itself avoids any such conclusions, and contests meaning by moving between positions. The different perspectives adopted in the poem confirm the pivotal position of this poem in Dorn’s life-work. It shows him moving from what is, in geographical terms and articulated by the cultural geographer Linda McDowell, a ‘scientific, rational, view of space’, to ‘an idea of space that is experienced or imagined’ (McDowell 1994, p. 153), in later works such as Slinger, Hello, La Jolla and Yellow Lola. Idaho Out moves between these perspectives: in some ways it follows Sauer’s interests ‘in the ways in which people left their imprints on the landscape through their productive activities and their settlements’ (McDowell 1994, p. 149), while in other ways it points the way forward to a use of landscape in the poem which acknowledges ‘contested and dissenting meanings, and that knowledge itself is provisional and contested’ (p. 151). This is a difference which McDowell refers to as ‘the key feature that distinguishes the ‘new’ cultural geographer from the Sauerians’ (p. 151), a difference which echoes Massey’s distinction between structuralist and post-structuralist approaches to space. Sauerian analysis requires a ‘proper’ position from which all information can be examined and analysed; later studies both suggest that such a position is impossible and include the observer in the landscape. Dorn, in Idaho Out, does both. The poem begins with a direct reference to Sauer’s work in ‘The Morphology of the Landscape’, first published in 1925; ‘Since 1925 there are now no/ negative areas he has ignored’ (all following quotations are from Dorn 1965, no page numbers), reinforcing the idea of knowing landscape through the ‘totality of its forms’. The position of the viewer is ‘hopefully Ariel’, a reference to the Shakespearian character from The Tempest, who is both mischievous and ubiquitous, able to cross distances in an instant and to change shapes at will; to ‘aerial’, being of the air; and the aerial as a receiver of messages. It is a ‘bird’s eye view’, although one which is clouded by the pollution from the ‘black and red simplot fertilizer smoke’ which ‘drifts its excremental way’. The perspective changes as the viewer closes in





‘past the low rooves’ and ‘in it more quickly/ than its known forms allow’. The poem continues in typical Sauerian fashion to describe the various features of the landscape and the ways in which human activity has left its mark through the ‘flour makers [who] turn the sides of the citizen’s hills into square documents’, and the way in which the nature of the landscape had affected the passage of people through it: ‘From this valley/ there is no leaving by laterals’. Yet Dorn links both history and geography by distinguishing between the ‘pre-communication/ westerner/ [who] travelled in local segments/ along a line of time/ utterly sequestered’ and the ironically addressed ‘ indian friends/ [who] signalled one another over his head’. The ‘westerner’ has no knowledge of the broader context of the country through which they are travelling, and reminds me of the story Donald Wesling tells of Dorn unrolling a map of the United States criss-crossed with railroads to a group of students and saying ‘this is our area’. This has an up-to-date corollary. Systems of broadband Internet via radio waves are being established, a similar system to the ones used by mobile telephones. Such a system doesn’t have to follow the same routes as other communication methods. Cablebased systems often followed the road, which had in turn followed the railway line, and often followed the river at the bottom of the valley. Radio-based systems, like the signals of the American Indians, are capable of operating across the valley systems, of establishing the ‘laterals’ Dorn refers to earlier in the poem. The narrative of the poem, and it is a road narrative, begins on the fourth page, following the extensive preamble, when the narrator steps out of the poem to greet the reader: ‘But I was escorting you out of Pocatello.’ Yet, despite locating the reader in Pocatello, the journey has still not really begun; we are still only going ‘sort of north’ and ‘Perhaps past the arco desert’. These are real places, and the Arco desert was used as a nuclear dumping ground, the Bitteroot is a mountain range and Inkom a town with a current population of some 738. As the poem develops, however, the journey does settle down, and it can be traced on a map with little difficulty, a process that turns Dorn’s apparently descriptive phrase ‘lost trail pass’ into the place name ‘Lost Trail Pass’. By leaving out the capitalization Dorn relocates the name into the landscape and shows how the names originated; a process he also carries out through the anecdote from the Lemhi farmer about the ‘soil content of the bitteroot’ which made



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cows ‘skinnier’. In one way, therefore, Dorn suggests he is showing us the authentic landscape, a landscape from before the process of naming and the human impact on the landscape. He is doing this through a process of gathering together a range of data, from processes of research and from observation, combining ‘local’ knowledge in the form of anecdotes, historical accounts such as that of the ‘explorers’ Lewis and Clark, and the geological in his description of the Arco desert as a ‘physiographic menace’ where shifting tectonic plates could reveal the buried nuclear waste. All these activities can be contained within a Sauerian landscape analysis. Where the poem hints at Dorn’s future work, in Slinger in particular, is in the way the narrator of the poem slips in and out, sometimes directly addressing the reader in order to lead her through the poem and the landscape. If, in Idaho Out, Dorn is describing the construction of places by drawing on the idea of the areal as the study of the spatial distribution of, and relationships between, physical and human phenomena, in his book-length poem Slinger (1975b), he moves out of the physical landscape into a mental landscape. In Slinger, begun some four years later than Idaho Out in 1969 but not finished until 1975, the geography is conceptual rather than actual. The action takes place on a ‘stage’ (a stage coach) on which the actors (a cowboy, a dance-hall madam, a poet-singer and a stoned horse) perform their roles. The ‘I’ of Idaho Out, the narrator leading the reader through the landscape, is replaced by an ‘I’ who doesn’t know what is going on, and who dies only to come back to life when drip-fed five gallons of LSD. There are precursors of the extended hip narrative of Slinger in Idaho Out, particularly where the narrator directly addresses the reader in ‘But I was escorting you out of Pocatello,/ sort of North’ (Dorn 1965), but where Idaho Out is rooted in the physical geography of the American West, Slinger is performed within an intellectual universe driven by the imagination: This is your domain. Is it the domicile it looks to be or simply a retinal block of seats in, he will flip the phrase the theatre of impatience. (Dorn 1975b)





When the horse is asked how far it is from Mesilla to Vegas he replies ‘Across/ two states/ of mind’. The preface to Section 111 contrasts ‘The inside real and the outsidereal’: inner space to outer space. In an interview with Roy Okada, Dorn refers to ‘a terrain of the mind’, and later on to Slinger as a ‘psychological drama’ (Dorn [1980], pp. 39, 49). In a discussion with Robert Bertholf he says, ‘I am talking about the form of Gunslinger in a way not being arbitrary, but registering just under the fact about society at large’ ([1980], p. 63). In the development from Idaho Out to Slinger, Dorn shifts from an interest in locale, the physical landscape that confronts him and the relationship between that landscape, the words he uses and the poetic forms he constructs, to the far more deeply spatialized and synchronous structure of Slinger. Michael Davidson in ‘ “To Eliminate the Draw”: Narrative and Language in Slinger’, comments: According to Dorn the local has been lost: in its place is a variable fiction created by global capitalism and manipulable by those few who have the cunning and will to use it. The central recognition in these poems is that man has become a function of a series of signs, dispersed from distant data banks. (Davidson 1985, p. 115–16) This is a critical shift in the relationship between the ‘free’ individual who travels through America, as if it was a space waiting for something to happen, and the way the individual is produced by the space. The space of America is now colonized, not by European culture, but by global capitalism. The subject, the free agent of the American Dream, is now reduced to a sign on a series of overlapping maps. Later in the same article Michael Davidson says: The space of the poem is the West in its largest sense. Not only is it the West created by television and the movies; it is also the West of exploration and exploitation. (1985, p. 118) In Idaho Out, Dorn is describing the construction of places, in Slinger he is using the construction of a psychological or intellectual space to underpin the form of the poem, as well as using the character of



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the Slinger to shoot holes in the simulacra produced by the ‘distant data banks’. Dorn unfailingly describes Slinger in terms of a narrative poem yet there is no internal temporal structure; most of the time of the poem is outside time. The roads on which the stage travels are not the roads on which everyone else travels, and the travellers never arrive at their destination. The journey in Idaho Out can be traced on a map; to trace the journey in Slinger requires not just a road map, but a series of overlapping sets of cultural, philosophical, linguistic and ideological maps. Dorn’s later work is similarly outside of any particular location. In his book Hello, La Jolla from 1978, the poems are written ‘on the hoof’, the Preface comparing their medium of transmission to the Pony Express. In the prefatory poem he says: A poet’s occupation is to compose poetry The writing of it is everywhere (Dorn 1978, Preface) He has gone from writing a poetry of the places which make up America, as in ‘On the Debt ’ and the concrete geographical and geological forms of Idaho Out, to a poetry of a spatialized America. He tunes into the media-borne messages of that space, and is both critical of the spatialization of America and the resultant homogeneity of experience and processes of commodification, as well as documenting the impact of the process on people and the places they inhabit on a day-to-day basis. In the poem ‘The Upwardly Mobile and the Backs which Provide the Ladder’, he says: Isn’t it ghastly the way they’ve pilfered from the workmanship. They took the sprouts right out of his mouth and gave him a quick rigidly compartmentalized dinner (Dorn 1978, p. 20)





The opening line mimics the tones of the ‘upwardly mobile’. The whole poem is a commentary on the impact of people losing their place and their relationship with what they produce to be replaced by the consumption of a commodity from which the traces of its origin have been removed. The final section of Hello, La Jolla is entitled ‘One O One, that great Zero/ Resting eternally between parallels’. They are poems written while driving, as explained in the Preface: The IOI section was written one hand tied to the steering wheel, driving. I mention this not to demonstrate that writing is still capable of illegality, but that it is necessary beyond considerations of place and time. (Dorn 1978, p. 75) Being on the road is to be between places. The interstate service station is the epitome of a non-place, its products unrelated to the locale and shipped in from outside. The driver’s view is locked on to the road ahead and the only entertainment is that which comes over the airwaves; the driver becomes a ‘zero’ between the parallel sides of the road. Villages and towns are by-passed and everywhere becomes like everywhere else. While on the road Dorn is ‘beyond considerations of time and place’, so he creates poems which are mosaics of the bits and pieces he comes across, hears on the radio, remembered fragments of news and the occasional road sign. He even entitles one poem ‘A Sense of Place’: I’d live on the Moon if the commute were a little less. (Dorn 1978, p. 81) He confirms the view of the world from the road as ‘like/ a chicken farm’ (p. Dorn 1978, 82). The traveller/poet as the ‘great zero between parallels’ becomes emptied out of reference, and it is on the road,



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between places, that Dorn confronts the ‘spatial’ practices that construct American culture. In these poems from the late 1970s Dorn is still on the road, but in the space of two decades has travelled a long way from the child in ‘On the Debt ’ who watches his father coming down the road after a day in the fields. The work of these poets demonstrates the increasing process of spatialization in post-war America. Dorn’s early work has an intense focus on place, before moving towards poems that explore the ways in which space is produced, populations are ‘dislocated’ and the local is invaded by the global. His work from the 1970s onwards is increasingly critical of the role of international capital, the ways in which power is imposed and sustained and the imperialist ambitions of new world orders. His work becomes decentred, moving beyond the organizing principles of the lyric self to produce work that is increasingly rhizomatic and is organized spatially rather than by cause and effect, and that, freed from recycling the past, his position in the world becomes increasingly nomadic; between places rather than stuck within them. I am not suggesting that this process is entirely positive; none of these poets has a sentimental approach to place, and none of them looks back to a golden age when self and place were organically and harmoniously linked. On the other hand neither do they uncritically enjoy the benefits of a global consumer society. What they are trying to do is develop new and different relationships between the self and the world that neither ignore nor embrace what is happening around them. The increasing complexity of the relationship to place as the world became increasingly ‘global’ is reflected in the complexity of the poetry. With the loss of the lyric ‘I’ to guide the reader the poems become a more ‘representational space’, a lived experience within which knowledge is embodied and situated, rather than a representation of space from a particular perspective, The aesthetic becomes that of contiguity of coincidence, reflected in an increasing experimentation with the visual form of the poem (see Chapter 6, on visual poetry).




Histories of Selves: Space, Identity and Subjectivity

Histories and space The objectivist concern with placing experience within its context provides some indications earlier on in the twentieth century of the kind of poetry that might emerge from reconfigurations of time and place. The process of contextualization dissolves notions of figure and ground that identify ground as space and in a supporting role to the figure as time. In his essay ‘An Objective’, Louis Zukofsky describes the role of context in poetry: A poem. Also the materials which are outside (?) the veins and capillaries – The context – The context necessarily dealing with a world outside of it – The desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars – A desire to place everything – everything aptly, perfectly, belonging within, one with, a context.– A poem. The context based on a world – The desire for inclusiveness – The desire for an inclusive object. (Zukofsky 1981, p. 15) The poem is constructed through the inclusion of context not its exclusion, and through an engaged and embodied involvement in the world and everyday life rather than isolation from it. Figure and ground merge, as do time and space. In the long poem Paterson (1963a), William Carlos Williams, closely associated with 80



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the Objectivists, is trying to write a poem that explores the origins of the town of the same name, the composition of the community and how it relates to its own history and to contemporary others. Williams’s attitude towards history echoes that of Walter Benjamin who says that: A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing between major and minor ones acts in accordance with the following truth: nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history. (Benjamin 1999a, p. 256) It is in the ‘remainder’, the bits and pieces of his own life and the lives of others, that Williams finds the information he uses to make the poem. The process of constructing the poem (out of ‘particulars’), his desire to be inclusive and his organization of the material through processes of coincidence and contiguity as much as any other principle, results in a poem which, in comparison to more ordered ‘verse’, lacks a defined centre. Moveless he envies the men that ran and could run off toward the peripheriesto other centres, directfor clarity (if they found it) loveliness and authority in the world (Williams 1963a, p. 36) The perspective of the poem towards its materials is located in the processes of its construction and the forms those processes produce. It is a particular and inclusive local perspective, which emerges through collapsing the distinctions between margins and centres, although with a residual longing for the clarity such distinctions bring. Authority for Williams is in the local, and in the particulars that exist within the local, rather than in abstract ‘authority’, an



Space, Identity and Subjectivity


approach that led the critic Edward Dahlberg to refer to Paterson as ‘lawless art’ (Dahlberg 1964, p. 24). In Benjamin’s terms Williams uses a constructive and creative process that combines a variety of histories into the poem and not a historicism that ‘contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history’ (Benjamin 1999a, p. 255). In Lefebvre’s terms, Williams’s aim often appears to be that of reclaiming concrete space, the space of intimate lives, family histories, everyday events, from its colonization by the abstract space of commodification, an abstract space that connects places but is never rooted in one locale. The poem itself becomes a ‘present’ in which the local and the nonlocal, informal and formal, and personal and public collide. He is describing the social production of space where ‘space is not a thing among other things, nor a product among other products: rather it subsumes things produced, and encompasses their interrelationships in their coexistence and their simultaneity’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 73). Williams’s relationship to history and tradition is complex and is reflected in both his choice of materials for the poem and its formal concerns. He would agree with Walter Benjamin when he says, ‘Every attempt must be made to wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower it’ (Benjamin 1999a, p. 247). Williams wants to ‘make it new’ and says in his autobiography, reproduced in the ‘Author’s Note’ to Paterson: He [Whitman] always said that his poems, which had broken the dominance of the iambic pentameter in English prosody, had only begun his theme. I agree. It is up to us, in the new dialect, to continue it by a new construction upon the syllables. (Williams 1963a, author’s note) Perhaps Williams’s attitude towards tradition is best located in the movement from a modernism which represented the ‘shattering of formal conventions as an expression of the disintegration of traditional values’ (Gelpi 1990), towards a post-modernism which that fragmentation anticipated. Yet Paterson is also a poem shot through with the idea of loss; the loss of surety and of certain ethical, political and aesthetic positions. It simultaneously mourns the loss of contact with nature, and



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Divorce is the sign of knowledge in our time, divorce! divorce! (Williams 1963a, p. 18) He begins ‘The Library’, the first section of ‘Book 3’, with a more complex assertion that relates the imposition of monetary value on the private experience of perception: I love the locust tree the sweet white locust How much? How much? How much does it cost to love the locust tree in bloom (Williams 1963a, p. 95) The loss is a recognition that while the process of the production of America is energizing and liberating, and a process that Williams is very much part of in his desire to write ‘American’ poetry, it is also part of the process of commodification. Ultimately this is deeply individualizing; if Williams’s project in Paterson was, in part, to make public the historical and spatial production of the town, the process of commodification returns it to the private, making it part of the development of individual, rather than community identity. The spatialization implicit in Williams’s poetic processes, that of combining a variety of perspectives in one space in order to develop and demonstrate connections, is challenged by David Harvey when, in The Condition of Postmodernity, he explores the relationship between representation, time and space. He claims that: ‘Aesthetic theory is deeply concerned with the ‘spatialization of time’ (Harvey 1990, p. 205). Taking as his examples the architect who creates space and the writer who uses the written word to ‘abstract[s] properties from the flux of experience and fix[es] them in spatial



the security of tradition, while recognizing that tradition limits and circumscribes. In Section 2 of Paterson ‘Book 1’ he says:


form’ (p. 206), he concludes that: ‘Any system of representation is a spatialization of sorts which automatically freezes the flow of experience and in so doing distorts what it tries to represent’ (p. 206). Paterson, in its collage of materials from across space and time, can be seen as a process of ‘freezing time’ through its method of combining materials from a range of contemporary and historical events. If I am arguing for a notion of space that is dynamic and multilayered, with endless unpredictable connections and trajectories, the link between space and representation made by Harvey is problematic. It makes forms of representation, and poetry is one, into a closed system where each stopped moment, each slice through time, becomes a structure which seeks to explain itself. This is an approach well represented and better illustrated in shorter modern and contemporary lyric poetry, and particularly those poems that specifically draw on the concept of ‘epiphany’, whereby the poem contains a ‘moment of truth’ arising from a sudden revelation or insight. In Seamus Heaney’s poem from the late 1970s about the Irish troubles, ‘The Toome Road’ (Tuma 2001, p. 667), the poem’s narrator, an unidentified ‘I’, meets a convoy of armoured cars. This encounter is then related to the immediate surroundings in which ‘a whole country was sleeping’, and its constituent parts are ‘fields, cattle in my keeping,/ Tractors hitched to buckrakes in open sheds,/ Silos, chill gates, wet slates, the greens and reds/ Of outhouse roofs.’ The narrator is frozen through indecision, although thinking that some movement is necessary, before realizing that despite the passing of the ‘powerful tyres’ of the armoured cars, the ‘omphalos’, the still essential centre of the world, although invisible, remains ‘untoppled’. There is movement, but it is all seen from one perspective. It is a notion of ‘stopped time’, of the ‘still centre’ and of ‘living in the now’ and the poem relates a moment of complete awareness, in which connections that otherwise remain hidden are suddenly made. For the reader, at least one familiar with events in Northern Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century, the poem offers an explanation of itself. Doreen Massey, on the other hand, argues that although often characterized in this way, representation is not necessarily a process of spatialization that produces closed and static spaces. She refers to the way in which the relationship between space and representation



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is frequently characterized: ‘Representation is seen to take on aspects of spatialization in the latter’s action of setting things down side by side; of laying them out as a discrete simultaneity. But representation is also, in this argument understood as fixing things, taking the time out of them’ (Massey 2005, p. 23). As a result, space develops the ‘character of a discrete multiplicity, and the character of stasis’, as in Heaney’s retreat to the still centre of the ‘omphalos’. There are also values attached to this process; ‘hold[ing] the world still in order to look at it in cross section connects with ideas of structure and system, of distance and the all seeing eye, of totality and completeness, of the relation between synchrony and space’ (Massey 2005, p. 36). The problem is not so much the perspective, or the maligned ‘view from above’, but the assumption that the view from above reveals some objective truth, which is also the whole truth. Massey relates these assumed connections to the foregrounding of synchrony in the development of structuralism. Her argument is that although the systems produced and exposed by processes of structuralist analysis were often given the characteristics of spaces, of frozen time, this was more a consequence of a desire to attack the dominance of narrative, of things happening in sequences of time, rather than saying anything of interest about space; it was against time rather than for space. Maintaining an unquestioned link between representation and space, although emphasizing the spatial, can result in space which in Foucault’s critique is still ‘the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile’ (see Massey 2005, p. 49). Space is still ‘in the realm of closure’ (p. 38), a closure that: robs ‘the spatial’ of one of its potentially disruptive characteristics: precisely its juxtaposition, its happenstance arrangementin-relation-to-each-other, of previously unconnected narratives/temporalities; its openness and its condition of always being made. (Massey 2005, p. 39) Tom Raworth, in a 14-line piece beginning ‘in black tunics middle aged’ from the poem sequence ‘Eternal Sections’ (Tuma 2001, p. 618), produces a poetry which seems to avoid a sense of closure. It has a theme running through it, the theme of normalizing behaviour as both related to growing older and in commercial contexts, in





other words the ways in which the ‘system’ demands that people behave in particular ways in order for it to function effectively. The poem begins ‘in black tunics middle aged/ in the stationery store’. It provides a location and suggests figures in that location, figures that are dressed in ways that have military or religious connections. It continues ‘every gesture, even/ food: to it’; with an apparent break in the paradigmatic chain between ‘even’ and ‘food’. Yet through this unexpected shift, Raworth opens up the kind of fault line in the poem that allows it to stay open to the play of multiple meanings. Through the use of the line break every gesture is ‘even’, as in even-handed or smooth, yet the gesture is also related to food, and the gestural and normative acts related to the production, preparation and consumption of food are some of the most ingrained habits in any culture, ranging in application from the holy sacrament to the habitual and regionally specific behaviour described by Michel de Certeau in his studies of everyday life in Paris. The next line, ‘thought which breaks’, makes for ‘food for thought’ and leads on to ‘breaks stereotypes’. The poem therefore links time and space through the horizontal plane, the reading surface of the poem, with its sequence of overlapping links. As a reader you go one way then get doubled up, have to track back and see where the links might be. Yet the poem also pulls you up short at individual words – and ‘food’ is a good example – and encourages the reader to draw on links from outside the poem. The word food becomes a slice through the poem, linking to other words related to food and ideas related to food. The poem uses lines which are discrete units such as: thought which breaks stereotypes which constitute extenuated to the point and lines which run on such as: the history of our own stiffness of manner no longer aligned to create a fractured structure of comments, impressions and observations which, while related to the ‘theme’, do so in oblique ways.



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This is not to say it is simply a kind of cubist poetry; if that was the case it would retain the characteristics of closure Massey refers to above, operating through a process of ‘discrete multiplicity’ as a series of stopped points and simply exchanging the ‘view from above’ for the view from a variety of perspectives. The poetry is rather an open network of language with multiple linkage points to other language and to the flux of experience. It is rhizomatic. That is, to some extent, true of all poems of course, and of all language, but the difference between the Heaney and the Raworth is that Heaney is seeking to represent the moment of illumination when the scene, lit from above, reveals its meaning through the combination of its elements from a single, authoritative perspective and in a single moment. Raworth is writing a poetry where words and lines sometimes seem to lead off into nowhere, or the link between one line and the next is neither obviously syntagmatic or paradigmatic, but from contiguity (see Lines 2–5 in the above quotation). It is a poem which has no single perspective and more than one direction, sometimes seeming to lead off from the end of the line and sometimes seeming to link back to an earlier assertion or suggestion. It is a poem within which differences coexist and remain unresolved. The poem has a theme, but crucially it is not a theme into which all elements of the poem can be collapsed, which is itself a discussion of normative practices and the ways in which they both include and exclude. In one way, Raworth could be seen as creating a kind of depthless post-modern surface, the very kind of representation Massey describes as lifeless. Yet, by drawing on referential depth and the creation of three-dimensional texts with a variety of possible futures, Raworth injects time into the poem, producing a text that has ‘multiple trajectories’ with ‘multiplicities of imaginations, theorizations, understandings, meanings’ (Massey 2005, p. 89). If the poem is a space it is now the ‘sphere of a dynamic simultaneity, constantly disconnected by new arrivals, constantly waiting to be determined (and therefore always undetermined) by the construction of new relations. It is always being made, and always therefore, in a sense, unfinished’ (Massey 2005, p. 107). For Massey a slice through time would not produce a map of the moment but would be ‘full of holes, of disconnections, of tentative half formed first encounters’ (p. 107). This is, crucially, Massey’s first representation in the form of an image of her dynamic concept of space-time. It is not a moment, as





Benjamin envisaged in the ‘monad’ or in the Heaney poem, or even a series of individual moments stacked up one after each other in a kind of ‘flicker-book’ version of history, or like Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’ where the movement becomes a series of stills, but moments that are linked and connected both horizontally, through space, and vertically through time. For Massey ‘there are always connections yet to be made, juxtapositions yet to flower into interaction, or not, potential links which may never be established. Loose ends and ongoing stories’ (p. 107). In this conceptualization of space it ‘can never be that completed simultaneity in which all interconnections have been established’ (p. 107). It is hard to think of a better description of the Raworth poem and in this configuration of space and time the distinctions between centres and margins, figure and ground, and events and their locations, dissolve into a series of relationships. This is not, however, the depthless present of post-modernism, but a reconfiguration which acknowledges interconnectedness, and contains within itself the means of its own deconstruction. Power structures are revealed as much as concealed and normative assumptions questioned through processes of coincidence and juxtaposition.



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Space, Place and Identity

If identity is pragmatically linked to our place of origin and of residence, language, ethnicity, gender and sexuality, then in recent years identities have become more fluid and impermanent as the world’s population becomes more mobile and as our experiences decreasingly take place, through information and communication technologies, in the places where the self is present. Recent critical theory has explored the relationship between the idea of an essential identity and one explained by its relationship to others. Gender, sexuality, age, and ethnic and national identity amongst others are said to be a series of constructed or performed rather than inherent characteristics. A relative and non-essential notion of identity is mirrored in contemporary notions of place as expressed by Massey and others. A place is identified through its relationship to other places and, as a consequence, is unstable. It will shift under different pressures, change from different perspectives and respond to different contexts. Identity in literary works is similarly problematized. Terry Eagleton talks about the way in which, after structuralism, ‘The confident bourgeois belief that the isolated individual was the fount of all meaning has taken a sharp knock’ (Eagleton 1996, p. 93). Bob Perelman refers to ‘The lyric I of the voice poem’ as ‘a prime object of attack in early L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing theory and practice’ (Perelman 1996, p. 109). Somewhat more ironically Rae Armantrout refers to ‘the stifled yawn’ which greets yet another discussion of ‘the speaking subject in contemporary poetry’ (Armantrout 1999, p. 43) in her essay on Fanny Howe’s poem ‘Q’ in A Folio for Fanny Howe (Green 1999). 89



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For some writers explorations of the relationship between ideas of an essential and performed or constructed identity inform both the form and the content of the poetry and the idea of language as a form of self-expression. The more spatial practices of ‘language’ writing, for example, draw on a poetics of form that denies notions of identity as unproblematically expressed through language, and resists final interpretation and closure through an exploration of concepts of deferred meaning and signification, and through an examination of the social function of the language system. In his essay ‘Writing Social Work and Political Practice’, Bruce Andrews echoes Burroughs on the ‘cut-up’ when he refers to the way in which, in language writing ‘the poetics would be those of subversion: an anti-systemic detonation of settled relations, an anarchic liberation of energy flows. Such flows are thought to exist underneath and independent from the system of language. That system entraps them in codes and grammar’ (Andrews and Bernstein 1984, p. 134). Yet in denying the expressive norms of the language system, practices that support local and regional identities, they could be said to embrace those same spatializing processes that support global capitalism, processes of flushing out historical and local meaning through a process of homogenization. The poet Jeremy Prynne, in a letter to the Canadian poet Steve McCaffery, also questions the illusion of freedom that might result from the process of deconstructing the language system: But in the political question of reference to a world in which social action is represented linguistically and its consequences marked out by economic function and personal access to social goods the ludic syntax of a language system is mapped on to determinations and coercions which by invasion cast their weights and shadows parasitically into the playing fields. I do not believe that freedom from this aspect of the social order is more than illusory No free signifiers: no unvalorized process: no free lunch. (Prynne 2000, p. 41) However playfully or procedurally the writer tries to divert the ‘weights and shadows’ cast by the social usage of language in order to create writing free of the ‘social order’, they still get through. The



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subject may, in part, be the subject of language, but deconstructing the language does not liberate the subject. The subject, writer or reader, performs their identity within the constrictions of those ‘weights and shadows’. In ‘Lure, 1963’ Denise Riley uses a series of cultural references, drawn from the fashion industry and popular songs, to locate and identify herself: Navy near-black cut in with lemon, fruity bright lime green. I roam around around around around acidic yellows, globe oranges burning, slashed cream, huge scarlet flowing anemones barbaric pink singing, radiant weeping When will I be loved? (Caddel and Quartermain 1999, p. 211) She performs her gender within ideologically produced sexualities, where the ‘I’ in the poem is both subject and object. As a ‘lure’ she is dressing herself in bright colours to attract others, in the same way that a fisherman will attach coloured feathers to a hook to make a ‘lure’ for fish. Her expressions of romantic love are constructed via the language of pop songs that are collaged in the poem, a process that provides a critical distance for the examination of her own experience. She is testing herself out against the world, the songs suggest, getting a sense of her identity by comparing it with others in a series of relationships. There is no sense for Riley that representation through language is an undistorted process of self-expression. The ‘I’s in the extract above are both those that are in the pop songs, and the person that is wearing the ‘Navy near-black ’ yet, as Prynne points out, there is no sense that the deconstructive process of examining her own cultural production will free her ‘self’ from those ‘weights and shadows’. Judith Butler is similarly ambivalent about the relationship between language and identity when she says: I do not believe that poststructuralism entails the death of autobiographical writing, but it draws attention to the difficulty of the ‘I’ to express itself through the language that is available to it. For this ‘I’ that you read is in part a consequence of the grammar that



Space and Identity


governs the availability of persons in language. I am not outside the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by the language that makes this ‘I’ possible. This is the bind of selfexpression, as I understand it. (Butler 1999, p. xxiv) It is this tension, between language as a means of self-expression, the self as a construct of language, and the poem as a constructed object with an existence independent of the author that provides a framework of ideas within which contemporary poetry operates. This is a framework that brings together ideas of authorship, of the lyric self and of the poem as ‘construct’, ideas of the space of the self and the space of the text. Some familiar theoretical texts from the middle of the twentieth century develop a relationship between writing, space and the self as author. Roland Barthes in ‘Death of the Author’ refers to writing as ‘that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’ (Barthes 1984, p. 142). For Barthes, as it is for Lefebvre and later Foucault, it is the body in the performative act of writing, the physical act of writing itself in a specific time and place, which produces a positive space. Once written, the text becomes ‘neutral’ and ‘negative’, an abstraction only brought back to life by the performative act of reading. But while the writing may begin with the self in a particular time and place, that process, too, involves others; writing is not ‘original’ but intertextual: We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. (Barthes 1984, p. 146) Writing and reading may involve the situated embodiment of the text, but they are not solitary activities and are more complex processes involving each text in a network of relationships with other texts. Foucault picks up on Barthes’s reference to negative space when in ‘What is an Author’ he says:



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It is not enough to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. Instead we must locate the space left empty follow the distribution of gaps and branches, watch for the openings. (Foucault 1991, p. 118) For Foucault the ‘death of the author’ has not resulted in a closed ‘negative’ but opened up a range of possibilities, a series of gaps within the text where each one provides a potential for ‘travelling’ through the text in different directions. Pierre Joris, in his essay ‘Notes Toward a Nomadic Poetics’, develops the idea of a relationship between identity and language that is in a constant state of assembling, dissembling and reassembling through the analogy of travel, producing poetry that is always on the move and resisting location and a fixed identity. He celebrates the multifaceted, the endless idiolects within any structure of language and, drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of the nomad and the rhizome, asserts that all languages are foreign to people without a place, and that poets need to free themselves from the ‘prison house of the mother tongue’ by adopting a multilingualism: A nomadic poetics will cross languages, not just translate. But write in all or any of them it is essential now to push this matter further, again, not as ‘collage’ but as a material flux of language matter, moving in and out of semantic and non-semantic spaces a lingo-cubism. (Joris 2003, p. 38) He goes on to discuss the matter of identity in poetry more directly: Barthes’ doleful sense that ‘the author is dead’. Were it so that would only transcendentalize him or her, for who else is god but the dead author, deus absconditus? What has happened is that the author has multiplied, has lost its, his her identity as singular subject We now have to say ‘I is many others’. A nomadic poetics will thus explore ways in which to make – and think about – a poetry that takes into account not only the manifold of languages and locations but also of selves each one of us is constantly becoming. (Joris 2003, p. 43)



Space and Identity


The nomadic, and its metaphoric representation as rhizomatic, exists between space and place and combines both, and Joris proposes an aesthetic not of collage, but of the rhizome – a root system that follows its own way and many other possible ways, a system that is connected but not a closed circuit. All three writers use spatial metaphors to describe the relationship between a text and its author. For Barthes the shift is from the serial linear text, issuing from the point of the author’s pen, to a multi-dimensional space. Foucault perceives the possibility of metaphorically entering that space, as readers, to hook up to the different possibilities now that the authoritative meaning has been removed. Joris invokes a more organic metaphor of following a root system, moving in and out of semantic and non-semantic spaces. What they also have in common is the idea that one can get inside a text, become part of it and, by extension, as readers, constructors of an individual text within the many possibilities that both its spatial construction and a spatial reading can bring. It is as if the author has been disconnected from the many power points of the text which hang, fizzing in the air, for the reader to come along and plug themselves into, in an endless number of different combinations. Works like that of Tom Raworth’s ‘All Fours’ have a variety of apparent perspectives, making any link with a stable identity, or time or a place arbitrary and transitory: though it might have been chronic around his neck and shoulders filled with thick high weeds the road was lined with stone almost entranced she started ordering quantities of everything down the windows of your station combed and perfectly normal bees through blood and perhaps night air while we rode back followed him to the front porch and the chimney bricks were fallen (Raworth 2003, p. 456)



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The first three stanzas have three different pronouns as their object or subject. The poem does not inexorably narrow down the possible meanings of words and phrases but sets up innumerable new ‘offshoots’, each one containing a variety of possibilities. The ‘I’ within the poem is not simply fragmented but seems to keep appearing and reappearing in a different guise, often referred to in the third person. A sense of place is similarly difficult to identify, despite the architectural references. The title seems to refer to the form of the poem and that it is written in four-lined stanzas (an earlier publication had a cover on which there were 16 collages arranged into a square). It could also be an extended joke running on from the title of another collection, Tottering State, where the adult is reduced to the level of the baby on ‘all fours’, a reading reinforced by a later part of the poem where there is reference to ‘a lovely little thing with eyes/ / shambling on ’ (Raworth 2003, p. 456). The poem also contains numerous references to a building, suggesting ‘four walls’. All these references remain possibilities within the poem, but the relationship between the population of the poem and its geography are never resolved. The ‘blown cell with a dusty bulb’ in the final stanza seems to indicate both a point of origin for the poem, as if the order of the material is the order of memory, and the origin of the poem as the dusty cell, until that meaning is destabilized by the next line in which ‘an instant to blank shining glass’ (p. 456) suggests the cell might be the cell of a flash bulb for a camera, and the instant a moment amongst others. Sometimes it seems as if there is either no self at all in the poem, or too many potential selves. Another Raworth poem from the 1990s appears to have the self written out of it, whether in the first person or as a third-person character. It is a poetry that lacks consistent names or pronouns, such as the poem ‘UNABLE TO CREATE CARRIER’ from the1999 collection MEADOW: pigeons, explained the supremo, perhaps basins of attraction and so easy to identify undefended footnotes to a moral atom forced to show traces of serious style



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interacting among enzymes to undergo ritual sabbaticals for a rush of air

The poem’s neutral voice is not conversation and has only traces of address, despite the reported speech of the ‘supremo’. Is it someone talking to the reader? If so, where can they be located in the text? What is their perspective? A clue comes in the third and final stanza where someone is ‘guarding time in an overnight bag/ which according to the pronoun you/ surpasses the apprehension of thought/ represented on screen by a halo’ (Raworth 2003, p. 539). If there is anyone talking within the poetry, or if there is any mode of address, then it often seems to be the poetry talking to itself within a matrix of responses. It is not ‘you’ who suggest(s) that ‘time’ ‘surpasses the apprehension of thought’, but the ‘pronoun you’. It is no single you, but every and all of you as well as the word ‘you’. The indeterminate nature of the second person is interrogated, as is the incapacity of thought to retain or perceive time. Thoughts may be ‘carrier pigeons’ in a ‘rush of air’, but they are also the experience the thoughts are unable to apprehend, as well as ‘footnotes’ forced to show traces of ‘serious style’ (which support ‘ritual sabbaticals’). The mind begins to leap backwards and forwards between the verses, trying to make links and close them, but the poetry remains stubbornly open: each time an identity begins to be developed it is pushed aside or broken up in the movement of the poem. Raworth’s point, of course, is that identity is not stable, and that a lyric poem which suggests a single perspective from a fixed identity is itself involved in the manipulation of embodied experience in order to produce a poem which may ‘capture the moment’ or ‘make sense’ out of a particular event. If there is no single and direct relationship, which can transcend space and time, between language and an empirical reality it is trying to express, a range of potential relationships exist. Language is not simply something that reveals an a priori or external truth or fact, a neutral tool through which ‘we’ express our ‘selves’ but, even when syntactically arranged, has a number of possible syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships in a particular context. Identity, and our social and cultural identity is at least in part a product of language



(Raworth 2003, p. 539)

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just as our language is a product of that identity, does not naturally reside within the self, but is located in our historical and spatial relationships with others and will change according to the context in which we find ourselves. Identities become fluid. The implication of this for a poetry of personal expression is that the poem is not, and never can be, an expression of a pre-existing identity through a carefully selected vocabulary. In the 1982 poem ‘Mirror’s Song’ (Tuma 2001, p. 736) Liz Lochhead describes the way in which she fragments the socially constructed self through smashing her reflection in the mirror. The mirror, according to Foucault, is both a utopia, ‘a placeless place an unreal virtual space that enables me to see myself there where I am absent’ and a heterotopia as it ‘exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy’ (Foucault 1986, p. 24). The mirror confirms absence (I am over there) and presence (I can see myself and my connections with the space that surrounds me). Lefebvre talks about the mirror as representing both repetition and difference; within the mirror the ‘Ego is liable to “recognize” itself in the “other”, but it does not in fact coincide with it’. It is a ‘reflection which yet generates an extreme difference’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 185), in which everything within the reflection is inverted. Lochhead sees her ‘other’ self within the mirror and sets up an opposition between the two, with the poem told in the voice of the mirror: Smash me looking-glass glass coffin, the one that keeps your best black self on ice. (Tuma 2001, p. 736) The mirror is a ‘glass coffin’, with the body on display but immobile. Once smashed ‘she’ll whirl out like Kali’, the Indian goddess of destruction, the new self reducing the old to a list of contents in her ‘alligator mantrap handbag’. In the final stanza, having fragmented her public image through smashing the mirror and naming and revealing the objects that constructed her, she enters public space in her new identity. Her construction as ‘feminine’, by ‘the/ tracts and the adverts, shred/ all the wedding dresses, snap/ all the spike heeled icicles’ (Tuma 2001, p. 737), while providing her with a



Space and Identity


public persona, also kept her apart from her community of ‘daughters’ and ‘mothers’. Her concerns become the more political interests in wars and Greenham Common, and Lochhead discovers an essential feminine self, able to move more effectively into the public space. Yet Lefebvre is critical of Lacan’s use of the visual reflection in the mirror as a way of locating the subject in space. For Lacan the pre-language infant sees itself as complete in the mirror, in contrast to its physical fragmentation in a ‘real’ world in which it cannot yet properly explore. The infant’s sense of a ‘real’ embodied experience is lost during the development of language, a process of abstraction, and through the ‘law of the father’ as exemplified by the phallus. This visual and conceptual understanding of the relationship between subject and space continues, for Lacan, through to the subject’s entry into the symbolic order of language. For Lefebvre, on the other hand, it is the body and the body’s movement through the world that produces space and in which the subject’s knowledge of the world is situated. To return to another distinction of Lefebvre’s, the reflection in the mirror is a signifier, not a signified, and therefore a ‘representation of space’; it is not the embodied experience of ‘representational space’. Similarly, subject formation through the symbolic order of language is, for Lefebvre, an abstraction which creates a ‘yawning gap that separates this linguistic mental space from the social space wherein language becomes practice’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 5). Lefebvre compares the directly lived and more concrete relationship to space of earlier civilizations (their ‘representational space’) with the modern tendency to develop visual ‘representations’ of space through a process of abstraction. This process of abstraction is one in which the mind, rather than the body, ‘produces’ the space. In premodern society for ‘seasonally migrant herders directions in space and time were inhabited’ and the ‘networks of paths and roads made up a space just as concrete as that of the body – of which they were in fact an extension’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 193). In modern society this direct relationship with space, according to Lefebvre, becomes lost: the architectural and urbanistic space of modernity tends precisely towards this homogenous state of affairs, towards a place of confusion and fusion between geometrical and visual which inspires a kind of physical discomfort. Everything is alike. Localization – and lateralization – are no more it is [also] the space of blank



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sheets of paper, drawing boards, plans, sections, elevations, scale models, geometrical projections and the like. Substituting a verbal, semantic, or semiological space for such a space only aggravates its shortcomings. A narrow and desiccated rationality of this kind overlooks the core and foundation of space, the total body, the brain, gestures and so forth. It forgets that space does not consist in the projection of an intellectual representation, does not arise from the visible – readable realm, but that it is first of all heard (listened to) and enacted (through physical gestures and movements). (Lefebvre 1991, p. 200) Lefebvre puts the body, a body that produces the space around itself, at the heart of ideas about space and identity. He sees the reclamation of the body, from the Cartesian mind/body split, as the key to reclaiming space from the nation-state and its systems and a global capitalism which seeks to divorce the body from the space it produces and which has produced it. The pre-verbal gesture is one way in which he explains this. Gestures, rather than thoughts ‘lie at the origin of language’ and ‘embody ideology and bind it to practice’ (Lefebvre 1991, pp. 214, 215). Writing itself, the act of moving a pen across a page, becomes both gestural and a result of abstraction via the language system. Finally, ‘Bodies themselves generate spaces, which are produced by and for their gestures’ (p. 216). For Lefebvre, therefore, the individual produces space through their senses, that is, what is within hearing, eyesight, touch, smell and so on. This production of space is from a certain perspective and a change of position of the self changes the space. As the body moves, it produces new spaces and objects pass from obscurity into light. The outer production of space through sensual apprehension is matched by an inner space, both physical and a state of consciousness, and this internal space develops from childhood into adulthood. The skin becomes a surface that, although liable to penetration, acts as both a barrier between the inner and outer space and provides a closure of the self. The skin is a boundary. It is also a means of identification and recognition; appearance is one source of our difference from others and marks out age, gender, social status and nationality. The poet Lee Harwood frequently draws on a relationship between the visual, the optic, and the haptic, the communicative sense of



Space and Identity


touch, in his poems about North Wales. In ‘September Dusk by Nant Y Geuallt’ (Harwood 2004, p. 397), for example, he moves from ‘The scent’ of bog myrtle as it is ‘brushed through’ and when it is ‘pressed between fingers’, before moving to a more visual description of ‘A flat moor – the colours muted’. Another poem, ‘Cwm Uchaf’ (Harwood 2004, pp. 408–9), begins when ‘someone yells from a window/ down into the dark street’. This situated and contemporary activity is set against the imagined space and timescale of the moon where ‘in a vast barren crater/ a rock very slowly crumbles’. The poem contains references to the death of Harwood’s friend, Paul Evans, in a climbing accident with Harwood, and draws comparisons between the importance of the ‘here and now’ and the finality of death. The poem then moves from ‘A fuzz of stars’ which ‘sweeps across the world’ as a visual phenomenon which is ‘partly known and unknown’, to the specific and detailed location of an imagined ‘fragile bone sphere cracked and shaky’. The fall of the body, ‘tumbling down’, is compared to the feelings of the survivor and his ‘stumbling descent through the day’s maze’ and the abstract visual images of the night sky become a symbol for the acceptance of the dead body into all space and all time in the ‘stars arms remote embrace’, before the detailed and located imagery of the drops/ of rich red blood’ and the physicality of the ‘thick orange bag on a hospital trolley’. The sense of physical presence, of the haptic experience of ‘thick’, is immediately set against the redemptive visual, a necessary removal from the immediate pain of death, to ‘The faint glitter of the rocks mica the sky/ catching the eye’. The poem returns to its starting place in Brighton, where ‘the waves’ are ‘going nowhere in particular’, and are compared to the loss of blood in ‘a gradual leaking away’. Through his combination of visual distance, and the sense of embodied presence, Harwood is able to combine both the physicality of the death and the intellectual and emotional response to that death. He can say ‘this is how it feels’, and simultaneously ask ‘what does it mean’. Just as there is an arbitrary relationship and, for poets, a creative gap, between language and meaning, there exist creative possibilities in the relationship with others, and one of those others is the self as it is perceived and represented in poetry. One function of contemporary lyric poetry is to know and represent more about ourselves and different ways of representing the world. It is the place from which many poets start, in a process of discovery and loss, a process in which



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self-identification can be both the end point and a consequence of writing. Marjorie Perloff describes a lyric as a ‘short verse utterance in which a single speaker expresses, in figurative language, her/his subjective vision of the truths of moments, situations and relationships’ (Perloff 1985, p. 173). Thirty years earlier, Olson referred negatively to the ‘lyrical interference of the individual as ego’ (Olson 1997, p. 247) as a restriction against which ‘open-field’ poetry had to work. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics traces the genealogy of the contemporary lyric back to Wordsworth’s ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ and Hegel’s idea of the lyric as containing ‘intensively subjective and personal expression’ (Preminger 1975). Within the contemporary lyric, according to much of the argument, the form and content of the poetry are fused to form a personal expression of deeply held feelings. In spatial terms the lyric is described as a closed form, its practitioners using the poem for ‘self-expression’, as against the ‘open’ form of more experimental writing. Lyric expressions of identity are often most clearly demonstrated in explicitly oppositional work by those whose identity is oppressed, denied, or under threat. Recent examples run through the work of women writers from the 1970s and 1980s and the work of writers from minority cultures, particularly first-generation immigrants into the United Kingdom. The other indigenous minorities in the United Kingdom (the Welsh, Scottish and Irish) have all used lyric poetry as an affirmation of identity, as ways of sustaining, defining and redefining their national and linguistic allegiances. Other poets, particularly those within dominant cultures, are more inclined to speculate on the nature of their identity and in the case of the more experimental poets, who are often explicitly critical of national or cultural allegiances, happy to write themselves off the map rather than stake a claim to their own space. Such distinctions between poetry are, in the twenty-first century, increasingly difficult to map, and I have some sympathy for Peter Barry’s view in Contemporary British Poetry and the City that there is now a ‘widespread preoccupation on the part of poets of all persuasions today with more-or-less “experimental” explorations of such things as: linguistic registers, implied voices’ (Barry 2000, p. 12). His conclusion is that ‘To imagine that the anxious or celebratory meta-poetries of the deconstructed subject are still the exclusive preserve of an always excluded avant-garde is to be



Space and Identity


twenty years behind the times’ (p. 12). It is a useful reminder that the circulation of ideas is both faster and more widespread than ever, and that to stamp your foot and identify your position within an oppositional binary between a mainstream that is assured of its place in the world and an avant-garde that is critical and experimental almost certainly means you’ll be either mown down or left in the dust by more mobile forces. Jo Shapcott’s poem ‘Phrase Book’ draws on a tension between invasive external forces and the desire to discover or retain an inner self as expressed by language. In the poem she uses material from the phrase book of the title and the language of the Gulf War of the early 1980s to demonstrate the way language itself is contaminated: I’m standing here inside my human skin, which will do for a Human Remains Pouch for the moment. Look down there (up here) Quickly. Slowly. This is my own front room where I’m lost in the action, live from a war on screen. I am an Englishwoman, I don’t understand you. (Tuma 2001, p. 843) On the one hand the tension in the poem seems to reside in the way in which the personal space of the speaker in the poem is invaded, whether actually, through the media, or potentially, through smart bombs. Her Englishness, as determined by her language, becomes open to doubt, and her language, based on random phrases, becomes fractured and incoherent. On the other hand, Keith Tuma in his analysis of the poem in Fishing by Obstinate Isles points out the way in which the reader is drawn into the parody of the ‘Englishwoman’, the way the reader is ‘flattered, asked to join the poet in mocking the speaker’ (Tuma 1998, p. 199). The repetition of ‘let me pass’ is significant, referring to the desire of a ‘phrase book’ user to pass herself off as an Englishwoman, as well as the more mundane meaning of letting someone pass by. The poem, rather than a discussion of the relationship between language and consciousness and the role of language in the construction of national identity, becomes an exploration of the relationship between the implicit author and the person who foolishly tries to ‘pass’ as an ‘Englishwoman’. While there are different



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strands within the poem, its entirety is not located in the more distant reaches of the discourses it contains. The poem appears inclusive, as if it is seeking to include those discourses within its frame, but the phrase-book language and military jargon, rather than being used as a way of unsettling ideas about relationships between language, experience and identity, simply become part of the tool box of the unspoken ‘I’ of the poem, a kind of lyrical ‘implied’ author, who is distancing those other discourses in order to discover, support and retain an essential self who understands the ‘real’ Englishwoman.

Catherine Walsh and Eavan Boland Despite having some sympathy with Barry’s assertion that varieties of poetry now experiment with the relationship between language and identity, it is still worthwhile comparing a poem like Eavan Boland’s ‘Distances’ (Boland 1995) with Catherine Walsh’s work ‘from Pitch’ in the Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry (Tuma 2001). The poems demonstrate the way ideas of the lyric, as a structuring device for the poem and as a set of ideas to be worked with and against, are used by different practitioners. Boland’s poem immediately identifies time and place, a speaking narrator and a person addressed: The radio is playing downstairs in the kitchen. The clock says eight and the light says winter. You are pulling up your hood against a bad morning. (Boland 1995, p. 170) Through naming a popular song, ‘I Wish I Was in Carrickfergus’, the poem conjures up images of a past Ireland for the narrator of the poem. It elides memory and place; ‘the way the streets/ of a small town open out in/ memory’ (p. 170). The image is that of harmony through tradition, and the protagonists of the poem, back in Ireland, see ‘salt-loving fuschias to one side and// a market in full swing on the other’ as they ‘walk the streets in/ the scentless afternoon of a ballad measure’ (p. 170). All the images conjure up the idea of an ongoing rhythm, of a continuation of a life that is measured in the time of tradition and with the ballad measure a symbol of the way in



Space and Identity


which language itself can be ordered to represent a continuing story. But the poem reminds us of ‘how// restless we would be, you and I, inside the perfect/ music of that basalt and sandstone/ coastal town’ and uses references to a number of objects to explore the tension between a nostalgic longing for the perfection of the past and an awareness that the reality might be somewhat different. The ‘tacky apples’ become ‘mush inside the crisp sugar shell’ and the ‘spectacles out of focus’. The poem ultimately questions its own premise, established in the song, that they wish they were back in Carrickfergus. Despite this ambivalence between image and reality, exacerbated by the marketing of the Irish lifestyle as a desirable commodity, the message of the poem is straightforward; that it is better to be at a distance to the unchanging nature of tradition than part of it. While Boland’s poem is arranged on the page in eight stanzas of three lines each, Walsh’s ‘from Pitch’ meanders down the page from a variety of left-hand margins. The title says it is ‘from’ something, presumably a longer sequence. So the first difference is that the poem is not bounded, we don’t know when we’re going to reach the end, or if it is the end when we get there. The poem’s first few lines set its conceptual boundaries. Reminiscent of the Objectivist ‘Thinking with things as they exist’ (Zukofsky 1981, p. 12), Walsh begins the poem: matter of fact poetical fabulous (Tuma 2001, p. 926) The poem is ‘matter of fact’, that is day to day. In addition the poem is a material object; it may be ‘matter’, made up of ‘facts’, but facts that are ‘poetical’ and ‘fabulous’. The poem is set in a ‘time’ which is ‘of the mind’, not necessarily in a narrative sequence. The tension is between the idea of the poem as a record of some event or a process of speculation, as in the Boland, and a poem such as Walsh’s that also creates its own experience. It is a fabrication, which may be made up of occasions or events, but is not a report on those ‘instants’. The empty open brackets positioned over the word ‘stasis’ also indicate a preference for a field of possibility over a fixed position. Walsh



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continues this explanation or coda for a few more lines before getting into the story of the poem, a story not radically different from that of Eavan Boland. She confirms that ‘this is not memory’ before the next word, ‘conditions’, both completes the idea of memory as a condition and forms a link to the next phrase where ‘memory/ conditions/ the state of the subject at/ the moment/ in question’ and then a slight gap leads to the next word, ‘being’ (Tuma 2001, p. 926). Walsh is explicitly exploring the construction of her identity within the psychological space of the poem and the geographical space it refers to. The next section is a fragmented description of landscape, located in a real place by the annotations rather than the information in the poem. When the poem becomes most expressionistic, however, in its recollection of another person, Walsh uses repetition to draw attention to the language itself and to question that process of expression. The repetitions are not ‘true’ but a little off-centre, each one adding a different piece of information and from a slightly different perspective: having not forgotten smell colour of eye hair tone flesh having not forgotten there should be some where eye hair colour of voice smell having not forgotten etc. (Tuma 2001, p. 927) Walsh is not content with conflating place with identity. It is not enough to remember and name the places of her memories, but she must work with them in the context of the conceptual space of the poem, calling into doubt the value of the process of naming: ‘how can/ what I name anything/ do anything’ (Tuma 2001, p. 929). She



Space and Identity


denies herself the agency or authority to order a structured narrative out of the events but has to self-consciously reflect on the processes of the poetry and the structures of language as well as its products and their relationship with embodied experience. None of the above is to deny Barry’s account of the differences or lack of them in the attitude to the lyric ‘I’ in much modern poetry. It does demonstrate, however, the way in which two Irish women poets work with relationships between identity and place very differently, and produce quite different poetry. In other words, the fact that they both problematize identity does not mean they do it in the same way and come to the same conclusions. Boland is exploring, although not without doubts, the nature of an Irish identity located in a specific place, while Walsh is interrogating the notion of identity and authority as expressed through poetic language. Similarly, and this is not to overload the Walsh/Boland contrast and comparison, a poet writing out of assumptions of normative systems may still seek to question her identity. This is different from a writer questioning ideas of the authority of language, of its expressive qualities and the ways in which cultural and political representations seek to retain control and authority. More traditional lyric forms seek to identify a place in which identity can be located and defined, while more experimental and spatial forms will undercut that certainty in order to bring relationships between identity and places into question.

Ralph Hawkins The English poet Ralph Hawkins, for example, uses a range of local and domestic references in his work while simultaneously locating other work in more remote and imaginary landscapes. His long poem, ‘Tell Me No More and Tell Me’, consists of 23 pages, with each page made up of between three and six four-line stanzas with the occasional couplet. Some themes occur consistently in the poem: domestic scenes, the landscape seen from inside a house, the scenery outside the window and the colours of it, and the flora and fauna. Yet the overwhelming concern of the poem is a construction of the space of the self. Lefebvre says: Space – my space – is not the content of which I constitute the textuality: instead it is first of all my body, and then it is my body’s



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counterpart or other, its mirror image or shadow: it is the shifting intersection between that which touches, threatens or benefits my body on the one hand, and all other bodies on the other. Thus we are concerned, once again, with gaps and tensions, contacts and separations. (Lefebvre 1991, p. 184) Earlier, Lefebvre had referred to objects ‘slipping from the non-visible realm into the visible, from opacity into transparency’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 183). It is through this process, he claims, that the ‘existence of space is established’. He refers to it as a ‘process of decipherment’ (p. 183). It is common sense that what we can perceive through vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste becomes our space, or at least our experience of a space from a particular perspective. Where that space is also domestic, and is shared with others, then it will also have its own history. A house, as Bachelard demonstrates in his Poetics of Space, is a place of accumulated memory and is produced by the repetition of apparently insignificant actions. ‘Tell Me No More and Tell Me’ is written indoors; the poet describes both what is around him and what he sees out of the window. There is a sense of physical presence, of a body produced by, and producing, the space. The poem is a painstaking search for identity, not with any apparent hope of completing the task by trawling back through time or through locating the self in broader spatial structures, but by picking up the bits and pieces that go to make up that domestic space, turning them over and examining them: Yes it comes back to that finally with an effort to unfold with clarity this subject matter the present voice looped back to the first line (Hawkins 1981, p. 17)

and also:



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trying to get it straight for the poem within the poem

The poem combines immediately perceived phenomena with the memory of what he has seen before: birds through the glass I know a row of trees through the mist and a room of feathered bed (Hawkins 1981, p. 11) It is in this constant swinging to and fro between his immediate environment within the house, including that which is outside the window, and that which comes in from afar, that the poet locates his search for identity. The poem is not saying these are things that made me, but rather these are the things that are part of the process of constructing my identity and a space that my body has produced. The focus of the poem is the everyday, and it has formal elements that make it similar to a diary. It reads as if written a page to a day, and many of the opening lines to each page/section give the impression of a ‘fresh start’ to the poem, as in the three examples below: O little life where is the way forward (Hawkins 1981, p. 13) empty day again you have formed (Hawkins 1981, p. 17) morning then afternoon (Hawkins 1981, p. 19) From such beginnings the poems, or particular pages of the sequence, follow an irregular pattern of inside the house, outside the house, afar



(Hawkins 1981, p. 15)

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(which can involve things coming in from away as well as the poet moving out of himself) and then an ending which involves either a folding back into the poem or an opening out from where the poem is. An example, and all the poems demonstrate differences, is: no more blue whiles put away pages of paper this time keep secret all your brother thoughts and winter on a horn of light is sky full the ash is filled with birds as the eye wanders while the birds stream what are they in the distance the trick of light fails without you and with you as on a pillow of feathers the mind glides with electric borders of light the light now is green and I have been taken away, sea voyage, in my own thought I drift watching winter leaves much to be done yes chop wood and the air chills (Hawkins 1981, p. 22) The ‘story’ of the poem is fairly straightforward. The poet tidies up his work for the day, his thinking time over. He begins to notice and describe the winter light, notices the birds but fails to identify them as the light is failing. He then drifts off into his own thoughts while simultaneously recognizing there are chores to be done and the temperature is dropping outside. The poem opens on a space of work before shifting to a transitory or ‘between space’ of watching the world outside where ‘the birds stream’, a process which leads into an inner space of contemplation. This is broken by a realization of his physical situation, a coming down to earth in the last line and a half, to the place in which he is located. The ‘other’ is both directly



Space and Identity


addressed as another person, ‘without you ’ and is a reflection of the self within the poem ‘and I have been taken away’. The spatial structure of within and without is reflected in the language of the poem. It begins on a business-like note, ‘no more blue whiles’, and finishes on a similar tone, ‘yes chop wood and the air chills’. In between the language becomes increasingly meditative until ‘in my own thoughts I drift/ watching winter leaves’, where the tone turns on the pun from ‘leaves’ (as the plural of leaf and as the verb to leave), and he drops back to earth. Some of Hawkins’s other poems seem to run counter to the domestic and ‘everyday’ frames of ‘Tell Me No More ’ and are set in ‘distant’ or imaginary places. He does not, however, use the exotic as ‘nostalgia directed towards the distant and the strange for the sake of novelty’ (Preminger 1975, p. 265) but to question notions of authenticity through the creation of imaginary spaces. Rather than resulting from travel, they are products of processes of globalization, of the ability in a post-modern world to experience other cultures through cuisine, television and film as simulations of themselves. In the chapbook Well, You Could Do there is a sequence of some 14 poems entitled ‘China’. In the first poem he clearly describes China as an alternative reality that refers to, but is not entirely, the geographical reality that is China. It is also a mental construct that he relates to his immediate surroundings: China the brain is too busy for you (Hawkins 1979) And then later in the same poem: in Brixton the houses are made of mud and wattle very little money called glue (Hawkins 1979) Other poems in the sequence are less clear about the status of ‘China’. In ‘5’ it operates as no more than a pun: ‘I think I’ll buy a china/ blue teapot’. In ‘The Fortune Cookie’ he goes from fried duck to the duck in the bath and once again combines a reference to cuisine,



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the fried duck, and a more culturally British scene by referring to ‘what it quacked/ in the bath when/ it was yellow’ (Hawkins 1979). In ‘China’ Hawkins is drawing distant places into the space of the poem and, through their juxtaposition with his everyday experience, drawing on the imagery to construct a space other than his location. As Hawkins says when interviewed, China is for him both ‘imaginary and real, and a place that isn’t a place’ (Riley 2000, p. 27). In ‘From the Chinese’, from the 1988 book At Last Away, the title suggests a translation, but there is nothing to say of what. On the other hand the title could be a reference to a take-away meal as in ‘get something from the Chinese on your way home’. The poem is in seven sections, each one containing between four and six unrhymed couplets and the ‘I’ in the poem is firmly located in the Chinese landscape. The poetry is sparse, reflecting a clean and uncluttered landscape which hovers somewhere between willow pattern and the post-nuclear world that William Burroughs describes in Cities of the Red Night. In the first couplet of the poem Hawkins uses capitals: in the Nine Wilds the People’s Temple (Hawkins 1988, p. 1) suggesting the names of real places. The next line appears to deny that, referring to ‘eight continents’ and an ‘orbit of stars’ as the place where ‘Chang handed/ me his tracing’. The ‘tracing’ suggests a map; on the other hand it could be a child in school (Hawkins was a schoolteacher for part of his life) who has completed a piece of work and is handing it in. As well as a series of exotic descriptions that appear to make sense but on closer examination do not, there are a series of biological references to speech and memory. There are ‘towers in the five coloured air’ and ‘mist hides the fast planets/ from the drained lowlands’. There are series of numbers that don’t add up, ‘Nine Wilds’, ‘eight continents’, ‘four edges of heaven’, ‘eighth month’ and, finally, ‘nine turns’, to coincide with the ‘Nine Wilds’. Within this off-centre landscape so carefully depicted, yet not finally constructed, there are both humans and animals. There is a ‘me’ in the first line who is handed a tracing by ‘Chang’. In the second section a ‘he’ ‘chose our planet/ and our stars’ and ‘searched the green/ void’. This might be Chang from Section 1, it might be a projection of the first person or



Space and Identity


it might be someone different altogether. In Section 3 we are introduced to ‘the brain of the ape’ that is ‘able to summon the powers of healing’. The poem seems simple enough, and there seem recognizable characters and narratives within it and the landscape seems plausible but on closer examination the poem spins off and out of representation into physical impossibilities. It is a place in which the poet can ‘lose himself’ and construct a complex interplay between ideas of coherence and clarity. It is, though, a poem in which the poet can also find himself, a space into which he can project identities. The poem suggests both the deterministic and structured order of Deleuze and Guattari’s genetic and biological tracing, and the disorder of a journey that he makes up as he constructs the map. It is an order and a structure that eludes him by the intrusion of the messiness of everyday life. A later book, The Coiling Dragon (1999), more explicitly combines the themes of domestic space and the exotic. It is not a poem written in the poetics of collage in the way that ‘China’ was, a process of placing the familiar next to the strange or the domestic next to the foreign, but a poem that combines surfaces and depths, a poem that takes you down into itself before it throws you back out. One way Hawkins does this is through that most common of poetic devices, the metaphoric process of giving one thing the qualities of another. The city in the poem becomes a wok in which there is ‘simmering, stewing, deep sea frying’, then a ‘city of radical pronouncements’ (Hawkins [1999]). Yet things do not add up as they should in a metaphor. There is no resolution or synthesis: things seem to go together but also stay stubbornly apart. An address to the city in Line 4 now becomes problematized; the relatively straightforward ‘you remain my favourite’ is complexified by ‘my favourites sell condiments’. Is there more than one city? Is the favourite in Line 4 nothing to do with the favourites in Line 12? Or are the condiments the favourites, the syntax distorted? The condiments themselves start off as unusual, ‘ginger juice, lily buds’, and end up completely fanciful, ‘star anis on clouds’ before the next line slides into cod mythology, ‘five immortals/ riding rams’. The rest of the page then slips from the cooking through Isfahan (a province or town in Iran and a type of hand-woven rug), through the gut, yanked by the dragon to a meditative chant on city. It is a city of many characteristics and many perspectives.



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His particular technique is to use words and phrases in combinations that at first appearance seem to follow syntactic and paradigmatic norms, but which on closer examination do not; where readers think themselves on solid ground before the rug is pulled away from underneath them, opening out into a space where many connections become possible. On page 1 of The Coiling Dragon, as he makes the switch from city to cooking and refers to ‘simmering, stewing, deep sea frying’, he echoes both deep-fat frying and deep-sea fishing, but says neither. When he uses ‘teeming’ in Line 4, one thinks of a teeming population, but this is soon to be recast as waters teeming with fish, and then turned on its head in the penultimate line of the page in ‘city of teeming rain’. Poem 9 has a ‘Punminister’ and: brews of wheat and rye put wriggles into prepositional constructions have an almost pissed off effect on the reader wanting satisfying habits there must be an axis of selection bound up with an axis of combination in composition so many worms like scrambled legs (Hawkins [1999]) This section illustrates a source of tension in the poem, a movement back and forth between the poem as a construction with no single point of origin, a grid system into which activities and ideas can be mapped, and a more organic and rhizomatic structure. There is a humanist desire for coherence, through the rhythm of time and history, alongside a post-modern playfulness in which any word which sounds a bit like another word can take its place along the paradigmatic axis of the line, thereby discarding any accumulated meaning. So the poem, and the series of poems, is a construct that combines the organicist notion of the rhizome and the Euclidean space of the grid, but one that takes its coordinates from a body in space, rather than from a predetermined system. These coordinates are always on the move, always seen from different perspectives within a four-dimensional space that combines the axis of space with the axes of time and history. Because it is constantly reformed



Space and Identity


with every shift of perspective the ‘grid’ doesn’t limit possibilities of combination or impose ‘coordinates’ on all words and objects. The success of the poem is that it keeps a series of dualisms in play, never allowing them to fall into simple dichotomies. The Punminister invents the word‘ pallaksch/ which meant either yes or no/ and served as a means for avoiding yes or no’ (Hawkins [1999]). The Coiling Dragon is a poem about places, real and imagined, language and identity. The space of the city in the poem is not a result of a planning exercise, but occurs because of the movements of bodies through space and the way they relate to each other. It uses a version of the techniques of narrative prose: bits of stories, the odd character that appears and reappears. The first-person narrator shifts around under the pressure to give it a stable identity but is located within the contents and contexts Hawkins chooses for his work. He is resistant to indeterminacy while finding the evidence of it everywhere. His work over the last 25 years is an exploration of his identity, from the search for a clarity that never really emerges in ‘Tell Me No More and Tell Me’, to a desire for coherence amongst the endless punning of The Coiled Dragon. And this exploration of identity is not only historical, although it is carried out over time, but it is also spatial. Not only does he locate himself in different imagined spaces, he also uses ideas of space, often linking the structures of language to the structures of space, to inform the space of the poem.

Fanny Howe The American writer Fanny Howe fails to fit into any of the major poetic groupings. She comments on the spatial and paratactic nature of the work of the language writers when she says they: perform the critical function of putting work into a verbal landscape without judgement (content) which renders the words equal. I admire this work a great deal and regret that I am unable to free myself from the language of a charged romantic. (Brito 1992, p. 102) She, somewhat ironically, oversimplifies her position. Her poetry, like language writing, draws on an implicit understanding of relationships between language, meaning and identity. The ‘I’ in her poems is not



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an unquestioned ‘I’ (or eye) or a fixed perspective. She plays with the idea of being hidden, of being other, of identifying with others and of disappearing altogether, and her later work is composed of layers, of moving in and out of alternative realities, perceived from different hiding places. In her essay ‘Artobiography’, she says: words come through me, and, it is only up to me to be prepared The massive amount of revision I put the words through is only a way of absolving them from the taint of having passed through me at all. I want to abolish the personal, or hurl it to the furthest point; and polish the impersonal, until its dazzle unfocusses a complete clarity, as with everything good. (Perelman 1985, p. 206). It is therefore not only the speaking ‘I’ who hides, successfully or otherwise, in the content of her poems, but she claims here that she tries to eradicate the presence of self within the structures of language. Her description of the process is physical: language becomes tainted and like other matter it is ‘passed through’ the body. In contrast the impersonal language ‘dazzles’, freed of the clumsy gesture of the body writing. Rae Armantrout, writing about Howe’s poem ‘Q’ in A Folio for Fanny Howe (Green 1999), relates Howe’s writing to ideas of the nomadic, quoting the poem which begins ‘the neo-neolithic urban nomad school of poetry’ (Howe 1999, p. 32). That line is a satirical critique of schools of modernist poetics, and the end of the poem a plea for collectivity where ‘we’re lost at last/ and can really see through words including “me”/ to the other side that multiplies/ the interior matter’ (p. 32). As Armantout says, Howe’s ‘nomadic anarchic collective’ is ultimately embodied in the form of the serial poem itself where ‘sequential we’s [are] the shape of these poems’ (Armantrout 1999, p. 45). Howe moves through the isolation of the individual to a communitarian collectiveness. While Howe is drawing on the idea of the nomad to describe the wandering of her ‘characters’, her irony should not be lost. Within the context of the poem ‘Q’, and particularly its many references to war, Howe is making a distinction between the nomad, who moves because she wants to, and the refugee who moves because she must. In her essay ‘Purgatory and Other Places’ she says: ‘To choose to



Space and Identity


leave home is one thing. To be forced – by political or economic realities – is another. If you have to leave home and inhabit a place where you don’t want to be, you reach the very lowest point in uncertainty’ (Howe 2003, p. 103). Her critique is of the more romantic configuration of the nomadic and a rhetoric of globalization which preferences the mobile over the static; a configuration in which the global population is able to move at will and be at home anywhere and everywhere, capable of shifting between multiple identities and multiple languages. Refugees (Deleuze and Guattari use the more neutral term ‘migrant’), by way of contrast, are lost and bewildered in their new surroundings. They have only a few bits and pieces of their old life with which to demonstrate their identity and the land and landscape itself are not just ‘unknown’, but ‘alien’. Even the weather itself becomes ‘menacing’, and the climate ‘lack[s] any corresponding climate from your own past’ (Howe 2003, p. 102). Out of their homeland they are unutterably and often abjectly other, needing to either band together with other refugees to maintain their identity or become assimilated into their new culture and surroundings and therefore change their identity. As Deleuze and Guattari say: the migrant goes principally from one point to another, even if the second point is uncertain, unforeseen or not well localized. But the nomad goes from point to point as a consequence and as a factual necessity: in principle points for him are relays along a trajectory. (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, p. 50) For Howe the refugee needs to adopt the strategy of the nomad: ‘Our task is to read the Bedouins/ now that we’re lost at last’ (Howe 1999, p. 32). The poem ‘Q’ begins: ‘We moved to be happy’ (p. 7). This movement is in the context of global urbanization and where they move to the ‘crash that we call a city’ (p. 7). There is an element of compulsion to this movement though, an unstoppable force of the water going ‘south for the winter’ that carried them ‘down like storm driven gulls’ (p. 7). In the second poem in ‘Q’, ‘we’ are referred to as ‘A lost tribe searching for new digs’ (p. 8). As the poem progresses its atmosphere becomes uneasier. In the sixth poem ‘Everyone lacks reassurance’, in the seventh ‘Outside’s a gray and wasted place./ Sleet slides into grease and trees/ into black



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I was talking about a person who was a place. The place had one name and infinite ways to get there. One way was by speech. When lost person is a lost place first the word stays in the voice. But then the ear has disappeared. You have a choice. Relief – or fear. (Howe 1999, p. 14) The poem describes the trauma of people losing their ‘place’, and the relationship between the language they speak and the place they live in. The place was the centre, with ‘one name and infinite ways to get there’, a sense which is lost. They become marginal and have to ‘fit in’, to develop an appropriate voice. The ‘word stays/ in the voice’, but there is no one who understands as ‘the ear has disappeared’. In the fragmentation of communities through movement around the world (often communities of resistance and subversion), individuals and groups become potentially more exposed to the exploitative nature of international capital and better suited to its needs. The final couplet turns on the word ‘choice’, and the choice of the refugee is relief: both freedom from fear of violent death and relief as charity or parish relief. In the context of this stanza the ‘neo-neolithic urban nomad school of poetry’ becomes not merely a witty jibe, but an attack on a carelessness that fails to engage with the realities of people’s lives. The nomad becomes a convenient metaphor for the subversion of global colonization and a lifestyle choice for the socially mobile. It works out differently for those who have no choice but to move and whose lives are violently fragmented. Yet Howe is



needles eyelass lace/ till alienation becomes delirium’ (Howe 1999, pp. 12, 13). It is in the eighth poem that the theme of the refugee and the relationship between identity and place becomes more explicit:


not simply calling for a nostalgic unity, a reassertion of place and identity neither possible nor desirable, rather she is creating a poetry in which abstract or theoretical assumptions are called into question and examined against the harsh test of practice. Towards the end of the sequence she outlines ‘home’, which is down: The path I will never find leads me to a farm by the sea with a donkey (Howe 1999, p. 35) before going on to question its construction: But what is a birthright? Does it help me to write poems and live in a shoe? (Howe 1999, p. 35) Beginning with the word ‘we’, the poem ends with the assertion, ‘I’m being split into the longitude of one’ (Howe 1999, p. 37), suggesting both a development of identity over time and a splitting of that identity by lateral movements and pressures. Another collection from 1997, One Crossed Out, expresses its ambivalence in its title, simultaneously referring to the number ‘one’ crossed out, the letter ‘I’ as an alternative form of that number or ‘one’ as a pronoun, crossed out. Howe sustains this ambivalence to the end, and the penultimate prose poem in the collection begins: One is my lucky number? Her sneakers were wearing down to two gnarled scoops, but she was never surprised that the vertical pronoun was also a number. (Howe 1997, p. 60) As well as the word ‘one’ referring to a pronoun and a number, the figure ‘1’ and the letter ‘I’ become interchangeable. The blurb on the back cover claims that:



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the poems speak in the voice of May, the girl crossed out, the bad girl, the mad and drunk girl, the jailed and drugged girl. May is swirling in language, and the language convinces us that we really are deep in the core of human consciousness, near the foul rag and bone shop of the heart. May is a neonomad, bringing to the world the opposite of worldliness, offering a glimpse of the invisible. (Howe 1997) May is also conditional: she may or she may not. Blurbs are meant to help sell books, so it is not surprising that it tries to sell to the reader a simplicity of expression that is not present in the poems. A reader certainly doesn’t get one unified voice, but a number of voices; voices which themselves question their own right to be voices. The poem is an examination by Howe of more than the ‘character’ of May, it is also an exploration of both the spaces that have produced May and of the spaces she produces, including the hospital, the jail, the refuge and the street. Sometimes the poem is difficult to locate, as in the beginning of the title poem of the collection: The walk up La Breaking to the Hills, then a shortcut to rosemary and wild foresight. Walked her burning around. (Howe 1997, p. 46) The sequence of two sentences, but three blocks of meaning, appears paratactic in its structure. The first line leads you in gently, assuming that it is possible to consider La Breaking and the capitalized ‘Hills’ as real places, but it doesn’t lead anywhere. The poem goes from the ‘walk up’, to the ‘shortcut’ and then ‘around’. The first sentence ends on a pun, and I keep reading forsythia for foresight. Rosemary is probably a bush; a bush which ‘her’ is walked around and which is either burning or the ‘her’ is burning in the sun. God speaks from a burning bush. The poems are not all this complex, but this speed of reference is evident in many cases, introducing a bewildering range of images, events and voices, and simultaneously presenting information and obliterating it. A reader will struggle sometimes to find May in the urban and rural landscapes Howe describes, as well as within the



Space and Identity


language of the poem. This is a key element of One Crossed Out, which reflects Howe’s interest in the ‘Apophatic’ (see Romana Huk’s essay in A Folio for Fanny Howe (1999) for a further discussion on this), a theological concept of describing and expressing knowledge of God by the use of negative, rather than positive attributes. God is therefore described as infinite, invisible, incomparable, immortal and so on. The final poem in One Crossed Out is called ‘The Apophatic Path’. It begins: What isn’t what is not Discover me or try to find me. If being is finding, can you find me? Who to, this address? (Howe 1997, p. 61) The poem ends, ‘even the base of me being, unknown’ (Howe 1997, p. 62). May is therefore not simply some ‘other’ that we discover via Howe’s descriptions of her actions and locations, but one also defined by negation. This emphasizes both her economic and social marginalization as well as her humanity as someone created in God’s image. She is unknowable. Huk draws on Derrida in describing Howe as ‘pursuing a linguistic faultline alongside otherness that eschews hidden teleological ends in exchange for “a certain difference, a certain trembling, a certain decentring that is not the position of an other centre”’ (Huk 1999, p. 68). May exists within the language of the poem. Like the ‘I’ within the poem ‘Q’, she also questions that existence and how the language is a representation of it: This time of year reminds me of the dot that completes my name. The dot over the letter that pertains to the first person singular is a symbol for me of my head. I always put on my dot when I’m already out of the word. (Howe 1997, p. 10)



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The capital ‘I’ emphasizes the importance of ‘the first person/ singular’, yet May compares herself to the lower case ‘i’, which functions as a hieroglyph with the dot forming the head on the upright body. Because of its process of negation, the poem does not define an ‘other’, but asks questions about how we know some ‘other’ and how they can be represented. Lefebvre says, while describing the relationship between the body and space, that ‘we are concerned once again with gaps and tensions, contacts and separations’ (Lefebvre 1991, p. 184). Although Howe works within a spatial aesthetic of simultaneity and contiguity, and May exists where ‘past, present, and future exist simultaneously’ (Howe 1997, p. 24), the poems also works within social spaces where some are invisible, and refused their allotted space and time: No one asked ‘who’s there?’ Not not. ‘Not what? Not who?’ Not not you, but not not me neither. Here or then. (Howe 1997, p. 52) The negatives spin their own tale, denying the person, crossed out, deleted but still there. Another poem also begins with a negative, ‘Nobody wants crossed-out girls around’ (Howe 1997, p. 53). A few lines further on she says: ‘They only know how to wisecrack’. They go with the flow of whatever is happening, ride the juggernaut, ‘make a pact’ with ‘whatever happens to be the meaning of their days’ (p. 53). When asked, ‘are you who’s who in America’, May, if that is the speaker in this poem, replies with gallows humour, ‘No, I’m just here with my corpse’. Howe sets the dispossessed and the homeless (negatives to set alongside immortal, infinite, etc.) in a variety of spaces, but draws on their desire to be found inside their own history. Many of the people in Howe’s poems ‘Q’ and ‘One Crossed Out’ seem to be inhabiting barren landscapes and marginal spaces, with Howe working creatively in the tension between the positive elements of nomadism, the way in which it can question and subvert a desire for control and homogeneity, and the despair of the homeless and the refugee.



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I began this chapter by restating the pragmatic relationship between place and identity. I demonstrated previously that Deleuze and Guattari embrace the liberationist potential of the breakdown of that relationship, and assert that people must step outside of the striated space of the comfort zone of family and state in order to experience freedom. They give Antonin Artaud, a surrealist poet who suffered mental breakdown, as a literary example of the ‘schizo’ and as someone who has ‘broken through the wall’ to ‘smooth space’. In his poem ‘All Writing is Garbage’, Artaud attacks those who write as if there is certainty between the word and what it means or signifies: All those who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. All those who have points of reference in their minds in well localized areas of their brains, all those who are masters of their language, all those for whom words have meanings – are pigs. (Rothenberg and Joris 1995, p. 515) Deleuze and Guattari claim that: few accomplish the breakthrough of this schizophrenic wall or limit the majority draw near the wall and back away horrified. Better to fall back under the law of the signifier, marked by castration, triangulated in Oedipus. (Deleuze and Guattari 1984, p. 135) For some, of course, that journey through the wall will be a oneway trip, and I’m obviously not alone in feeling some irritation at Deleuze and Guattari’s enthusiasm for an acutely painful condition. Yet, in any discussion of the relationship between language, the culture that produces it and the culture it produces, the schizophrenic condition is undoubtedly fascinating. Sufferers of schizophrenia are



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equally distributed across space and time, between gender and race, and apparently unaffected by environmental conditions. Anthropologists have recently argued that schizophrenia is, in fact, a condition coterminous with the development of language. The split between reality and the representation of reality caused, for some, a condition of confusion; the abstract and arbitrary nature of language always seemed to have an oblique relationship to embodied experience. Janusz Wróbel in his book Language and Schizophrenia (1990) argues convincingly that schizophrenia is a semiotic illness, characterized by a failure to understand the role of language in everyday communication and the relationship between language and experience. The result is a language usage by schizophrenics that is fragmented (crazed) and apparently unrelated to the here and now. R. D. Laing in his study of schizophrenia in Sanity, Madness and the Family (1970) emphasizes the anti-establishment nature of schizophrenic behaviour and the way those he studied were often attracted to underground and cult activities of 1960s Britain in preference to the stultifying family environments.



Space and Identity

Now You See It: Visual Poetry and the Space of the Page

Histories of visual and concrete poetry Despite its marginal status on an experimental wing of the literary world, ‘concrete’ or ‘visual’ poetry, work that emphasizes the materiality of language and the visual elements of the poem, has been an important presence in avant-garde movements throughout the twentieth century. The possibilities of digital technologies and the Internet as ways of constructing and distributing work have increased interest. Visual poetry is, of course, more concerned with space than linear poetry, with the way in which the material of the poem is distributed within its chosen medium, the space within which the text exists and, particularly where the work’s performance is outside the pages of a book, the spatial context in which it finds itself. The space that is between the words in some visual poetry is not, therefore, necessarily the space of the page within the context of the book or magazine. In the ‘Poetry Plastique’ exhibition, for example, in 2001, text appears written in the sky by David Antin, John Cage’s work consists of letters printed on plexiglass, while Michael Snow produces a film made up of words (see Sanders and Bernstein 2001). More recently the development of ‘web art’, distributed via the Internet, has drawn on the practices of visual and concrete poetry (see for example). If I’m arguing that the ‘spatial turn’ in social and cultural theory has influenced the form and content of poetry, then both the concepts and practices of visual poetry should be increasingly important to a range of practices. 124



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Interest in the visual in all poetry is nothing new. In the anthology Word Score Utterance, Choreography, in Verbal and Visual Poetry the English poet Bob Cobbing says, ‘all poetry has a visual aspect’ (Cobbing and Upton 1998, Preface). In the same book Edwin Morgan says: Since most written or printed poetry already has a visual element, it is probably wrong to regard visual or concrete poetry as a totally new departure. A page of The Faerie Queene looks different from a page of Paradise Lost, to say nothing of a page of ‘The Waste Land’. These things hit the eye right away and affect our reading of the work concerned. What ‘visual poetry’ does is foreground and specialise and extend and sharpen something which has always been there. (Cobbing and Upton 1998) We know a poem is a poem, first of all, because it looks like one. A poem is (usually) made up of lines which, often arranged into verses, normally stop before the right-hand margin. The arrangement of the lines within a poem also affects the sound of the poem by emphasizing certain words or syllables and suggesting particular rhythms and pauses. In a postscript to Kob Bok (Cobbing 1999a), a book which includes a combination of visual and verbal texts, Cobbing again says ‘Concrete poetry is for me a return to an emphasis on the physical structure of language – the sign made by the voice and the symbol for that sign made on paper or in other material and visible form’ (Cobbing 1999a, Postscript). Defining visual poetry is difficult; its practitioners were not only explicitly internationalist and impatient of national boundaries, but also challenged boundaries between art forms. Dick Higgins’s ‘Intermedia Chart’ (see Figure 6.1) (Rothenberg and Joris 1998, p. 428) is a Venn diagram of a range of possible relationships between visual poetry, conceptual art, happenings, mail art and other related activities. Hopelessly complex at first glance it reveals itself as an attempt visually to represent a series of relationships that do exist or have existed in the past. As a diagram it is able to represent that complexity without engaging in a reductive process of trying to categorize the different art forms. On the other hand it doesn’t tell us anything about what those different labels for art practices refer



Visual Poetry and the Space of the Page


Figure 6.1 ‘Intermedia’, Dick Higgins (1995)

to. The American poet, artist and critic Johanna Drucker is equally aware of the difficulties of categorization: In the twentieth century the explorations of various typographic, calligraphic, and even sculptural manifestations contributes to a widespread proliferation of formal innovations. At the end of the twentieth century there is a fully developed, very complex, continually reinterrogated, and highly varied range of work being produced in which visual and verbal distinctions are difficult to sustain. (Jackson, Voss and Drucker 1996, p. 39)



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She traces influence on contemporary visual poetry through the Russian and Italian Futurists, Dada and the Noigandres group from Brazil. Lines of influence criss-cross, some going back to literary modernism in Pound, Stein and Joyce, while others operate in a more interdisciplinary tradition through Dada and the Futurists. Many of the practitioners were unaware of contemporary work going on in other parts of the world and it is not until the 1950s and the production of a variety of manifestos that ideas of concrete poetry begin to coalesce. These are soon fragmented again by an enormous variety of activity including Burroughs’s and Gysin’s ‘cut-ups’, the typewriter experimentation of poets like Charles Olson and the interest in the material nature of texts by the language poets in the United States and Canada. Meanwhile in England, poets such as Bob Cobbing began to subvert the ‘official’ use of office machinery to produce a variety of work that often had no words at all. Others produced ‘art books’, one-off visual objects, while two-dimensional and three-dimensional visual art increasingly incorporated text within it, and text-based sitespecific work found its way into the discourses and practices of arts policy makers and civic planners. There are earlier examples. Mallarmé’s ‘Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard’ from the 1890s is a poem which implicitly asks questions about how the appearance of a poem affects its reading. In their commentary to ‘Un Coup de Dés’ in Poems for the Millennium, Rothenberg and Joris stress the importance of Mallarmé’s work to twentieth-century poetics and author theory by referring to the way in which: These visual/musical inventions prefigured most of the important moves by poets after him, as did his explorations of ‘chance’ and open-ended meaning, both of which gave to language & process a share of the authority/authorship previously reserved for the poet. (Rothenberg and Joris 1995, p. 76) David Scott in Pictorialist Poetics and Penny Florence in Mallarmé, Manet and Redon, on the other hand, usefully relocate Mallarmé’s poem in the historical context of France of the nineteenth century, and as a work that arises from the links between visual art and poetry at that time. For Florence the integration of text into visual, or the




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in pictorialist poetry, the poem asserts itself not only as a text to be read as in conventional discourse, but also, like the painting, as an artistic arrangement of signifiers. Its language functions primarily on an aesthetic level, the communication of meaning sometimes playing a merely subsidiary role. (Florence 1986, p. 2) This is a sensible conclusion to arrive at, and it is certainly the case that the idea of ‘meaning’ in visual texts needs to be approached with even more caution than in others, but I am not sure that I entirely agree. The use of text in work that is designed according to a visual aesthetic will break down conventional syntax and will place words in new contexts, but the result is more often a dialogue between the ‘meanings’ a word carries around with it and the visual apprehension of that word in the context of the poem. It is in this type of correspondence that the density and breadth of meaning in visual poetry can be found. ‘Un Coup de Dés’ is a long poem made up of a title page followed by 11 two-page spreads. The title runs through the poem, with words from it appearing in capital letters, sometimes isolated on a single page. The poem is ‘composed by the page’, with each two-page spread making a ‘picture’ through the use of eight different typefaces. I have immediate access to three book versions and one internet version (in Rothenberg and Joris 1995, p. 76; Scott 1988; Florence 1986; and at ). The book versions have the spine dividing each page, forcing the lines on to one page or another and suggesting two left-hand margins, one on each page. This is absent from the internet version which has, in effect, a single left hand margin from which all the lines are measured off. This is a more satisfying representation, probably closer to Mallarmé’s original vision of the poem (see Scott 1988, p. 142). There are a number of analyses of the content of the poem (see, for example, Florence 1986, pp. 84–126 and Scott 1988, pp. 138–46), but I want to try to draw out the implications of Mallarmé’s procedural and formal interests and try to explain why Rothenberg and Joris



arrangement of text according to a visual aesthetic, results in the referential qualities of the text becoming ‘subisidiary’:

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would see him as having ‘prefigured most of the important moves by poets after him’. As well as the usual formal considerations of stanza, line, syntax and sound, the poem uses the page as a site for the visual construction of the poem out of the material of language, combining the effect of the arrangement of the material on the page with the referential qualities of the words and their syntactical relationships. The arrangement of lines, shifting left-hand margins and the use of white space all affect the rhythmic aspects of the language, the pace of reading, and the way attention is given to particular words. Scott also refers to the way: The page thus asserts itself both as an ironic denial of language’s positive rational gestures and as a potentially symbolic field, capable, silently, of reverberating, extending, or enlarging the irrational or unconscious implications of the text. (Scott 1988, p. 139) While the poem is a picture, it is an abstract one, and as such is ‘potentially symbolic’. It is perceived both synchronically, all at once in a form of gestalt experience, and diachronically, in that it is ‘read’ over a period of time. Scott’s point is that the visual arrangement and the fragmented syntax potentially transmits a range of non-verbal meanings which add to the verbal material and that, together, they produce a variety of readings and a variety of potential meanings. When I read the page headed ‘LE NOMBRE (THE NUMBER)’, I am not sure how to read the lines. The eye is thrown backwards and forwards across the page, moving from capitals to italics in tiny font size. The final words of the title, ‘LE HASARD (CHANCE)’ is in bold capitals and cuts across the lower section of the right-hand page (Figure 6.2). I’m not sure whether this is to be read as a delay after the previous section of the title some three pages back or as part of the text on that page. It is both of course, a fact that opens the word out to multiple possibilities, see-sawing between reference points. It is both ‘as indifferent as CHANCE’ and a continuation of ‘NEVER WILL ABOLISH’. Crucially, the poem plays with ideas of poetic time through its spatial arrangement. Spreading the title over four pages dispersed throughout the poem, for example, interferes with the flow of the




‘Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard’, Stéphane Mallarmé 10.1057/9780230595569 - Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, Ian Davidson

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect 2011-04-21

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Figure 6.2

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reading process. I am not always sure in what order to read the lines, whether some should have more emphasis than others and how I should pace the reading. Given a Shakespearean sonnet, as a crude example, most readers would produce an identical reading in terms of word order, and a broadly similar reading in terms of duration through stress, rhythm and pace. Faced with ‘Un Coup de Dés’ it is highly unlikely that this would be the case, and this is not simply the result of a deficiency in understanding or experience to be overcome by further study. The poem, through its form, challenges the idea that there is a sense of a final, complete or correct reading somewhere within the text. The poem lends itself to, and encourages, diverse readings or performances, and it is through this idea of a reading, whether private or public, as a performance, as something with a particular duration and process, that I can approach visual poetry. To do so, otherwise, would mean either simply expressing bafflement at the variety of possible interpretations, or only dealing with the poem at a conceptual level and failing to grapple with the complexities of the referential nature of the text. The idea of each reading, whether out loud and in public or silently to oneself, as being a different performance, enables a more detailed engagement with the material of the poetry in the absence of a determined word order or any sense of duration.

Visual poetry and the poetic line Free verse on a page is initially identified by the use of the line that breaks before the right-hand margin. The line brings together the idea of the poem as a unit of ‘time’, in the way it creates rhythm within the poem, and as the primary influence on the spatial organization of the poem. The importance of the line can be simply illustrated. If a poem were reprinted in different versions, the lines would remain the same. Almost anything else about its appearance could change, the typeface and the numbers of lines to particular pages, but the line would remain as the principal structuring device of free verse. The poet Steve McCaffery stresses a relationship between time and space in the line: At the outset let me say that I don’t consider linear and visual as antinomial. The line is, and always has been both visual




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Others are more cautious, and in his book Free Verse, Charles O. Hartman distinguishes between the way poetry is organized on the page (which he calls the spatial element), and the temporal factors in its measure and pace and the duration of its reading: But we can at least learn more about poetry by considering its relationship to space and time Certainly both space and time are involved, but it seems to me that the spatial characteristics of poetry have always been secondary. Our poetic conventions derive from a time when poetry was not only aural but oral Some critics now interest themselves in ecriture, in books as books and not as records of speech. If this idea should gain ascendancy over the way we read, the spatial element in poetry might take on a greater importance written verse always involves some admixture of spatial organization. The shape on the page of metered stanzas creates a presumption of order Nevertheless for the present we continue to think of language, and thus verse, as a temporal medium. (Hartman 1980, p. 12) Time and space, for Hartman, are related to the sound of the poem as heard, a process which occurs over time, and the poem as visual arrangement, an act of perception which occurs in a spatialized ‘moment’, when all the material is spread out before the reader. He goes on to emphasize: The prosody of a poem is the poet’s method of controlling the reader’s temporal experience of the poem, especially his attention to that experience. (Hartman 1980, p. 13) For Hartman, poetry is experienced (performed) over time and its organization and arrangement control the ‘time’ of the poem and the reader’s/performer’s experience. Syntax and prosody all play their part. Regular (quantitatively measured) verse provides blocks of poetry on



and temporal, appearing as radial, vertical, diagonal, as well as horizontal. (Cobbing and Upton 1998)

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Figure 6.3 ‘Silencio’, Eugen Gomringer (1954)

the page, its regularity in space matched by its metrical regularity in time (its measure). In free verse the turn of the line provides the shape of the poem on the page. Visual poetry implicitly and explicitly challenges this. It is in the main non-linear, or uses the line in such a way that the reading becomes ambiguous. Time becomes arbitrary or absent and a reading could take a fraction of a second or forever. How is time present in a classic concrete poem such as Gomringer’s ‘Silencio’? (Figure 6.3). What ‘timing’ is indicated in Steve McCaffery’s Carnival with its collage of words, letters and graphic images palimpsestically arranged over and under each other? (Figure 6.4). The word order, weighting of each word and the stress patterns within a line are absent from most visual poems and while individual ‘performances’ of the poems will each have a duration, this is not necessarily derived from any sense of timing contained within the prosody of the poem. Other ways of suggesting or controlling readings emerged. The proliferation of the typewriter as a tool for the composition of poetry further allowed free-verse poets to easily locate words with accuracy on the page. Poets could simultaneously pay attention to the appearance of a poem and use that appearance to ‘score’ a reading of the poem according to their individual physical characteristics. This was done through exploiting the typographical possibilities of the typewriter, by leaving spaces between words, between lines, altering line length and changing both right- and left-hand margins with some




(a) Carnival – Panel 1 : 2 Figure 6.4 Carnival, Steve McCaffery (1999). Panel 1: 2, 3, 4 and Panel 2: CHANGE OF ADDRESS



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(b) Carnival – Panel 1 : 3 Figure 6.4 (Continued)



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(c) Carnival – Panel 1 : 4 Figure 6.4 (Continued)



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(d) Carnival – Panel 2: CHANGE OF ADDRESS Figure 6.4 (Continued)

accuracy and consistency, and the way a poet can ‘indicate exactly the breath, the pauses, the suspension even of syllables’ (Olson 1997, p. 245). If a gap was so long, as here for example, then the voice would pause for a certain length of time. The space on the page becomes part of the rhythm of the reading or performing of the poem.





In her essay ‘After Free Verse’, Marjorie Perloff refers to a ‘a poetics of postlinearity or multilinearity’ (Perloff 1998, p. 156). Just as free verse celebrated breaking down the restrictions of metrical verse, visual or non-linear poetics celebrates the freedom that comes from refusing to stay ‘in line’. She goes on to say: Who would have thought that less than forty years after Olson celebrated the ‘LINE’ as the embodiment of the breath and the signifier of the heart the line would be perceived as a boundary, a confining border, a form of packaging. (Perloff 1998, p. 156) In an afterword to the anthology of ‘experimental’ poetry by women, Out of Everywhere, Wendy Mulford refers to ‘texts which have been generated on different principles, which are multi and non-linear’ (O’Sullivan 1996, p. 239). If, in the movement towards modernism, metrically structured poetry gave way to free verse, with the line as the key characteristic of the ‘poetic’ and sustaining the difference between free verse and prose, then linear free verse has, in some respects and at the experimental edge, given way to post-linear or multi-linear verse. Reading Out of Everywhere reveals work in ‘prose’ lines, some of which fill the page, others of which leave large gaps. Some combine the graphic with the verbal, others use a range of fonts or shift around the left- and right-hand margins or use capitals out of their ordinary usage. Some of the poems do look like contemporary free verse with a solid left-hand margin, but surprisingly few. The time of the line, it appears from the evidence of this anthology, is replaced by the space of the page.

The 1950s and 1960s It is worth keeping Out of Everywhere in mind when reading an earlier book, An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, edited by Emmett Williams and published by Dick Higgins’s Something Else Press; an anthology which is in many ways a defining moment in the history of concrete poetry and a kind of summation of the work from the 1950s and 1960s. The careful use of the indefinite article (‘An’) suggests that the editor and publisher did not want it to be seen as ‘The’ defining collection, but its cast list includes the key figures involved



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in the international development of visual poetry in the middle of the twentieth century and includes not only Emmett Williams himself, but Henri Chopin, Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Bob Cobbing and many others. The anthology is explicitly internationalist. Not until the appearance in 1995 of Poems for the Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, have so many different nationalities been represented between two covers. If one purpose of an anthology is to create a national ‘treasure house’ or ‘show case’ of poetry, then An Anthology of Concrete Poetry has no national agenda or allegiance and implicitly questions the relevance of national identity as an organizing feature of a poetic movement. In the introduction Williams comments on how, in concrete poetry, ‘the confused geography of its beginnings reflects the universality of its roots’ (E. Williams 1967). There is a relatively simple explanation for the anthology’s international perspective. Because it implicitly questions the referential nature of language, visual poetry can bring together poetry from different languages relatively easily. Words become visual objects and are interpreted as such. Their meanings, and their syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships to other words within the language system, become only one function amongst others. Max Bense talks about ‘poetry on a level of metalanguage, poetry in a world of its own’ and ‘the grey haze of meanings that hovers over each surface’ (E. Williams 1967). Augusto de Campos talks about ‘Concrete Poetry: tension of things-words in space-time’ (E. Williams 1967). The word is therefore a ‘thing’ in its own right, a mark within the visual space of the poem. What it refers to, and its part within a particular language system, is only one role within the poem. The works of Bob Cobbing, in the books Shreiks and Hisses and Kob Bok, for example, are often visual texts without an identifiable word in them. In these the eye roams around the page, looking at both the overall composition of the page and possible references of individual shapes or textures. There are layers and folds, and things permanently hidden within those folds, the three-dimensional appearance never unfolding on the two-dimensional surface. In an earlier poem, ‘WOWROMWRORMM’ (Figure 6.5), from An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, the poem is made out of words, but their blurring turns them into the shape of the worm the title nearly says in a verbal and visual response to Apollinaire’s poem of ‘Pleut’, which it both resembles and reverses





Figure 6.5 ‘WORM’, Bob Cobbing (1966)

to indicate that worms come after rain. Dom Sylvester Houedard talks of ‘wobble’ and ‘interweave’ in the poem, where the poem, while static, gives the illusion of movement to produce a text that is only semi-legible. A number of poems in Kob Bok use the same technique. Some words are blurred until they become indistinguishable, others are letters that look like words but are not, while others are lists of



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slang or anagrams reflecting each other across the centre of the page. Another looks like it has been juddered out of the printer, the same line repeated a number of times before the paper is passed through again. Concrete poetry of the 1950s and 1960s implicitly allied itself to a politics of the Left and, through links to Situationism and Fluxus, to processes of subversion. In much of the work there is an implicit anticonsumerist or anti-capitalist message. A political excitement comes off the pages of An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, a kind of homemade localized radicalism (many of the poets talk about ways in which their poems could become public art and exist outside literary spaces) within a global movement. It is reminiscent of Situationism in its aims of retaking public space both through the intrusion of artworks (concrete poems) and the colonization of language itself, subverting its forms and structures. ‘Writers Forum’ a London-based workshop and press that focuses on visual and concrete poetry and has published over one thousand works since 1963, is an example of this ‘grassroots’ approach. The publications are often simple, photocopied reproductions. There is no marketing department, no commercial distribution network. It is a cottage industry that gives the participants control over the means and ways of production, its roots closer to protest groups and the anarchist movement than more literary circles.

Graffiti artists: from clean concrete to dirty visuals In An Anthology of Concrete Poetry the majority of the works demonstrates a continuation of the typographical experimentation of the Futurists and Dadaists. They emphasize the two-dimensional surface of the page and work in blocks of text which create a particular design. Well known examples include Gomringer’s ‘Silencio’ (Figure 6.3) and Pignatari’s ‘beba coca cola’ (Figure 6.6), in which the poem and the page are constructed by clearly delineated blocks of text, the page cut up into the black of the text and the white of the paper. Within this majority there are some significantly different examples. Emmett Williams produces a ‘rubber-stamp poem, from a genre I called “universal poems”, probably because I furnished spectators with rubber stamps and let them construct the poems’ (E. Williams 1967) (Figure 6.7). In a poem such as this, the letters and the words they may make up are obliterated by the repeated use of rubber





Figure 6.6 ‘beba coca cola’, Décio Pignatari (1957)

stamps. A number of other poets either overtype or type words so close to each other they lose their individual identity and become part of a patterned chain demonstrating a shift from the ‘clean’ twodimensional typographical experimentation to what McCaffery calls the more ‘dirty’ process of layering and obliteration. Describing the ‘range of difference within the products of concretism’ (Jackson, Voss and Drucker 1996, p. 400) McCaffery refers to: the presence of two fundamental tendencies. One towards the clean and the other towards the dirty. Dirty concrete characterises much of the British scene (for instance the work of Bob Cobbing, Paula Claire, Bill Griffiths, Clive Fencott, cris cheek,



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Figure 6.7 ‘rubber-stamp poem’, Emmett Williams (1958)

and Lawrence Upton). Which can be described as a preference for textual obliteration rather than manifestation, and the use of found objects as notation for sound performance In contrast ‘clean’ concrete is epitomised in the spatialist texts of Pierre and Ilse Garnier, Gomringer’s konstellationen, the semiotic texts of Décio Pignatari, and in much of the earlier work of the Campos brothers. (Jackson, Voss and Drucker 1996, p. 400) He suggests that ‘dirty’ concrete poetry engaged with and interrogated the tendency of ‘clean’ poetry towards the ‘closure’ of the text and the production of a ‘reified condition as object’ (Jackson, Voss





and Drucker 1996, p. 400). There are other connected differences. The first is the further development of ideas of the architectural, and a subsequent interest in ‘three dimensional’ or layered work as against work which is fundamentally two dimensional. This introduces the idea of the work as a lived space, like a building one inhabits and which one constructs by moving through it. The second is the relationship between dirty concrete and ideas of the ‘baroque’. These find their most complex expression in Gilles Deleuze’s work in The Fold (2001), where he uses the ideas of Leibniz to develop the idea of the baroque in visual art through an examination of the ‘fold’ and the ‘pleat’. Ideas about space that have changed, and that change, is reflected in the poetry. Rather than space being envisaged as a pre-existing surface or container within which the material of the poem is arranged, the space of the poem is now produced by the writer and reader in the act or performance of writing and reading. Perspective is no longer fixed, as it was for much earlier graphically based concrete poetry, but shifts according to viewpoint. Architectural form acts as a useful analogy. It is three dimensional and designed to be seen from without and within. The person enters the building and, as she moves through it, creates a series of spaces defined both by the boundaries of the building and their sensory perception. It can be seen all at once, from a distance, but it also has to be seen in bits, experienced from the inside. The complexity of ‘dirty’ concrete suggests a similar reading process. The reader has to move about within the poem in order to produce a range of different spaces. The relationship between ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ concrete poetry can also, in part, be illuminated by relationships between classical and baroque architectural styles. The baroque is celebratory, energetic and playful, and contains ornament and decoration beyond notions of function which rarely give up their entire significance in one glance or if viewed from one perspective. In his book Reflections on Baroque, Robert Harbison says: Baroque buildings have has never ceased to annoy the purists because they strive after the impossible, aiming to suggest to viewers that they are watching an unfolding process rather than a fixed and finished composition. (Harbison 2000, p. 1)



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impressionistic grammar, so fertile in spreading confusion or at least uncertainty about whether the word at the end of a line is a noun or a verb, about when the hovering or suspended sense will be allowed to find temporary rest or final closure. (Harbison 2000, p. 6) Although he draws in references from across the arts, Harbison is ultimately coy about the relationship between the baroque and literature, saying that even writers like Milton are ‘not exactly Baroque but like Baroque by a kind of metaphorical extension’ (2000, p. 227). Frank J. Warnke, on the other hand, in his 1972 book Versions of Baroque: European Literature in the Seventeenth Century, is clearer about the role of the baroque in the literary arts. For Warnke the baroque is typified by contradictions, by the conceit, the paradox, the antithesis and the oxymoron. It is a reaction to the Elizabethan use of ‘the fixed form of the sonnet, and the fixed stanzaic patterns of rhyme royal and ottava rima (which) operate as pre-existent containers into which the poetic material may be poured’ (Warnke 1972, p. 33). He continues: For most typical Baroque poets, on the other hand, material makes form, and the individual poetic utterance, particularly in the lyric, assumes a unique prosodic form, suitable for it and for it only. (Warnke 1972, p. 33) In the same way that for Lefebvre space is ‘produced’ by spatial practice, the form of the poetry (its space in both a formative and a psychological sense) is produced by the baroque twists and turns. The readers of baroque literature, or those who experience baroque architectural space, get lost; there are no viewpoints from which the totality of the artwork can be perceived. This complexity and the open-ended nature of baroque art, and poetry in particular, mean that baroque literature can present difficulties when the works are paraphrased. Owing to their ‘dramatization of the experience of contradiction’ and their ‘thoroughgoing subversion of logic’, Warnke is led to the conclusion that a poem of Marvell’s, for example, ‘is not really



From a literary point of view he talks about the way Milton in ‘Paradise Lost’ uses:


a poem that conveys a meaning; it is a poem that constitutes an experience – the imaginative experience of the validity of contradictory truths’ (Warnke 1972, p. 59). The baroque is therefore characterized as being with multiple perspectives. It is an experience that draws ‘reader’ and ‘read’ into the same frame and which breaks down borders between viewer and viewed. In her work on the baroque, neo-baroque and modern entertainment media, Angel Ndalianis refers to the ‘seventeenth and late twentieth centuries’ shared fascination with spectacle, illusionism, and the baroque formal principle of the collapse of the frame’ (Ndalianis 2000). According to Ndalianis, the ‘classical’ concerns itself with ‘closure’, a closure which comes about via a perception of space as ‘ordered’ and which has the sense of a ‘centre’, both of which give the work a particular perspective. Baroque, on the other hand, ‘suggest(s) worlds of infinity that lose the sense of a centre’. The ‘polycentric and multiple’ centre is now determined by the spectator, with each new position setting up a new focus and new spatial arrangement. As well as this shifting relationship to perspective, the ‘baroque’s difference to classical systems lies in its refusal to respect the limits of the frame’ (Ndalianis 2000). The work will spill over established borders and boundaries. In Lefebvrian terms the ‘dirty’ concrete poems emphasize the attributes of representational spaces, those that are lived and experienced. As baroque spaces are constructed by the indeterminate wanderings of the body and the gaze, the poetry of a piece like Steve McCaffery’s Carnival is constructed by the reader (see Figure 6.4). The reader/viewer sees it as a map or a diagram, as a representation of space, but must also enter it through the text to experience the piece. Carnival is made up of two ‘panels’, and each panel is made up of 16 sections, each one a ‘page’ within a chapbook. The chapbook has to be dismantled to construct the panel. There is also a much smaller scale representation or ‘map’ of the piece, so the individual sections can be located within a bigger picture. Each panel is made up of a shape, a little like part of a coastline of a map. The shape is made up of typewritten letters (although other tools for mark-making are introduced in ‘Panel 2’), sometimes in discernible words or phrases but in other cases illegible or not arranged into words. As they lose legibility the letters simply become the dots that go to make up the overall shape of the panel. Like baroque, the Carnival panels are



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designed ‘in order to put the reader, as perceptual participant, within the centre of his language’ (McCaffery 1999). McCaffery continues in his introduction to the pieces to refer to a ‘structure of strategic counter-communication designed to draw a reader inward to a locus where text surrounds her’. There is no privileged perspective from which the ‘text’ is to be perceived. ‘The panel when read is entered ’, an experience like entering a labyrinth or maze or even the ‘body’ of the text. The way out is not clear but the reader must travel along ‘countless reading paths’ and ‘through zones of familiar sense into the opaque regions of the unintelligible’ (McCaffery 1999). Once in the maze the reader loses a sense of the way out. In ‘reading’ the second page of Carnival ‘Panel 1’ (Figure 6.4 (a)) the ‘reader’ will first of all take in the whole shape. As a geographical map it looks like a coastline with a long sandbank leading away to the left, something like a lake coming in from the right and a river cutting across about a third of the way up. The coastline is all curves, folding back on itself and the two colours are generally in horizontal bands, giving a layering effect. Most of the words are indecipherable while others stand out. So the words have two functions: as referents, but also as material objects that take up space in the image and form the shapes within it. Reading from the top left we get a number of words and phrases. The first is ‘just think of and say’, an encouragement to act on impulse, to give in to the chance of consciousness and an echo of Ginsberg’s ‘first thought best thought’. The next discernible text is mainly in capitals – ‘EVE’S ENDING EVERrrrrr ’ – whether a reference to Eve of the Bible, some other Eve or the eve of the day we do not, at this stage, know. There follows a series of lines that overlap and cross each other. Some bits are impossible to work out while others are clear. The first lines are in red type, and are the only bits of red type with legible words. They are ‘t was late it was a black form wit ’. The ‘m’ of form is not clearly an ‘m’. It may be another letter crossed out. Crushed in underneath that is ‘sort of homely muscle and comely’, although ‘comely’ has a couple of letters disfigured. So even when there are words to be made out, there is no certainty that those are the words. And there is no clue as to whether these words are significant or not. If they are fragments, are they chipped off something of which we should be able to guess the whole? Or are they remnants, bits left over? We have to assume they have some significance, even if that only comes about through





chance. An aesthetic decision was made to leave these words as legible words. A further clue as to the significance of individual words is in whether they reappear in different sections of the panel. A series of biblical allusions occurs throughout the poem: to Eve, Adam and on the last page to Babel. On the third page (Figure 6.4 (b)) the lines ‘WITH THE WORD I AM TO BE DISCOVERED/ EVE WILL LEAD ME BACK TO/ THE PULSE OF PURITY’ appear in different forms across the ‘map’. On the fourth page (Figure 6.4 (c)), the religious theme continues when the words ‘i have the word then i can call this world a lie’ run broken down the page. In her essay on McCaffery, ‘Inner Tension/ In Attention’, Marjorie Perloff quotes McCaffery as saying ‘I built the text around certain biblical allusions. Adam as the power of nomination; Babel as the source of polyglossia and so on. All of this I would now scrap’ (Perloff 1998, p. 268). Although his views on language may have changed and the references may not add up to any current concerns of McCaffery, the image of Eve which runs through the poem, and other religious references, do provide sources of stability and recognition as the reader goes through the text. Another page refers to ‘THE PATTERN OF EVE/ THE PATTERN OF EVENT’. They develop an interrogation of the relationship between language and meaning, between language and the world it might describe, and do so within the context of the Christian myth which states that ‘In the beginning was the word’. ‘Panel 2’ continues this exploration. The principal instrument is the typewriter but McCaffery also adds ‘other forms of scription: xerography, xerography within xerography (i.e. metaxerography and disintegrative seriality) electrostasis, rubber-stamp, tissue texts, hand lettering and stencil’ (McCaffery 1999). Within this more diverse visual field, a series of statements reflect the process of constructing the visual poem and the relationship between the ‘figure’ of the text and the ‘ground’ of the paper. The first page has the phrase ‘penetration to the white experience between the words’, the second ‘you must writ/ upon it you must write/ upon the page that there is/ white upon the page’ and includes the pun about the constipated mathematician who worked it out with a pencil. A rubber stamp of ‘CHANGE OF ADDRESS’ (Figure 6.4 (d)) and (I think) ‘NO EXCHANGE REQUIRED ON CHEQUES’ form a repeated motif throughout the poem. These, I presume found texts, are stamped



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over and over again around an axis that sometimes shifts to make flower-like forms across the piece. They give a sense of movement and provide the ‘centres’, frequently referred to in ‘Panel 1’, but centres that keep getting thrown off centre. The ‘CHANGE OF ADDRESS’ suggests both geographical mobility of a population as well as the different ways a poem might address its readership. ‘NO EXCHANGE REQUIRED ON CHEQUES’ links to McCaffery’s idea of a ‘textual economy’, which would ‘concern itself not with the order of forms and sites but with the order-disorder of circulations and distributions’ (McCaffery 1998, p. 201). Other phrases continue and develop the ‘language’ theme such as ‘permanent signifier/ of place’ on page 4, and the change of address on page 6 where the poem has extended blocks of fragmented prose in which the reader is directly ‘addressed’ in both meanings of the word; ‘where do you live and why/ because I am about to tell you’ and finishes on an extended repetition of the phrase ‘her name remained on every tongue after they all had forgotten her name remained’. The riff ends with a reference to ideas of figure and ground when ‘returning home I plunged deep into the black words of my/ book long after I forgot the whiteness of the white’ (McCaffery 1999). Issues of meaning, of address, of identity and of tension between the materiality and referentiality of language combine the concerns of the concrete poets and the language poets. I have used McCaffery’s Carnival as an example of that and as an example of the way in which a turn to a more ‘dirty’ concrete, a concrete inscribed with the ‘social utterance’ (Perloff 1998, p. 269) that earlier producers of concrete poetry, according to McCaffery, failed to engage with, connects to more text-based visual poetry.

Pages and spaces I began this chapter by emphasizing the importance of the visual nature of the poem to all poetry and want to end it by describing the way two very different poets, Caroline Bergvall and Ed Dorn, have used the space of the page to develop and emphasize particular aspects of their poetry. Bergvall is European and would trace the roots of her work back through Surrealism and Dada, while Dorn is American and ‘Black Mountain’ in origin, although he has spent a significant amount of time working in Europe. Bergvall is well known as a





performer of her poetry and for her site-specific sound and text works as well as a commentator and theorist of contemporary poetry. Dorn, while he would have developed a concern for the visual aspects of poetry through his association with Olson, would not be considered a ‘visual’ poet or have any obvious connections with concrete poetry. In a late text however, ‘Languedoc Variorum’ (in Dorn 1996), he develops meaning closely linked to the process of composition by the page, rather than the ‘line’. In her poem ‘in situ’, and the title itself reflects something of Bergvall’s aspiration to make the text have something of the qualities of an ‘installation’ or site-specific artwork, Bergvall creates three fields across the page through the insertion of an imaginary vertical line to left and right about where one would expect to find the margins of a schoolbook (Figure 6.8). Dorn splits the page of ‘Languedoc Variorum’ (Figure 6.9) through the addition of a horizontal line of the character ‘¶’ about half the way down the page and another of the character ‘†’ about 20 mm up from the bottom of the page. The different sections of the page are reinforced by the use of a different typeface and font size. These divisions and differences are consistent throughout the poem. The effect of the three ‘fields’ in ‘in situ’ serves to increase its dynamic, to give a sense of something always going on. There are three distinct voices, a central voice and two out in the margins, but some blurring of this distinction occurs as the poem reaches its end. The poem seems to echo Gertrude Stein’s ‘Lifting Belly’ in places where it emphasizes performativity through repetition, ultimately calling attention to the structure of the language itself as when Stein writes: Kiss my lips. She did. Kiss my lips again she did. Kiss my lips over and over and over again and she did. (Rothenberg and Joris 1995, p. 104) Like Stein, Bergvall questions structures of language and meaning through including non-verbal elements within the poem and through denaturalizing the reading process. As a reader I hunt for a satisfactory procedure for the format, trying to read it as a play, as a sound poem



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Figure 6.8 10.1057/9780230595569 - Ideas of Space in Contemporary Poetry, Ian Davidson

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect 2011-04-21

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‘in situ’, Caroline Bergvall


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Figure 6.9 ‘Languedoc Variorum’, High West Rendezvous, Ed Dorn (1996)


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and as a three-part text. None is entirely satisfactory but entails me moving between the different reading processes. The time of the poem is distorted through the division of the space of the page. Its distortion is increased by the different qualities of work within the three sections. Within the left-hand margin are what appear to be characters, ‘kisser 1’ and ‘kisser 2’, and beyond the right-hand margin are what appear to be footnotes or diary entries, in a small, italicized typeface, each one preceded by a date making the poem a combination of stage, which characters enter, and script, through which the activity is recorded. The dates in the right-hand margin are chronological and run from 1993 to 1995, suggesting that the poem describes a sequence of events over a specific period of time. Each entry begins ‘on’ something, giving the text the quality of a pronouncement, a philosophical treatise or a quasi-scientific feel of some previous century. The central block of text is made up of a combination of words and repeated, patterned punctuation marks. The number of words increases as the text progresses until the leftand right-hand margins fall away leaving just the block of text in the centre made up of words. The central block describes one, or many, sexual acts. The spatial distribution of the material on the page disrupts the timing of the performance of the poem and creates a text that specifically and explicitly disrupts the reading process in a structured way. If read aloud, does one read, for example, the words ‘kisser 1’ and ‘kisser 2’, and if so, is there a gap just after them? The font size of the journal entries suggests they should be said in a whisper. The punctuation marks suggest a score while the italicized statements in the far-right margin have the appearance of stage directions, but they are not. The number of words, as against punctuation marks, increases as the poem goes on. It suggests a process of ‘tuning in’, like the dial on a radio moving and the static slowly clearing. If the first impact of the way in which the space of the page is used is on the reading of the poem, its timing, the second is on the role of the subject within the poem. In some ways this is the most personal of poetry, describing sexual activity in great detail, while on the other hand its structure distances the subject author. We do not know where to locate her, what voice she might have. Is she one of the kissers in Column 1, the narrator or originator of the work in Column 2, or the diarist in Column 3, cool and collected and





commenting from a distance? The author is, of course, all three – the subject, the object and the chronicler. The distribution of the text(s) on the page suggests multiple identities at work within the poem and provides a number of perspectives. The absorption of the left- and right-hand margins into the centre suggests a process of resolution, of focusing, and a process of colonization and silencing, of absorbing those identities within the subject/author. Some of these diverse reading practices can be further examined through ideas of performance. In an interview with John Stammers, Bergvall questions her role as writer and as a producer of ‘readable’ texts, or at least texts that bear a resemblance to other book-based writing: the more I write and the more I’m involved as a practitioner and thinking about it the more complicated and complex it gets and therefore the more open I get to various situations in which I could involve my becoming a writer. So that it becomes less and less clear that to be a writer for me is to generate books. (Bergvall 1999b) She sees writing as something which ‘questions the authority of language with language’ and its performance as an ‘observation’ which ‘locate(s) expressedly the context and means for writing whether these be activated for and through a stage, for and through a site, a time frame, a performer’s body, the body of a voice or the body of a page’ (Bergvall 1996). For Bergvall writing is a performance, yet she also produces writing that explicitly demands an active performance by the reader, whether the individual spelling it out to himself or the performer in front of the public. The writing appears incomplete and shattered across the page, the body of the text broken up. It is dismembered, with not only the syntax disarranged but also language taken apart at the level of the syllable. The idea of the body is further explored through Goan Atom. In the interview with Stammers again, she says: My motivation has been very much to do with gender and with sexuality. These are very strong motivators which to me are to do with how would you use language to construct or destructure assumptions about gender, about sexuality, about female gender.



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Where do you situate the use of language within that so that you don’t fall into a kind of identity based writing, or identity based art, but so that the whole question of identity becomes questioned. You can only question identity through questioning yourself There are other writers who have developed ways of trying to deal with language in a conceptual manner so that they could find a language that might bring those aspects of the body of sexualised unstraightened bodies into language. I’m interested in the whole notion of what you do with the flesh in language. (Bergvall 1996) In the first part of her poem Goan Atom, the image of the doll runs through the poem, a doll made up of parts, and which is always falling apart. The idea for the doll comes from the ‘Poupée’, the work of Hans Bellmer, a surrealist artist who constructed dolls made up of a variety of parts of the body, but which never form complete bodies. In an implicit criticism of the body fetishism of the Nazi regime in Germany, Bellmer produced dolls made up of four legs arranged in a Swastika and other poses where figures are deranged or compressed. The first part of Goan Atom is called ‘Jets Poupée’, a throw away or disposable doll, suggesting both the disposable nature of the girl or woman as commodity and the way in which we should throw away childish things. This idea of a doll that could be dismantled provides Bergvall with a metaphor of articulation and disarticulation, a metaphor she carries through to the language itself. Just as the body can be articulated, so too can language; broken down at the level of the syllable, it becomes inarticulate. As Bergvall says in the interview: In the same way the articulation or dis-articulation of language in the way that I was talking about it, though coming at it from different angles, becomes problematized. So the Doll project for me was a way of playing with language of disarticulating language at the level of syllable very often. (Bergvall 1999b) To add to the metaphor, the use of different languages dislocates the reader (languages are associated with places and to switch languages is to locate the reader somewhere else) in the same way the limbs of





the doll are dislocated and the bits of syllables are dislocated from that which they complete or completes them. Bergvall emphasizes the concrete nature of language for her when she says in the same interview that she ‘cannot forget she is using verbal material’ and this material is spread across the pages. The phrases are disjointed, often at the level of the word, and the unfinished or incomplete words lose their signification and become graphic marks on the page. The end of one page goes: li kemy dolly’s knees t Hey I full of joins they’re full of joi (Bergvall 1999a) before you have to turn the page to get the ‘n’, which has a page to itself, as does the ‘s’ which completes the words. Bergvall’s is a mechanical world in which bodies can be taken apart to see how they work and then put back together again. Drew Milne comments in his review of Goan Atom on the way in which ‘the book’s alternatively erotic games also foreground the performative slipperiness of the subject’ (Milne 2000). Within Bergvall’s work there is a sense of a body in performance, flesh in language, represented by the doll and reinforced by the stuttering voice that always seems to be either just ahead of itself or just behind: Enters the EVERY HOST dragging a badl Eg Finally I So that the inspiration for such thoughts becomes visible through the navel (Bergvall 1999a) The stage direction in Line 1 is echoed through the poem. The characters come into view, then recede or just fall apart. On the next page there is ‘Enter DOLLY’, and later on ‘Enter HEADSTURGEONS/ followed by/ Enter FISHMONGRELS’. The body of the text, or the body in the text, or the body that makes up the text, or the body



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the text makes up, is never far away. The space of the page is also a performance space, a stage. The section following ‘DOLLY’ reinforces the dual reference to ‘enter’ as a stage direction and to ‘enter’ sexually: Enter DOLLY Entered enters Enters entered Enter entre en train en trail (Bergvall 1999a) The language, disarticulated at the level of the syllable, and the use of more than one language give the reader many entry points into the text, in the way that the disarticulation of the body, represented by DOLLY, provides many entry points: sgot a wides slit down the lily sgot avide slot (Bergvall 1999a) In performance it is the word made flesh, but it is a word that is always unsure of its own construction and context rather than a word that lays down the law. The language is tuned in and out as she searches across the waveband, syllables and words remain half completed for some duration before a turn of the page finds the final letters. The language games and the spatial disorientation of the reader are part of the way the poem is presented, its form and its subject. Metaphors of disjointedness and dislocation, both forms of spatial separation where things are held apart, run through Goan Atom. Dorn’s poem, ‘Languedoc Variorum: A Defense of Heresy and Heretics’, from the ‘sampler’ High West Rendezvous (Dorn 1996), is similarly reticent in helping readers to locate themselves. The title itself, a ‘variorum’, is a word used to describe the different versions of a poem and emphasizes the instability of the text and the possibility of multiple and diverse versions. If Dorn’s work through the 1970s and 1980s, from Hello, La Jolla to Abhorrences, dislocates a





reader from her place in America, as I demonstrated in Chapter 3, ‘Languedoc Variorum’ dislocates at the level of the page. Each page is split three ways, with two horizontal lines. The top portion of the page is entitled ‘Jerusalem’. The lower part, which is split by a row of crosses, is entitled ‘SUBTEXTS & NAZDAKS’. The ‘NAZDAK’ is both a character in Star Trek and also a slang term for the Nasdaq, a stock exchange dealing in high-tech stocks. On each page there is therefore a ‘main’ text at the top, followed by a subtext and then a ‘NAZDAK’. The ‘main’ text is a series of poems about heresy and persecution, the next text down is a commentary (a subtext) in a different font and a smaller size, and the third section is the ‘NAZDAK’, written in capital letters in the style of a stock exchange report (Figure 6.9). There appear to be three continuous texts running from page to page, independent yet with intersections. So it should be possible to read a full page at a time, and try to keep all three poems going at the same time, or to follow one poem through by reading the relevant section on each page. Readers are presented with a series of options in the way they construct the text. In some cases, and the lower section is an example of this, the syntax continues from page to page; in other cases the work is bracketed off and seems to conclude on a single page. Within this complex matrix Dorn sets out to cause further disruption. No one section is allowed to settle. The top section seems to get going before it is interrupted by a poem based on work by D. H. Lawrence, and the line spacing goes from 1.5 down to 1. This is followed by a poem about the Bogomil, a dualist religious sect from the Balkans (Dorn’s interest is in their heresy), which believed that the visible and material world was created by the devil. The rest of the section is made up of a short poem on Shoko Ashara, the cult leader responsible for the sarin attacks in Japan in the mid-1990s, a longer one on Tomas Torquemada, the first Inquisitor General, and a poem about Simon de Montfort, called ‘Notes on Beziers: the past as cauchemar’ (nightmare). The themes of all the pieces in this top section are the relationship between religion and heresy and organized religion and the nation-state, with resulting oppression and, frequently, mass murder, ending on the slaughter of the Cathars by Simon de Montfort in the Cathedral de Saint Nazaire. Dorn approaches this by isolating events and individuals within the poems, creating poetry out of the history. The discursive prose of the middle section adds, as Dorn sees it, to this corruption and collusion between the Abrahamic faiths:



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¶ The struggle between the three dominant one-god systems has a great deal to do with class and economic oppression and very little or nothing to do with religion and theology. And in fact the hierarchs of each system conspire at the top. They show up at one another’s funerals and they all participate equally in the satellite auctioning of the public’s ‘privatized’ property. The Sheiks of the Gulf have long rendezvoued in the Riviera and the Seychelles, the domain of Romanist dopers and drinkers. And they collect in the floating capitols of transnational capital – it’s really the one and only culture. However, the non-empowered just try to get on with their Jihads or the daily reading of the Bible as a realtor’s prospectus to the Holy Lands. Unlike the hierarchs, they haven’t got theirs, have never had and won’t ever have. To them, ‘Peace Brother’ is just another exhortation to cease and desist from messy and disruptive attempts to take a little weight off the other end of the balance. Hijack a Concorde with a kitchenknife would be the ultimate lo-tech solution. So it is, so it increaseth. The police proliferate, the prisons multiply. Monotheism grows ever more desperately cruel and bloody and implacable, battering the countless hapless against the stone wall of its singular will. (Dorn 1996, p. 36) Unlike the top section, the middle section is not divided into separate poems but into sections or paragraphs, each one beginning with a ‘¶’ and combining personal comment and invective, aphorism, historical information and memory. Dorn inserts himself, through a combination of acid commentary and personal memory, between the religious wars of the top section and the gibberish of international capital in the bottom section, forming links in some cases, but inconsistently. The different parts seem to leak or bleed into each other, mixing and muddying, rather than one section being explicatory or illustrative of the other. On page 38 (Figure 6.9), the middle section begins with an aphorism that could come straight out of Yellow Lola before turning into a parody of rap: ¶ The Virtues are far less interesting than the Sins and therefore far less widely practised. Putcha condom on, takeya condom off, Sow Bellies down a nickel, palmolive up a dime, putcha condom in the




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The next paragraph in the middle section is written as straight history: ¶ In 1621 (Plymouth Colony, 1620) George Calvert, Lord Baltimore went out to Newfoundland under a proprietary patent from James I but the climate drove him off (Dorn 1996, p. 38) The bottom part of the middle section on that page goes back to: ¶ The majority is nearly always against and at odds with the policies, oeconomic, social and political they invariably say Fuck you, take a Haiku; (Dorn 1996, p. 38) Dorn is using a variety of voices, the personal and the apparently objective, to present both history and ‘his story’. Compare this cacophony to the steady beat of the poetry in the top section: After that the story gets practical. God’s firstborn they taught, was Satanael, the highest spiritual being the universal viceregent. That position gave him enough pride to set up his own empire and recruit a number of angels. (Dorn 1996, p. 38) In the more fragmented middle section, Dorn roams through history, pulling together evidence to support his thesis that state-organized religion is the cause of the most bloodthirsty wars in history. In contrast to the other two sections of the page, the third section is a stream of apparently off-the-cuff and hyped-up statements couched in the discourse of the stock exchange, the Nasdaq. It is written in



pouch ov yo sweat shirt for yo bitch. Come on putcha condom on/ come on putcha condom on. (Dorn 1996, p. 38)

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bold capitals with no lineation and the use of the dash, ‘–’, as the main punctuation mark in imitation of the ‘tickertape’ language. Simultaneously funny, horrific and offensive, they mock a language that seeks to dissociate cause from effect. If the history in his previous sections, whether the measured poetic history of the top section or the personal sideswiping of the middle, is about tracing cause and effect, then the international finance of the stock exchange is about denying that cause and effect. It is hell, which is down below and at the bottom of the page. For example: —PIG HOCKS GLUT THE MARKET—GET OUT—BODY PIERCING UP A QUARTER—BACTERIA COUNT SHARP INCLINE— VIRUS BURST STEADY—HOLY VIRGIN UP A NICKLE— (Dorn 1996, pp. 38–9) It is language, running ceaselessly off the machine. Critical of the ahistorical tendencies of post-modernism, yet equally scathing of conservative attempts to retain control through simple appeals to tradition, Dorn develops a historical understanding of heresy and subsequent oppression and massacre by examples from across the last ten centuries. Different analyses or typologies are suggested by this structure, yet when they are followed through each reveals instabilities. The top section is history from historical sources, and about countries and peoples, the middle is the subjective history of the individual and the bottom section is the base, the economic underpinnings. The structure also suggests heaven, purgatory and hell. The visual aspects of the poetry, the space of the page and the use of different typefaces and font sizes, allow him to keep these different perspectives in play, to retain a ‘poetic’ analysis of the diversity of material that comes his way. As Dorn says in the introduction to High West Rendezvous: Writing such a book as Langue d’Oc and its variations has afforded me the opportunity to think widely, if not deeply, about the synchronizations and parallels and correspondences the new times have with the old, the dark mass of flitting realizations emerging at dusk like bats from the cave of the Medieval demi-millennium. (Dorn 1996, p. 1)





He can simultaneously present and interrogate particular positions, ideas and information. He can sustain ambiguity while expressing outrage; he can play seer and analyst at the same time. Neither Bergvall’s nor Dorn’s work would normally be called visual or concrete poetry. Yet both have used the space of the page as a site on which to build their poems, using the visual element to reflect concepts and ideas in the poetry and set up referential systems that would otherwise not be present. Bergvall’s use of the ‘dramatic’ format for her poem sets up expectations in the reader she both fulfils and denies. Dorn is able to intertwine personal, social and economic material through the use of the split page, allowing him to demonstrate different functions of languages and the uses to which different discourses can be put. He is using the page as a sort of map or a plan into which he can locate his different poems. The page becomes a diagrammatic representation of the different spaces language might inhabit as well as a representational, lived space, and one that the reader enters and uses. In use, during the process of reading, the crude distinctions of the mapping exercise break down and the discourses begin to jump the barriers.



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Through the Looking Glass: Poetry in Virtual Worlds

Writing about the relationship between the Internet, digital technologies and poetry and poetics within the context of changing ideas of space can be both a beguiling and a baffling process. It is beguiling in the sense that the spaces produced by the Internet and digital technologies are both a symbol of the spatial turn and a significant part of its production. The Internet redefines relationships between space and place, changes relationships between people and places, breaks down relationships between space and time and supports processes of globalization. The body may be in one place while the mind is in another and experience decreasingly takes place in the place in which the body is located. Surfing the Internet applies ideas of the ‘nomadic’ in the way one can apparently move freely around the Internet without a home and where home is always with you. The structure of the Internet itself is ‘rhizomatic’; it can be broken into at any point and has no centre or periphery. The Internet and digital technologies also produce spaces within which a variety of ideas about literature and ‘literary theory’ can be applied and examined; hypertext is both an application and a demonstration of intertextuality and of the importance of context to the production and reception of texts. Digital works distributed via the Internet can demonstrate and apply ideas of the performative, whereby within virtual space the texts ‘play’ themselves, turning text into performer and reader into audience. They provide a means and a space for interaction, making author and reader, or actor and audience, co-producers of the text. Yet to write about these relationships is also baffling. While one senses that the Internet is new and different, it is difficult to locate 163



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exactly where that difference lies, and particularly whether that difference is conceptual or simply different procedures. The Internet and digital technologies are difficult to locate within a framework of historical development; there is no obvious starting point. If we are saying that the Internet is new and different, then new and different from what? Is the history of the Internet, for literature, part of the history of the development of the book, and the development of printing technologies? This is where Jerome McGann locates it in his book, Radiant Textuality, and he also makes a convincing case for comparing the ‘open’ concept of the library to that of the Internet. Summarily expressed this would locate digital technologies and the Internet in a history which began with the oral transmission of texts, through the handwritten manuscript to the printed book and its distribution. The Internet, in this analysis, represents a next stage, in which restrictions of the publishing industry are removed, and texts freely circulate in the virtual space of the Internet. Yet the history of the Internet is also part of the history of electronic mass media, of radio, film and television, and could be located in the development of ideas of the ‘global village’ and the ‘society of the spectacle’ through the works of Marshall McLuhan and Guy-Ernest Debord. In this context the Internet represents a further development of the communicative facilities of mass media, providing both a means of storing and transmitting information by transnational ‘media providers’, yet also turning anyone with a personal computer into a media provider. If, as post Second World War commentators have said, the ways political power, social norms, national identities and the consumer society are asserted and maintained is through the ability of the mass media to construct and transmit texts and images, then the way in which the Internet and digital technologies allow anyone with a personal computer to contribute is its most democratizing or revolutionary potential. The Internet and digital technologies potentially provide a free space, free of the control that accompanies official media sources, and within which a bewildering diversity of images can be constructed, manipulated and distributed. The visual nature of the Internet and virtual space, leaving aside fringe experiments in tactility, means that tracing ideas of visual perspective from the Renaissance, through Cubism and to the present might provide a further context in which they can be described. If the development of perspective in the Renaissance was about the



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development of the viewing subject as much as it was about that which was being viewed, and the fragmented subject of the Cubist painting represented the fragmentation of the subject viewing the painting, then peering through a screen into a ‘virtual’ space without scale or fixed perspective will similarly construct a different subject; performative, inclusive, constructive and slippery. The history of the Internet and digital technologies must also lie in the more general history of culture and society, and more recently in the shift from a modernism to a postmodernism, and in the changes in relationships between language, geography, nationality and identity and subjectivity of which the Internet is both product and producer. The universality of the Internet and digital technologies, and the way it can be pressed into the service of a variety of social and political agendas including the anarchic (see the work of Hakim Bey for example), the development of regional and community identities, globalization and the homogenization of cultures, internationalism and mutual respect for cultures, subversion of state ideologies and the construction of the individual as a consumer, adds to the difficulties of analysing and examining its relationship to current poetry practices. It is therefore, within this range of possibilities, difficult to know where to start. On the one hand to write about the Internet risks trying to redefine all cultural and social relationships, while on the other it is simply an addition to the ongoing development of interactive information and communication technology such as the radio, television and telephone. The questions seem both wide reaching and epistemological; what do we know about the world, how do we know it and how do we represent that knowing back to ourselves? They can also be simplistic and pragmatic; how fast can it communicate, how much information can it hold, and what can I do with that information? It is for these reasons that I am electing to take a more stranded approach, untwining some elements of activity and examining them in temporary isolation (an approach that, ironically, is somewhat anti-spatial), in an attempt to break through the mirror effect of the Internet and the way it reflects back a distorted but complete image of the world. In isolation the links to other and previous practices become more evident, and within these histories minor narratives more closely related to poetry practice emerge; of



Poetry in Virtual Worlds


the development of visual poetry for example and the relationship of the Internet to small-press publication. I’ll give an example of one of these strands. For the contemporary poet the Internet and digital technologies provide, simultaneously and collectively, a place of writing, a means of manipulating and editing text, a means of distribution and a place of storage. In his essay ‘What is the History of Books’, Robert Darnton outlines his ‘model circuit’ between author and reader for the book, a circuit made up of author, publisher, printer, shipper, bookseller and reader as the ‘elements that work[ed] together for the transmitting of texts’ (2002, p. 18). The writer on the Internet can create a ‘short circuit’, linking directly from author to reader and missing out publisher, printer, shipper and bookseller. There are different responses to this, ranging from celebration that the power of the publishers is broken and new and more imaginative forms of writing can be freely available, to concern that the ‘market’ will be flooded with unedited and indiscriminate bad writing. I am not, however, forecasting the death of the book. From the evidence so far the only printing activity related to poetry that seems to have reduced in the United Kingdom in recent years is the low-circulation specialist poetry magazine (which I’ll come back to). Internet publication has simply become another option in the possibilities for publication, alongside the more specialist paper-based publication, the small magazine and the self-published pamphlet. And as far as the book is concerned, the development of printon-demand publishing and the Internet as a marketplace seem to have secured the immediate future of the poetry book, and two major new poetry lists in the United Kingdom have been established via Salt and Shearsman. The usual limitations to maintaining a substantial catalogue of poetry, the need for a significant financial outlay at the time of printing, for an initial print run in the hundreds and the need to store the books have gone, to be replaced by a ‘justin-time’ service that can respond to fluctuating sales. Similarly, as bricks and mortar bookshops struggle to give half a shelf to the more bland poetry from the more mainstream publishers, online bookshops such as Amazon can maintain a long list of books on a virtual bookshelf. Their only outlay is the entry on their database. The shortrun stapled poetry pamphlet can sit alongside the bestseller and be available anywhere in the world at 24 hours a day. This example of



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the ‘digital economy’ means that books that would have been previously unpublished as uneconomic can now become economic, and that books that would have struggled to be distributed outside of a small number of the cognoscenti, can be available to all. This is not to suggest that any publisher does not want to print a bestseller, they do, but that a publisher can, through the use of new technologies, sustain a diverse list of books, some of which might only sell in relatively small numbers in the early years. Economically the publisher is no longer dependent on a small number of books selling a large number of copies, but can alternatively have a longer list. Income is dependent on the list as a whole, mirroring the situation of the online bookseller. The methods of production and distribution don’t change other relationships between poet and reader, and poets and publishers still have to work to develop an audience for their work, but it does mean that more poetry in book form is more easily available. There are other changes for writers and readers. More stable low-cost digital technologies that can be operated intuitively, and increasing bandwidths, mean that online writers can add sound and vision to their work. In isolation, none of these features were impossible by previous means. Internationally committed groups such as the ‘lettrists’ and the ‘concrete’ poets of the 1950s produced and distributed their work internationally and outside formal channels of publication, and Dadaists produced ‘multi-media’ works incorporating text, sound and visual art, but digital technologies and the Internet, because of the way they combine information and communication, mean that it can be done easily and quickly, producing a surface of rapid activities. There is, however, one further danger to my historicist approach, that in seeking to distinguish between the book and Internet I will seem to imply that all paper-based books share the same processes and procedures, and that all digital works have a common genealogy and use similar methods. This is nonsense of course, and there are significant differences between the best-selling novel and the limited-run ‘art’ book to use another crude distinction, and the online digital text or work can vary from that which imitates the page of a book to highly performative pieces. I therefore want to make one further distinction between the poetic text which uses a simulation of the page to imitate the paper-based presentation of texts, and the





‘digital’ text, which might use a range of technological features to ‘perform’ or present the work. While many poems will sit between the two, using features from both the historical practices of paper-based printing and publishing and the more performative spaces produced by digital technologies, there is a distinction between the poem that, although written on a word processor and existing in digital form, follows the usual conventions of print and publication, and the ‘poem’ (although that word itself becomes contested) which can only exist within digital environments (see, for example, ‘Baila’ by Loss Glazier at http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/glazier/, a work which combines textual and non-textual visual images). Examined from within the history of publishing and the book, the impact of such digitally produced performative texts (texts which may move, make noise, feature animation and which may have a specific duration for their performance) is contradictory. On the one hand it could be written as a narrative of increasing alienation, reducing the embodied experience of language to the visual apprehension of surfaces. With online publishing and reading work on screens even the tactility of the object of the book has gone, and a picture of a real object replaces a real object (yet, of course, with a book, one doesn’t touch the text, but the paper which bears the imprint of the text and both book and computer are simply media for the transmission of the texts). I’m not sure whether I’m reading or watching, and some of the elements I normally have under my control, such as the ability to read more slowly or quickly, or to go back over something I’ve read, or the ability to read the work in a different order (what McGann calls ‘Deformation’) is taken out of my hands. When Guy Debord says in The Society of the Spectacle that: ‘Everything that has directly lived has moved away into a representation’ (Debord 1967, Section 1), he seems to prefigure virtual worlds. The spectacle is the ‘existing order’s uninterrupted discourse about itself’ (Section 24) and a process which privileges vision, producing a ‘tendency to see the world by various specialized mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly)’ (Section 18). In language that echoes Lefebvre’s description of the way that modern capitalist processes of production have alienated the subject from a physical knowledge of ‘concrete space’ (and this is no coincidence as Lefebvre and Debord were closely associated in the 1960s), Debord is revealing the role of technology in creating a surface that conceals processes



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of power and control. This is a further development of the social impact of the book, which itself can be seen as reducing the shared and collaborative process of reading out loud or storytelling, where teller and listener shared a specific context in time and space, to that of visual apprehension. With the book and the individualized practice of silent reading, the experience of the text (as Michel de Certeau says in his essay ‘Reading as Poaching’, 1988, pp. 165–76) becomes visual, whereby ‘the text no longer imposes its own rhythm on the subject’ and ‘reading frees itself from the soil that determined it’ (p. 176). The contact between reader and text becomes visual, and the eye, rather than the voice, becomes the principal instrument. This is a problem exacerbated by the technology of printing and a developing literate population who shift from the extended appreciation of a small number of books to moving fairly quickly over a large numbers of texts. Anyone familiar with browsing the Internet will easily recognize the parallel with Internet surfing, where apparently unlimited numbers of texts are often scanned quickly, barely read, as the mouse hovers over the next link. The Internet and digitalization therefore further distances the reader from the text, and the physical object of the book is reduced to dots on a screen. This is a process mirrored in other aspects of contemporary life, and Rob Shields, in his work on urban space, develops the notion of ‘visualicity’, and the ‘glance’ as a way of apprehending urban space. According to Shields, the glance ‘ruptures’ the continuity of the gaze, takes it out of serial time, can simultaneously connect the past in the form of memory with the future and reveals the inarticulable (http://www.spaceandculture.org/robshields). While Shields has developed his idea of the glance in order to find new ways of ‘grasping’ or articulating urban spaces, it is tempting to apply it to the virtual space of digital technologies and the Internet. There is a counter argument that digital technologies and the Internet, rather than continuing the process of abstraction that the book is responsible for, reintroduce some of the elements of the oral transmission of poetry. They can reintroduce the voice, and there are various archives of spoken poetry currently being developed (see http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/ and the Brunel University ‘Archive of the Now’). Performance via digital technologies and distributed via the Internet can give the poem duration and a rhythm and share characteristics of time-based art, such as film or music.





The technology can introduce a variety of extra semantic elements, some of which might stand in for the body language of the live performer, and they can combine work from different art-forms. Increased bandwidths and increasingly intuitive digital tools mean that transmission of information does not simply mean the verbal, even for the relative amateur, but can include still and moving images and sound. Other technologies (and wikis and blogs are a good example) support collaborative and communal processes of writing. Any visitor to a wiki can change a text, providing a shared, communal space of activity. The combination of these facilities could be said to reintroduce to texts some characteristics of a shared human experience. If the aesthetic and creative elements are contradictory in terms of describing the impact of the Internet, so too are aspects of literary scholarship. I am not referring to the way in which digital technologies can enhance the development of scholarly editions of previously existing texts through the use of hypertext links and sound files. That seems indisputable. I am referring to the process of producing critical scholarly readings of texts that only exist in online form. Digital technology, like the mass-produced printed book, is supposed to provide perfect copies, and I’m going to use a work by Loss Glazier, Director of the Electronic Poetry Center (http://epc.buffalo.edu/) at the State University of New York at Buffalo and an established digital and book-based poet and commentator on digital poetry, as an example. The work, ‘A Revolution Is Worth A Thousand Words’ (http://wings.buffalo.edu/epc/authors/glazier/viz/revolution/revolution.html), is programmed, it cannot exist in any other form or outside the context of the computer-derived performance. A copy is impossible. A ‘traditional’ poem can exist in a variety of formats; in books, on the wall, carved in stone, written in a notebook, on the computer screen and so on. While these different contexts will provide different frameworks for the readings, the text itself, as an arrangement of words into lines and stanzas, remains the same. It is portable between and within media in a way that a programmed poem is not. There are other implications for scholarship. I watched Loss Glaziers ‘digital’ poem ‘A Revolution ’. I then lost this poem on the web for some weeks. I can now, at the time of writing, locate it once more following a web search that took me back to the ‘Electronic Poetry Centre’ at Buffalo University, but it has



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‘(new version)’ in brackets. Since I couldn’t make a copy of the old version, I don’t know what’s different about the new version. Part of the context of experiencing artworks via the Internet is that a work can be seen one day, with free and democratic access, only to be removed or changed the next. Different versions of paper-based texts exist, and are the subject of considerable scholarly enquiry, but the production of one new text does not overwrite another. Those different versions can be gathered together and compared. And one principal feature of the printing press and the published book was the ability to reproduce an identical text across space and time. This is not the case with digital works where the new or amended text overwrites previous texts, versions that become untraceable without a forensic examination of the hard disk of the author. I will describe in some detail my experience of ‘reading’ the Loss Glazier poem and try to draw out some of the implications. ‘A Revolution Is Worth A Thousand Words’ consists of four pages, each one with lines of text arranged vertically, horizontally and diagonally, and with images. It is palimpsestic and some of the text goes on top of other text, partially obscuring it. It has an opening page that presents the three historical characters, Che Guevara, Karl Marx and Emiliano Zapata. There is then a subsequent page made up of images and text for each character. The images are of the characters, although Karl Marx’s head is part of a landscape reminiscent of Stonehenge. The verbal text is made up of apparent fragments, some of which reappear on different pages. The poetic is that of the ‘cut-up’ or ‘open field’, producing an open text that encourages a variety of interpretations as the words shift into different combinations. The aesthetics of fragmentation and of collage and montage are, of course, further complications in determining whether the total poem is being displayed, or whether some elements are being left out. Once opened the poem performs itself, and runs through its four ‘pages’ without any interference from the reader, although clicking on some bits did seem to affect the speed of operation. At the first iteration on my computer, the original version had no sound. Someone came into my room and began talking to me and unattended it went through a further iteration and sound came. I let it run through and the sound seemed different every time. Sometimes it faded at





different places. I still don’t know whether the first silent iteration was meant to be silent or whether it was a blip in the technology. I don’t know whether the new version should have sound all the way through or whether it doesn’t work properly. On yet another machine the original version refused to perform as before, repeating the same indecipherable phrase over and over again and presenting only a half-completed screen. I didn’t know whether the poem had been set up to be radically different each time it was accessed or whether it was the machinery or the software playing up. This is an extreme example, and a problem of the variety of home computers I used to access the Internet rather than the work itself, but it brings us to our first problem when reading poetry in virtual spaces; different technologies for accessing poetry in virtual space will provide different ‘performances’. I regularly use three machines, two with a very similar specification, although one has a better network connection and the other has more advanced graphics. It is rare to get the same ‘performance’ of any particular text; the timing of a performance can be affected by a modem running slow, the visual emphasis changed by the capability of a graphics card, and different browsers provide different frames. My experience with the Glazier text demonstrates a clear distinction between digital, online works and book-based works. If I buy a poem in a book I have it forever in a particular form, or at least as long as the material of the book holds together. I can see a poem on the web and then never be able to see it again in that precise form, or in any form for that matter. In many cases, particularly more complex works, it is impossible to make a copy of the work. Servers go down, search engines lose links, links get broken and authors or others can remove or change the works. Caroline Bergvall, whose digital work ‘Ambient Fish’ I examine later in this chapter, makes a distinction between the temporary Internet performance and print culture when she says in an interview with Marjorie Perloff: I don’t worry about the ephemerality of work placed on the net. Due to the nature of the beast, work is likely to disappear. In fact, more and more artists present temporary projects on the net which are up only for a particular amount of time and then get removed. This interest in duration as a dynamic form of publishing is certainly connected to performance. I develop my pieces across



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a range of environments, some less ephemeral than others so my basic understanding has always been that work disappears after a brief delay. This is shaping the way I consider the so-called permanence of print and the way I play with it. (Perloff 2000) The characteristics of the technology become part of the nature of the performance. While the reception of a poem through any medium, whether read live, communicated by the page or mediated via the computer, is determined by the context in which it is received in a written text, it is assumed that the poet and publisher have control over the way the poem is laid out, when the lines end and what is apparent on each page at a time. Even within the variables and limitations of the context of a live reading, it is assumed that we get what s/he wants us to hear and see. In virtual spaces accessed by the Internet, or even with work distributed via a compact disc, the technology (hardware, software and the means of distribution) all become part of the context. This is not to say glibly that the medium is the message, but those elements in writing which we assume to be capable of reiteration, line length, stanza length, even the particular words themselves, stop being so. I will look briefly at two more online digital texts. Jim Andrews’s ‘Seattle Drift’ (http://www.vispo.com/animisms/SeattleDrift.html) is a short interactive piece where the first line of the work itself reflects something of the tension in simply calling such a work a poem: SEATTLE DRIFT I’m a bad text. I used to be a poem but drifted from the scene. Do me. I just want you to do me. There are three buttons at the top of the screen: ‘Do the text’, ‘Stop the text’ and ‘Discipline the text’. If you press the first one the text starts to fall apart and drift slightly jerkily down the screen. ‘Stop the text’ freezes it in a new position and ‘Discipline the text’ takes it back to its original position. If allowed to continue, the text





expands the space ‘behind’ the screen, with some words floating free of the original syntactic connections and becoming isolated and others forming clusters, some with new syntactic relationships. The ‘drift’ of the text can only be followed by manipulating the sliders in the browser to catch glimpses of it as it fragments in the larger space it produces during that process of fragmentation. ‘Drift’ refers to the situationist notion of drift as a process of wandering which sought both to reclaim urban spaces and to find new ways through them by subverting usual and official patterns of movement. It could also suggest movement in a geological sense, a ‘continental drift’, closely linked through plate tectonics to the Seattle Fault, a fault in the North American Plate, which runs under the city. The phrase ‘to get someone’s drift’ means to understand what they are implying or hinting at, suggesting a ‘subtext’ to the poem, and the drifter is an iconic figure in American western mythology, moving from place to place without establishing roots. The poem therefore has an uncertain geography and shaky foundations, and the name prepares us for the way the poem might behave. By drifting off the screen, and disintegrating into new patterns that lose both the discipline of the line and word order, the poem questions its own claim to being a poem, and implicitly criticizes the categorization of artworks at a time when digitalization allows varieties of media to be brought together in new combinations. It suggests, particularly through its playfulness, that such discipline is unnecessary, but could be pleasurable. The language echoes that of a sex worker or a pornographic film; it’s a voice heavy with desire but passive and emphasizes the role of the Internet in the sex industry, as a distributor of ‘pornographic’ material. Much of the success of Andrews’s poem lies in its apparent simplicity, and the ways in which that simplicity is simultaneously manifested in a number of ways and produces a rich diversity of possible responses. The poem has a single identifiable voice that the actions of the poem disintegrate, a process that puts the attention on to individual words or phrases as they become isolated. The ‘voice’ turns to ‘graphic’ as the language loses its syntactic order and accumulated meaning, with the word ‘text’ being the final one to move cautiously out of frame. Caroline Bergvall’s work ‘Ambient Fish’ (Bergvall 1999c) opens on to a screen with two small buttons, which have the appearance of



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I thought that the humorous and crude animation would amuse as well as focus the reading. It was also an allusion to the work done on The Doll [a reference to Hans Bellmer’s Poupée which is a key figure in the book Goan Atom] where the refrain features. The first green nipple or button which you have to click on replicates Bellmer’s drawing of a finger clicking on a breast to reveal other sexual worlds, which was the starting-point for his Poupée projects. In print, it seemed important to retain the sense of spectacle and viewing pleasure of the animation. (Perloff 2000) From this point the work is not interactive but is programmed to ‘perform’ itself, and once started the viewer sees a grid of 16 green buttons, whose similarity to breasts echo Bergvall’s interest in the relationship between the body and writing. These blink to reveal words or phrases. The voice is broken up and fragmented. Some of the words revealed under the buttons are the same as those said by the voice while others morph into different phrases. The work comes to a halt with the voice still continuing. This is a performed work with a duration of only a few seconds with the language embodied through the recording of the author’s voice (although the body is only heard and not seen) that, as Bergvall says, demonstrates: ‘the way mixed media digital technologies enable the creation of time based textualities, unthinkable in book form’ (Bergvall 1996). The use of graphics, the timing of the voice and the visual effects could only be achieved through the use of digital technologies and can only lend themselves to distribution via the virtual space created through digitalization. The words flash on and off the screen at a pace just beyond the legible and the reader, unable to turn back the pages or slow down the performance, must play it over and over again. There are similarities between the works in the way that both of them refer to the relationship between the body, language and the technology, as if in recognition of the way that the technology renegotiates that relationship. Andrews’s ‘bad text’ is a body that needs both ‘doing’, and the program literally dismantles the text, and ‘disciplining’, in order to be pulled back together. The voice of



human nipples, one of which does nothing, while the other begins the performance of the piece. Bergvall says:


Bergvall’s ‘Doll’ poem is broken up and fragmented, as if the ‘fuckflowers’ that ‘bloom in the mouth’ in the opening line are then responsible for breaking up the rest of the poem into fragments. There are important differences. Andrews’s work has a sense of knowing irony, and we’re invited to laugh at ourselves and the text, while Bergvall’s has a more integrated and absorbed relationship between text, image and voice, and the apparent intimacy of the spoken voice does not allow us the critical distance the Andrews piece explicitly sets up. Both works are programmed to perform themselves, and while Andrews allows some measure of interactivity, the important process of ‘drift’, as the words move across the screen, cannot be interfered with in terms of either velocity or trajectory. This programming turns reader into viewer, albeit an active viewer who can replay the performance at will, yet also a viewer dependent on the technology to perform the work. The relationship between body, technology and language becomes complex. In some ways the technology involves the body in a way that a page-based text cannot, providing either auditory or visual stimulus, while in other ways the programmable technology limits the involvement of the reader, unable to hold the book or turn the pages, to read the poem backwards looking for links, copy extracts from the poem into a notebook or memorize it. If the virtual space of the Internet can be characterized as ‘open’ and rhizomatic, then this is nowhere more evident than in the development of the online poetry magazine. Digital technologies and the Internet have meant that more books are more easily available; they have also brought about more significant changes in the form and function of the ‘little magazine’. Paperbased poetry magazines are varied in their intentions. The can seek to represent a national or regional identity (Poetry Wales for example), a particular approach or set of ideas (see the early history of Harriet Monroe’s magazine Poetry and its role in the development of Imagism and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E journal), to develop a community of writers and readers, or simply to provide a space which seeks to publish the best work it can find. There is, however, a clear sense throughout the twentieth century that magazines have provided an avenue of publication for Modernist and experimental writing that would struggle to get accepted by more established publishing houses, as well as supporting new writers in developing a track record that may result in a first collection.



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The number of magazines that have existed even in recent years is bewildering (see http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/magazines, and the ‘Little Magazines Project’ at http://www2.ntu.ac.uk/littlemagazines/). Some have only lasted an issue or two while others go on for decades. They range from the glossy and perfectly bound to the temporary and the stapled. From the 1960s to the 1980s the advent of low-cost reproduction techniques led to a spate of publications, often modelled on political flyers, and operating in a ‘gift economy’ in which poets were not paid for their work and income from the magazine, if any, simply paid for reproducing the next issue. These were distributed outside of conventional literary circles, and were as often linked to art schools as literature departments in universities. The advent of personal computing and desktop publishing software in the 1980s meant that magazines could be produced which were indistinguishable from more ‘professional’ products. Despite these technological advances, the difficulties of selling and distributing magazines meant that many in the United Kingdom were dependent on grant aid from Arts Councils, and they found difficulty in sustaining themselves on a more permanent basis. This imperfect history conceals a rich tradition of diverse practices, but does serve as a background to the role of the Internet and digital technology in the ‘poetry magazine’. In some ways the Internet and digital technologies seemed to provide all the answers. Unlimited space meant that the restrictions on the amount of poetry in each issue could be lifted, and distribution through the Internet was free. There was a downside, that there was no real way of charging money for the magazine, but given that, in many cases, in a paper-based world this simply paid for printing and distribution and contributed little or nothing to the published writer or the editor, this was not necessarily the barrier it might at first appear. As John Tranter, the editor of the Internet magazine Jacket puts it: ‘magazine subscribers subscribe; that is, they pay money. My readers get Jacket for free. Obviously I’ll never get rich that way. But it sure beats trying to edit, print, publish, distribute and sell a print edition of a literary magazine. I’ve been there, and done that’ (http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr89-1/jacket.htm). In the same article Tranter describes the Internet as a ‘paradigm shift’ in




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I enjoy editing the poems and articles and taking photos of people and designing the pages, and I even enjoy writing the HTML (hypertext markup language) typesetting code that underlies the pages. Jacket exercises all my various talents – and it’s fun. It has also enlarged my circle of friends by a factor of about ten. And I feel I’ve enabled a lot of writers to find a wider international audience for their work, especially younger poets. I received a lot of generous support and assistance when I was a young writer, and it’s good to be able to give something back. This location of the Internet magazine within the internationalist and communitarian counter-culture or alternative politics of the 1960s and 1970s is important. Its development is more difficult to explain within a consumer or market-driven economy. While the ethos of online publishing might have similarities with more radical paper-based magazines of previous decades, the product, the online magazine, has significant differences. The alternative poetry magazine of the 1960s and 1970s was characterized by impermanence, limited space and low circulation, while the online magazine is characterized by unlimited space, permanent availability and potential worldwide circulation. Not only will the current issue be available to anyone with an Internet connection, but all back issues will be archived and available to anyone, all over the world at all times. John Tranter’s Jacket (http://www.jacketmagazine.com) is a good example. Since first appearing in October 1997 there have been some 30 copies (by 2006) with no sign of any letting up. What is remarkable is not only the longevity and regularity, but also the scale of each issue. Although early issues contain what would be expected in a substantial print magazine, say a couple of articles, a selection of poems and reviews, later issues have contained, by paper and print standards, significant quantities of materials. In issue 11 for example there are three separate features on individual poets, each made up of a number of articles, a ‘special’ feature and two conference reports as well as poems and reviews. By issue 28, the latest complete issue at the time of writing (and the concept of complete appears to be at the whim of the editor), there are another three features,



magazine publishing and he gives his motivation for editing and publishing Jacket:

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each made up of about a dozen articles, three interviews, around 35 items under ‘Reviews and Articles’ and poems from around 32 poets. This is a scale and a diversity impossible to imagine in print, yet it is also work, given freely by poets and critics of some reputation, and who have published extensively through conventional routes. This is not a magazine for beginners and, in fact, unsolicited poetry submissions are not accepted, but contains work by and about some of the major figures in Modernist and post-modern writing. Jacket, and the name itself is an ironic gesture towards the magazine’s virtual existence, echoing the phrase ‘don’t judge a book by its jacket’, seems to combine qualities of both the concrete and virtual worlds, enjoying the space that the technology offers yet also monitoring that space carefully through the editing process. Although the paper-based world is mimicked in the way work is collected into ‘issues’, each with a date and with a standardized layout. There is, of course, no practical reason why the material couldn’t be organized thematically into ‘interviews’, ‘reviews’, ‘poetry’ and so on rather than dated issues. The ‘search’ function allows a reader to draw out particular themes or locate work by specific authors across issues and turns the archive into an infinitely expandable online library. Hibbard, in his review of the online magazine Big Bridge, talks of the way in which ‘one continuous issue is to some degree the main attraction of ejournals’ and how ‘with hypertext, limitless billows of virtual space and links reaching to links, ejournals can connect to an infinity of material’ (Hibbard 2006). I know what he means but perhaps the notion of continuous is not the right one. As a reader in the archives of these magazines I tend to cut across their seriality, linking between first and last issues by virtue of one in the middle and then doubling back to take another route through. The search engines and databases that make up the archives have no notion of the issue, and search on terms that sit outside time. The organization of the material becomes entirely spatial, as categories of works by individual writers and themes in articles and reviews form new patterns in the material. In this case, once it is past its sell-by date and archived (although in the case of Jacket they are presented as a living archive), for the online magazine the issue number becomes irrelevant. For the paper-based version it is all important,





of course, and the only way that elusive articles can be tracked down. If online magazines are firmly rooted in the language of their previous and contemporary paper-based counterparts, the author web site would seem to have no precursor or current comparison in a paper-based world. The web site of the poet Peter Howard (http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/poetry), a well-known ‘digital’ poet and columnist on online poetry for Poetry Review in the late 1990s, opens up on a page that includes a selection of his poems, some audio recordings, links to his hypertext poems, his ‘famous’ links page and a page about Howard and his work (Figure 7.1). It is clear that Howard is using the web as more than a performance space for individual poems, although within his site the hypertext and javascript poems do just that; he is also using it as a stage for the performance of the self. His work ‘Portrait of the Artist’, which

Figure 7.1 Peter Howard’s website – ‘Low Probability of Racoons’



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he describes as ‘very weird by my standards’, opens on to an ornate picture frame across which the text ‘A Portrait of the Artist’ is written and underneath this a series of other statements appear one at a time before being replaced by the next: as an old joke with mild depression with self indulgent gloom absent from society little different from everyone else unable to make up his mind. The title echoes both James Joyce and Dylan Thomas while the series of statements about the image or idea of the poet locates him within a poetic tradition that foregrounds the lyric poem as a form of self-expression. This series of statements occurs while the rest of the work is loading and forms a framework of ideas through which the poem is read. On completion there is a series of industrial warning signs. Clicking on these in turn produces a further small work behind the sign. Reading the work from top left, behind the first sign is ‘The weasel goes pop’, followed by the word ‘pop’, popping. The second has the phrase ‘The words are the important things’ dissolving into the background, the third a picture of the poet with a group of friends from the late 1960s or 1970s with the title ‘Once upon a time’, and the fourth a reworking of ‘Oh, to be in England, now that April’s there’ into ‘Oh, to be in April, now that England’s there’. Through this distortion of traditional associations and word order Howard is subverting tradition, and he continues this with a series of puns which comment on the form and function of poetry and through which the reader is invited to share the writer’s understanding of the process of subversion he is engaged in. With frequency, although not with complete regularity, the word ‘sublime’ appears and is then changed to ‘subliminal’, as does ‘fragment’ which changes to ‘fragmeant’. Another frequently recurring frame is a set of credits for a home movie, with the accompanying hiss of Super 8. Howard is presenting bits of information, within an aesthetic of collage, and using the ability of flash software to create fluidity





between the different parts, to construct a biography. The word ‘subliminal’ indicates the desire and intention of the poet to present something of himself he thinks he has previously kept hidden, and the word ‘fragment’ and its corruption ‘fragmeant’ to indicate something of the method, that these bits and pieces do add up to something. The ‘craft’ is exemplary; the poem is well constructed, with immaculate timing and a good sense of design, yet ultimately the poem never does anything more than collapse back in on itself. If the Internet has the potential for the rhizomatic and the nomadic, then, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, Howard does not move from the arborescent. The self is central to the poem, and rather than each new point in the system of the poem being a further node which can form its own centre and move out into a new set of connections, the self becomes the centre to which all points return. The poem recognizes the fragmentary nature of modern life but is finally, despite its appearance of modernity, nostalgic. The self becomes the place where meaning is revealed through the fragments of available history, the credits for an old film and photographs from the past, and, despite the spatial potential of the medium, the poem finally depends on an understanding of self as the product of history. If one aspect of the lyric poem is about the poet selling the poetic persona to a readership, then Howard’s site is set out as a stall. Of all the sites I’ve considered so far his is most clearly using the structure of the site as a way to sell himself and his work and the communicative functions of the digital economy in ways that obviously arise from the systems and processes of the old economy. For Howard the web, the Internet and digital technologies have not given rise to new epistemologies, new ways of knowing and representing the world, or brought about a process of reflection on the role of the poet or artist. What they have allowed him to do is distribute and advertise his work and to use new digital media to present his work in both impressive and attractive formats beyond that of the written page, and to integrate elements of design and staging. Peter Manson is a poet and editor from Scotland, and for 2006 was the Judith E. Wilson fellow at Cambridge. His web site, ‘Freebase Accordion’ at http://www.petermanson.com/, seems to be operating in much the same territory as Howard’s. Its index of contents includes lists of publications, reviews, a ‘portrait of the artist as a baby’, a series of images entitled ‘fractals’ and sections of a long,



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apparently autobiographical piece called ‘Adjunct: An Undigest’. Both sites contain collections of work that make up the home site of the poets, and it is as if we see into someone’s house and the clutter that is there. Both sites also contain works that tell us something about the poet through articles and the links they select and locate them in a broader poetic field. Yet I can locate in Manson’s work a number of ways in which he responds to the ‘spatial turn’ and draws on a variety of ideas related to space in the poetics of the work itself. In ‘Fractal Self Portrait’ and other ‘fractalized’ figures the blurred features such as eyes, nose and mouth seem to remain but the borders are stretched as the fractal reproduces itself. If it is a self portrait, it is timeless and a further mocking representation of Manson along with the animation of a picture of the child Manson which morphs into the adult Manson. This is a theme echoed by the punning title of his 1997 pamphlet, me generation (http://www.petermanson.com/megen.htm). While Manson’s approach to the production of the self involves the historical, it is also located in the spatial. The web site also contains extracts from his book-length work Adjunct: An Undigest, a book he describes as ‘an attempt to gather together those interesting or funny examples of found language to which my reading habits had begun to sensitise me, and which I felt were in danger of passing me by’ (http://www.petermanson.com/Letitbe.htm). In the process of putting the book together he deliberately avoided the serial nature of the diary by choosing a page for each entry using ‘a system whereby each new entry would be written on a page selected by a random number generator’ in order that the book didn’t ‘imply too linear a narrative’. In the following section Manson begins with a reference to the American poet Ted Berrigan, before moving to sample an entry on the ‘Manson Crater’ (a crater caused by an asteroid some believe was responsible for destroying the dinosaurs) from the web site: http://www.adelphiasophism.com/awwls/00/wls1485.html. The repeated references to ‘Manson’ make the reader flick backwards and forwards between the Manson as crater and the Manson as poet, creating a flickering amusement: Bed Teragon. Potato explodes, shattering microwave bulb. Hooded concave. Poultice a self-induced wave of irritation. Sounds like





Lou Reed. I PROMISE: Forsyth moves to help stroke man. Asteroidal bombardment destroyed the dinosaurs the Manson Crater, Iowa the Manson Crater was 65.4 million years old, give or take 0.4 million years most Manson rocks have normal polarity the Manson impact could have occurred either 200000 to 300000 years before or after Chicxulub alternatively, Manson could have occurred during a brief and previously unknown interval of normal polarity during the reversed polarity period Manson-sized impacts should occur every few million years, so it is suspicious that the Manson Crater is so close to the Chicxulub. He maketh me to lie down in green waters. I wonder what the first entry was. Adjunct is made up of blocks of text containing a quick-fire collection of everyday ephemera, gags, recollections of a poet and editor, and offbeat language he picks up in everyday situations. ‘Adjunct’ is a grammatical term for ‘any word or words expanding the essential parts of the sentence; an amplification or “enlargement” of the subject, predicate, etc.’ (OED), and therefore serves as both a description of the writer, as an adjunct to everyday life, and a description of the poetic process in which the subject is ‘amplified’. The second part of the title suggests that the material is ‘undigested’, and therefore kept outside of the body, as well as being the opposite of a digest, defined by the OED as ‘A digested collection of statements or information; a methodically arranged compendium or summary of literary, historical, legal, scientific, or other written matter’. The title does, of course, suggest all those things in the definition, but through conflating noun and verb keeps them ‘undigested’. The space of the Internet has allowed Howard and Manson to produce a collection of linked texts in a way that no print publication ever could. It is an archive while they are still alive. They have included verbal and visual pictures of themselves, collections of material, lists of books published and links to their favourite sites. It is poetry, poetics and biography all in one. It is historical, while providing a simultaneous surface of contemporaneous links to other places. Poetics and aesthetics overlap at times, but Manson is more resolutely experimental than the cautious nod of Howard towards the aesthetics of modernism. Yet both have, more than anything, used the material to produce a space for themselves, and a space that



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speaks directly to a supposed public without the mediation of the literary industry. In tracing the impact of the Internet and digital technologies through the history of the book, the poetry magazine, the poetic works themselves and the ‘home site’, I have tried to draw together the ways in which they both mirror or develop the past and indicate the future. If spatialization is a process which foregrounds a ‘spatial awareness’ over a ‘historical consciousness’, then the Internet plays a major part in the way it structures and distributes knowledge, and the archives of poetry magazines are a good example, supports the manipulation of knowledge into new forms, and supports rapid and complex forms of communication. In poetic terms it is more ‘open field’ than ‘closed lyric’, and, to repeat Doreen Massey, ‘there are always connections yet to be made, juxtapositions yet to flower into interaction, or not, potential links which may never be established. Loose ends and ongoing stories’ (Massey 2005, p. 107).




Ades, Dawn. 1974. Dada and Surrealism. London: Thames & Hudson. Andrews, Bruce, and Charles Bernstein, eds. 1984. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Andrews, Jim. n.d. ‘Seattle Drift’. Armantrout, Rae. 1999. ‘ “Q” and the Serial Nomad.’ A Folio for Fanny Howe, ed. Paul Green, 43–7. Peterborough: Spectacular Diseases. Attridge, Derek, Geoff Bennington, and Robert Young, eds. 1987. PostStructuralism and the Question of History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bachelard, Gaston. 1994. The Poetics of Space. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. Barry, Peter. 2000. Contemporary British Poetry and the City. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barry, Peter, and Robert Hampson. 1993. New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1984. Image, Music, Text. Oxford: Fontana. Benjamin, Walter. 1985. One Way Street and Other Writings. London:Verso. Benjamin, Walter. 1986. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Schoken Books. Benjamin, Walter. 1999a. Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. London: Pimlico. Benjamin, Walter. 1999b. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin MacLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Bergvall, Caroline. 1996. ‘What do we mean by Performance Writing’. Ephemeralities of Text Conference Keynote Address. Bergvall, Caroline. 1999a. Goan Atom. Cambridge: REM Press. Bergvall, Caroline. 1999b. ‘Speaking in Tongues: John Stammers talks to Caroline Bergvall.’ Magma 15. Bergvall, Caroline. [1999c]. ‘Ambient Fish.’ Bernstein, Charles, ed. 1998. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press. Bernstein, Charles. 1999. My Way – Speeches and Poems. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bey, Hakim. n.d. Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism. Boland, Eavan. 1995. Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet. 186



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192

An Anthology of Concrete Poetry, 138–9, 141 Andrews, Bruce, 16, 17, 18, 22, 90 Andrews, Jim, 173–4, 175–6 Antin, David, 124 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 139 Armantrout, Rae, 89 Artaud, Antoin, 122 Attridge, Derek, 15 avant-garde, 7 Bachelard, Gaston, 48, 107 baroque, 144–7 Barry, Peter, 101, 106 Barthes, Roland ‘Death of the Author’, 92, 93, 94 Belmer, Hans, 155 Benjamin, Walter, 6, 7, 67, 72, 81, 82, 88 Bergvall, Caroline, 4, 149, 162, 172–3 ‘Ambient Fish’, 172, 174–5, 176 Goan Atom, 154–7 ‘in situ’, 150–1, 153–4 Bernstein, Charles, 16, 17, 18 Berrigan, Ted, 183 Black Mountain College, 12, 149 body, 26, 48–57, 99–100, 154–7 Body without Organs, 56–7 Boland, Eavan, 106 ‘Distances’, 103–4 book history, 166 British Poetry Revival, 12 Burroughs, William, 10–11, 12, 127 Butler, Judith, 49, 91–2 Cage, John, 124 Cantos, The, 7, 13, 14 Certeau, Michel de, 3, 26, 36, 63–4, 86, 169

city, 27, 36, 61–3, 114, 169 Cixous, Hélène, 49 Cobbing, Bob Kob Bok, 125 ‘Worm’, 139–41 collage, 4, 6–8, 13, 14, 23, 39, 93 composition by field, 12, 69 concrete poetry, 124, 125, 126, 127, 138, 139, 141, 144, 149, 150, 162 Condition of Postmodernity, The, 83–4 Cubism, 6, 7, 23, 87, 164 Dada, 8–10, 127, 149 Dahlberg, Edward, 82 Darnton, Robert, 166 Davie, Donald, 60, 65 Debord, Guy-Ernest 13, 164, 168 Deleuze, Gilles, 144 Deleuze and Guattari, 3, 25, 27, 56, 64–5, 93, 112, 116, 122–3 diachronic, 15, 129 Dorn, Edward, 3, 59, 60, 149–50 Hello La Jolla, 77–9 Idaho Out, 72–5 ‘Languedoc Variorum’, 150, 152, 157–62 ‘On the debt my mother owed Sears Roebuck’, 70–2 Slinger, 75–7 Drift, 13, 174, 176 Drucker, Johanna, 126 Eliot, T. S. Waste Land, The, 7, 13, 14 Fast Speaking Woman, 50–2 Foucault, Michel, 26, 27, 48, 53 ‘What is an Author’, 92–3 free verse, 4, 131–2, 133, 138 193



Index

Index

Gender Trouble, 49 Giddens, Anthony, 26 Glazier, Loss ‘A Revolution is Worth a Thousand Words’, 170–2 ‘Baila’, 168 globalization, 23, 26, 27, 76, 110, 116 Gomringer, Eugen, 133, 141 Greenberg, Clement, 7 Gregory, Derek, 25, 60–1 Griffiths, Bill, 42 Bikers, 45–7 War w/ Windsor, 43–5 Harbison, Robert, 144–5 Hartman, Geoffrey, 132–3 Harvey, David, 27, 28, 83–4 Harwood, Lee, 99–100 ‘Cwm Uchaf’, 100 ‘September Dusk by Nant Y Geuallt’, 100 Hawkins, Ralph At Last Away, 111–12 ‘China’, 110–11 ‘From the Chinese’, 111–12 ‘Tell Me No More and Tell Me’, 106–10 The Coiling Dragon, 112–14 Well You Could Do, 110–11 Heaney, Seamus ‘The Toome Road’, 84 Hejinian, Lyn My Life, 20–2 Hell’s Angels, 45–7 Higgins, Dick, 125, 138 history, 14, 15, 17, 67, 80–2 Hooker, Jeremy, 31 Houedard, Dom Sylvester, 140 Howard, Peter, 180–2 Howe, Fanny, 89, 114–16, 121–3 One Crossed Out, 118–21 ‘Q’, 116–18 identity, 32, 89–90, 96–7, 105, 107–9 intermedia, 125–6

Jacket, 177–80 Jameson, Fredric, 3, 14–15, 26, 63, 64 Joris, Pierre, 39 ‘Notes Towards a Nomadic Poetics’, 93–4 Karawane, 9, 10 Lacan, Jaques, 98 language, 26, 90–1, 98, 102–3, 155–6 language poetry, 14–22, 89, 114, 127 Larkin, Philip, 30 Lefebvre, Henri, 2–3, 25, 26, 27, 29, 33–5, 36, 37, 38, 40, 56, 60, 63, 65, 82, 92, 97, 98–9, 106–7, 121, 145, 146, 168 line, 131–8 lines of flight, 40, 41, 65 Lochead, Liz ‘Mirror’s Song’, 97–8 lyric, 100–1, 103 MacSweeney, Barry Ode Long Kesh, 53–5 Mallarmé, Stéphane ‘Un Coup de Dés jamais, n’abolira le Hasard’, 127–31 Manson, Peter, 182–4, 185 map, 26, 35, 41, 60–5, 67, 76, 112 Massey, Doreen, 2–3, 25, 27, 28–33, 35, 40, 73, 84–5, 87–8, 185 Mayer, Bernadette, 18 McCaffery, Steve, 90, 131–2, 133, 134–7, 142–4 Carnival, 146–9 McDowell, Linda, 73 McGann, Jerome, 164, 168 McLuhan, Marshall, 164 Monk, Geraldine ‘James Device Replies’, 52–3 Morgan, Edwin, 125 Mottram, Eric, 12 Mulford, Wendy, 138



194

195

Ndalianis, Angel, 146 nomadic, 39–48, 79, 93, 94, 115, 117, 182 Notley, Alice, 31–2

Riley, Peter Alstonefield, 37–9 Riley, Denise ‘Lure, 1963’, 91

O’Hara, Frank, 12, 59, 60, 61–3 Objectivism, 80 Olson, Charles, 3, 48, 101, 127, 137 Maximus Poems, The, 59, 60, 65–70 ‘Projective Verse’, 65–6 Out of Everywhere, 138

Sauer, Carl, 74 Morphology of the Landscape, 73 schizophrenic, 122–3 Scott, David, 127, 129 Shapcott, Jo ‘Phrase Book’, 102–3 Shields, Rob, 27, 169 Silliman, Ron, 18, 20 Situationism, 13 Slinger, 75–7 Snow, Michael, 124 space, 14, 16, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 26, 59, 67, 69, 73, 82, 88, 144, 145, 146 conceived, 34–5 concepts of, 3, 4, 25, 29 lived, 34–5 perceived, 34–5 virtual space, 163–5, 169, 172–6, 179 and the body, 25, 48–57, 64, 92, 98–9, 106–7, 121 and place, 25, 28–33, 59–60, 70, 76, 82, 94, 95, 97, 105, 163 and time, 3, 4, 6, 12, 14, 18, 21, 24, 25, 27, 32, 57, 59, 64, 65, 66–7, 78, 82–5, 87–8, 92, 100, 113, 129–33, 163, 169, 179 spatial practice, 23, 24–5, 33–9, 70 Stein, Gertrude, 12, 20, 150 structuralism, 3, 8, 73, 85 synchronic, 15, 129

Penny, Florence, 127–8 Perelman, Bob, 89 ‘Chronic Meanings’, 18–20 performance, 131, 154–7 Perloff, Marjorie, 15, 101, 138, 148, 172 Pignatari, Décio, 141, 142 Piombino, Nick, 18 place, 28–33, 59–60 and identity 32, 60 postmodernism, 14, 23, 27, 82, 87–8, 165 Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 63 post-structuralism, 3, 8, 14, 61, 73 Pound, Ezra, 7 Practice of Everyday Life, The, 63 Prynne, Jeremy, 90–1 Raworth, Tom ‘All Fours’, 94–5 ‘Eternal Sections’, 85–8 ‘Unable to Create Carrier’, 95–6 representation, 83–5 representational space, 25, 28, 33–9, 65, 79, 98–9, 146, 162 representations of space, 23, 25, 28, 33–9, 63, 65, 98–9 rhizomatic, 39–48, 64, 79, 87, 93–4, 113, 182

Thousand Plateaus, A, 40, 56 tracing, 64–5 Tranter, John, 177–8 Tzara, Tristan, 8–9



Index

Index

Waldman, Anne Fast Speaking Woman, 50–2 Iovis, 50 Walsh, Catherine, 103–6 Warnke, Frank, 145–6 Williams, Emmett, 138, 141, 143

Williams, William Carlos, 12, 84 Paterson, 80–3 Writer’s Forum, 141 Zukofsky, Louis, 7, 80, 104



196

Ideas of space in contemporary poetry

Contemporary Poetry

Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science

Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

Holding Patterns: Temporary Poetics in Contemporary Poetry

Contemporary Critical Criminology (Key Ideas in Criminology)

Contemporary Ideas on Ship Stability

Contemporary Religious Ideas: Bibliographic Essays

Psychology of Space Exploration: Contemporary Research in Historical Perspective

Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An Introduction

New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Apocalyptic messianism and contemporary Jewish-American poetry

New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Contemporary Human Rights Ideas (Global Institutions)

Contemporary Public Administration: Ideas and Issues

Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

Contemporary Ideas on Ship Stability and Capsizing in Waves

Writing Plural Worlds in Contemporary U.S. Poetry: Innovative Identities

Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form

Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form

Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in New American Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Poetry

Guilt (Ideas in Psychoanalysis)

Modern Ideas In Chess

Modern Ideas in Chess

Phobia (Ideas in Psychoanalysis)

Phantasy (Ideas in Psychoanalysis)

Management Ideas (In Brief)

Fresh Ideas in Decoupage

Children's Ideas in Science

Ideas of space in contemporary poetry

Contemporary Poetry

Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science

Gendered Spaces in Contemporary Irish Poetry

Holding Patterns: Temporary Poetics in Contemporary Poetry

Contemporary Critical Criminology (Key Ideas in Criminology)

Contemporary Ideas on Ship Stability

Contemporary Religious Ideas: Bibliographic Essays

Psychology of Space Exploration: Contemporary Research in Historical Perspective

Syncopations: The Stress of Innovation in Contemporary American Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetics)

Contemporary British and Irish Poetry: An Introduction

New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Apocalyptic messianism and contemporary Jewish-American poetry

New Perspectives on Contemporary Chinese Poetry

Contemporary Human Rights Ideas (Global Institutions)

Contemporary Public Administration: Ideas and Issues

Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

Contemporary Ideas on Ship Stability and Capsizing in Waves

Writing Plural Worlds in Contemporary U.S. Poetry: Innovative Identities

Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form

Questions of Possibility: Contemporary Poetry and Poetic Form

Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in New American Poetry (Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics)

Poetry

Guilt (Ideas in Psychoanalysis)

Modern Ideas In Chess

Modern Ideas in Chess

Phobia (Ideas in Psychoanalysis)

Phantasy (Ideas in Psychoanalysis)

Management Ideas (In Brief)

Fresh Ideas in Decoupage

Children's Ideas in Science

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