Download PDF - The Poetry Project

26 APR/MAY 11 #227BOOK REVIEWSbetween music’s idealized emotional impactand the need for something soluble, the speakerworries that atmospherics “is the direction I amheaded / like I’m in a cloud chamber / meanderingwith some stray things flaring” (“Enya’sPanic Room”).Throughout the course of the book, Johnson’spoetry consistently tests these perceived environmentaldimensions on both ends of thespectrum, and finds similarities. The concentratedpolitical spectacle in the open, commonarea of a pavilion, where soldiers “…enforcedistance / as they allow the décor // to washover them” (“The Spiral Theatre”) resonateswith certain stifling aesthetics of the writingavant-garde. In “Bowery Safe Room,” an audiencearrives to “sweat the technique of thebad poem” unaware “they were being groomedfor oblivion”. Here the use of “safe room” playswith the connection between enclosure andexpanse, as the poetry performance space, anassumed haven for free expression, also revealsits restrictive and intellectually isolating dimensions.What is “safe,” and indeed closed-off, ina community increasingly geared toward an experimentalelitism? What can be sounded herethat is fresh, inviting, progressive?As an answer, Johnson’s prosodic stuttercomes into play—a strikingly unique poeticaldevice that appears consistently throughoutthe book, actively linking a voice to its immediateenvironment. These triply repeated wordsassume a sound and its source feed back intoeach other, or echo insistently, unmoored (aMax Headroom–esque momentum of lyricbroken by natural imperfections; the spatial,embodied, emotional, and technological exposinga collective lack): “...a dolmen that doesnot not / not need need need an equal” (“TheHouse of Good Taste”). Instead of allowingspatial elements to flatten out this stutter (asLucier does on his recording—“as a way tosmooth out any irregularities my speech mighthave”), Johnson plays with and draws attentionto these repeated words, both soundingthem across lacunae and in the center of lines;a rhythmic reinforcement of negation and needthat cuts into the poems’ melodies, pulling thebody into the center of the prosody.Confronting the distances and limits of a personaor culture meaningfully bound to its constructedspaces, Study in Pavilions and Safe Roomsmakes room for language in a multiplicity ofshifting tones—elegiac, bizarre, candid, humorous,biting—to fill, resound against, or rootinto emptiness. These are poems about whatis possible in a time of diminishing returns,elegantly rising above the locked-in, the ubiquitouscloud of fear that blankets everything:“And here you say that someone somewhere/ has just now shut herself in to freak out forweeks / and this does not not not only occur inliterature” (“Sermons from Science”).Jamie Townsend lives in Philadelphia, where hecurates the c/c reading series, co-runs con/crescentpress, and is active in the NPP community.Meddle EnglishCaroline Bergvall(Nightboat Books, 2011)review by abraham avnisanEven before you open it, Meddle English quietlyannounces itself. Its sleek matte cover is understated,but its sharp, punning title promisesplayful mischief while, in the same breath, assertingitself in the imperative. On the book’sfront cover is a 1489 image, “the roundness ofthe world explained”—on the back, a facsimileof Robert Smithson’s textured, handwrittenphrase, “A heap of Language,” taken from hisartwork of the same name. The two imagesneatly frame the breadth of Bergvall’s project,situating the new and selected texts of MeddleEnglish at the intersection of literature and thevisual arts. Her practice is rooted in both linguisticand literary research and site-specific installationand performance. Bergvall is uncompromising—andherein lies the importance of thisbook as it reflects her intervention in the field—in her insistence on the possibilities of writing/speaking/making within liminal spaces. Herproject traverses not only disciplines but genres,languages, international borders, genders, bodiesand histories. In the best sense of the term,the work is experimental: its success hinges asmuch on the questions it asks as on its outcomes,which can never be fully anticipated.The book’s neat, understated exterior deliverson its promise of mischief and the result issometimes messy—in a good way. If languageis material accreted over time, writing is anarchaeological project. Our world is a heap oflanguage, the book’s exterior suggests. Dig in!demands Bergvall, meddle English! “Let us cuta cross-section into building stacks of language”,she writes, “what gets revealed is history andground…Temporariness and excavation.Volatility, weathering and renewal.” Bergvall’sarchaeological project works in two stages,though these often occur simultaneously. First,an uncovering of what has worn away (thinkAnne Carson’s use of brackets in her translationof Sappho to indicate missing text or, perhapsmore appropriately, those brackets refigured asthe performance piece Bracko.) Here, writingserves as a record of “fundamental ruptures,discontinuities, far more than it delivers stability.”Its source language is historical: in “ShorterChaucer Tales,” Bergvall plumbs Middle English,an unstandardized “maelstrom of influencesand confluences…a mashup on the rise.” Thesecond stage is a “renewal,” reworking, reimagining—afilling-in of the places where languagehas worn away. Its source language is also a“mashup,” but an acutely contemporary one—vernacular, digitized, pressurized, degraded,transformed, transported, sung, accented,heard; the “anglo-mixed, anglo-phonic, anglofoamiclanguages practiced around the worldtoday.”The texts of Meddle English employ a widerange of linguistic strategies. In “ShorterChaucer Tales,” Bergvall’s seamless superimpositionof txt-speak over Chaucer, of 21 st -century European stories over medieval ones,is thrilling. “Fried Tale (London Zoo)” tells theexploits of two bankers, “2 suits, a mega pairof Smith, Blupils no dout, / viddying how theytrading outa goodness welth stuporifik / … jus4 kreaming the topping, o my brother”.The previously published Goan Atom, selectionsof which are reprinted here, is a concrete, formallyexperimental sequence which, amongother things, figures language as the body ofa doll, which is then stretched, reconfigured,disfigured:Sgota wides litdown the lilysgot avide slotdonne a lolly to a headless cindy slots into licThe layered, polyglot and performative “Cropper”employs musical repetition and variation tomeditate on linguistic and bodily boundariesand their transgression:Some never had a body to call their own beforeit was taken awaysom aldri hadde en kropp de kunne kale sinegen før den ble revet bortceux dont le corps d’emblée leur est arraché