Ancient pcoet

DIONYSUS : 

Brekekekex koax koax— 

from you I’m catching your disease!

               -Aristophanes, The Frogs

In the realm of ancient comedy, where the essential vision remains to be reversibility, or the absence of absolute order in the universe, a god like Dionysius and a slave like Xanthias can exchange identities, even if for a moment, and divine speech can intersect with, or become one with animal language.

Nonsensical noise, yet still maintaining a simulacrum of order, even over the level of art and music, the amphibian chorus nevertheless remains, and cannot be less than, an embodiment of divine logos. Here, nature itself, and its kingdom of inhuman sound, in surpassing human speech, is enclosed in an art form that represents in patterns of rhythmic lines that which we can hear but cannot comprehend .

Today, beyond the confines of art, and within a newer realm of writing, even this last envelop of order is abandoned, for a simulation of chaos, the multiple, and the unreadable.

However, we no longer have nature nor the sacred as its indecipherable secret component, since we already discarded the nostalgia for any mysticism or romanticism of the esoteric. What we are left with is the simple mechanism of a surface burdened with historical and political overdeterminations, and a culture captivated by its own semantic weight.

To remimic the indecipherable, by some parodic use of valorized cultural forms, and to return it cold and resisting, by short-circuiting the patterns of hardened meanings, beyond the confines of themes, rhetoric, and imagery, and into the matter of language itself, is to renew a link with ancient comedy, and remember the reverse, or perverse, double of the sign.

Mysterious letters

Here's a partial list of the things Inman's work never allows to break free: images, phrases, sentences, emotions, critiques, clarity, understanding, compassion, connection. If, as Charles Bernstein points out, the terms “absorptive” and “anti-absorptive” “should not be understood as mutually exclusive,” there are still very few poets who have created work as anti-absorptive as Inman's (“Artifice” 22). It's easy to imagine, in fact, how a description of Inman's work from a more conventional literary perspective might seem a parody: “Here is a poet who has never shown us anything clearly, who has never presented an emotion or expressed an idea, who will not finish his sentences and undermines even his phrases, who obsessively returns to improper punctuation and does not always finish spelling a word, and who does not even believe that all this negativity serves any clear purpose.

(From Mark Wallace, http://www.fascicle.com/issue03/essays/wallace1.htm, 9 April 2009)

Reading a few lines--if "lines" can be used here--of David Melnick, or for that matter--if that matters--from P. Inman, brings you to the edge of linguistic forms, where it seems the paralinguistic elements of language have overtaken the priority formerly given to words and syntax. Less words than cyphers, the elements we see on the page transform the nature of our attempt to understand from a hermeneutics to a cryptology. Just like Paul Klee's mysterious letter paintings, the linguistic elements appear to bob in and out of relief in a space that presents and swallows them at the same time.

These fragmented graphemes inviting completion, doing probably something beyond sound and concrete poetics, explode the arbitrary existence of the Word, and interrogate the flux of meaning-making that a contact with symbols normally seduces us into. There is pain in the absence or lack of recognition, but at the same time a liberation of hard-boiled associations, whenever a line, if not a word, begins to dream by itself. And the almost declarative. Almost. Scattered letters pulling each other to form a thought, like pure objects orbiting the outer space of our lives.

Zero poetics

We've had discussions since classical times about the nature of poetic language, and we're inclined to think that it has always been the business of practicing poets to reflect on the practice of their business. The various redefinitions of what poetic language may mean, however radical they may be since, let's say, Wordsworth, have never questioned the existence of this category, up to the extent that even with Jacobson in the 20th century, linguistic theory itself seems to have conserved its existence in its cabin of terminology.

We would like to think that a zero degree writing in this direction is one radical attempt by its search for a realm of writing that deprives itself of all markers of the literary, if at all this is a possible goal, as if it were possible to rid ourselves of the poetic by going to another extreme end. What is useful in this attempt, at least, is the way it exposes the contingent nature of any conception of the literary or poetic, and how this conception may be implicated in the cultural politics of the time.

To insert a text like "January Zero" by an American writer Ray DiPalma in the thread of this discussion is already assuming that this text can be seen to be a part of this whole debate, if alone we take cues from the fact that it appears in Ron Silliman's anthology In the American Tree, which in itself is part of an ongoing polemic in American letters. These are all paratextual elements conditioning our reception of the text, in the same way that the simple knowledge of art production in France created the shock effect of Marcel Duchamps' urinals. The inertia of the dynamic weave of history and myth sets the ground for a collective imaginary affecting the significance of acts and events, allowing us to swim back and forth from a quotidian deprived of any importance, to a cultural framing that foregrounds the values of that culture.

To read "January Zero" is like a return to an exercise of style, reminding us as did Queneau before that the literary is essentially a question of form. The mechanical reproduction of the same syntactic pattern is reinforced by the narration, in the present tense, of a series of routine acts unaccompanied by any psychological depth. This flat procedure keeps us bouncing back into the formal and material grid of the text, impeding any escape into representational or referential content, and making us doubt the existence of any real narrative at work (the way Beckett began it with Watt). By a movement to one extreme moment of style, "January Zero" reincarnates formal self-reference as literary feature, but in a post-narratorial and post-lyrical context. In the end, however, this procedure does not revalorize reflexivity as poetic or literary style, but simply emphasizes the material efficiency of a language powerful in its mechanics, but empty of ultimate meaning.

The subject

To break into a theme, into a subject: that's one major principle of coherence, the logical beginning of reference, the first twist of order, a magnificent star.

There's a meeting place where, sentence after sentence, all words have a tendency, the way knives can slice an apple. Who or what can resist that, swimming upstream? The arrow has only one point.

all sound

A former professor told a student how her arguments are sound, all sound. An old quip, nothing original about it. People probably quote old witticisms to revive their sense by the harvest of new laughter. From another perspective, you could say there was nothing deprecatory anymore about the pun. The replacement of the logico-semantic content of an utterance by its material embodiment as representing the totality of the "significance" of the discursive string is already the axiomatic base of many contemporary literary practices, from futurism and lettrism, to language poetry and post-literate art.

Building up sound to replicate sense has always been the feature of traditional poetic style, the mythic ambition of onomatopoeia, wedding matter with meaning, or vice versa, or whatever along this binary dialectic, still felt by many in their linguistic fantasies. But my anecdote can be seen to be saying something more, if we move away now from the technical asides we managed to spew. Let's not be blind to its paradoxical bind, where its humor consumes the very logic it tries to deny, where sense and non-sense meet in the paradoxical materiality of the sign.