Michael Schuffler : Kid Stigmata

 

 

 

 

 

In his book, The Violence of Language, Jean-Jacques Lecercle demonstrates that the rules of grammar, ordered by logic, are “defeasible,” comparable not to “laws of the physical universe” but to “frontiers.”  On the other side of a frontier (established by the rules of grammar) is what Lecercle terms “the remainder:” that “part of language that cannot be formalized,” that the science of linguistics accounts for under the rubric of “exception,” registers of significance that exceed or proliferate regardless of the intention of a given speaker or text. “The speaker is the locus of two contradictory tendencies:” “speaking” and being “spoken by” language; “mastery over,” “possession by,” and the “workings of language are not to be as sharply distinguished as we might think.” While the permeability, instability, or “constitutive remainder” of language itself is “everywhere at work” (in ad-puns, “Freudian slips,” jokes, slang, the malleability of a word’s part-of-speech), to dislocate a frontier, break the habits programmed in the structure of the “English language,” or, as Nathaniel Mackey put it (addressing the connection between enjambment and pronouns in his book, Splay Anthem), “trick language out of the kind of positionings that grammar imposes upon us,” calls for poetic in(ter)vention (Cross Cultural Poetics (episode #113)).

Rosemarie Waldrop, considering in retrospect her book of poems The Road Is Everywhere or Stop This Body, correlates her “feminist preoccupations” with the work’s formal endeavor to extend “the boundaries of the sentence;” grammatically, the “change of subject/ object function on the same word,” she explains, is “relevant to the women:” “because women in our culture has been treated as the object par excellence: to be looked at rather than looking; to be loved and having things done to and for, rather than be the one who is doing.” The “pattern” proposed by the poem, through which subject and object are “unfixed, “reversible,” “constantly shift,” subverts or works against the degradation intrinsic to (the imperative to think representationally implicit in) that grammatical distinction. (Politics of Poetic Form. New School, NYC, November 18, 1988)

The impositions implicit in the categorical determinations of normative/prescriptive grammar, the command to words to denote implicit in nomination, the use of words to say what we want/have to say, dissociates words from themselves, makes them withdraw(n) (as stand-ins). I came into language in-between the pidgin English my schoolteachers discouraged and the proper English they tried to teach me, neither of which I could fully assume or identify with—a blankness in place of the linguistic ‘shifter’ wherefrom only an articulation’s lack speaks, withdrawn as words are.

Kid Stigmata’s severe compression, the versatility of its words’ part-of-speech, and the cooperation of its gestures (ideogrammic, homonymic/phonic, syntactic, perverse, poly/hyper/a-grammatical, mirroring, silent etc., (which allow the part-of-speech of its hinged words to vacillate, fold in to themselves and become clay-like)), are a function of a withdrawn speaker ‘whose’ repression is transposed to/ventriloquized by (and through) words themselves. As such, by way of this differential co-articulation in which the self-repression of words (as stand-ins) assumes the (lack of) identity of ‘someone’ withdrawn from speech/self-assertion, the poems try to bring the being withdrawn of words to word, enacted in the movement of exemplification.

 

 

 

 

 

Kid Stigmata (above/ground press, 2022) is the first publication by Michael Schuffler (b.1986, Hawaii). He is a graduate of Regis University's MFA in Creative Writing program (Poetry).