mudtrombones knotted in the spill, Neil Flory
Arteidolia Press, 2023
Language, arguably, realizes its potential to be purely poetic when it frees itself from its utilitarian mandate to communicate the mundane—when it swerves to avoid what André Breton memorably called “the erosion and discoloration that result from its use for basic exchange”--and instead maps its way through territories whose contours are shaped by the non-utilitarian forces of affect, imagination, speculation, and sound- and shape-based improvisation. In doing so, it can reveal something of the peculiarities and discontinuities characterizing the relationship of language to the mind and to the world—a relationship that is natural to it as a human practice, but one whose taken-for-grantedness tends to obscure the ambiguities on which the complicated interchange of the linguistic and extra-linguistic rests. Poetry can bring this to awareness, as it does in Neil Flory’s mudtrombones knotted in the spill.
Throughout this collection of fifty-six poems and prose poems, Flory’s writing takes the form of a stream-of-consciousness that calls attention to the way language inserts itself, like an unruly poltergeist in a room, into the flow of thought binding us to, and separating us from, the world around us. In part this is due to the arbitrary nature of the linguistic sign. Flory shows this graphically with poems like “vs.,” the opening stanza of which runs:
weldmeldn ess
of dilettante
con vexly honed ]oriole
hey glib slim
luckydice out
the fullness
cavityesque vs.
stark \tonnage
of
isn’t
Here, Flory playfully illustrates linguistic arbitrariness with a series of orthographic disruptions: breaking words where accepted syllabification ordinarily would not allow it; inserting brackets and other punctuation marks in unexpected places; creating whimsically compound words. By defying what have come to be accepted as correct conventions in this way, he highlights the fact that they just are conventions and could always have been otherwise, had the history of the standardization of usage taken a different path.
In “salt-grains” Flory’s play with spellings takes the form of a reduction of language to its elemental sounds, as he leverages repeating consonant combinations into a rhythmic sound-poetry of phonograms recalling Futurism’s onomatopoetic words-in-freedom:
fan-squeak
qkqkqkqkqkqkqkqk
wheezewhine sp sp
spspspsputt er sputter sp sp spsp hnhnhnhn
Flory’s orthographic displacements serve as reminders that the interaction between word and world may show up as a point of friction between the ideal and real. If, as Stanley Cavell held, we learn language and the world at the same time, our learning the world as an arena of discrete objects, each more-or-less defined in terms of a set of ideal qualities, is in part the result of the habit of our thinking of individual words as referring to individual things. Broken-apart or compounded words like “acce lerando,” “tallgrass,” “hardscr abble,” and others, also taken from “vs,” tend to undermine this picture of one-to-one correspondence. We are used to language helping to carve the world at certain joints; these displacements hint that other joints could be found, or invented.
That the adequation of word to world, or the lack of it, depends on the currents of thought that words ride, is the subtext to many of these poems. In the ironically-titled “communication,” for example, Flory writes of
waiting for wisdom
in circles
garbled she said all our
world in fragments our thoughts
are clusterings fragments and all
confusion our thoughts static condensations
of mud dry lifeless
The stream of consciousness doesn’t always run smoothly; it ebbs and flows, suddenly changes directions, washes out, runs dry, and springs up again. It finds words and loses them again; it is, as the title of one poem has it, a “process” that might lead to a dead end as much as to a fecund idea:
an ill-formed
thought
ferreting
itself
out
pointing its
finger at the mirror
swallowing
a
cyanide pill
the sturdy,
well-developed thoughts
now advancing
stepping
over
the body
It is also a process that proceeds as much by non-logical or non-semantic association as by discursive reason or the rules of ordinary grammar. For this reason, Surrealism was attached to automatic writing for what it was thought to reveal about the unfettered mind’s associative image-forming faculty. In “isthmus tourniquet” Flory offers an apparently automatically written piece rich in startling images-- “cardboard ragged lifetimes”; “indifference swimming the ink-worn sidewalks”; “towering tessitura breakwaters and altissimo convolutions”--linked together on the basis of what Breton liked to call words’ secret affinities. Some of these affinities, hinted at in the cropping up of technical terms concerning music—not only here, but in other poems as well--may have to do with Flory’s work as a composer of music for orchestras, soloists, and small ensembles. It would seem natural for musical terms to bubble up to the surface if he were to cede control to the self-directed currents of automatic writing.
Not all of these poems can be read as being about language or the workings of the mind. “The Thousand Crows,” a prose poem in one long run-on sentence, unspools in a high-velocity rush of visual and audio sensations as it describes an exasperated woman screaming at a thousand crows as a thunderstorm is about to break. What provoked her is something of a mystery. We don’t know what she thinks the crows have done—called down the storm? Torn the leaves from the trees? Simply made a cacophonous nuisance of themselves, as crows are wont to do?--but she harangues them
until the sudden wind returned in howling triumphant velocity until the massive golden flashes overhead (now undeniable) announced a new electric sky about to form
In “edifice,” an evocative depiction of the destruction of a disused factory, Flory suggests a metaphor for the erasure of memory:
rusted wrecking
balls
Ideal’s edifice
smashed, strewn
across the wet
cobblestones
vivid banners torn
from bricks,
battered streetlamps,
trampled into
forsaken
boulevards of
dust they
chained themselves
to wishful
anachronisms of
convenience,
sputtering
machines of the
derelict factory,
while outside
the surrounding
(rebuilt) city shines,
hums, forgets,
speeds on ahead
The factory is a piece of the past—a “wishful anachronism”--due to be replaced by something presumably better, or at least newer. In either case, it will be forgotten, urban renewal being one form that the repression of memory can take.
The vivid imagery of “edifice” shows that while Flory’s poetry may play creatively with the ways word, thought, and world converge and diverge, in the end it also demonstrates that language, when freed for poetic purposes, can serve as a medium of exchange that concedes nothing to discoloration and erosion.
Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work, and is the author of the essay collection As Within, So Without (Arteidolia Press, 2021). Website: danielbarbiero.wordpress.com