Alan Reed : Post-Mortem of the Event, by Klara Du Plessis

"This is a Document of Affect": on Klara Du Plessis's Post-Mortem of the Event

 

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Post-Mortem of the Event is Klara Du Plessis's fourth full-length collection of poetry. It addresses itself, in manifold ways, to questions concerning the life of poetry beyond itself: to its circulation, its reception, its functioning as a cultural artifact and the desiring and imagining it implicates itself in. The poems within it apply themselves to the task as a kind of self-reflection, staging within themselves something between an analysis and recreation of the broader practices and social ecologies that constitute them.

This is ground that Du Plessis knows well. As the former curator of the long-running Resonance Reading Series and now as an academic working with the material history of poetry as part of the SpokenWeb project, she has developed a keen sense for how poetry moves in the world. Though I am sure that this work played no small part in influencing the collection — I would like to single out her use of  the correct terminology when writing about archives, a rarity among poets and theorists not themselves trained as archivists — there are also several thematic through lines from her earlier collections that extend to this one, and which feel to me like they are essential steps to what she has been able to do here. As a long-time reader of her work, it is this continuity in her practice that most intrigues me. 

I want to offer a reading of Post-Mortem of the Event that understands it in the broader context of Du Plessis's body of work. My hope is that this will make for a richer and deeper appreciation of both the book itself and also the inventiveness and thoroughness with which Du Plessis has been at work on the themes emerging from her practice. 

It will not be an exhaustive reading, I cannot image that being possible in the brief space of what is intended to be a review, but I would like to at least trace the outlines of one thematic trajectory that is among this collection's key concerns. It has to do with the body in its relation to language, with how she understands that relationship to function and the forms that it takes in her work. 

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Post-Mortem of the Event pays attention to the emotional and affective undercurrents of poetry with a stark clarity and a rigour that is worth noting. There is in this a disregard for a poetics of expression, for what the poem itself might have to say. Du Plessis is here interested in the poem as a social artifact, in all the complexity of feeling and meaning it takes on when enmeshed in the act of its reception. She pursues this line of investigation in two contexts: first in the performance of the poem and then in its recording and the second life of its preservation. Here, I will address the first of these: the moment of a poem's public performance, what she names the event:

Open and amplified as words touching nouns, 

this is the event. Reclining anatomy, none 

other than skin forward, stripped to the organ. 

Nudity comes with the vibration of disrobing, 

empty thrill of tactility, disclosing round 

portals, no features, moon object of emotion. (p. 13)

Here, the event strips the poem, and in this nakedness is a featureless emptiness which the event populates with other meanings. The moon, after all, has no light of its own: its luminance is a reflection. The poem in this state, as a site of projection, is a recurring theme of the collection. 

Implicit in this is a schism: a fundamental difference between the material and the meaningful which makes meaning a malleable and transferrable property, arbitrary, even, if given the right conditions. A deft understanding of this principle underpins much of the work Du Plessis does in this collection; and I would argue her awareness of it is key to her capacity to identify and analyze the various permutations poetry is subject to when it enters into the world. 

It is an understanding that has deep roots in her practice. In Ekke, her first collection, she writes of what feels to me like an emergence of this understanding:

When I look in the mirror I see / C

reflections of language,

It is prejudiced against me

I do not belong in any one mirror, my tongue licks away the definition

of language in the mist on the glass

the glass responds differently when I ask in different lingos

there is no lingua franca of the mind (p. 40)

There is an uneasiness with language here, a resistance to it articulated through the organ of the tongue — the organ that is both figuratively and in practice the point where language and the body intersect. Here, the impossibility of an adequate or even consistent linguistic representation of the self triggers a revulsion, a bodily alienation from language. 

Du Plessis is bilingual, she speaks and lives within both English and Afrikaans, and much of Ekke concerns itself with the tensions arising in a lived experience split like this between languages. In the many incongruities between the two languages, in the fundamentally different ways that each imagines the world, the arbitrariness of the meaning each produces is laid bare and the self-evident identity of the word with what it names calls itself into question. It is here that I see the emergence of the understanding informing Post-Mortem of the Event: if the meaning generated by language can no longer be taken for granted, then it opens the question of how any given meaning is arrived at. 

For Du Plessis, this is as much a practical question as anything else, one that she has worked at with increasing sophistication in the writing that followed Ekke. In Hell Light Flesh, she demonstrates her careful attention to the processes by which meaning is generated and circulates: to how it gathers to and lingers in objects, and how its movements through and alongside objects comes to colour and inflect it. Consider this treatment of the hand: 

Mum says her hands are more

elegant when she paints,

the nails elongate,

her fingers slim to represent 

images, to hold everything gently.

The hand is also the primary implement

in an over the knee spanking... (p. 29)

Here the contradictory values of gentleness and violence are articulated together, metonymically reproducing something of a child's ambivalence towards a parent's role as both caregiver and arbiter of punishment, though here with the care being offered to paints and a canvas instead of the child's body. With this distribution of meaning through the scene, with the suggestion of neglect alongside the torment of corporal discipline, Du Plessis lays the foundation of much of the book's articulation of its thematics and its subject's psychology.

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In Post-Mortem of the Event Du Plessis takes this carefully cultivated attention to detail, to the complexities of articulation and their implications for reception, and shows how these dynamics play out in the context of what she names the event. Where in Ekke she writes of the body in its alienation from language, here she works through various ways the body is implicated in language, in poetry, in the performance of the event.

Soon the event pronounces its fame.

It alights,

light-footed and heady. It opens

its mouth for other poems to open theirs, 

to open theirs,

so throat becomes a mouth

and stomach becomes a mouth

and intestinal gut health becomes a mouth.

 

The event wants a constant entering. 

To enter and enter and enter

the performance

to activate, to cheer, to yes,

            to find surface beneath surface, to find surface above surface (p. 60)

In this propagation of the event is a parallel proliferation of bodies, especially mouths, mouths which speak the event into being. The body is the stage upon which the event unfolds. Speech is here an inevitably and necessarily an embodied act. 

This is a condition of language which Du Plessis explores at length in G, her collaboration with Khashayar "Kess" Mohammadi. Their playful exploration of a poetic space situated between and encompassing English, Persian, and Afrikaans turns on the shared material roots of language. 

This us,

this me-and-you

poem resides in the we

            ons / maw / of our mouths (p. 27)

Here, "maw" is simultaneously a Persian word for "we," an English word for "mouth," and in Afrikaans an abbreviation of "met ander woorde," which translates to "in other words." In this shifting and shimmering play of meaning, where each language both appears and is displaced by the others, what is left solidly tangible is the sound of the word. The material presence which otherwise would be subsumed in meaning slips into visibility. And, as occurs in this passage, what is revealed is the mouth, the visceral fact of speaking and the necessary enmeshment of the body. In adopting a looser stance in relation with meaning, G enabled Du Plessis and Mohammadi to touch deeply upon how the body is implicated in speech.

In the concept of the event there is an especially subtle understanding of this relationship between body and speech: a body is required for speech, certainly, but reciprocally, the body, if it is to be more than an assemblage of organs, must speak:

Presence comes first into handwriting,

then into face, commitment to inhabiting 

body. To inherit event and then submit

[body]* pronounced epoch into lingering. 

Slow ease of almost moving. Negligee verse 

stews in own filth, sweat, and gesture. No one 

needs to be so sophisticated, they’re unkind. 

Bliss defecation, disentangling script in fragile 

miracle of a molting spider’s sustainability 

limbs. The event’s hands exist in reminiscence, 

misspelling air as vast becoming. (p. 20)

[* - In the text, this instance of the word body is inverted both horizontally and vertically.]

In contrast with Ekke, Du Plessis here situates presence as emanating first from writing and only afterwards approaching but not yet inhabiting the body — in this first gesture there is only a commitment. It is in the submission to the event that the body enters into visibility, into presence. There is the implication in this that the sense of embodiment depends in some way on relationships to language and performance; that the body, at least insofar as it is lived and experienced, is not something language comes to occupy but rather is in some fundamental way constituted by it. 

There is also something to be said for how the body appears here, in the event. Characterized by filth, sweat, and defecation, it is a visceral and grotesque image; though more than that it is also a body that is fragmented, insubstantial, or perhaps even dismembered. It feels in some significant way incomplete. It is the event that feels whole, though it is a wholeness that exists "in reminiscence," as an imagined trace of a body that never was. The event is the realization of a fantasy of the body and of the possibility of living it out.

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Which leaves open the question of what fantasy Du Plessis imagines animating the event. In a moment where she likens the poetry reading to a funeral, she writes of the poem, taking the place of the ritual of last rites, as a beckoning towards "a frantic, unfinished, panic-stricken clasp at life-before-death" (p. 45). Here, life is not given, there is something elusive or unobtainable about it. What of it is within reach has an air of incompleteness or insufficiency about it, but that is nevertheless compelling enough to be the object of an almost desperate desire. 

I want to suggest that this life-before-death is the body as the event imagines and articulates it, and from that speculate about the desire that underpins the fantasy of the body that the event projects. I would say it is a fantasy of an impossibly living body, a body somehow distanced from the inevitable failure and mortality of the visceral body:

This is a poetry reading.

Everyone dying

can live safely in the metaphor of their hope (p. 49)  

Here Du Plessis touches upon the desire for that distancing, gesturing towards a hope structuring the fantasy the event proffers. But given how she understands the event to operate in relation to the body, it is important to note that it is a fantasy of life born of a retreat from it. 

The event articulates the possibility of an embodiment in its own image that can be taken on and lived out, but there is something about it that she insists is lacking. In how she writes of the body imagined by the event as a reminiscence for a body that never was, she suggests that there is an emptiness to it, that the fantasy animating it is in some way grounded in insubstantiality. 

In other moments, she characterizes this inadequacy in more viscerally imagistic terms:

Inveigh the great death, rail against the break, 

breath entering the body not through respiratory 

tract, but through the vast ventilation of corpse. 

Vainly, binding the poem in adoration. (p. 15)

Here she positions the body as articulated by the event emanating from a corpse, and the embodiment it offers a lifeless movement of air. This she characterizes as vanity, a misguided adoration and an imposition upon the poem driven by a fear of death. The event here becomes a corruption of the poem, a weight upon it, acting from a desperate longing making it into something else.

Implicit in this characterization is a deep distrust of the event, of poetry, and of language, which I feel is grounded in the alienation Du Plessis writes of in Ekke. It has given her a sharp critical insight into the working of language and I have no doubt that it has contributed substantively to the agility, clarity, and incisiveness of her writing. It has also made the body a key figure in her poetics, its recurrence the material trace of the work she has done to arrive at a sophisticated understanding of the body in both its alienation from and enmeshment with language. 

Post-Mortem of the Event is a powerfully intelligent and insightful collection, the full extent of which I have only been able to touch upon here. It amply demonstrates the rigour and depth of thought animating Du Plessis's practice, and is simultaneously both a remarkable analysis and creative work. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alan Reed is the author of two novels, The Benjamenta College of Art (Pedlar Press, 2020) and Isobel & Emile (Coach House Books, 2010), and a chapbook, Little Lost Children (mOnocle-Lash, 2022). Their short work has appeared in MuseMedusa, Vallum Magazine, dANDelion, The Coming Envelope, and Papirmass, among others. They live and write in Montréal/Tiohtià:ke.