This is an essay about toy worlds, real-toy words—their animation in a certain book of poetry and (/as it relates to) the animistic disposition through which they are realized/that they awaken in their readers (“words are living beings”) (Yau’s review). The Tranquilized Tongue, Eric Baus’ fourth book of poetry, formalizes in what Baus calls “prose dioramas” (Touch the Donkey), the semiotics of real toys. This essay will track the development of that formalization, highlight certain gestures that anticipate or reach toward it, and allude to some of the processes through which it is realized; I will try to shrink small enough to fit through a diorama’s viewfinder, small enough to listen to words.
Baus’ second book of poetry, Tuned Droves, features a poem titled, “This Is A Film About Real Toy Trains” (TD, 21). Reading (in 2009) at Colorado State University (Pueblo), Baus prefaces “This Is A Film About Real Toy Trains” with the following remarks:
I wrote it after watching this short-film by Charles and Ray Eames, who were, they were a lot of things, but they were filmmakers, too; they did a lot of different, sort of design things, like probably these chairs are designed by them; like, anywhere you look, they sort of had a hand in things, especially from the 50s on. And, this particular film had a voiceover… A lot of the time they made films, sort of, for corporations, like IBM, but a lot of times they just did things they liked. And, this one is called Toccata for Toy Trains; it’s a fifteen-minute long film, and it’s just like, they shot all these toys trains, but they shot them in a way so that they look real, like, the landscapes, like… it’s just this like, really weird, little miniature world. And, I’m not really interested in toy trains, but the way that it was presented was really engaging to me; because, one of the things that the voiceover says, which is something that I got really interested in… in this sort of Mr. Rodger’s style voice, Charles Eames says: “This is a film about real toy trains,” and then he starts explaining the difference between what a real toy is and a scale model. And, scale models, to him, would be, sort of, the perfect copy of the real thing, but he’s interested in, sort of, looking at something and looking at, like, a toy as sort of an imaginative object that doesn’t have all the things that, like, the real train would have, and that you sort of get something by that. So, I was interested in that: thinking about poems as, like, whether or not they copy the real world, or whether or not they’re worlds on their own terms. None of that will probably come through in the poem! (Pueblo)
Toccata
for Toy Trains is pretty much like
Baus describes it, but it features more than just toy trains; real toys of various kinds bustle
about, smile for the camera, or otherwise have somewhere to be in a toy-world of a late 19th/early-20th century train
station. The short-film follows the journey of real toy trains. As Baus explains, the toy-world is presented
from the point-of-view of a toy (on the
scale of toys), as if the viewer were a toy: a toy-world filmed with tiny cameras; the camera even moves through
the aisle inside one of the toy train-cars. Baus’ poem, “This Is A Film About Real Toy Trains,”
mimics the syntax of the two-minute voiceover that begins Toccata for Toy Trains,
which goes like this:
This is a film about toy trains. These are real toys, not scale models. That doesn’t mean that toys are good and scale models are bad, but they are different. Most of the trains we have used are old, and some are quite old. The reason for this is, perhaps, that in the more recent years, we seem to have lost the knack of making real toys. Most old ones have a direct and unembarrassed manner that give us a special kind of pleasure. A pleasure different from the admiration we may feel for the perfect, little copy of the real thing. In a good, old toy, there is apt to be nothing self-conscious about the use of materials; what is wood is wood; what is tin is tin; what is cast is beautifully cast. It is possible that somewhere in all this is a clue to what sets the creative climate of any time, including our own. Anyway, let’s take a close look at some real toy trains. (Eames)
And here is the first prose stanza/paragraph of “This Is A Film About Real Toy Trains:”
The actual overheard looking. That is not to say that looking is good
and overhearing is bad, but that this is one way of having a tongue. (TD, 21)
The poem continues to perform, as Baus puts it, “different permutations” (Discrete Series) of the voiceover’s syntax. After reading the poem, Baus mutters, somewhat to himself: “So, not many toy trains there” (Pueblo). I hear in that remark, not really a dissatisfaction with the poem, but that “This Is A Film About Real Toy Trains” fails to activate what it was about the Charles and Ray Eames’ film that appealed to Baus; it fails to respond (adequately) to the question for poetry that seeing the Eames’ film generated.
As the poem’s title states, the poem, which reads like the voiceover to the Eames’ film, claims that it is a film. Similarly, the “oldest poem” (Pueblo) that Baus ever kept, “Wondering Why Her Skin Feels Like Sand” (TTS, 46) (from The To Sound), invents a backstory for a Max Ernst collage; it’s not so much that a voiceover without footage or a backstory to a collage not included with the poem makes the reader wonder about the footage/collage; rather, the poem operates, becomes the film (or collage) the way a deictic word (this), decontextualized, refers to itself.
“A Second Silhouette” titles the poem on the page facing “This Is A Film About Real Toy Trains;” (at the same Pueblo reading), Baus prefaces his performance of that poem by saying that, in writing it, he was interested in finding the most “general way of representing people” (Pueblo). Here is the poem in its entirety:
There is a woman and a boy or a man. One is standing behind
a tree and speaking thinking. The speaker is singing This Is Not
My Voice and A Train Is A Toy And Negative Rain. Inside the ex
posed song someone is hidden. The phonograph projects a second silhouette. (TD, 20)
The “figures” (Pueblo) (as Baus names them) in the sentence: “There is a woman and a boy or a man,” suggest to me blank paper-dolls (their negatives) or “silhouettes” of their referents, the seemingly static aspect of toys. That impression is reinforced by the tension between “There is” and the “figures” being right (t)here, that is, the very words on the page, brought into relief by the act of reading. “A Train Is A Toy” the poem tells us: word-sized. The generic quality of the diction of the first sentence (then referring to someone as “one”), together with the simultaneous negation/assertion expressed by the phrases, “This Is Not My Voice”/“Negative Rain,” and the confusion of terms in “A Train Is A Toy,” approximates or gestures towards the “unusual” signifying system of real toys, which simultaneously distance from/assume their referents: “Inside the exposed song someone is hidden.” As if singing the song (which presumably one does in reading the poem) revealed/kept someone hidden. In an article titled, “A Toy Semiotics,” Brian Sutton-Smith characterizes this unusualness as follows:
The message for the majority of toys is that they signify some property in the real world (dolls for babies; cars for automobiles), and yet at the same time paradoxically signify that they do not signify what those real objects signify. Their schematic perceptual features, indicate quite clearly that they themselves are not simply signifiers (as the words doll and car might be) and are not to be taken as miniature replicas of the real thing (which is the other category of adult toy collections). Instead, in children’s toys there is usually a perceptual heightening of some features in order to permit quick figure ground segregation (as in cartoons, or caricatures or Frantz’s famous infant facial drawings, or as in clear black edge jig saw puzzles) and in consequence an equally quick reaction and comprehension. The child’s toy world by heightening and caricaturing the dramatic features of its denizens, reduces the information loss that is to be conveyed but at the same time permits a faster emotional response. All of this of course within the paradoxical and safe framing that this both is and is not a baby or a car which is the key condition for play to occur according to communication theorists. (Smith, 1)
Besides the poem’s
approximation to the semiotics of real toys, it also implies that words think and speak; if the “figures” are the
very words, “One is standing behind a tree and thinking speaking.” Scared Text, Baus’ third book of poetry, also attributes
consciousness/feelings to its words. The
coupling of the words tell the reader (in a “direct and unembarrassed manner”)
about the kind of ‘text’ to be found in
the book that it names, as well as describe themselves;
that is, the words “scared” and “text”
together make a pair of frightened words. In an interview with Map Points Poetry, Baus explains how he came up
with the book’s title, then quotes Marguerite Duras’ book Summer Rain to
exemplify the relationship to words/things that he’s interested in cultivating through the practice of reading
and writing poetry, both for himself and readers.
One transposed letter helped me to imagine the book’s landscape. If a
sacred text might be viewed as emanating from a position of authority or of
transcendent knowledge, I was interested in what kinds of insights a more
vulnerable, tumultuous, “scared” text might open up. There is something
compelling about a physical book that feels frightened, or a book so wild and
alive that it outgrows conventional boundaries. I like the idea of feeling
compassion for a book, that in expanding the limits of how one cares for and
interacts with the world of things one’s consciousness might also be enlarged.
There is a beautiful moment in Summer Rain by Marguerite Duras about a little
boy (who can’t read) finding an “injured” book:
“They took it to
Ernesto, who looked at it for a long time. It was a very thick book bound in
black leather, and a hole had been burned right through it by what must have
been some terribly powerful implement like a blowtorch or a red-hot iron bar.
The hole was perfectly circular, and around it the rest of the book was unscathed,
so it must have been possible to read what remained of each page. The children
had seen other books in bookstore windows and in their parents’ house, but they’d never seen one so cruelly treated
before. The younger brothers and sisters cried.”
When I write a new poem I sometimes think like one of the siblings in this passage. (Map Points)
Sometimes Baus refers to Scared Text as a “faux bestiary but not really,” sometimes as a “diorama or a voice-over to a surrealist nature film” (Counterpath/Reed College). “Puma Mirage,” the title of one of the book’s sections/one of the poems in that section, is comparable (as a pair of words) in its effect to that of the book’s title (in that it is what it names). Is it a mirage of a puma, or a mirage puma-like? The paradox of identifying a mirage projects a kind of animated heat-wave on the verge of turning puma. Isn’t it surprising how the very sound the word-pair produces makes it seem friendly? A mirage, something generally considered a projection associated with fatigue/delirium, comes across as an autonomous entity (the words on the page), not as a distant, delusional hope signaling trouble or a doomed fate... Maybe Baus’ poetry is afraid that words/things are doomed to being mistreated as lifeless, inert. Words are things, too; they exhibit a kind of agency when pushed to their instrumental limits. Put something extra heavy in a washing machine, then turn it on; it starts to appear alive as it starts to break.
At one reading, Baus
calls the first noun-phrase in his poem, “Puma Mirage,” a “word” (Dikeou
Gallery); at another, he calls it a “thing” (Studio One), and both times he
says that it keeps “popping up” in Scared
Text, then spells the word/thing:
The Ur-Mane invented a puma mirage. Its ears rang inside its own ears. Stupid purrs. The puma’s image lapsed as it foraged for footprints. The silhouette grew large and it spilled. The puma’s shadow absorbed a horse. It was called The Blur when it stirred. (ST, 38)
I imagine the poet Cole Swenson to have been thinking of this poem (especially the sentence “Its ears rang inside its own ears.”) when she compared the words in Scared Text to “fauves” who “pace” “behind ever-thinning bars” (ST, back-cover).
Save for a few fragments
structured similarly to the book’s title, past-tense declarative sentences beginning with the definite article
(like the ones above) comprise the entirety of The Tranquilized Tongue. Perhaps
that is the only way a “tranquilized tongue” can speak. In an interview with Inverted Syntax, Baus explains that he “wanted to spend
time paying attention to the variation
within consistency in that form” (Inverted Syntax). Here is the book’s first poem, “The Illuminated Egg:”
The word moon assembled its intestines inside the king’s saliva. The letters cried. The birth of each letter contained one hundred films. The merged nerves dropped to the ground. The arrows were injured by what the speech spread. The microphone was looking for an echo to explain. The picture of the burst tongue offended the crowd. The birth cloud reddened between rains. The city’s moans drowned underneath the first growls. The voice atomized the line between the children’s clinging hands. (TTT, 1)
“The word moon” indicates, namely, the noun-phrase it is, and that the poem is on or at the scale of its (own) words, the description and described confounded (what is tin is tin). That a word would assemble “its intestines” feels slightly off or implausible (in terms of the context usually expected of this given noun-phrase) and, at the same time, happens; “assembled” gives “The word moon” hands with which it brings itself to life (“intestines”), forms/just formed it like a spit-wad as the sentence is read, and thus the grammatical subject assembles and is assembled by its predicate.
Past-tense sentences usually say what happened; in these sentences (of “The Illuminated Egg”) those things happen through being read. To be clear, when next the poem says, “The letters cried,” its letters cry as they are read. When someone cries they might do so in the letter “o,” but this sentence suggests, as well, alphabet-letters in tears, with feelings. “The voice atomized the line between the children’s clinging hands.” Whose voice? As the poem is voiced, the “line” (of poetry) “between” the “children’s clinging hands” (holding the book like a toy and speaking to it/being spoken (to) by it) is “atomized.” There is a grain or texture to words; they have hands; letters, feelings.
In the poem, “The Egg’s Alias” (TTT, 9), the double sense of “filled” gives the sentence, “The pharmacy filled with sand.,” in one register, a certain flatness/static quality (as past participle), in the other, the sensation of movement (as intransitive verb); this combination generates an “intensity within seemingly static elements” (Neon Pajamas) that realizes the nervousness of words.
The sentences’ doubleness, both static and dynamic, where the description and described are confounded, and the words distance themselves from and, paradoxically, at the same time, stand for their referents, formally (/significantly) enacts the semiotics of real toys, realizing the life of words as things.
The sentences of The Tranquilized Tongue realize the life of their words in a variety of ways. Notice how, in the following sentence, the past-tense verb animates the sentence’s noun phrase, simultaneously distancing it from/adhering it to its usual associations/referent, so that reading it turns the key in its back.
The word ghost asked for bread. (“The Devoted Cloud”) (TTT, 47)
Notice how “asked”/“bread” at once famishes the noun-phrase, in a sense empties it, and how that very emptying (attributing hunger to “The word ghost”) brings it to life; the words exhibit a kind of agency. It’s as though the words dictated their company.
Swapping the verbs of the following sentences demonstrates that the animation of their words, regardless (and because) of the seeming repetitiveness of the same sentence form, is not the result of a mechanical procedure but the sensitive assembly of words.
The signal flowered. (“The Statue’s Saliva”) (TTT, 23)
The letters cried. (“The Illuminated Egg”) (TTT, 1)
The blank space blinked. (The Eviscerated River) (TTT, 43)
There’s no formula for the formalization of the semiotics of real toys. When a reader begins to conclude (to themselves), say, for instance (in a moment of negligence to the words), “this poem attributes consciousness to inanimate objects,” a sentence like, “The unconscious bed began to float,” announces itself as an exception. All the book’s sentences are exceptional. Each word, in being regarded on its own terms, joins an assembly of words that awaken the reader to each one's vivaciousness. Even the word “The,” through being repeated at the start of every sentence, starts to become only its sound, the sound of words spawning.
The blue scales on the pigeon’s tongue predicted the sea’s circuitous prayers. (“The Alluvial Tomb”) (TTT, 24)
The revolver’s blast hoarded a handful of abdomen. (“The Corporeal Cliff”) (TTT, 17)
Pretend the sea, in its movements (which corresponds to its sounds), is saying a prayer, a prayer that is predicted by “blue scales;” are the “blue scales” musical or squamous? Both? The word “sea” comes to life in hearing the sound of its endless movement as a prayer (the sea’s circuitous prayers”). A disembodied blast (particularly a “revolver’s”) takes shape as a word by hoarding, an action with psychological implications; it’s as though “the revolver’s” sound were wanting, therefore embodied/visually-minded.
The illustrated ocean remained still. (“The Seance’s Ellipses”) (TTT, 14)
As though it could move. In the sentence: “The redundant feathers woke up as antennae” (TTT, 15), the interaction of the adjective “redundant” with the prepositional phrase “as antennae,” opens the word feather’s eyes. The words interact with each other to simultaneously “push away” (from) and “pull back” (Andy Fitch interview) their referents, doing so uniquely in each case.
Take a close look at and compare the following sentences:
The feral music of a mimetic howl reproached the cathedral dome. (Poetry Project)
The spiral music of a mimetic howl reproached the cathedral dome. (“The Vestigial Sentence”) (TTT, 50)
The first sentence does not appear in The Tranquilized Tongue, but the second one does; considering the revision of ‘feral’ to “spiral,” it becomes even more evident what a delicate process it is to handle words without them vanishing... how carefully and precisely the book’s sentences are put together so as to allow for an interaction between their words, which animates them. “Spiral” (“music”), being seemingly disembodied/movement, incorporates in its reproach. The word ‘feral’s’ interaction with “howl” shies away the word “music;” but in ”The Ocean’s Intestines,” the word “feral” wilds (as the wind) as an adjective for sails:
The encyclopedia of feral sails deciphered the amplified tide. (TTT, 59).
On the occasion of the New York premiere of The Tranquilized Tongue at Berl’s Poetry Shop in Brooklyn, someone named Jared, introducing Baus’ reading, hints at all this in describing how the book’s sentences “regale us with possibilities of what nouns can do to each other, how an adjective or a possessive can act upon a noun to crush it under its weight or lift it like a helium balloon into the sky” (Berl’s). The agency acknowledged in and granted of words (shrinking small enough to hear what “The word ghost” asks for) is reflected in the processes through which they are formed into sentences; Jared’s introduction also mentions “a mysterious kind of glossary page in which lists of words were linked together like a rudimentary database. Eric informed us that this was the raw material of his poems, and that he began poems by building these lists and then mining word combinations” (Berl’s). The words in these lists are from Baus’ previous books/incomplete poems (Propagation).
In an essay written for the Poetry Foundation titled, “My Vocabulary Did This: Propagation Poetics,” Baus describes developing a relationship to words/sentences through twenty years of working with the literary technique known as “the cut-up,” a procedure he likens to the cultivation of plant life, the grafting of cactuses.
Gradually, I have come to understand cut-ups as a set of incredibly varied techniques, rather than as one specific type of writerly tool or one particular kind of aesthetic result. I am trying to think more affectionately and intimately about a technique that can often be described in terms that imply the mechanical or the violent... (Propagation)
Lately, I am much more interested in what happens after the cut than in the dramatic act of cutting itself. Though the idea of the “cut-up” might seem to imply an instant discovery, the moment the mediumistic scissors function like a planchette, I try to give my cuttings some time to dry, to grow stranger, away from my eyes. I like to put them in a drawer for a while until the impulse that created them dissipates a little. I try to collaborate with my forgetfulness and to make space for their particularity (Propagation).
What Baus ‘gives’ to the “cuttings:” “time to dry, to grow stranger,” his “forgetfulness,” and “space for their particularity,” accounts for the variety of sentences in The Tranquilized Tongue, as well as suggests that words, like plants, have a life of their own.
Works Cited
Baus, Eric. The To Sound.
Verse Press, 2004.
Baus, Eric. Tuned Droves.
Octopus Books, 2009.
Baus, Eric. Scared Text (Colorado
Prize for Poetry). Center for Literary Publishing, Colorado State University,
2011.
Baus, Eric. The Tranquilized
Tongue. City Lights, 2014.
Baus, Eric. “Reading at Colorado State University, Pueblo, April 16,
2008.” Pueblo, Colorado State University. PennSound.
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Baus.php.
Baus, Eric. “Reading as Part of the Discrete Series, Chicago, October
29, 2004.” PennSound. http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Baus.php.
Baus, Eric. “Reading at the Dikeou Gallery, Denver, November 6, 2009.”
PennSound. http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Baus.php.
Baus, Eric. “SELECTED READINGS 2004-2013: Reed College.”
https://ericbaus.com/upcomingrecent-readings-news/.
Baus, Eric. “SELECTED READINGS 2004-2013: Poetry Project.”
https://ericbaus.com/upcomingrecent-readings-news/.
Baus, Eric. “SELECTED READINGS 2004-2013: Counterpath (Denver).” https://ericbaus.com/upcoming-recent-readings-news/.
Baus, Eric. “An Interview With Eric Baus.” Map Points Poetry, vol. 1,
no. 2, 2015, p. 1, ericbaus.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/3ce0f-mappointsonlinevol1issue2done1.pdf. Baus, Eric. “ The Weird World of Language: An Interview with Eric Baus.”
Inverted Syntax, 12 Feb., 2019.
http://www.invertedsyntax.com/interviews/the-weird-world-of-language-aninterview-with-eric-baus.
Baus, Eric. “TtD Supplement #4: Seven Questions for Eric Baus.” Touch
the Donkey, 2014, touchthedonkey.blogspot.com/2014/07/ttd-supplement-4-seven-questions-for.html.
Baus, Eric. Andy Fitch, February
21, 2014, Eric Baus. Vimeo,
Counterpath, 21 May 2014, vimeo.com/87824440.
Baus, Eric. “I Write to the Generation of
Sound // An Interview with Poet Eric Baus.” Neon Pajamas, 17 Oct. 2019,
www.neonpajamas.com/blog/eric-baus-interview.
Baus, Eric. My Vocabulary Did
This: Propagation Poetics, Poetry Foundation, 19 Dec. 2019, www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2019/12/my-vocabulary-did-this-propagation-poetics.
Eames, Charles and Ray. “Toccata for Toy Trains (1957).” YouTube,
uploaded by Eames Office, 28 Feb. 2012,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=oorg2q0D8hs.
Jared. “NY Premiere of THE TRANQUILIZED
TONGUE by Eric Baus Featuring Readings by Wendy S. Walters and Karen Weiser.” Berl's
Brooklyn Poetry Shop, Berl's Brooklyn
Poetry Shop, 14 Aug. 2014,
www.berlspoetry.com/recordings/2014/7/11/eric-baus.
Sutton-Smith, Brian. “A Toy Semiotics.”
Children’s Environment’s Quarterly Vol. 1 No.1, Toys: History. Theory and Ethnography, 1984, p. 1.
JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41514489.
Yau, John. “What Happens After Eric Baus’s
Pharmacy Fills With Sand?” Hyperallergic, 2014, hyperallergic.com/140842/what-happens-after-eric-bauss-pharmacy-fills-with-sand.
Michael Schuffler (b. 1986, Hawaii) is the author of Kid Stigmata (above/ground press, 2022). He is a graduate of Regis University's Mile High MFA program (Poetry).