Daniel Barbiero: petal / transport, by James Mesiti

petal / transport, James Mesiti
Arteidolia Press, 2024

 

 

 

 

In contemporary lyric and post-lyric poetry, the voice is not that of a personalized, speaking subject revealing itself through the expression of interior states of thought and feeling, but rather takes the form of a synthetic nexus within and among various moments of perception, thought, sensation and imagination, as realized in language. Contemporary lyric and post-lyric, in other words, is grounded not in the appearance of a transcendent sensibility or personality but instead by the way the voice identifies with the world and situates itself as a presence within it, through the suffusion of imagination and the binding force of language. In petal / transport, his new collection of poetry, the voice James Mesiti sets out on the page rarely makes direct reference to itself as a thinking, feeling subject – I counted only sixteen occurrences of the first person singular pronoun “I” in its pages all of which, as if to signal subordinate status, appear as lower case – but nevertheless brings us news of a world whose concreteness is shot through with imagination and enacted in the material given of language.

The book opens with a long sequence of forty-five poems titled “becoming clay.” Here is the first poem in its entirety:

reaching to. of reaching stairs to soil. soil to
milk jaws. this wind was broken. gravels and
fingertipped last like nothingness in god. or clear
moss that is. its row is / what was. it like to place
elbow in vessel. what branch left waters not to
continue. not to shape without door. not to know
which is to be petal and which is only. just transport.

 

                                                          best, yours.

treelands, january 13

Mesiti articulates moments as they are taken up in fragments of language. He describes physical gestures (“reaching to”; “fingertipped”; “to place elbow/in vessel”), pairs nouns in unlikely combinations (“milk jaw”), and refracts inanimate objects (“gravels”; “moss”) through abstractions (“nothingness in god”; “is / what was”). A sense of subjectivity emerges here, as elsewhere in petal / transport, not on the basis of direct, first-person utterance but indirectly, through its attention to things, qualities, and analogical connections by which the moment’s constituent instances can be framed and set in order. The ordering principle is language, whose artifice and difference from sensual experience Mesiti emphasizes through unconventional phrase structure, grammatical omissions, and word coinages. Throughout the book, in fact, the strangeness of the word-world interface manifests itself in the deliberate obstruction of plain reference through deformations of syntax and diction. At every turn Mesiti brings out the material otherness of language as if to highlight its formative role in the saying of what is said.

At the same time that he draws attention to language’s role in mediating and articulating the human presence in the world, Mesiti affirms that there is something for language to mediate – that there is or was a particular presence present at a particular moment. In addition to what he puts in the body of his poems he often, as he does here, appends a postscript in the form of a closing salutation and reference to a location and date. We can imagine the poem as having been written at a given time and a given place, like the personal letter it mimics. Mesiti’s parodying of epistolary form this way not only indicates the relationship of the poem to a time and place, but helps to establish something like a community of complicity with the reader. In appropriating the closing conventions of a letter his postscripts imply a link between the poem and the reader-as-addressee, a motif he plays in different affective registers depending on the closing salutation he chooses. In addition to the fairly neutral “very truly, yrs” we get the mildly rueful “sincere apologies”; the friendly concern of “take care”; the abrupt informality of “time to go”; and the oddly ambiguous “love but something, always.” In being addressed in this way we as readers are pulled into the knot of meanings Mesiti constructs, as interpreters and distant (because unknown) intimates. It is as if Mesiti is hinting that the voice speaking from the page can realize itself as a voice not through a reflexive sense of its own interiority but rather only to the extent that it is reflected back to itself through the reader’s participation in a sympathetic I-thou relationship. Or, as he puts it in the preface to the sequence: “reader/if you’ll have me”. To be sure, Mesiti seems to contradict this in a passage in poem xxvii of “becoming clay,” two versions of which appear one after the other: “a/letter’s/fallacy/must/be/that/second/person/is/hinge/to/first”. But we might ask whether the fallacy lies in the I-thou relationship itself, or in the inevitable way that a letter, by virtue of being a text removed in time and place from its recipient, implies the presence of an interlocutor who in fact is not there.

Whatever the ambiguities of the I-thou relationship as mediated through a text, Mesiti invites the reader to become a more active participant in a community of meaning in a later poem called “circle your/the poem.” There, Mesiti lays out a dense rectangular block of text composed of syntactically decomposed phrases whose words are run together without spaces in between. The reader presumably is given the choice of assembling a poem by selecting whatever thoughts and images seem to him or her to belong together; whatever order emerges is the result of an open-ended, interactive collaboration.

Emergent order appears as the subject of a poem Mesiti presents as a wry parody of a multiple choice question:

2) How can tempo antagonize ambiguity?
            a) a translation for chaos in coherence
            b) if upside down doesn’t need a beholder
            c) by drought
            d) in the preterit absence must define and be defined
            e) all of the above
            f ) none nor the above

The meaning suggested here relates to time as we structure it, its structure being one of the ways imagination contributes to the order we perceive, or think we perceive, in the things and events surrounding us. “Tempo” in music structures time with a rate of movement; in a larger sense it represents the imposition of a regular measure on something that often is experienced ambiguously as an inchoate and inconsistent flux. To structure time as tempo is, as Mesiti suggests, to antagonize ambiguity by exchanging the regularity of an artificial coherence for the everyday experience of time as a variably paced flow. Human temporality itself is shot through with ambiguity: as an always incomplete synthesis of past, present, and future it defines and gives value to two absences -- the future as the not-yet-being and the past (here represented as “the preterit,” the simple past tense) as the no-longer-being – by virtue of a present that itself is an unstable point vanishing into the past as it flees toward the future. Does this built-in ambiguity translate into an all of the above? A none or nothingness, which would imply a none of the above? An undecidable both?

The poems in petal / transport encompass a heterogeneity of form and content that resists reduction to a neat summary. And yet the short poem “the fiction to be” does seem to capture something of the general tone of the book in what it says and how it says it:

the fiction to be. Its border where
we likeness semantic and so on. on.

The poem, the story, the text in general, is experience’s discursive double – a semantic likeness arising at the border between language and world. Because we can create these discursive doubles we can even imagine the world as given as a kind of pre-linguistic fiction to be, one that will take on color and sense once we craft it through our choice of words and attention to prosody. Language may not be a transparent medium for blandly pointing to the given but rather is, as Mesiti phrases it elsewhere, a “slippage [in/sound]” – a sliding together and apart of word and world as each attempts to escape the gravitational pull of the other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Daniel Barbiero : mudtrombones knotted in the spill, by Neil Flory

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