Daniel Barbiero : Léon-Paul Fargue’s Mundane Comedy

 

 

 

 

“The first time that I saw, under the sapwood of Paris, really saw, like a true damned one, Hell [l’Enfer]  and Heaven [le Paradis] in mobs of men and old women, the first time that we looked into each other’s eyes, it was, I believe, a night of vague rioting. I was having an aperitif in a genial little bar, not far from the Rue de Lancry, in a sort of cul-de-sac [impasse] as greasy as the bottom of a frying pan, and which snaked with the smirks of a distinguished tributary toward Boulevard Magenta.” (p. 64)

This is the opening sentence of the prose poem “Paris” by Léon-Paul Fargue. I read it as Fargue’s Mundane Comedy – a kind of counterpart to Dante’s Divine Comedy, but abbreviated and transposed to the night streets of a working-class district in 20^th century Paris. It runs straight from Inferno to Paradiso and indeed telescopes them into each other. We can’t always tell where one leaves off and the other begins; Fargue leaves no boundary between them.

The people we meet in hell we can find in heaven because the one is the other. These people include a miscellany of types existing at the margins of the city:

Tripe sellers, leather workers in their rooms, girls at the windows, with heavy and cold legs, card shooters, toothpick bureaucrats, hair-scratchers and follow-me-young-man-madams, Czech vendors, Saar emigrants, bank clerks, all the creeping vegetation of the houses of Paris rushed in fragments of bodies toward the sky...(pp. 72-73)

Fargue's heaven, as he describes it, is likewise filled “with living things of all kinds, such as have populated Breughel and Bosch.” (p. 75)

Fargue’s people can inhabit both heaven and hell because they all are located in the same neighborhood of the same city. This neighborhood – “this corner of living-dead men” – is the tenth arrondissement, a working-class section on the northern outskirts of Paris with its apartment buildings, train stations (the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est), and cafés. It is there, rather than in a dark wood, that Fargue finds himself. There are no circles there, just the city streets and the bar which provides the center of gravity for the night's events.

The poem begins with the hint of a diffuse but palpable tension. Fargue recalls a taut atmosphere of anticipation which made him

think of the specific fears, of the eternal attitudes of the populations that live in the shadows of volcanoes. The day before an eruption causes short fevers and bursts of granules to run over their skin. Invisible sarabands gallop at the level of kneeling fields. Mustard columns are diluted in the green sky. Then, at the first gasp of the boiling mountain, the earth retracts, man flees bent in two, flowers break, cattle whirl round. (pp. 64-65)

But will the volcano erupt? Fargue reports that in the 10^th arrondissement, he and the others “know that a fire will not suddenly spring from the chest of Paris;” rather, it would appear not to be the workers but rather the intellectuals of his acquaintance who, “in the drawing rooms in which we get together,” are concerned with thinking about revolution. It is “part of their snobbism.” (pp. 65-66) We get the impression that the unrest in the streets is rather desultory and short-lived. While it lasts, Paris is “an anthill bungled [bousillée] by the wooden shoe of a cowherd” (p. 73), but then things simply drift back to normal, and for Fargue the evening ends with a vision of paradise “above the roof of the city.” (p. 74)

Fargue can make Paris simultaneously heaven and hell because his Paris was a Paris in which observation, sensation, recollection, and imagination blended together into a world of phenomena uniquely his own. Rather than being guided through his imaginary Inferno by the shade of a deceased poet, Fargue is guided by the ghosts of his own memory and the inventions of his imagination. Fargue’s Paris was an imaginary city, which isn’t to say that it wasn’t real. It was, but it wasn't entirely real either. It was surreal in the original sense of a reality-above-reality made up of the factual and the counterfactual, of the waking perception and the dream vision, of the abolition of the contradiction between the objective and subjective. In effect, Fargue’s Paris was the objective witness of his own subjectivity. It was this at least in part because Paris had been, since the nineteenth century, what Roger Caillois called a modern myth -- the

world of supreme grandeurs and unforgivable crimes, of constant violent deeds and mysteries; the world in which everything, everywhere, is possible at all times, because the imagination has sent there its most extraordinary enticements ahead of time and discovers them at once…(Caillois, p. 178)

If Fargue could superimpose heaven and hell over the physical reality of the city’s streets, cafés, and inhabitants, it was because the city’s imaginative infrastructure had already been put in place by predecessors such as Baudelaire, Breton, and Aragon. It was a transformation as dramatic as anything Baron Haussmann had imposed.

In Fargue’s own mythical Paris the tenth arrondissement is a neighborhood of “sooty trenches” with its

stenches [relents], its cats entangled in carapaces, like insects, its large blackish crepes that the man kneads with his foot, mixing under his weight carrots, lettuce, corpses, and dark heels of bread. (p. 64)

Some of this is real, some of it might be, and some of it isn’t. Where to draw the line between them isn’t clear, as Fargue’s imaginative transformation of the facts on the ground introduces a deliberate poetic ambiguity into his record of the night’s events. Take, for example, his description of the moment he sets out for the café in which much of the poem takes place:

I throw myself into the street, into this beneficent water that dozes between banks with windows. Fresh water from a street in Paris where one mingles with reflections, water purer than in any city in the world, comforting water, a miraculous spring, from which emits a mixture of courage and hope. I enter a shady café. (p. 69)

This could be a description of a rain-wet street, or it could be an elaborate metaphor for the street itself as a kind of river whose banks are the windowed buildings that front it on either side. If we take Fargue’s “water” literally, then “reflections” (“reflets”) would refer to the images of buildings and other objects appearing in the water running over the pavement below. But if we take “water” as a metaphor for the street, “reflections” turn out instead to be moments of introspection which, given Fargue’s tendency to weave memory into his prose poems, would take the form of recollections. (In describing the dead-end street on which his bar is located as a “tributary” [“affluent”] of the Boulevard Magenta, he sets a precedent for reading the street as a river.) As an imaginary river in an imaginary Hell, Fargue’s street is like a mirror-reversed Lethe. Rather than being a river of forgetfulness it is a river of remembrance, where the past’s “ghosts had lined up in single file along the steps eaten by tides of feet.” (p. 67)

As for the café he enters, this presumably drab working-class watering hole becomes an exotic place where Fargue

had the feeling that I was in a tent pitched by nomads, a tent that a sort of hereditary approval of poor devils stretched to the limits of a country, and I saw love, usury, loneliness, conspiracy, debauchery and fury in it. But like a showcase of objects. (p. 70)

This last line betrays a certain detachment in Fargue’s imaginings. The lives of the others around him here are so many objects on display, to be seen from the outside. But it is a detachment that will eventually break down.

Inside the bar, Fargue takes a seat next to a young couple. If this is his Inferno, they are his counterparts to Dante’s Paolo and Francesca, banalized as befits the setting:

Two young folks drink from the same glass: one in overalls, one in a bodice, laughter. He, the common man from Larousse, a widespread type, without originality, without value: a good mechanic from the village with hard hands and dog white teeth. But her, the Fleur de Marie... (p. 69; ellipsis in the original)

The man apparently is drunk, as Fargue describes him in a striking set-piece:

And the man, who was barely the master of his impatient hands, rose by arpeggios toward spheres where his dark dreams sparkled. He felt splendor, strength, vertigo. He was walking like a Resurrected Man in a strange ether. He suddenly saw Museum frescoes flit through his ramified & sensitive head. He came face to face with his double [sosie] at the summit of whirling planets. He heard postcard stands tilt toward his immense ears. He was dying on the battlefield, distraught, thin and transparent as in a nightmare, very small & endless, and as he saw himself in the purple stars of drunkenness with his buddies. (pp. 71-72)

Fargue’s description shades over from observation to metaphor to simile to a speculative identification with the man’s internal state. “Rose by arpeggios” is a beautifully turned metaphor for a staggering walk – an arpeggio leaps in asymmetrical intervals, like the unevenly spaced steps of someone who’s had one too many. Fargue captures the physical disorientation, distorted perception, and dreamlike fantasies of intoxication – the vertiginous feeling of moving within a “strange ether;” the alienating experience of coming face to face with one’s reflection in a mirror and seeing it as a doppelganger rather than one’s actual self; the illusion of seeing the café’s lights as “whirling planets;” the experiencing of the strange chain of images that Fargue imagines rush through the man’s head. When he reaches this last point, Fargue abolishes the distance from which he originally observed the couple; he takes this objects out of their showcase. He pulls off the neat dialectical trick of not only experiencing the interpenetration of his own inner states with external reality, but of seeing the inner states of another – of grasping that other as a subject by observing him first as an object, and then subsequently re-subjectivizing him through the empathetic reach of imagination. At this moment Fargue is a subjectivity confronting another subjectivity, recognizing him in his interiority as he would recognize himself in his own interiority. Poetic projection takes Fargue from the visible known to the ordinarily unknown through a kind of inference that bypasses logic in favor of a lived analogy.

In the end the couple provide the occasion for Fargue to see his Paradiso within his Inferno. The unrest in the street has ended – “the derailment was averted” – and in the café Fargue sees that the two hadn’t been affected by it:

The upheavals hadn’t reached them. They were wise and passionate like characters in paintings. They saw everything in white. They climbed unsullied floors, they picked fruit, trampling on ravishing serpents, possessed themselves, twisted in a mirage. They were but cosmic dust: out of space, absent, eternal, and so strange, so comical, so barbaric in that display of glasses, spirits, and mouths...They lived, we were dead. They galloped in the divine, while we were preoccupied with revolutions. (p. 74; ellipsis in the original)

The “stupidities of these two monsters from the Infinite” show him that Paradise, with its “arabesques” and “great landscapes of staggered plains” is “nothing else” than “[l]andings, embankments, medians, half-moons, rotundas, fumivores and carriages loaded with human grapeshot” (p. 75)  – the mundane city around him.

 

 

 

References

Roger Caillois, “Paris, a Modern Myth,” in The Edge of Surrealism: A Roger Caillois Reader, ed. Claudine Frank, tr. Claudine Frank and Camille Naish (Durham, NC: Duke U Press, 2003). Internal cite to Caillois.

Léon-Paul Fargue, High Solitude, tr. Rainer J. Hanshe (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2024). Internal cites consisting of page numbers only are references to this source.

 

 

 

 

 

Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about 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 : The Magritte Poems, by Mark Young, with an introduction by Javant Biarujia

The Magritte Poems, Mark Young, with an introduction by Javant Biarujia
Sandy Press, 2024

 

 

 

 

For twenty years, Mark Young has been writing poems in response to the paintings of René Magritte. That the dialogue, which is still ongoing, has been a fecund one for Young is borne out by the sheer volume of poems written so far. The Magritte Poems, which collects Young’s Magritte-inspired poetry to date, contains more than 540 of them, along with other poems of related content.

Magritte’s work has been a creative provocation for a number of poets and other writers since, of all of the painters associated with Surrealism, he produced work that quite clearly was conjured from a conceptual core. Indeed, he described his art as the visible description of thought. At their best, his paintings involve an ontological sleight of hand that exploits the gap between our representations of reality and the reality they represent, in the process rearranging our everyday picture of the world and its furniture and unsettling our relationship to both. He inverts the ordinary relationships between things; deliberately mislabels objects; creates disturbing visual puns; and reframes our ideas of the values and functions of things by forging links between things inhabiting distant ontological domains. And with the exception of a brief “Renoir” period in the early 1940s and the caricatural “vache” paintings from later in that decade, he did all of this in a neutral, almost style-less style that deliberately resembles the most banal commercial art or dictionary illustration. That style turns out to have been both an asset and a liability. On the one hand it made the paintings approachable, the better for them to work their subversion almost surreptitiously. On the other hand it made them too approachable, which resulted in their popularization to the point of oversaturation and cliche. In the process, their edges have been dulled. Many of their images and motifs are familiar enough that it’s easy to become inured to their genuine strangeness. It is to their great credit that, by engaging Magritte’s paintings with a combination of seriousness and ironic humor, Young’s poems help us to see once again how these paintings could, as Magritte put it in his autobiography/artist statement “Lifeline,” make “everyday objects shriek aloud.”

Young’s poems are imaginative inventions grounded in ekphrasis. Some of them involve inferences spun out of the visual clues Young sees in the paintings; some are meditations on the philosophical problems the pictures appear to raise. All of them carry the titles of the paintings to which they respond.

Here is La Joconde:

The slice-of-sky curtain is
center stage — or should
that be center plage? Behind

it are two other curtains, red
this time, ready, when the
bell starts to ring, to move

slightly forward & draw to-
gether to conceal the other &
leave only sand & sea in sight.

The painting shows a seashore at dusk, with a round bell sitting on the sand. At its center is a wedge of bright blue sky flecked with white clouds. The sky, like the bell, is familiar as one of Magritte’s frequently recurring visual motifs. The sky is framed by two red curtains pinched in at the middle, the one on the left paralleling the half-hourglass shape of the slice of sky. Young’s response takes the form of a calligram using center-justification to mimic the curvilinear outline of the curtains and wedge of sky. His description of the painting is economical and precise; with an off-rhyme between “stage” and “plage,” he imagines the section of day-lit sky as a prop or stage set about to be hidden by the red curtains once the bell signals them to close. Will that closing mean the close of day, leaving only the twilit stretch of beach and water? Or, if this is all a stage set, does that mean that the world we perceive is simply a spectacle to divert us? Young answers this second question with Le Beau Monde:

The world which
we see
clearly

is the curtain
in front
of

the
world which
Magritte clearly sees.

Le Beau Monde shares the curtains-and-sky motif and general formal structure of La Joconde, but with differences. The wedge of sky is the same but the curtains here are solid blue, and the wedge is superimposed over an identical blue-sky-with-clouds that makes up the entire background; the bell is replaced by one of Magritte’s signature green apples. The scene as Young gives it to us is no longer a stage set; rather, the curtain appears to be an embodiment of the Veil of Isis, which occults the true reality of the world behind the apparent reality “we see/clearly.”

With this terse poem, Young encapsulates in a few words one of the fundamental motifs recurrent in Magritte’s art – concealment, in the form of objects covered by or hidden behind other objects. Magritte’s biographer Alex Danchev quotes the painter telling an interviewer, “Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see.” Magritte seems to have meant this in a literal sense, but the paintings hint more generally that the visible is concealing something of a reality other than the mundane reality we see. Magritte was no metaphysician, but some of his paintings do suggest a dissociation or contradiction between the phenomenal world and whatever it might be hiding – the noumenal, the Ideal, thought: call it what you like, even if he might not have used those terms. The implication is that the phenomenal world is a screen hung on an invisible frame. If Magritte’s neutral style compels us to recognize the banal objects he depicts as physical things unproblematically present to perception, his subjecting them to bizarre arrangements or his opposing words to them, whether through incongruous labels or titles, tends to undermine what Stevens called “the eye’s plain version.” We’re left with the impression that what we’re supposed to see is that what we see is constituted by what we don’t see: that is, by the invisible image or idea that makes the thing present to us as the thing it is. As Young puts it in The Improvement,

Things might seem to be
how they seem until you

reach the door — or, more
probably, one of many doors —

marked Magritte the Magi-
cian, open any of them, &

discover the invisible that
resides behind the visible.

Young’s first of three responses to The Son of Man, Magritte’s famous image of a bowler-hatted man whose face is hidden behind a green apple, begins by raising a question concerning the relationship of the apple to the laws of physics, and hence to the nature of its reality:

Does this apple obey
the laws of gravity
& fall at thirty-two feet
per second per second?

Does time move slower
in the reality of an unreal
landscape? Do objects
invent their own velocity?

Is the apple’s downward movement through time and space something proper to the apple – does it “invent [its] own velocity” – or is it something we impose on it? Does our experience of time vary with the perceived reality of the place in which we experience it? The questions Young raises here seem to touch on the Kantian notion that such structures as time, space, and causation aren’t inherently part of an independent reality but instead are imposed by the conceptual apparatus of the human mind. This may or may not have been what Magritte intended, but Young’s imaginative questioning of the painting insightfully reveals a meaning provoked by the image itself.

One of the techniques Magritte famously used to provoke a surreal meaning was the pairing of images of objects with the names of other, seemingly unrelated objects. It was a technique he employed in a series of paintings titled Le Cle des songes, translated either as The Interpretation of Dreams or The Key to Dreams. Young takes a 1935, English-language Key to Dreams once owned by Peggy Guggenheim that depicts a horse, misnamed “the door;” a clock, misnamed “the wind;” a pitcher, misnamed “the bird;” and a suitcase, correctly labeled “the valise,” and responds to this painting of dual signification with a double-entendre of his own:

.....& then
there are
those rare
times when
our dreams
speak to us
in a language
we can under-
stand.....

Does the “language we can understand” refer to a decoding of dream symbolism in which an image of obscure meaning is translated into the word that reveals its true meaning (or vice versa)? Or to the fact that here Magritte uses English, a language we as Anglophones can understand?

One of the conceptual motifs Magritte addressed in various ways is the inversion or deliberate confusion of the relationship between inside and outside. One of his best-known works, The Human Condition, shows a room in which there is an easel holding a canvas in front of a window; the image on the canvas is a skyscape exactly continuous with the view beyond the window. The immediate meaning of the painting would seem to be a pun on the notion that a painting is a window on the world. But Young’s response goes further and sees a conundrum in the skyscape appearing both inside and outside of the room:

Inside the
outside

     is much
     the same

as outside
the outside

     except
     there are

far fewer
people. 

As the wry closing comment indicates, not everything in The Magritte Poems is a straight-faced meditation on metaphysics; Young’s signature ironic humor runs throughout the collection. It’s an attitude in keeping with the mordant wit that informs much of Magritte’s work. Young writes with a plain diction that is superficially analogous to Magritte’s flat, illustrational style, but whereas Magritte’s style conveys a sense of intellectual detachment and emotional distance, Young’s instead draws the reader in and signals his own involvement with the paintings he engages. That it is a vital involvement is apparent not only from the number of Magritte-inspired poems Young has written and collected here, but from the many registers in which Young writes as he responds to Magritte’s images and ideas. In addition to the more philosophically oriented poems that I’ve chosen to focus on, there are poems based on the facts of Magritte’s life, and poems of social criticism. The collection also contains Young’s “Florence Foucault” poems, which are sourced from Michel Foucault's Magritte book This Is Not a Pipe and from The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, an 1860 book by Florence Hartley. With The Magritte Poems Young has produced what is in effect his epic, but one that seems to want to be dipped into and read a little at a time. There is much here to please and to stimulate.

 

 

 

 

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; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Open Doors Review, London Grip, Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, and elsewhere. His essays on poetics have appeared in the books Telling It Slant (University of Alabama Press), and The World in Time and Space (Talisman House). He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III will be appearing in A Year of Deep Listening, to be published by MIT Press in December 2024. Website: https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.

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