Muttertongue: what is a word in utter space, Lillian Allen, Gregory Betts and Gary Barwin
Exile Editions, 2025
In Muttertongue, a collaborative effulgence by Lillian Allen, Gary Barwin and Gregory Betts, the inchoate life of words and the spaces between them fearlessly explores alternative modalities to destabilize the manufactured consent of our language gatekeepers. A mouthful one might add, a paradigm shift, a semantic reshuffle, an ungracious scouring of the politically correct: all and more, in deed and word. Indeed. He said saying, he wrote writing. He resembled, looking.
Making its presence felt in print and audio and subtitled ‘what is a word in utter space’, it mines the established areas of concrete and visual poetry, that hard fought for territory in the empire of English Literature, where anthologies gathering and professors professing cobbled together the kingdom of approved stanzas over time, book and college. Who gains admittance and who gets shifted or shafted. These riotous rebels, rich in education and cultural roots, revel in their joyous attack on the rational, that castle of purity held in high regard by the cultural mavens that make up the honour guard of our civilized exchanges.
Liz Howard calls it ‘a sacred ceremony, a joyous and radical cacophony of words of images’, and in this she is more than accurate. The print contains dialogue and trialogue, provocative and kicking against perceived pricks, poems both linear & visual, and some of what one might term typewriter torment. The audio (available as digital download and vinyl) calls up earlier expressions such as the Four Horsemen, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and the original Dadaists from 1917, whose mad jabber onstage at the Cabaret Voltaire challenged the chaos left in the wake of WW1, attempting to upend all norms. As Hans Arp later confessed, t’was in many art forms, - “poetry, dance, song and painting, we were searching for a new order that would expose an elementary art and new order that would lead humanity from the disorder of the era and create a new balance of heaven and hell”. Hugo Ball, in a published diary, stated that by delving into “the mystical and mythological depths of human consciousness one could uncover that which the enlightenment had buried by “disregarding the importance of human beings, had made reason to be our mortal enemy” Dada would bring “irrationality, fantasy and speculation to transcend the distinction between art and life, reigniting the magical side that had been lost in the process”.
In the performances at the Cabaret Voltaire it was reported that all seven instigators were caught by ‘an indefinable intoxication’, such were the frenzies of expression. Also a mystical climax took place in June 23rd 1916 when Hugo Ball, dressed as a magical bishop dressed in a cubist costume read his verses without words, after having recited his first two sound poems, he wondered how he should end his performance: “When I noticed that my voice had no choice but to take on the ancient cadence of priestly lamentation that style of liturgical singing everywhere from east to west, for a moment it seemed as if there were a pale bewildered face in my cubist mask, a curious image of ten year old boy trembling and hanging on to the priest’s words in his parish…Then the lights went out as I had ordered and bathed in sweat I was carried down off the stage like magical bishop.’” While the actual content of these two sound poems seems not to have come down to us, one suspects some systematic derangememnt of cadence and grammar grafted onto staccato rhythms. Or perhaps whispers and murmurs surfing the audience’s expectations. But in the earlier reference to ‘indefinable intoxication’ one feels the cacophonous yet calculated climaxes of the Four Horsemen and the Muttertongue collective. Of course, as in all cultural revolutions something is lost in the refining fires of transformation. Some traditions are gladly scuttled while others are carefully saved and stashed in safe places to be exhumed by later generations. Thus we yet have Hugo Ball’s ‘Three Propositions of Dada: (1) How does one achieve eternal bliss? By saying DADA. (2) How does one become famous? By saying DADA. (3) With a noble gesture and delicate propriety one goes crazy until one loses consciousness.’
Was Alfred Jarry’s Theatre Of The Absurd, his infamous play Ubu Roi, the scandal it created pushing him into that ‘first prophet of the avant-garde’ and his embrace of Pataphysics another offshoot of the irrational? In a banquet there can be many courses. Even going backwards in time, which for the irrational is easy-peasy, we hear that the Zurich Dada group read his play out loud at their first gig. Myself, I came of age in the sixties’ upending of cultural norms, where the surreal visions of psychedelic substances made pop music makers and fans susceptible to the fantastic and surreal, readymade pretzels that later had to forcibly realign themselves for family and career. “Semolina pilchards climbing up the Eiffel Tower”. Another case of the more you look the more you see. And inevitably the more you listen the more you hear. And that is exactly what Muttertongue is all about: listening more & hearing more.
That Dada soon morphed into the more refined, and some would say disciplined, movement of Surrealism, where the dreamworld and all measure of irrationality and fantasy were slowly but surely dragged into the cultural mainstream to be stamped with the respectability of galleries, museums and university courses, was as perhaps as predictable as the earlier institutionalization of Impressionism. Innovation has a habit of being ignored, mocked, knocked on the head, defanged and then quietly resuscitated when the initial dangers have been properly packaged as the next big thing, shelves spilling over with coasters, posters and t-shirts. Cultural expression is a continuous circus. Performative, as we say, whether category confirming or expanding.
As Warhol predicted, In the future everyone (and everything) will be famous for fifteen minutes. That future, something of a fizzle in the 60’s, has now been endlessly extended. How one times out that fifteen is a matter of choice, and in our age of planetary digital display, any iconoclastic expression can find its niche and audience, to then mutate that fifteen into years and decades. As Allen, Barwin and Betts make their case for the continued joyous consumption of the irrational and revelatory, we hear the voices of their individual cultural inheritances as they strip the accretions of colonialism and approved culture from the ancient roots they suspect have been packaged for respectability and profit, and if we allow ourselves, participate in the audible presence of chant and chorus as they reverberate around the room we have chosen for consumption. Their carnival of mad celebration certainly makes a respectful nod to the Four Horsemen (bp Nicoll, Steve McCaffery, Rafael Barreto-Rivera & Paul Dutton) whose performances, particularly the classic CANADADA, are yet available on the net, and unapologetically extends the tradition of ‘sounds assembling’ from some mystery source into their own cacophony of carefree contempt.
One can only hope they will continue to perform their boundary burning to reveal that all limits are actually invisible, that the rational and irrational, fantasy and reality, order and chaos, conscious and unconscious, rhythm and stasis, the approved and the shadow banned, are in fact, dance partners in the giddy whirl of life as they waltz and shimmy in disreputable indulgence.
Gordon Phinn is a poet, novelist, memoirist, critic, editor and videoblogger, a relic who can remember when manuscripts had to be posted with SAE’s in manila envelopes. Recently, he has been preoccupied with several video projects, - Gord’sPoetryShow (Youtube), Poet Of The Moment (#84 at last count, Facebook) and Poem Of The Day (Instagram). Since the demise of WordCity, where he was reviewer for four years, the collection soon to be published as Joy in All Genres, he has found a new home in The Miramichi Reader and other hospitable harbours such as the Asemana substack His older critical work for BooksInCanada and Paragraph has been collected in It’s All About Me and Bowering and McFadden, while his memoir Moving Through Many Dimensions seems to be still shaking the odd tree here and there. He lives and breathes by the shore of Lake Ontario in Oakville.
