"This is a Document of Affect": on Klara Du Plessis's Post-Mortem
of the Event
1
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.
2
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.
3
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.
4
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.
%20(1).jpeg)
.jpg)
