"the sun's kingfisher rod" - Richard Murphy
by Michael Peverett
This comes from near the beginning of the title poem of Richard Murphy's first poetry collection, Sailing to an Island (1963). (An earlier version of the poem was published in 1952 when the author was only 25.)
"Plumbed by the sun's kingfisher rod" works with four images.
1. The track of the sun on the sea.
2. A penis - (compare the use of the word rod in "Seals at High Island", a wonderful poem that you can read by following the link given below).
3. A kingfisher's lateral flight over water (and its dazzling colours).
4. A fishing rod. ("Kingfisher" was a reasonably well-known brand of bamboo fly rod.)
Contrasted with the bold extravagance of this line, but just as skilful, is how the rhythm of repeated but unavailing effort gets evoked by the internal rhyme in this:
Colonialism of some kind or another is a big theme of Murphy's poetry. He was himself Anglo-Irish, of wealthy Protestant Ascendancy stock, and is the first poet I've researched for whom one of the best sources is Debrett's. His family were colonial administrators. He fell out with Faber in 1984 when the new editor Craig Raine didn't want to publish (or rather, re-publish) a poem about the estate in Rhodesia that Murphy's father bought when he retired from being mayor of Colombo. According to Murphy's Poetry International page, Raine mistook a subtle exploration of colonial guilt for unreconstructed imperialism. That may be unfair to Raine. He may have been fed up with colonial perspectives, guilty or not.
"Making no headway", the author and his companions don't make it to Clare Island. Instead they stop at another island, Inishbofin. The poem ends with the whisky- and sea-drunk poet getting to his room and discovering, in a woozy moment of revelation, the mystery inherent in the most commonplace of objects: "here is a bed". Here on an island.
I think this is a beautifully inclusive poem, because some of the sea-intoxicated confusion is Murphy's recognition of his own muddled thinking e.g. about establishing a fishing business here in Cleggan Bay, he, an outsider. At Inishbofin, the drink doesn't entirely dispel the courteous distance between Murphy and his island hosts. It's a theme that returns in the second poem, "The Last Galway Hooker":
Sailing to an Island is one of those mainstream collections that are divided into themed sections. This can be a bad idea if the collection you are sub-dividing is vulnerable to a charge of slightness. The later sections of Sailing to an Island look like they're influenced by Lowell's subdivisions of Life Studies (1959). But, Murphy's poems about Roethke and Wittgenstein in apposition to e.g. Lowell's "To Delmore Schwartz", or Murphy's poem about his grandmother in apposition to e.g. Lowell's "Dunbarton" - no, these are damaging comparisons. Nearly all of what interests me about Sailing to an Island is in the three boat poems that constitute the first section.
The third of these boat poems is "The Cleggan Disaster", a title so admirably direct that it eventually claims attention, and then provokes a question: how does a modern poet get to write this? And it's a good poem; these are the opening lines.
The contrast with the "holiday fashion" of the first poem is intended and powerful. Murphy did not need to invoke a muse to underline what we can immediately feel, a different level of language for a bigger theme.
In a way it is a plainer style. There is a lot of story to tell, and the language has to keep its distance. At first reading it's the artistry of a short story that we appreciate, for instance the confident delay of nearly a page before Concannon, the story's seeing eye, is introduced.
Yet the language isn't so plain that, even at this early stage, we can't register, as from somewhere far off, the remote rumble of alliterative doubling: hulls/hissed, rain/rowers, drenched/drying.
I didn't really quote this opening for didactic purposes, though. I just wanted to remember, before I take Island down to Barnardo's, the marvellously wide-ranging effects of that improbable word "hearth", which deserves a Prynne-style twenty-page exposition. That, and "the shadow of stacks". (When description is like this, description is what I like best.)
The unanticipated disaster occurred soon after nightfall on 28th October 1927. 44 fishermen from in and around Cleggan (Connemara) were drowned because of a sudden storm in Cleggan Bay. It was a traumatic event for the local area; fishing in small boats almost disappeared for many years, affecting every aspect of the lives of those thinly-populated communities. The event is still remembered and commemorated (e.g. in the recent Vertigo Films documentary An Bathadh mór).
In this context Murphy's poem is not entirely the author's property; it belongs to a people. But that's the very essence of epic narrative. Murphy came to know Patrick Concannon, who survived the disaster and brought his crew home (though he was blinded in the process). And pursuing my earlier theme, this was partly because Murphy was able to get himself into the position where he was handed something now very rare, a genuinely epic subject: a poem about a people, and about a way of life, and about an event that altered it forever. A poem, also, that is centred on work, on an all-male cast of breadwinners. On the sea, among islands. And obviously the uneasy sense of appropriation is there, and is not to be ignored. But the poem was a gift as well as an appropriation. Despite all these features of atavistic epic, obvious once they're pointed out, it doesn't come over as being an exercise in a literary mode. Unobtrusively borne within the plain story, those features manifest themselves as power, and account in part for the unusual brilliance of the narrative, compared to most contemporary "narrative" poems, which seem to struggle with legitimacy, and end up not telling their stories very well.
So maybe his thinking wasn't so confused, after all. Because part of Murphy's intention when he started to mess with the fishing business was avowedly poetic. He wanted to forge a stronger language from his sea-experience. And he did, and all his best poems bear the mark of it.
Poetry is colonialism, too.
*
NOTES
In career terms, it was that familiar pattern, a cable-car ascent followed by a prolonged tramp downhill. Prior to the falling-out, Murphy (b. 1927) had been an established Faber poet for twenty years, a regular Poetry Society recommendation, and a regular part of the literary scene, pal of Auden, Lowell, Roethke, Hughes, Plath, etc. Afterwards, Murphy's poetry was re-published by the Gallery Press in Ireland and by Wake Forest UP in the USA. But in 2012, I don't think any of his poetry is still obtainable in the UK - a fate that I imagine all too often befalls poets in their eighties.
A few choice poems, including "Sailing to an Island", can be read in full on the Ireland - Poetry International Web.
There's also an interesting interview with Eugene O'Connell, from 2007.
Ricorso is an invaluable source of information on Murphy, as on so many other Irish writers.
The fullest commentary I've found on Murphy's work is this review of his memoir The Kick. But I can't tell you who wrote it. Text on the web, (like the text of much-copied medieval poems), is prone to shed meta-information like an author's name unless it's secured within the text itself. I, Michael Peverett, should know better than to forget that lesson from my Langland studies...
A Galway hooker is a kind of boat, silly!
Patrick Tierney's ballad verses "The Bofin Disaster", written just after it happened in 1927, can currently be seen here.
From what I can gather, Patrick Concannon's blindness was temporary; perhaps a bit like photokeratitis, though the poem seems to suggest that it was the constant battering of sea-water that caused it. At any rate, there's no hint of it in this interesting memoir by the Breton Nationalist Yann Fouéré, who came to know Pat Concannon in the early 1950s, during his exile in Ireland.
Across the shelved Atlantic groundswell
Plumbed by the sun's kingfisher rod,
We sail to locate in sea, earth and stone
The myth of a shrewd and brutal swordswoman
Who piously endowed an abbey.
Seven hours we try against wind and tide,
Tack and return, making no headway.
The north wind sticks like a gag in our teeth.
This comes from near the beginning of the title poem of Richard Murphy's first poetry collection, Sailing to an Island (1963). (An earlier version of the poem was published in 1952 when the author was only 25.)
"Plumbed by the sun's kingfisher rod" works with four images.
1. The track of the sun on the sea.
2. A penis - (compare the use of the word rod in "Seals at High Island", a wonderful poem that you can read by following the link given below).
3. A kingfisher's lateral flight over water (and its dazzling colours).
4. A fishing rod. ("Kingfisher" was a reasonably well-known brand of bamboo fly rod.)
Contrasted with the bold extravagance of this line, but just as skilful, is how the rhythm of repeated but unavailing effort gets evoked by the internal rhyme in this:
Seven hours we try against wind and tide.The aimed-for island is Clare Island and the swordswoman Gráinne Ní Mháille (Grace O'Malley, c. 1530 - 1603). Her story interweaves with the English re-conquest of Ireland, that brutal colonization ("Spenser's colonization", we poetry fans like to call it). BTW, Gráinne met Sir Philip Sidney, as well as Elizabeth I.
Colonialism of some kind or another is a big theme of Murphy's poetry. He was himself Anglo-Irish, of wealthy Protestant Ascendancy stock, and is the first poet I've researched for whom one of the best sources is Debrett's. His family were colonial administrators. He fell out with Faber in 1984 when the new editor Craig Raine didn't want to publish (or rather, re-publish) a poem about the estate in Rhodesia that Murphy's father bought when he retired from being mayor of Colombo. According to Murphy's Poetry International page, Raine mistook a subtle exploration of colonial guilt for unreconstructed imperialism. That may be unfair to Raine. He may have been fed up with colonial perspectives, guilty or not.
"Making no headway", the author and his companions don't make it to Clare Island. Instead they stop at another island, Inishbofin. The poem ends with the whisky- and sea-drunk poet getting to his room and discovering, in a woozy moment of revelation, the mystery inherent in the most commonplace of objects: "here is a bed". Here on an island.
I think this is a beautifully inclusive poem, because some of the sea-intoxicated confusion is Murphy's recognition of his own muddled thinking e.g. about establishing a fishing business here in Cleggan Bay, he, an outsider. At Inishbofin, the drink doesn't entirely dispel the courteous distance between Murphy and his island hosts. It's a theme that returns in the second poem, "The Last Galway Hooker":
One calm evening he sold me the Ave Maria.This line draws attention to the very thing it seems to hold in reserve: that it's Murphy's money that is really the agent here. And that there's a necessary coolness about commercial transactions. Money does not always make other people happy. Murphy is not ignorant of, but is willing to accept responsibility for, the unmanning effect of this sale on the boat's former owner.
Sailing to an Island is one of those mainstream collections that are divided into themed sections. This can be a bad idea if the collection you are sub-dividing is vulnerable to a charge of slightness. The later sections of Sailing to an Island look like they're influenced by Lowell's subdivisions of Life Studies (1959). But, Murphy's poems about Roethke and Wittgenstein in apposition to e.g. Lowell's "To Delmore Schwartz", or Murphy's poem about his grandmother in apposition to e.g. Lowell's "Dunbarton" - no, these are damaging comparisons. Nearly all of what interests me about Sailing to an Island is in the three boat poems that constitute the first section.
The third of these boat poems is "The Cleggan Disaster", a title so admirably direct that it eventually claims attention, and then provokes a question: how does a modern poet get to write this? And it's a good poem; these are the opening lines.
Five boats were shooting their nets in the bay
After dark. It was cold and late October.
The hulls hissed and rolled on the sea's black hearth
In the shadow of stacks close to the island.
Rain drenched the rowers, with no drying wind.
The contrast with the "holiday fashion" of the first poem is intended and powerful. Murphy did not need to invoke a muse to underline what we can immediately feel, a different level of language for a bigger theme.
In a way it is a plainer style. There is a lot of story to tell, and the language has to keep its distance. At first reading it's the artistry of a short story that we appreciate, for instance the confident delay of nearly a page before Concannon, the story's seeing eye, is introduced.
Yet the language isn't so plain that, even at this early stage, we can't register, as from somewhere far off, the remote rumble of alliterative doubling: hulls/hissed, rain/rowers, drenched/drying.
I didn't really quote this opening for didactic purposes, though. I just wanted to remember, before I take Island down to Barnardo's, the marvellously wide-ranging effects of that improbable word "hearth", which deserves a Prynne-style twenty-page exposition. That, and "the shadow of stacks". (When description is like this, description is what I like best.)
The unanticipated disaster occurred soon after nightfall on 28th October 1927. 44 fishermen from in and around Cleggan (Connemara) were drowned because of a sudden storm in Cleggan Bay. It was a traumatic event for the local area; fishing in small boats almost disappeared for many years, affecting every aspect of the lives of those thinly-populated communities. The event is still remembered and commemorated (e.g. in the recent Vertigo Films documentary An Bathadh mór).
In this context Murphy's poem is not entirely the author's property; it belongs to a people. But that's the very essence of epic narrative. Murphy came to know Patrick Concannon, who survived the disaster and brought his crew home (though he was blinded in the process). And pursuing my earlier theme, this was partly because Murphy was able to get himself into the position where he was handed something now very rare, a genuinely epic subject: a poem about a people, and about a way of life, and about an event that altered it forever. A poem, also, that is centred on work, on an all-male cast of breadwinners. On the sea, among islands. And obviously the uneasy sense of appropriation is there, and is not to be ignored. But the poem was a gift as well as an appropriation. Despite all these features of atavistic epic, obvious once they're pointed out, it doesn't come over as being an exercise in a literary mode. Unobtrusively borne within the plain story, those features manifest themselves as power, and account in part for the unusual brilliance of the narrative, compared to most contemporary "narrative" poems, which seem to struggle with legitimacy, and end up not telling their stories very well.
So maybe his thinking wasn't so confused, after all. Because part of Murphy's intention when he started to mess with the fishing business was avowedly poetic. He wanted to forge a stronger language from his sea-experience. And he did, and all his best poems bear the mark of it.
Poetry is colonialism, too.
*
NOTES
In career terms, it was that familiar pattern, a cable-car ascent followed by a prolonged tramp downhill. Prior to the falling-out, Murphy (b. 1927) had been an established Faber poet for twenty years, a regular Poetry Society recommendation, and a regular part of the literary scene, pal of Auden, Lowell, Roethke, Hughes, Plath, etc. Afterwards, Murphy's poetry was re-published by the Gallery Press in Ireland and by Wake Forest UP in the USA. But in 2012, I don't think any of his poetry is still obtainable in the UK - a fate that I imagine all too often befalls poets in their eighties.
A few choice poems, including "Sailing to an Island", can be read in full on the Ireland - Poetry International Web.
There's also an interesting interview with Eugene O'Connell, from 2007.
Ricorso is an invaluable source of information on Murphy, as on so many other Irish writers.
The fullest commentary I've found on Murphy's work is this review of his memoir The Kick. But I can't tell you who wrote it. Text on the web, (like the text of much-copied medieval poems), is prone to shed meta-information like an author's name unless it's secured within the text itself. I, Michael Peverett, should know better than to forget that lesson from my Langland studies...
A Galway hooker is a kind of boat, silly!
Patrick Tierney's ballad verses "The Bofin Disaster", written just after it happened in 1927, can currently be seen here.
From what I can gather, Patrick Concannon's blindness was temporary; perhaps a bit like photokeratitis, though the poem seems to suggest that it was the constant battering of sea-water that caused it. At any rate, there's no hint of it in this interesting memoir by the Breton Nationalist Yann Fouéré, who came to know Pat Concannon in the early 1950s, during his exile in Ireland.
'Then Him' by Emily Critchley
After ‘The Marriage of Faustus and Helen’
II
Suppose suppose you forgot
just for a second all those smutty
wings – ambivalence of old
& dove right there where it’s at.
Blessed foretaste! The cage
is not a pulley system –
or trap, but has a lake
inside, mirrored, a valley too
that glitter-balls its way through
to a new sort of freedom: spherical.
Know that, whatever happens, I will
meet you in this place afterwards.
It could’ve been nothing
but we called it – now it belongs to us permanently.
& city sirens cry out celebratorily
& thousands of skin molecules moisten
under ground, happy we’re almost
in each other’s way again; almost
fall down the escalator for joy!
What surprise – all that tumbleweed
& other dust collected in a coronet
to be offered half perfectly again;
with the graceful thud of a passing train.
O, I’ve known swallows touch the ground
too soon, only to be trounced;
epillions neglected, rubbished for not meeting
the house martin in his nest. I’ve taken
to the edge of cliffs, jumped part way
only to stub my toe on the small distance
(because my eyes were closed!)
You wouldn’t lead me to that kind of death –
but the littler, more perfect one, stringing me out
with songs of such fitting striation
that you cannot leave: they are smiling in wax,
dipping a toe into the whole part,
where you, at once impressed & beautifully propelled,
resist frowning, but know you belong…
III
A different paradox / doxography. That he is
not quite there must be an understanding
to cope. Then, unbind the little bine
around your throat, on your way over
just one of this city’s many superb bridges.
Here. Glancing over the side
fear, not in an eagle, but a duck, this time
not driving – speed was its destruction
& spouted malice, a rich Hellespont,
where formal information gathered
that we did not ask for, but survived.
Erasmus would have had a field day,
or Helen, at our new found humanism.
So spins the little world for those who think
it through: to mend unthreadable their
troubled love of twisting. & life is long –
& worries less the need for song.
-----------------------------------
This poem was published in IMAGINARYLOVEPOEMS (Paris: Corrupt Press, 2011)
Emily Critchley holds a PhD in contemporary, American, women’s poetry and philosophy from the University of Cambridge. She is the author of several critical articles - on poetry, philosophy and feminism - and several poetry publications. Her Selected Writing, 'Love / All That / & OK', was published by Penned in the Margins in 2011. In 2004 she won the John Kinsella - Tracy Ryan prize for poetry, at the University of Cambridge, and in 2011 was joint winner of the Jane Martin Prize for Poetry. Critchley teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich, London.
List of Publications:
The Dirt Glitch Land Alter Affair (Cambridge: Arehouse, 2003)
How to make Millions (Cambridge: Arehouse, 2004)
I just want you to know that we can still be friends (Intercapillary Space, 2005)
When I say I Believe Women… (London: bad press, 2006)
Of All the Surprises (Switzerland: Dusie, 2007)
Who handles one over the Backlash (Norfolk: Oystercatcher press, 2008)
Hopeful For Love Are Th’ Impoverish’d Of Faith (Southampton: Torque press, 2010)
Love / All That / & OK: Selected Writing (London: Penned in the Margins, 2011)
Sonnets for Luke (Liverpool: Holdfire press, 2011)
IMAGINARYLOVEPOEMS (Paris: Corrupt Press, 2011)
This is not a True Thing (London: Intercapillary Editions, forthcoming)
II
Suppose suppose you forgot
just for a second all those smutty
wings – ambivalence of old
& dove right there where it’s at.
Blessed foretaste! The cage
is not a pulley system –
or trap, but has a lake
inside, mirrored, a valley too
that glitter-balls its way through
to a new sort of freedom: spherical.
Know that, whatever happens, I will
meet you in this place afterwards.
It could’ve been nothing
but we called it – now it belongs to us permanently.
& city sirens cry out celebratorily
& thousands of skin molecules moisten
under ground, happy we’re almost
in each other’s way again; almost
fall down the escalator for joy!
What surprise – all that tumbleweed
& other dust collected in a coronet
to be offered half perfectly again;
with the graceful thud of a passing train.
O, I’ve known swallows touch the ground
too soon, only to be trounced;
epillions neglected, rubbished for not meeting
the house martin in his nest. I’ve taken
to the edge of cliffs, jumped part way
only to stub my toe on the small distance
(because my eyes were closed!)
You wouldn’t lead me to that kind of death –
but the littler, more perfect one, stringing me out
with songs of such fitting striation
that you cannot leave: they are smiling in wax,
dipping a toe into the whole part,
where you, at once impressed & beautifully propelled,
resist frowning, but know you belong…
III
A different paradox / doxography. That he is
not quite there must be an understanding
to cope. Then, unbind the little bine
around your throat, on your way over
just one of this city’s many superb bridges.
Here. Glancing over the side
fear, not in an eagle, but a duck, this time
not driving – speed was its destruction
& spouted malice, a rich Hellespont,
where formal information gathered
that we did not ask for, but survived.
Erasmus would have had a field day,
or Helen, at our new found humanism.
So spins the little world for those who think
it through: to mend unthreadable their
troubled love of twisting. & life is long –
& worries less the need for song.
-----------------------------------
This poem was published in IMAGINARYLOVEPOEMS (Paris: Corrupt Press, 2011)
Emily Critchley holds a PhD in contemporary, American, women’s poetry and philosophy from the University of Cambridge. She is the author of several critical articles - on poetry, philosophy and feminism - and several poetry publications. Her Selected Writing, 'Love / All That / & OK', was published by Penned in the Margins in 2011. In 2004 she won the John Kinsella - Tracy Ryan prize for poetry, at the University of Cambridge, and in 2011 was joint winner of the Jane Martin Prize for Poetry. Critchley teaches English and Creative Writing at the University of Greenwich, London.
List of Publications:
The Dirt Glitch Land Alter Affair (Cambridge: Arehouse, 2003)
How to make Millions (Cambridge: Arehouse, 2004)
I just want you to know that we can still be friends (Intercapillary Space, 2005)
When I say I Believe Women… (London: bad press, 2006)
Of All the Surprises (Switzerland: Dusie, 2007)
Who handles one over the Backlash (Norfolk: Oystercatcher press, 2008)
Hopeful For Love Are Th’ Impoverish’d Of Faith (Southampton: Torque press, 2010)
Love / All That / & OK: Selected Writing (London: Penned in the Margins, 2011)
Sonnets for Luke (Liverpool: Holdfire press, 2011)
IMAGINARYLOVEPOEMS (Paris: Corrupt Press, 2011)
This is not a True Thing (London: Intercapillary Editions, forthcoming)
Amy Cutler: Notes on ‘The Diagram- -Poems’
The self-conscious ambivalence of Douglas Oliver’s cover title ‘The Diagram- -Poems’, with its torn dash, opens a speculative link between poetry and diagramming not present in the first page’s alternative title, ‘The Diagram Poems’.[1] Is there a connection between the diagrams, on the verso, and the facing poems? Is this an ekphrastic or a procedural connection?
The cover photograph by Mike Russell, with its pen-drawn pictogram on a board pad, illustrates the pedagogical role of diagrams. But Oliver’s surreal set uses diagrams which ‘plot and transform movements of several groups of raiders as they make commando-style seizures of key sites’, as he prose-notes at the start. The diagrams are linked to the co-ordination of activities: they also transform the structure of these activities. Diagrams are ‘piloting devices’ for thought.[2] They are kinetic (dia-gram, the moving form); they record and inform action. But they are also metaphorical – formulating and testing hypotheses or complex information problems through iconic thought.
In Oliver’s first diagram poem ‘Team Leader’ the human co-ordinator (we presume the get-away driver) becomes bodily part of the organised geometric imaginary of car and driving process. He switches on an ‘internal driver’ which steers his human operations: the movement of ‘blood’, the ‘eyes (…) sighting’ and finger which ‘points left’, the ‘crook of elbow / in the hollow where car axles break’, and ‘his gloves mirror(ing) an inset which is / a steering wheel’ - all corporeally following the pattern of the car. In the second poem, ‘P.C.’, a diagrammatic image is redrawn three times as ‘conjurors in corridors’, ‘a vaccinated dog’ or ‘the parachute / dynamic of an old-fashioned aviator / ejecting from arrowed lines’. Oliver shows we are ‘All foreigners to these three visions’, which are ‘portals’ without which ‘none of the other movements can be complete’. These alien ‘portals’ offer intersecting configurations of the event plane; they are also undisclosed ‘visions’ depending on alien sets of perceptual inferences.
Oliver considers various procedures of the diagrammatic. Military operations and signalling (‘incurable warfare’, ‘old-fashioned aviator’, ‘the sergeant’, ‘the airman signal’). Networks of action and ‘standard procedures’ (the poem ‘Central’ maps within itself internal communications and telephone exchanges, a sonic infrastructure beyond cables). The ‘totemic’ mapping of taxonomies of fauna, as in the third poem, ‘The Fire Station’. His diagrams (redrawn in this edition by David Chaloner) map the idiosyncratic as well as the replicable – ‘Arrest’ includes a block demarcating a ‘captured funeral party’ at a bank. The human figures in action are rendered in the same sparse scientific line, caught between the utilitarian functions of tools and circuits. One stick figure in a clamp enacts ‘the span of life / so inevitable and yet adjustable’ – where the girth of space around him as ‘life’ shows the large metaphorical stretch of spatial quantification. The poem ‘Gold’ maps ‘the mid-point of this fortune’ in a figural geography ‘between two hazardous / and likely banks of dread’.
This gold – bank or cash desk – is schematised again in ‘U’, faced with a drawing of magnetic interactions, with the magnet ends marked with orienting labels ‘Law’, ‘Personal Valuables’, ‘Attack’, and ‘Escape’. The poem, if a key to the image, suggests that the magnetism represents the systemic forces of ‘banking magnates’, ‘the hierarchies of their laws’, and investments as ‘fields of force’ – as well as a form of metal hoarding which can be mapped against ‘the arrows / of acquisition, law and management’. This diagram is familiar to the plotting of magnetic fields and conductivity; but with its labels (‘mistake’, ‘one-way’) it also resembles, fleetingly, a picaresque treasure map (with its final ‘arrow pointing to an unseen cemetery’).
The final diagram offers an elegiac infograph marked ‘all directions unsure’, encompassing ‘funeral’ and ‘hearse’, but also a stranded label without a key (‘Code W-1 of the Cloaca’) and, below, an illogically centrifugal arrow sequence of traumas and trauma victims (the circle-with-arrow form usually indicates a continuous cycle; here, it appears to show unpinned causal relations between ‘2 Women 16 men’, ‘Captured Beaten The Gauntlet Tortured’, and ‘3 men killed in cold blood or allowed to die’). In the lower right quadrant of the figure, a toponym marks empty space as ‘Festival of the wild beasts’. The two semi-circles of police encircling a wood with a helicopter prompt Oliver’s ‘This diagram could again spring a picture / encircling like buttocks’. The diagram is a culturally generative form: it springs pictures ‘again’. The poem’s title ‘The Diagonal is Diagonal’ plays with the literal referential quality in a disingenuous way: the poem also envisages actual movement in the diagram (‘the rush of a diagonal’) as well as cognitive movement (‘the arrow of a bad thought’), as, earlier, Oliver asked the reader to somehow follow the pointed finger into symbolic temporal content (‘escape if you can / into the arrow of time’; ‘directed futurewards by a will / that isn’t mine’).
This skeletal stretch of relations renders, again, a life path: ‘down the swift diagonal / that slants from the cemetery in courage’. The identification of ‘points’ as spatial landmarks in a life is transformed into emotional content, writing of ‘the innocent point exactly neighbour to that other start / from which team leader became a finger pointing left’, left being ‘the old sinister direction’ which was ‘from the beginning, / the cemetery’. ‘It is my dead son who always brings me to this point / of innocence in the heart of swift cruelty’, the arrows allegorise.
The motifs of the text – escape routes (‘It’s a clear path / across the street’) and arresting forces related to the bank heist, and the repeating of funerals and cemeteries – each in some way speak to the role of diagrams in presenting routine patterns of data and action, and also the eventful break from these. The diagram exists between fixity and transformation. Even trauma, here, is a kind of diagram of lost innocence (‘all these started in the drawings from the point / neighbour to / the point at which the innocence stays clean’). We have ‘no right to borrow it, jig it into shapes, / display it like a wound’. These are the human narratives expounded from diagrams. To the speaker, the use of these diagrams is always a ‘borrow’ (‘my right is minimal’). Grief, too, is a ‘borrow’, ‘nothing / without the original movements’. The sparseness of the diagrams challenges the speaker’s models of understanding; they dramatize the ‘remote’ sense of ‘consequence’ with confused emplacement of bizarre toponyms and arrows (whether these are events in space or time is unclear). The diagrams here are a ‘handwork of the mind’ , being the griever’s mind. Loss falls back, as if on an infrastructure of mourning according with external instruction (‘it was an academic drew the arrows and the loss of hope’).
The prose note at the start anticipated the sequence as a diagrammatic heist, ‘taking over a fire station and the central telephone exchange, raids on three banks, and the final getaway’. Graphic functions can be used to arrange and incite break-out, as these imagined guerrillas escaping the financial system with the loot. But in the last poem, ‘The Diagonal is Diagonal’, there is no final high-jinks getaway. ‘It all turns so really funereal for us / as brave as that and as flawed / just a final diagram almost straight / and a heart on which the diagram is scored / besides the death of innocences we have known / and even caused a little in the scarface heart’. Diagrams are not transcendent. In Oliver they can be like scars: the continued arrival and operation of knowledge in one’s body and heart. But the pattern of grief is somehow mundanely stranding, too: ‘now the picture transforms no longer; it is the picture’.
Notes:
[1] Douglas Oliver, The Diagram-Poems (London: Ferry Press, 1979), unpaginated
[2] John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London: Continuum, 2006) p. 176
Amy Cutler has recently launched Land Diagrams, an ongoing series of 'twinned studies' in which commissioned writers respond to the same visual encoding of landscape.
Mark Dickinson: Three of 3 READINGS
Mark Dickinson reviews:
J H Prynne, Pearls That Were, Equipage, 1999
Harriet Tarlo, Love/ Land, rem press, 2003
John Kinsella, Sheep Dip, Wild Honey Press, 1998
Download essay as a pdf
17/04/2012
J H Prynne, Pearls That Were, Equipage, 1999
Harriet Tarlo, Love/ Land, rem press, 2003
John Kinsella, Sheep Dip, Wild Honey Press, 1998
Download essay as a pdf
17/04/2012
Mark Dickinson: First of 3 READINGS
J H Prynne, Pearls That Were, Equipage, 1999:
J H Prynne’s poetry, gathers together communication at its most difficult & conflicting. The disorientation of sense can be quite a discomforting experience, but its difficulty is really just a lived obstruction to the reception field, as what nestles between ‘wounds’ can reveal itself in the [1]‘the show to hope again’. I think the making of poetry of this kind is complex, but a necessary complex, that gathers together a granulation tissue ‘around the wound’. The physical embodiment and contextual realism may indeed be read as a ‘bar to wing,’ within the ‘trembling brilliance’ but the lineation does not assimilate a totalised subversion of reception; it electrifies from within a disjunctive sense order, the possibility of conjecture. At the linguistic level the syntactical line and counter-phrase forms hairpins that are essential (‘in parvo’) for a viral transmission within the language string ‘. So to reiterate, the disjunction (non-segmented rather meta-stranded) is not what it may appear to be, but it may feel ‘like eyelids over grit’.
In the face of any crisis, at the point of an immediate saturation experience between memory and forgetfulness, is the unspeakable act. But individually, historically and politically we must collectively repair. A sensational transformative rendering simply accommodates a nullifying print, but conjectures and the quivering condition of what remains possible may say, or imprint via connective hairpins, as a gift economy on behalf of the communicated transport of response. A traver/sing of condition accrues a correspondence of testaments and embeds within them an ‘open’ response with the frugality of, “linguistic disobedience”.
Six sections into Pearls That Were the continuity of the quatrains modify to ‘Lobster-orange’ and the resounding shrill of the Rienzi as hero/ mob incline the same orifice of terror & power, ‘quite sheer’ ‘and awash’. This is not felt as a breaking apart of the quatrains as a metered musicality, but I do sense a crisis of deliverability in the modality of lyric, as a vessel of critical dialectic expression.[2]
In Prynne we read the arrangement that articulates the morphological & dynamic infusions of ‘the waves still/ recoiling their crested and turbid confusions’ and very ‘Much like waves upon a shore’, a resistance becomes physically and mentally tiring. But there are no mechanised aids to buoy, knowing the sounds, and navigating such strong syntactical currents is always pressing against a need to just say “fuck it, I’m drowning!” But you can’t always swim against the rip, sometimes you have travel obliquely & ‘flicker some hope remaining.’
Notes:
[1] The word ‘show’ here is problematic, but even subjugated to the a quivering register of a thingly spectacle, the word ‘hope’ still holds, especially with the condition and support of ‘again’.
[2] A bugbear this entire sentence, but there’s despair enough to ‘joint screaming with rind orange’.
J H Prynne’s poetry, gathers together communication at its most difficult & conflicting. The disorientation of sense can be quite a discomforting experience, but its difficulty is really just a lived obstruction to the reception field, as what nestles between ‘wounds’ can reveal itself in the [1]‘the show to hope again’. I think the making of poetry of this kind is complex, but a necessary complex, that gathers together a granulation tissue ‘around the wound’. The physical embodiment and contextual realism may indeed be read as a ‘bar to wing,’ within the ‘trembling brilliance’ but the lineation does not assimilate a totalised subversion of reception; it electrifies from within a disjunctive sense order, the possibility of conjecture. At the linguistic level the syntactical line and counter-phrase forms hairpins that are essential (‘in parvo’) for a viral transmission within the language string ‘. So to reiterate, the disjunction (non-segmented rather meta-stranded) is not what it may appear to be, but it may feel ‘like eyelids over grit’.
In the face of any crisis, at the point of an immediate saturation experience between memory and forgetfulness, is the unspeakable act. But individually, historically and politically we must collectively repair. A sensational transformative rendering simply accommodates a nullifying print, but conjectures and the quivering condition of what remains possible may say, or imprint via connective hairpins, as a gift economy on behalf of the communicated transport of response. A traver/sing of condition accrues a correspondence of testaments and embeds within them an ‘open’ response with the frugality of, “linguistic disobedience”.
Six sections into Pearls That Were the continuity of the quatrains modify to ‘Lobster-orange’ and the resounding shrill of the Rienzi as hero/ mob incline the same orifice of terror & power, ‘quite sheer’ ‘and awash’. This is not felt as a breaking apart of the quatrains as a metered musicality, but I do sense a crisis of deliverability in the modality of lyric, as a vessel of critical dialectic expression.[2]
In Prynne we read the arrangement that articulates the morphological & dynamic infusions of ‘the waves still/ recoiling their crested and turbid confusions’ and very ‘Much like waves upon a shore’, a resistance becomes physically and mentally tiring. But there are no mechanised aids to buoy, knowing the sounds, and navigating such strong syntactical currents is always pressing against a need to just say “fuck it, I’m drowning!” But you can’t always swim against the rip, sometimes you have travel obliquely & ‘flicker some hope remaining.’
Notes:
[1] The word ‘show’ here is problematic, but even subjugated to the a quivering register of a thingly spectacle, the word ‘hope’ still holds, especially with the condition and support of ‘again’.
[2] A bugbear this entire sentence, but there’s despair enough to ‘joint screaming with rind orange’.
Mac Low's diastic process (in Gale Nelson's stare decisis)
by Michael Peverett
Most people know of the diastic method in connection with its inventor, Jackson Mac Low, but my encounter with it came via the poem "Modern Forgery" in Gale Nelson's book stare decisis (Burning Deck, 1991).
The diastic method generates a one-dimensional directional output (i.e. a stream of words) which can form the basis of a finished poem or text.
This output is derived from two inputs.
The first is the "source text", a pre-defined reservoir, normally of ample dimensions. The actual words in the output are all taken from the source text. In this case the source text is H.D.'s Trilogy.
The second is the "seed text", also pre-defined; typically a sentence or two in length. In this case it's Genesis 48:16:
The Angel who has delivered me from all harm may he bless these boys. May they be called by my name and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac, and may they increase greatly upon the earth.
The output is generated by taking the seed text one character at a time; each character is represented by a word (sourced from the source text). The word must contain the seed-character, and furthermore must contain it in the same position that it occupies in its seed-word.
I'm not describing this very well. But as an example, the part of the seed-text that consists of "bless these boys" generates the following output:
....bed
clock she herself
moon-shell thinking thought
the herself instead
beside hood eye-lid
talisman ....
No? Still puzzled? Here it is again, this time with the seed-characters capitalized:
....Bed
cLock shE herSelf
moon-Shell Thinking tHought
thE herSelf instEad
Beside hOod eYe-lid
taliSman ....
Got it now? OK.
It's a fascinating technique. Meditating on it over the last few months, here's a few observations:
1. The method is submerged.
The traditional technique to which the diastic method is most closely related is, of course, the acrostic. The acrostic aspect of a poem can't be heard, and as readers of Geoffrey Trease's Cue For Treason will recall (oh no, more children's lit), it can easily fail to be seen, unless the acrostic letters are emphasized in some way. Traces of the diastic method are even more submerged. It's difficult to see them even when you know they're in front of you. Have a go at finding them in this passage:
Hermes indicated
papyrus
atmosphere good
Presence
spectrum-blue strangely
remote
wilful
Even with the seed-text to hand, it proves quite elusive. (It was
[incr]ease greatl[y].)
If you used the diastic method in a poem and you didn't say that you were doing it, it's a safe bet that no-one but a codebreaker would ever find you out.
2. It is stringent.
What I mean precisely by "stringent" is, again, best shown by example.
Mark's round at my house looking for a pair of boots he left behind, and I need to text him to tell him where they are.
First, I'll try heroic couplets:
Look in my bedroom if you want your boots;
They're in the wardrobe, underneath the suits.
Piss!
Now, I'll try the diastic method, using the seed-text weather report for january seventeenth. (As it turned out, I only needed up to the letter s.) As for the source text, I'll make things easy on myself by using the entire Oxford English Dictionary.
Well, get ready. Foot thither thither. Reach bedroom; explore into wardrobe, intently. Ferret, boots carefully jutting way long thru beneath estuary estuary suits.
The trouble this caused me is what I mean by the diastic method being stringent. Its rules are so prescriptive that there is very little scope for choosing the words you would actually like to say. I even had to resort to the feeble expedient of incorporating obvious nonsense ("estuary estuary"), trusting that Mark would be smart enough to ignore it.
3. Elimination of individual expression.
Of course, this is not how, or why, poets use the diastic method. Mac Low's idea was to restrict his own scope for individual expression, replacing it by programmatic text-generation incorporating chance collisions.
You don't use it to convey information or to "express yourself", and you don't take your words from just anywhere (as you do when you're speaking), but from some specific wordhoard - such as Whitman or H.D. (in Gale Nelson's poem), or e.g. Djuna Barnes in Mac Low's well-documented case.
Mac Low used Charles Hartman's computer program DIASTEXT (1989) to generate the drafts of Barnesbook: Four Poems Derived from Sentences by Djuna Barnes; however, he then edited these drafts to a certain extent, in some cases even rearranging and discarding words. As Mac Low reflected, chance can never be the sole agent in poem-generation: "The very devising of methods must involve the author’s taste at certain points..."
4. Automation
A program is definitely the most painless way of generating diastic text. I strongly recommend eDiastic, though I don't know if its source code is in any way directly derived from Hartman's historic piece of C coding. Here's something I've just generated using it -the seed text is a sentence from an imaginary guidebook to the Pyrenees, and the source text is a blog post about Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons that I wrote a couple of days ago:
That's the tremendous
which five dangerous wood landing original landing
a islands because mate friend adventure
is and water below
the character about less suddenly
some and looking slower handy
water calm less that suddenly because
are Captain relationships usually realism
terms the are
the write loaded heavily Garner gunwale suddenly characters character
(I've left this sample output just as eDiastic displayed it, beginning a new line with each new seed-word. The diastic method does not, however, determine lineation. In all the other poems quoted here, the author lineates at will.)
It would be interesting to know if Gale Nelson used a program for "Modern Forgery" or not. (Composing a diastic poem manually wouldn't really be all that laborious.) Nelson's poem is composed of two diastic outputs that are not obviously edited. But if he did use a program, he must have tampered with the output. That's the only way to explain why, in the quotation I gave earlier, both of the words "eye-lid talisman" have the seed-characters in the wrong position: a program wouldn't make those "mistakes". (What do you mean, you didn't notice?!)
Does it make a difference? Maybe. Diastic output that is produced manually could permit the author significantly more control over which words are selected from the source text; for, circumscribed as it is, the reservoir is still ample and there will be plenty of opportunities to select from various options on aesthetic or other grounds. But output generated by computer would take those decisions out of the author's hands.
5. Diastic output is unlike normal prose.
I guess you'll think this is pretty obvious, since it's rare for diastic output to make much sense. But my point isn't just about sense. There are also some characteristic formal features that stand out as unlike normal prose.
Diastic output is typically marked by uninterrupted sequences of long words. This phenomenon occurs because when there is, say, a 12-character word in the seed-text, the latter part of it necessarily requires embodiment in words that are at least 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 characters in length. They are often longer but they can't be shorter. For similar reasons, short words that do appear in the output stream are often clustered together.
Diastic output also tends to produce word repetitions ("estuary estuary", "characters character", etc). This is because it often turns out that the same source-word comes in handy for embodying successive characters of a word in the seed text.
After reading diastic output for a while, some common words or starts-of-words in the seed text, like "the", begin to become rather noticeable in their embodied forms:
terms the are (me, above)
thinking thought the (Nelson, above)
the the Amen (Nelson)
So perhaps it doesn't take a codebreaker to spot diastic output, after all!
6. The acrostic does not have a particularly exalted reputation in traditional verse. I've probably forgotten some obvious exception, but on the whole the hallowed canonical poetry of western tradition does not contain acrostics. It has always been a gimmick, a piece of fun, at best an elegant sort of ornament or knack, the kind of thing Elizabethans liked - Jonson's introductory poem to Volpone exemplifies that. Diastic verse, by contrast, drops all claim to ornament, though not perhaps fun; but its method serves the serious business of randomizing text and of eliminating the continuities of prose statement.
7. The content of the seed text doesn't actually matter, does it?
As I began by remarking, the diastic method is submerged, and the seed text is always difficult to locate in the generated output. In a sense the choice of seed text has a determining influence on the output, but since the principal reason for using it is to randomize, it's reasonable to conclude that any other seed text of similar length would be just as good for the purpose. Of course, the seed text in itself might have a thematic connection with the poem, might carry a message - just as the down-phrase in an acrostic does. But generally speaking, poets who use the diastic method don't tend to be big on "themes" or "messages".
Yet Gale Nelson quotes his two seed texts in the headnote of "Modern Forgery". One, as we've seen, comes from Genesis; the other, from one of Whitman's letters. They're almost the only sentences in the whole of stare decisis that make sense. So I suppose you could say that the choice of seed text presents the poet with an opportunity to say something, but it's an opportunity that's quite likely to be declined.
8. The diastic method is a radical adaptation.
Mention of acrostics is helpful with regard to how the seed text is used. What it completely omits is the crucial matter of the source text, for which the acrostic has no equivalent.
Crucial, because the nature of the source text, unlike the seed text, certainly does matter. Supplying all the vocabulary in the output, it irresistibly defines the colours and tones of the output; in response, the output discovers and investigates the source text. (More about this below.)
It was at this point that I belatedly realized that the diastic method really has a dual lineage in literary tradition. If from a certain point of view it resembles the acrostic, from another it is essentially an adaptation, and its important analogies are - depending on where your interests take you - eighteenth-century versions of Shakespeare, Hollywood re-makes, tales of King Arthur for children, cynical abridgements, lyrical translations, Calixto Bieito's opera productions, film-of-the-book / book-of-the-film, dub versions and hip-hop samples...
It is a radical adaptation because it shifts the viewpoint away from the constraints of the original text, but not in a defined direction (this is perhaps open to question). What is left is more a heap than a structure. In a heap, you can sometimes find things for yourself.
9. The diastic method is a stage in the composition process.
i.e. it does not produce a poem all on its own. Something must be done with the output; at the very least, there are choices to be made about how the output is presented.
Indeed, there's nothing wrong with using the diastic method in a distinctly subordinate role, as Mac Low did in "Sleepy Poetry" (2001):
The streamy steeds
Still murmur at their íll-fated charges.
Our fright has musical arms:
Our great friend’s head
Is feeding-space’s ever-jaunty thorns
From round mere lóvers’ noughts.
Imagination shall for the poet be shade
(Over and off).
That thirsty spánning man
is toil’s precious faller, parting the chariots
When blushingly all thus friendly couch.
Mac Low tells us in a note that the diastic method was used to shuffle the words (out of Keats' "Sleep and Poetry", of course), but the final text has been so over-composed that it's now impossible to see diastic traces. Here it supplied the merest of biscuit-bases for Mac Low's toweringly fluffy dessert.
*
And of course, that is also how the diastic method is used in "Modern Forgery". The outputs alone do not make the poem, it's what you do with them. This will be clearer if I quote a couple of pages (you should know that stare decisis is a spacious book, and not many of its 140-ish pages are packed with words).
So here's the eighth page of "Modern Forgery":
crackling clothes
*
clock she herself
moon-shell thinking thought
And here's the thirteenth page:
glass Wandering afternoon
patient fire-balls
furiously I escaped expanding
expanding forever
*
leaden reward
blindfolded symbolic
mean mystica
Whitman is in the upper part of each page, H.D. in the lower. You can see here how Nelson controls his two data streams, deciding how much of them to release onto each page. It's like a mixing engineer twiddling knobs. The unique character of each page arises from his decision. It defines the look of the page, and how the two segments interact with each other. (Of course, the choice of lineation is also important.)
I quoted these pages intending to spell out their rather obvious distinguishing characteristics by indulging in some close reading, e.g. to note (in the first of them) the matched sounds in "crackling clothes" and "clock"; to venture a parallel between wandering and the via mystica (in the second); perhaps, heaven help me, to allude to The Merchant of Venice in regard to that "leaden reward". But I had sense enough to think, No.
It is not that there is no meaning here: meaning there certainly is; and these analyses could easily be taken a lot further. And what's all the more interesting is that the agency of this meaning is distributed. A good deal of it comes, in a sense, from Whitman, or from H.D., or from that large segment of nineteenth-century US culture that they share in common. Nelson and the diastic method act here as enablers, breaking open and exposing the meaning to modern daylight. (Because, all too often, meaning gets insulated within a canonical text, like a fly in resin; we can still see it, but it can't sting us.)
But what dissuaded me is this. "Modern Forgery" is 25 pages long; pages such as the two I've quoted; but when we read we don't rest on these pages. Sense being excluded by design, we soon learn to read fast. A decided rhythm becomes a characteristic of our reading experience; it is the rhythm of turning the pages. Our experience is not only the static experience of a page, which always has something of the picture about it, but the dynamic experience of a ceaseless flow, which "Modern Forgery" retains, while it disrupts so much else, from the long processions of its two source-texts.
*
So far as I know or believe, none of the other poems in stare decisis use the diastic method. But the texts, however derived, are like "Modern Forgery" in as much as they forcibly assert that they are patterns that exclude being read, in any but the slightest degree, as prose statement. Its seven multi-page sequences, nevertheless, continue to prompt a sense of flow, so that altogether it's a bit like a giant flipbook.
It's absolutely not my intention to deal in depth with the whole of stare decisis. You can still buy it (see below), but my own copy came from a sunny junkshop in All Saints Street, Hastings; I take it as certain that it once belonged to Ken Edwards.
Besides, "dealing" is impossible. There is a, well, richness in one sense, poverty in another, that really precludes this whole conception of dealing.
Perhaps I might make a partial exception of the first of these sequences, which is called "Pose Proem". I take the word "Proem" seriously. In this sequence wide-ranging parody combines with recurrent images of futile stasis to suggest a preliminary statement of intent, critically reflexive (Andrew Duncan's valuable term) of tradition.
Creation tempered by unison.
Revolving test proves
strength. Five hundred
generations of rice eaten
at one table.
I wonder if Duncan would also regard "Modern Forgery" as reflexive (in as much as it plays off Whitman and H.D.)? My view, though obviously the US is different from the UK, is that Nelson's and Mac Low's work is much more closely aligned with the luxuriantly empty rich/poor London work that Duncan condemns, blames and excludes from his canon- here, here and here. (Of course, Duncan is not so easy to pin down as all that. You will see Peter Finch, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer in his list.) I think these and other recent posts in Angel Exhaust are really important in shaping what will be the orthodox view of our recent poetry history; and for that very reason, it's important to counter them. But the countering isn't to be done on AD's own terms. As Writers Forum (the workshop) excludes all evaluative criticism, so Cobbing's utopianism excludes the very idea of canon for which AD argues so reasonably.
Another position in Duncan's current constellation is that ignoring the background of a poet's ideas leads to false understanding. This is a pretty common assertion in the US too (Ron Silliman has used it often). Poetry as a poker-game: if you want to understand the play, you better understand the stakes. Not an analogy on which I'd found a generalized theory of artefacts. My demurral goes something like this:
I don't suppose that the ideas around an artefact can be certainly attributed or enumerated; I do suppose that it's impossible to understand them all; ignorance, therefore, is an insecapable element in exposure to an artefact (this is just as true of the artefact's maker as anyone else). But if you cannot know ALL the background, then it cannot be necessary.
Well, but it might remain to argue that SOME measure of intellectual background is necessary? Perhaps it could be so for individual cases; but then how are you going to generalize your chosen measure to all artefacts? You can't, so the general proposition fails.
In stare decisis the longer sequences are separated by single-page interval poems. "Interval 3" is also a statement of praxis: "I seek the word triggering neither response nor understanding for that which it represents...."
Playful or not, this is in fact pretty useful for not-understanding e.g. the sequence "Passive Anger", in which each page (or rather, each cell) consists of a single brief sentence, with a fringe of broken phrases above and below it. It's immediately obvious that the meaningful sentence is to be ignored and that the area of attention is all about what lies around it and behind it.
The final sequence, "Parameters", consists of eighteen words - for the most part, they are half-words - spread over five pages. The last word in the book is "render", which is half of the word "surrender", and also refers to the soap and tea-light trade.
NOTE:
You can look up the precise meaning of the Latin phrase stare decisis if you like. It is a legal term that signifies, more or less, the principle of observing precedent.
Gale Nelson teaches at Brown University, Providence RI. He has published three full-length books with Burning Deck, of which stare decisis (1991) was the first. When I began work on this post, nearly a year ago, I lamented that Nelson seemed to have stopped publishing. Then, what do you know, along comes This Is What Happens When Talk Ends (2011), a very exciting-looking book, interestingly reviewed by rob mclennan here.
Most people know of the diastic method in connection with its inventor, Jackson Mac Low, but my encounter with it came via the poem "Modern Forgery" in Gale Nelson's book stare decisis (Burning Deck, 1991).
The diastic method generates a one-dimensional directional output (i.e. a stream of words) which can form the basis of a finished poem or text.
This output is derived from two inputs.
The first is the "source text", a pre-defined reservoir, normally of ample dimensions. The actual words in the output are all taken from the source text. In this case the source text is H.D.'s Trilogy.
The second is the "seed text", also pre-defined; typically a sentence or two in length. In this case it's Genesis 48:16:
The Angel who has delivered me from all harm may he bless these boys. May they be called by my name and the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac, and may they increase greatly upon the earth.
The output is generated by taking the seed text one character at a time; each character is represented by a word (sourced from the source text). The word must contain the seed-character, and furthermore must contain it in the same position that it occupies in its seed-word.
I'm not describing this very well. But as an example, the part of the seed-text that consists of "bless these boys" generates the following output:
....bed
clock she herself
moon-shell thinking thought
the herself instead
beside hood eye-lid
talisman ....
No? Still puzzled? Here it is again, this time with the seed-characters capitalized:
....Bed
cLock shE herSelf
moon-Shell Thinking tHought
thE herSelf instEad
Beside hOod eYe-lid
taliSman ....
Got it now? OK.
It's a fascinating technique. Meditating on it over the last few months, here's a few observations:
1. The method is submerged.
The traditional technique to which the diastic method is most closely related is, of course, the acrostic. The acrostic aspect of a poem can't be heard, and as readers of Geoffrey Trease's Cue For Treason will recall (oh no, more children's lit), it can easily fail to be seen, unless the acrostic letters are emphasized in some way. Traces of the diastic method are even more submerged. It's difficult to see them even when you know they're in front of you. Have a go at finding them in this passage:
Hermes indicated
papyrus
atmosphere good
Presence
spectrum-blue strangely
remote
wilful
Even with the seed-text to hand, it proves quite elusive. (It was
[incr]ease greatl[y].)
If you used the diastic method in a poem and you didn't say that you were doing it, it's a safe bet that no-one but a codebreaker would ever find you out.
2. It is stringent.
What I mean precisely by "stringent" is, again, best shown by example.
Mark's round at my house looking for a pair of boots he left behind, and I need to text him to tell him where they are.
First, I'll try heroic couplets:
Look in my bedroom if you want your boots;
They're in the wardrobe, underneath the suits.
Piss!
Now, I'll try the diastic method, using the seed-text weather report for january seventeenth. (As it turned out, I only needed up to the letter s.) As for the source text, I'll make things easy on myself by using the entire Oxford English Dictionary.
Well, get ready. Foot thither thither. Reach bedroom; explore into wardrobe, intently. Ferret, boots carefully jutting way long thru beneath estuary estuary suits.
The trouble this caused me is what I mean by the diastic method being stringent. Its rules are so prescriptive that there is very little scope for choosing the words you would actually like to say. I even had to resort to the feeble expedient of incorporating obvious nonsense ("estuary estuary"), trusting that Mark would be smart enough to ignore it.
3. Elimination of individual expression.
Of course, this is not how, or why, poets use the diastic method. Mac Low's idea was to restrict his own scope for individual expression, replacing it by programmatic text-generation incorporating chance collisions.
You don't use it to convey information or to "express yourself", and you don't take your words from just anywhere (as you do when you're speaking), but from some specific wordhoard - such as Whitman or H.D. (in Gale Nelson's poem), or e.g. Djuna Barnes in Mac Low's well-documented case.
Mac Low used Charles Hartman's computer program DIASTEXT (1989) to generate the drafts of Barnesbook: Four Poems Derived from Sentences by Djuna Barnes; however, he then edited these drafts to a certain extent, in some cases even rearranging and discarding words. As Mac Low reflected, chance can never be the sole agent in poem-generation: "The very devising of methods must involve the author’s taste at certain points..."
4. Automation
A program is definitely the most painless way of generating diastic text. I strongly recommend eDiastic, though I don't know if its source code is in any way directly derived from Hartman's historic piece of C coding. Here's something I've just generated using it -the seed text is a sentence from an imaginary guidebook to the Pyrenees, and the source text is a blog post about Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons that I wrote a couple of days ago:
That's the tremendous
which five dangerous wood landing original landing
a islands because mate friend adventure
is and water below
the character about less suddenly
some and looking slower handy
water calm less that suddenly because
are Captain relationships usually realism
terms the are
the write loaded heavily Garner gunwale suddenly characters character
(I've left this sample output just as eDiastic displayed it, beginning a new line with each new seed-word. The diastic method does not, however, determine lineation. In all the other poems quoted here, the author lineates at will.)
It would be interesting to know if Gale Nelson used a program for "Modern Forgery" or not. (Composing a diastic poem manually wouldn't really be all that laborious.) Nelson's poem is composed of two diastic outputs that are not obviously edited. But if he did use a program, he must have tampered with the output. That's the only way to explain why, in the quotation I gave earlier, both of the words "eye-lid talisman" have the seed-characters in the wrong position: a program wouldn't make those "mistakes". (What do you mean, you didn't notice?!)
Does it make a difference? Maybe. Diastic output that is produced manually could permit the author significantly more control over which words are selected from the source text; for, circumscribed as it is, the reservoir is still ample and there will be plenty of opportunities to select from various options on aesthetic or other grounds. But output generated by computer would take those decisions out of the author's hands.
5. Diastic output is unlike normal prose.
I guess you'll think this is pretty obvious, since it's rare for diastic output to make much sense. But my point isn't just about sense. There are also some characteristic formal features that stand out as unlike normal prose.
Diastic output is typically marked by uninterrupted sequences of long words. This phenomenon occurs because when there is, say, a 12-character word in the seed-text, the latter part of it necessarily requires embodiment in words that are at least 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12 characters in length. They are often longer but they can't be shorter. For similar reasons, short words that do appear in the output stream are often clustered together.
Diastic output also tends to produce word repetitions ("estuary estuary", "characters character", etc). This is because it often turns out that the same source-word comes in handy for embodying successive characters of a word in the seed text.
After reading diastic output for a while, some common words or starts-of-words in the seed text, like "the", begin to become rather noticeable in their embodied forms:
terms the are (me, above)
thinking thought the (Nelson, above)
the the Amen (Nelson)
So perhaps it doesn't take a codebreaker to spot diastic output, after all!
6. The acrostic does not have a particularly exalted reputation in traditional verse. I've probably forgotten some obvious exception, but on the whole the hallowed canonical poetry of western tradition does not contain acrostics. It has always been a gimmick, a piece of fun, at best an elegant sort of ornament or knack, the kind of thing Elizabethans liked - Jonson's introductory poem to Volpone exemplifies that. Diastic verse, by contrast, drops all claim to ornament, though not perhaps fun; but its method serves the serious business of randomizing text and of eliminating the continuities of prose statement.
7. The content of the seed text doesn't actually matter, does it?
As I began by remarking, the diastic method is submerged, and the seed text is always difficult to locate in the generated output. In a sense the choice of seed text has a determining influence on the output, but since the principal reason for using it is to randomize, it's reasonable to conclude that any other seed text of similar length would be just as good for the purpose. Of course, the seed text in itself might have a thematic connection with the poem, might carry a message - just as the down-phrase in an acrostic does. But generally speaking, poets who use the diastic method don't tend to be big on "themes" or "messages".
Yet Gale Nelson quotes his two seed texts in the headnote of "Modern Forgery". One, as we've seen, comes from Genesis; the other, from one of Whitman's letters. They're almost the only sentences in the whole of stare decisis that make sense. So I suppose you could say that the choice of seed text presents the poet with an opportunity to say something, but it's an opportunity that's quite likely to be declined.
8. The diastic method is a radical adaptation.
Mention of acrostics is helpful with regard to how the seed text is used. What it completely omits is the crucial matter of the source text, for which the acrostic has no equivalent.
Crucial, because the nature of the source text, unlike the seed text, certainly does matter. Supplying all the vocabulary in the output, it irresistibly defines the colours and tones of the output; in response, the output discovers and investigates the source text. (More about this below.)
It was at this point that I belatedly realized that the diastic method really has a dual lineage in literary tradition. If from a certain point of view it resembles the acrostic, from another it is essentially an adaptation, and its important analogies are - depending on where your interests take you - eighteenth-century versions of Shakespeare, Hollywood re-makes, tales of King Arthur for children, cynical abridgements, lyrical translations, Calixto Bieito's opera productions, film-of-the-book / book-of-the-film, dub versions and hip-hop samples...
It is a radical adaptation because it shifts the viewpoint away from the constraints of the original text, but not in a defined direction (this is perhaps open to question). What is left is more a heap than a structure. In a heap, you can sometimes find things for yourself.
9. The diastic method is a stage in the composition process.
i.e. it does not produce a poem all on its own. Something must be done with the output; at the very least, there are choices to be made about how the output is presented.
Indeed, there's nothing wrong with using the diastic method in a distinctly subordinate role, as Mac Low did in "Sleepy Poetry" (2001):
The streamy steeds
Still murmur at their íll-fated charges.
Our fright has musical arms:
Our great friend’s head
Is feeding-space’s ever-jaunty thorns
From round mere lóvers’ noughts.
Imagination shall for the poet be shade
(Over and off).
That thirsty spánning man
is toil’s precious faller, parting the chariots
When blushingly all thus friendly couch.
Mac Low tells us in a note that the diastic method was used to shuffle the words (out of Keats' "Sleep and Poetry", of course), but the final text has been so over-composed that it's now impossible to see diastic traces. Here it supplied the merest of biscuit-bases for Mac Low's toweringly fluffy dessert.
*
And of course, that is also how the diastic method is used in "Modern Forgery". The outputs alone do not make the poem, it's what you do with them. This will be clearer if I quote a couple of pages (you should know that stare decisis is a spacious book, and not many of its 140-ish pages are packed with words).
So here's the eighth page of "Modern Forgery":
crackling clothes
*
clock she herself
moon-shell thinking thought
And here's the thirteenth page:
glass Wandering afternoon
patient fire-balls
furiously I escaped expanding
expanding forever
*
leaden reward
blindfolded symbolic
mean mystica
Whitman is in the upper part of each page, H.D. in the lower. You can see here how Nelson controls his two data streams, deciding how much of them to release onto each page. It's like a mixing engineer twiddling knobs. The unique character of each page arises from his decision. It defines the look of the page, and how the two segments interact with each other. (Of course, the choice of lineation is also important.)
I quoted these pages intending to spell out their rather obvious distinguishing characteristics by indulging in some close reading, e.g. to note (in the first of them) the matched sounds in "crackling clothes" and "clock"; to venture a parallel between wandering and the via mystica (in the second); perhaps, heaven help me, to allude to The Merchant of Venice in regard to that "leaden reward". But I had sense enough to think, No.
It is not that there is no meaning here: meaning there certainly is; and these analyses could easily be taken a lot further. And what's all the more interesting is that the agency of this meaning is distributed. A good deal of it comes, in a sense, from Whitman, or from H.D., or from that large segment of nineteenth-century US culture that they share in common. Nelson and the diastic method act here as enablers, breaking open and exposing the meaning to modern daylight. (Because, all too often, meaning gets insulated within a canonical text, like a fly in resin; we can still see it, but it can't sting us.)
But what dissuaded me is this. "Modern Forgery" is 25 pages long; pages such as the two I've quoted; but when we read we don't rest on these pages. Sense being excluded by design, we soon learn to read fast. A decided rhythm becomes a characteristic of our reading experience; it is the rhythm of turning the pages. Our experience is not only the static experience of a page, which always has something of the picture about it, but the dynamic experience of a ceaseless flow, which "Modern Forgery" retains, while it disrupts so much else, from the long processions of its two source-texts.
*
So far as I know or believe, none of the other poems in stare decisis use the diastic method. But the texts, however derived, are like "Modern Forgery" in as much as they forcibly assert that they are patterns that exclude being read, in any but the slightest degree, as prose statement. Its seven multi-page sequences, nevertheless, continue to prompt a sense of flow, so that altogether it's a bit like a giant flipbook.
It's absolutely not my intention to deal in depth with the whole of stare decisis. You can still buy it (see below), but my own copy came from a sunny junkshop in All Saints Street, Hastings; I take it as certain that it once belonged to Ken Edwards.
Besides, "dealing" is impossible. There is a, well, richness in one sense, poverty in another, that really precludes this whole conception of dealing.
Perhaps I might make a partial exception of the first of these sequences, which is called "Pose Proem". I take the word "Proem" seriously. In this sequence wide-ranging parody combines with recurrent images of futile stasis to suggest a preliminary statement of intent, critically reflexive (Andrew Duncan's valuable term) of tradition.
Creation tempered by unison.
Revolving test proves
strength. Five hundred
generations of rice eaten
at one table.
I wonder if Duncan would also regard "Modern Forgery" as reflexive (in as much as it plays off Whitman and H.D.)? My view, though obviously the US is different from the UK, is that Nelson's and Mac Low's work is much more closely aligned with the luxuriantly empty rich/poor London work that Duncan condemns, blames and excludes from his canon- here, here and here. (Of course, Duncan is not so easy to pin down as all that. You will see Peter Finch, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer in his list.) I think these and other recent posts in Angel Exhaust are really important in shaping what will be the orthodox view of our recent poetry history; and for that very reason, it's important to counter them. But the countering isn't to be done on AD's own terms. As Writers Forum (the workshop) excludes all evaluative criticism, so Cobbing's utopianism excludes the very idea of canon for which AD argues so reasonably.
Another position in Duncan's current constellation is that ignoring the background of a poet's ideas leads to false understanding. This is a pretty common assertion in the US too (Ron Silliman has used it often). Poetry as a poker-game: if you want to understand the play, you better understand the stakes. Not an analogy on which I'd found a generalized theory of artefacts. My demurral goes something like this:
I don't suppose that the ideas around an artefact can be certainly attributed or enumerated; I do suppose that it's impossible to understand them all; ignorance, therefore, is an insecapable element in exposure to an artefact (this is just as true of the artefact's maker as anyone else). But if you cannot know ALL the background, then it cannot be necessary.
Well, but it might remain to argue that SOME measure of intellectual background is necessary? Perhaps it could be so for individual cases; but then how are you going to generalize your chosen measure to all artefacts? You can't, so the general proposition fails.
In stare decisis the longer sequences are separated by single-page interval poems. "Interval 3" is also a statement of praxis: "I seek the word triggering neither response nor understanding for that which it represents...."
Playful or not, this is in fact pretty useful for not-understanding e.g. the sequence "Passive Anger", in which each page (or rather, each cell) consists of a single brief sentence, with a fringe of broken phrases above and below it. It's immediately obvious that the meaningful sentence is to be ignored and that the area of attention is all about what lies around it and behind it.
The final sequence, "Parameters", consists of eighteen words - for the most part, they are half-words - spread over five pages. The last word in the book is "render", which is half of the word "surrender", and also refers to the soap and tea-light trade.
NOTE:
You can look up the precise meaning of the Latin phrase stare decisis if you like. It is a legal term that signifies, more or less, the principle of observing precedent.
Gale Nelson teaches at Brown University, Providence RI. He has published three full-length books with Burning Deck, of which stare decisis (1991) was the first. When I began work on this post, nearly a year ago, I lamented that Nelson seemed to have stopped publishing. Then, what do you know, along comes This Is What Happens When Talk Ends (2011), a very exciting-looking book, interestingly reviewed by rob mclennan here.
a link
Have a skim through Rupert Loydell's interview with Robert Sheppard, which appeared recently in Stride.
Lots of reminiscing, but the most interesting bit is Robert's detailed brain-dump of where UK experimental poetry is now. And the remarks about hard-to-get-a-handle-on writers like Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer.
MP
Lots of reminiscing, but the most interesting bit is Robert's detailed brain-dump of where UK experimental poetry is now. And the remarks about hard-to-get-a-handle-on writers like Allen Fisher, Adrian Clarke and Ulli Freer.
MP