"Intercapillary Space"

 
 
s'wet

wild strawberries
burgeoning. no fruit

and the flies






my cyclamen



bushes, bushes

and, it isn't yellow

is most verdant green

with yellow plash -

mildly orange

within that

Melissa Flores-Bórquez and Edmund Hardy


Wendy Mulford's The Land Between (Reality Street, 2009)

MF-B: Mulford's poems have often taken the memory of concepts to be history. Then they try to find ways out from this idealism. The result is some kind of landscape. I CHINA AM is a three part sequence which opens the new book and is its most intriguing piece. The 'land between' seems to be, in this first part of the book, a European-Chinese location on the surfaces of paintings - the book's cover shows a painting (right) by Giuseppe Castiglione, an Italian who was sent to China in 1715, becoming a favourite court painter. His Chinese name is Lang Shi'ning, known for his detailed animals and flowers. The bird is a hawk.

EH: I CHINA AM locates what at first appears to be a subsistence which interrupts the empirical purism you arrow to. Initially glimpsed 'between' (anywhere and anywhere), the pieces of the poem bring out both detail and pattern from this subsisting border gate as works encountered away from any potential nullity of place.

MF-B: Yes, up until the bit about the “potential nullity of place”, which seems a bit of an untimely splurge. After all, this is not a poetry of liberation; the resulting set of jarring ‘works’ – between lands – are both witty and occlusive.

EH: Not liberation but a dramaturgy of restitution.

MF-B: I’d start in a different place. But here’s a page from Mulford first (click to make big):



Your recombining ‘works’, tilted towards us at the speed of reading, come dangerously close to spinning back as ‘ruined perception’, and that’s all we need. It isn’t that there is some poetry which is ‘open’, which keeps myriad possibilities alive like a phantom of the market’s differentiation. Instead there is some poetry like I CHINA AM which actually turns on and back into one possibility, one ongoing connection between pieces, trying to find the condition of the connection as if naming took place when the eye tails across white space.

EH: Why a phantom of the market and not an ever-deferred wish to blow up time into all possible worlds at once?

MF-B: Because I don't think many poets do want to blow up time. Is there a poem which would remain intact in all possible worlds?

 
 
In straights they pare against declivity, counter-style any dragless curtain of summit. Not the cover a slope is, but how trees convoke where slippage heeds the dawned bristle of horizon.


Theirs can’t have been a precise leaning of woods, tallness assigns contusion deriving an earth without robbing its buoyancy of poise, a raftered float of gift out of indifference.


Hoisting one unreleasable lamination above earth in a straight stemming of gift? Slant was groundless once the correction of swerve is far bother along root-verve direct, uptake of vertical latch: not bent across chance but a hatch opening desire at proprioceptive edge, abides the stab in orientation but uncut. Do trees feel the staff difference, heal the leaping plane of its inference?


Single jointure between what draws earth’s defigured surface and the approach to a pinned shore: a world deferring to what is too long away from its own differential.


Vertical stride compressed an earth’s way of incline: ditched origin rears a contour-step obtaining a mite of unselect horizon. This lancing tallness is an abridgement of nature, accepts on erect interminability what is each final stem of the offer.


That the naked (scarred) bounce of earth becomes green bar thrown at the newer hiddens. Earth spine from which rooted things fall out, face up along the preventing verticals, no assent is nearer to perpendicular thorn than this anticipation.


A portion’s nape sheathing world is the common telescopic participle of standing upright and disinclined together. A tree’s point is not to chip the clouds but divest earth of its clipped trailing.


Neck of taut trees not so reckless as to wreak a world on rugged extrapolation: pines crane to an unenmity zone standing out in extra pole against any paradigmatic dipping or sapping.


Disobeys the slope-force of earth in field, a pole towards the uncrooked tip of slightness in the ascendant. As gravity hosts a centre out, its irregular currents above the granular seek of narrow slipway at this hoisting wave. Onto uncoasted sky unlike rising, unlike denial of adjacency.


These come in microbars of a world released from its grids of slope, blinking the betweens of multiple barrier, openly textured by screens got across the lean of slithered hurts.


An entirety slit to coherence risking the verticals of horizon, not a cast light rinsing but its looming slice of the glint.


In undeflection the trees as close to unbarring the declivities of world absorption as they get. Resolving earth’s curvature across the steepness-leap they make by not curling any further into it themselves. Is this how terrestrial suction flows otherwise?


Conversion into its proto-crescence: that laps elongation at the feet, to foreshorten by stunning it erect, centering what fails to leach horizontally. Undistributed ease of vertical success incites the fear of it risen in peace.
Where world-hold could be shunted by redundant turbulence of pinned norms: until a spate of upright trees actively sculls the rift towards parallels of its ascension. How any scansion of end lines up vertical steps of filling the stop at up. No nurture can fulfill this far.


Lift stalls in its loftprint and banks knottedly before horizon as the taper gets retracted into sinew bending for reprisal. The ascent not the least exempt from prior instability but same source set upon a hardship of direct scantiness to edge, masthood goes seamless at erect the crease of edge.


Conviviality of trees in upright flue greets normative horizon-storm: fire in the root is smoked out of avoidance, free horizontals crackle in the eye of the vertical. A lull at the edging is happier stability once a collective takes it unexpelled to the uptorn.


Admitted into the quandary of the radius of horizon, taut quivers have no other towering jointure of defection.


What won’t stand up riots all slope for cover. What grows unbending sows a different spate upon the drift. Which mustn’t grow tall without sending out in single shift.