Craniotomy / Lyric Poetry
Edmund Hardy
1. Rose
We must go inside the skull,
2. Metal
A touch of the skin of consciousness in the poetry of Anna Mendelssohn (‘the second hurled whore’) involves a displacement of disquiet:
3. Fern
The language of enquiry, for Lyn Hejinian, can align with or lean against the senses in an empiricism which, Bacon style, seeks not knowledge of the world but just the world itself. Within this, the line investigates its own worm or word-cast (& what is a field of poets but a set of lines, endless worms heading towards the sun).
4. Bullion
"quartzite infinities / played out in empirical surf" (Carol Watts, ‘Wrack’) The sea is its own investigation into records of cargo and other wreckage; the result is not chance, Wrack insists, though this refusal is not a path towards a total system implied by fragments so much as a play of determinations received by freed substances which become originating in their relation to themselves. The ruins of a never-surfeiting sea conjure an aleatory Imperialism patterned outside of time; but the wrack on the shore happens upon itself as us, and as such is entrusted to its readers. The motif of etching-writing in/stroke/of the surf becomes part of a chain or splash of substitutions - from foam to trace, squall to full stop, starfish to hand. The splash of substitutions ends in coinage and commodity, the plurality of any limit:
5. Ellipsis
In the poetry published in union newspapers in the US in the 1930s, and collected by John Marsh in the anthology You Work Tomorrow, lyric enacts its own emptying out from two pressures: historical, revolutionary memory on the one hand, and workplace coercion on the other. Poll, the name of a contributor of poetry to the United Automobile Worker in 1939, finds their poems emptied out into pure interpellation:
6. Myth
“Pip-Pip-Pip” (John Gay)
In book II of 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London' (1716) there is a scene in which Doll, the apple seller, falls through the ice (“The cracking Crystal yields”) while also being decapitated by a life-time of labour – her neck snaps beneath “autumnal Loads”. And as the severed head of Orpheus, thrown into the River Hebrus by Maenads, still sang out “Eurydice”, so:
7. Cold World
In the darkness, we can at least see that we can see nothing.
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This essay formed the first part of the Interior Ears hand out accompanying the event "Intercapillary Places" 2
1. Rose
We must go inside the skull,
Sudden a thought came like a full-blown roseIn this neural model, informed by William Bell’s lectures on the nerves, as Alan Richardson argues in his British Romanticism & the Science of the Mind, the face is not the index but in fact the foreword or abstract of the heart – the skin is the visceral organ of choice for Keats, flushing, panting, blushing, an intercapillary poetry in which the passions of the mind will show themselves, roseate, coloured like a chart. In fact, skin is the semi-transparent but entirely unspoken satin in these lines – feeling and thought are the same: the rose flashes past and recedes into blood where it becomes a flush, so that the skin cuts through at the end of the line, before, anatomizing, the next cut goes right inside the heart. This is poetry as investigation, into language and the body emblazoned, and the passions of both. I take this method to be emblematic of a number of more contemporary lyric investigations.
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot.
(Keats, The Eve of St Agnes)
2. Metal
A touch of the skin of consciousness in the poetry of Anna Mendelssohn (‘the second hurled whore’) involves a displacement of disquiet:
unforked from the fire,A smudgy clawing, denting, leaves a smelting – the fire and “roaring start” of suspicions – which shape a metal shroud, pawed by a paranoia and inflamed hatred, the body sealed as in a bashed at can, by and with a thought which oscillates between true (political consciousness, beset and pawed by ambition and justification) and false (the pawing is that of a wakefulness insistently jarring at the product of an ideological apparatus) – neither is aligned entirely with the idea, later in the poem, of really “being alive”, such that the brain here is neither blown-out nor full-blown, it appears as soft, marked, but ductile, able to shift shapes because layered – impure accumulations. A consciousness which can be pawed into presents a complex idea of dislocation structures within multiple ideologies or pressures. Pricked by claws, it flakes as sawdust.
the roaring start
a consciousness that is pawed into,
nudged by lions’ claws, sweaty sawdust
3. Fern
The language of enquiry, for Lyn Hejinian, can align with or lean against the senses in an empiricism which, Bacon style, seeks not knowledge of the world but just the world itself. Within this, the line investigates its own worm or word-cast (& what is a field of poets but a set of lines, endless worms heading towards the sun).
And queried in the green rays as I sate:‘Queried’ sets up a tiny two stress grid square (| |), from which the same rhythmic pattern repeated as ‘green rays’ can diagonal out – the same grid but different, ferns and queries in a space which is moving, recombining. Wet fern leaves in a rain storm are green fans or grills of beaded light; the green ray of thought’s horizon line is broken, fleshed into leaf: up close it’s an entanglement – to scratch, protect, immerse. The bare light of matter, as a primary quality of patterned form, is darkness visible, a green blaze. Among the forms, inquiry into the world moves out and up in a diagonal, grounded by its originating locus, this tension producing a fractal movement of thought, the recursive algorithm of a frond.
(Thomas Hardy, from ‘Childhood Among the Ferns’)
4. Bullion
"quartzite infinities / played out in empirical surf" (Carol Watts, ‘Wrack’) The sea is its own investigation into records of cargo and other wreckage; the result is not chance, Wrack insists, though this refusal is not a path towards a total system implied by fragments so much as a play of determinations received by freed substances which become originating in their relation to themselves. The ruins of a never-surfeiting sea conjure an aleatory Imperialism patterned outside of time; but the wrack on the shore happens upon itself as us, and as such is entrusted to its readers. The motif of etching-writing in/stroke/of the surf becomes part of a chain or splash of substitutions - from foam to trace, squall to full stop, starfish to hand. The splash of substitutions ends in coinage and commodity, the plurality of any limit:
and there in bullion morning you askFlotsam receiving determination, becoming cause and reaction, a passage to the bare bones which are identical to the means of knowing them.
will it come near raiding a league out
spanning a tongue's length a ship or
rock manoeuvring the tide rising small
insurgencies shift the grains the cries
inside the absences of air [. . . ]
5. Ellipsis
In the poetry published in union newspapers in the US in the 1930s, and collected by John Marsh in the anthology You Work Tomorrow, lyric enacts its own emptying out from two pressures: historical, revolutionary memory on the one hand, and workplace coercion on the other. Poll, the name of a contributor of poetry to the United Automobile Worker in 1939, finds their poems emptied out into pure interpellation:
mounting. . .The three points of punctuation condense and implode the mind and its perceptions, the mind which also carries on. Speech surrounds and picks away at the lyric’s brain, inserting only itself, without context – speech as a pickpocket roulette of empty chambers.
mounting. . .
mounting. . .
come on there cutter. . .
let the shavings fly. . .
cut the steel. . .
16th by 16th. . .
6. Myth
“Pip-Pip-Pip” (John Gay)
In book II of 'Trivia, or the Art of Walking the Streets of London' (1716) there is a scene in which Doll, the apple seller, falls through the ice (“The cracking Crystal yields”) while also being decapitated by a life-time of labour – her neck snaps beneath “autumnal Loads”. And as the severed head of Orpheus, thrown into the River Hebrus by Maenads, still sang out “Eurydice”, so:
Pippins she cry’d, but Death her Voice confounds,The voice skitters and bounces beyond death, but Doll does not cry out a last gasp of spirit, only a ghastly continuation of instrumentality; public song presents the contradictory unity of a market harmony. A parody of the unrestrained individuation which Adorno (‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’) diagnosed as lyric’s route towards voicing the hidden of ideology, Orpheus is held as a spectral inverse of society, as lyric’s capitulation and ironic capacity to still give voice beyond the world-song it is entangled within. Gay’s line bounces round to a different way of unmasking the universalising spirit: founded on a sale placard, thus irrecusably embedded in the “bustle” of mere existence, false or failing song can – by irony’s scrutiny – achieve the illumination of necessity without the language of solitude. Gay’s use of tragic love’s absolute last gasp also extends to the deathly shelling of goods to their seed, revealing there not the seeds of love but the possibility of a new orchard and new returns,“Pip-Pip-Pip”.
And Pip-Pip-Pip along the Ice resounds.
7. Cold World
In the darkness, we can at least see that we can see nothing.
the cold of that nightLabourers migrate – most of the speakers interviewed by Henry Mayhew for his study of London in 1850, from whom the text of Seeds’ Mayhew poems is taken, would have migrated into London from the countryside; where is it that the character of national and international labour markets will be imposed, where will their own continuities, imposed from within multitudes at different speeds, such that some people will die from want, find their brutal edge, as labour-power takes on the consistency of a commodity, as potential itself is bought and sold. Seed works within this recorded speech, which embodies class against class and not an abstracted economy, cutting, rearranging, archiving, investigating it through form. In this quote, which ends the project’s first volume, there is no full stop at the end, ‘I thought it never / would be over’ and it isn’t over, the forms found in the spoken text here are not interstitial or episodic, they roll on, this is multitudinous voicing as the architrave of the civic or of civil liberties, as the idea of multitude was for Spinoza. The line breaks here cause this fragment to turn on the word ‘still’, doubling the cold into two lines, ‘still’ the point of purchase – the centre of the speaking voice’s temporal rustle - which allows the thought to continue on, pushed onwards with a force which gives it not an echo but a grammatical search for the subject ‘multitude’- labour-power incarnates in poetry as pure possibility, inseparable from the body of the worker – cold, cold still – horrifically inseparable from its repository or substratum, which would be life itself. What is searched for is a grammar to articulate not one faculty but the entirety of human faculties inasmuch as they are involved in productive praxis. As such, the poetry investigates how labour-power can move from a proper noun to a common noun, and it isn’t over.
in my limbs still
I thought it never
would be over
(John Seed, Pictures from Mayhew, LVIII)
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This essay formed the first part of the Interior Ears hand out accompanying the event "Intercapillary Places" 2
