A Festival of More

By Susan Holbrook

I visited the Influency class two weeks ago and was struck by the ways participants approached, engaged, questioned and celebrated poetry. The Influency salon is a uniquely active forum; where investigations are not motivated by anticipated exam questions, and assertions are not cloaked in the objectivity that, while ostensibly debunked in our critical age, the academic article still demands. In other words, the salon allows for enthusiasm, for irritation, for passion, in its discussions of poetry.

As an academic, I’ve written on topics like Gertrude Stein’s prescient performativity and bp Nichol’s paragrammatic recuperations but my motivation as a scholar in these ventures is unspoken. Tonight, between you and me, let me say I study Gertrude Stein and bp Nichol because they bring me joy. Indeed, the environment of the Influency salon allows me to declare, unobjectively, “I really like Gregory Betts’s book” and you will probably hear me say I have “favourite poems” in The Others Raisd in Me.

I am free here to begin my meditation on Greg Betts’s book with the question: Why do I like this book so much? There are multiple small reasons, pleasures at the micro level of each poem, and some of those I will go into later, but my principal attraction to The Others Raisd in Me springs from the paradoxical dynamic of its formal energy; that is, it is at once maximalist (to borrow Margaret’s term from your “Influency Primer”) and minimalist. Centrifugal and centripetal forces are in constant humming tension. Contradiction seems to have charged much of Betts’s work. His 2005 collection If Language offers us 56 anagrams of a single 525-letter paragraph from a Steve McCaffery essay – really, every one of Betts’s poems contains the same 525 letters. In his foreword to the book, JC Bellringer calls these poems “strange spectacles of language that are both random and inevitable” (IL 6). As in The Others Raisd in Me, where Betts finds dialogue for Hamlet and Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 150, he finds seminal McCaffery quotations in McCaffery’s (entirely other) source paragraph (IL 11).

Part of my attraction is to the sheer excessiveness of Betts’s project. We see maximalism in his ambition to write not just one or two plunders but 150 plunders of the same poem. Also ambitious is the thematic scope he announces, you know, just 400 years of Western culture.

But not only is this guy too much, he wants more! Betts thematizes excess, capitalizing on the three occurrences of the word “more” in Sonnet 150 – it’s one of the words he delights in repeating and repeatedly leaves intact. He quotes Stein’s deploring of “the absence of more” (TORiM, 171) and suggests that “more” is better than “best.” Not surprisingly, he chooses to compose a poem deploying only the ‘m’ words: “…make / me more / more my / me more.” When he asks in poem 3 “who taught thee / how to make love / more, more,” I can’t help hearing Andrea True’s 1976 disco refrain “how do you like it / how do you like it / more more more.” (Incidentally, Betts may have neglected to include the age of disco in his survey of the evolution of human subjectivity, unless it is addressed at the beginning of section 13, with the poem “o / to / oo / too”). There is even something excessive about the epigraphs to each chapter, as they fall outside of the guiding constraint of the book.

But the epigraphs exert a minimalist pull too, as the entirety of each era is telegraphed through the brief quotations of two thinkers. And minimalist also, of course, is the book’s constraint, the author’s limited palette of the single sonnet. Many of the poems embody a minimalist aesthetic, as the scarcity of available letters necessitates economy. Under the large embrace of the title “Of Love” (54) we get the distillation of culture’s reams and scads of pining, moaning, extolling, persuading, entreating love poetry: “she said / he said / shed.”

So this push and pull, the simultaneity of inflation and infolding, spill and vacuum, all performing between the covers of a book which is itself both smaller and bigger than your standard poetry collection, are what endear me to Betts’s book. Fittingly, he has chosen a Shakespearean sonnet which presents a thematic paradox, as the speaker’s admiration and ardour increase the more unadmirably the object of his affection behaves. Paradoxes are scattered throughout: of hockey we learn that “we own / the game / we sold” and we revel in the doubly paradoxical statement that “this might be / the worst best / line ever / to be both.”

The compositional paradox driving the book is that Betts creates by taking away; as writers we are familiar with the process of editing, the paring down of early drafts, but what if the act of writing began that way? This paradox is addressed in an early 16^th-century sonnet by Michelangelo, who says of sculpture,

The stone unhewn and cold
   Becomes a living mould,
     The more the marble wastes
       The more the statue grows.

There is a nod to Michelangelo in poem 30. This is one of my favourite poems and key to my engagement with the book. Iconically represented in this poem is the art of sculpture.

Most of the poems in the book feature words displayed with familiar integrity, but in poem 30 we get the name "david" appearing as if carved, and we are reminded of the particular method of the author’s project. There’s a nice resonance here with Jacob McArthur Mooney’s commentary on my own work; recall that he opposed “wind-up doll experimentalism” to “the sculpture camp,” and in Betts’s case the characterization is particularly apt. The author has not applied ink to a blank page, but rather chiseled away at the marble of Sonnet 150 to reveal "david" and every other poem in the book. These are like newspaper blackout experiments (where you take a black magic marker to the newspaper and start crossing out words), except here we have what looks like a kind of Wite-Out experiment.

While we don’t see a black magic-markered block framing each poem, The Others Raisd in Me similarly declares its own procedural origins. Not only do we have an emblematic reminder in the "david" poem, but Betts articulates his method at the outset, even supplying Shakespeare’s sonnet so we can have the fun of flipping back to it should we want to test a poem by re-enacting its plunder (and we do). When I was here last we talked about the effect on the reader when the creative method, what Mooney called its “prehistory,” is left unobscured. I would argue that keeping the sculptural genesis of these poems in mind adds significantly to our enjoyment of them.

For instance, here’s one of my favourites:

nothing

is more

beautiful (64)

“Beautiful” is one of those words that has been rendered meaningless through overuse – young writers are instructed to avoid it (along with words like “soul” “innocence” “unicorns” and “yearning”). But just as with “soul,” “innocence,” “yearning” and even “unicorns,” the able poet can revive a dead “beautiful.” After “nothing / is more / beautiful” we expect a “than” and then … something, the thing to which no other beautiful thing can compare, but instead we get the white page. Here “beautiful” is energized by its abandonment. Precisely because we know the poems were created through truncation, we see the “than,” almost as an after-image. We might even imagine flashes of the something that follows, the hosting sonnet inviting features of the beloved, which are thankfully left un-enumerated.

Interestingly, it’s not that there’s a “than” in Shakespeare’s sonnet, so this is not word sculpture we can replay in simple terms. Rather it’s the way the immanence of the sculptural process has contoured our reading practice that generates this experience. Once these flashes, or phantom words recede, we are left with the four words. The substantive energy of the phrase is sucked back from its implied conclusion to the noun that is present. Now we can consider that “nothing” is itself beautiful; in fact, it, nothing, is more beautiful than other stuff. One nothing is the physical white space ‘left’ by the chiseled-off conclusion. There is an energizing, never-ending loop here. A beautiful loop.

Another poem exhibiting this sculptural energy is on page 28:

will we

ever me

again?

Here the phantom letters are the ‘e’ and ‘t’ missing after “me.” Skimming the poem, we might even mistakenly replace them, as we recognize the familiar phrase “Will we ever meet again?” As with the preceding poem, the reader enjoys the whimsical result of what we imagine as a lop, as an “e t” et off. We look to what is left, and once again what might first appear to be sense butchered, is in fact freshly phrased insight. The “me” is syntactically positioned to retain the energy of the verb “meet,” and becomes verbified.

What does it mean for “we” to be “me”’d? In a book announcing that it will track the human subject since the rise of individualism, this minimal poem is highly suggestive. It appears in section one of the book, which explores the Renaissance period when the tenure of individualism might not have been so certain, so it seems appropriate to wonder if the medieval, communal “we” will be “me”’d again in the future. While love endures as a principal theme throughout Betts’s book, this initial section is heartily engaged with it. This poem serves as incisive critique of the love sonnet’s stance.

While sonnets purport to celebrate the beloved, the other, in truth they reveal, celebrate and immortalize the poet/speaker. The sonneteer is dependent on the scenario of yearning, the “we,” to convey the real project, “me,” and the verbifying of the me underscores that. Poem 37 more explicitly addresses this inversion: “when i say / me / i mean / how i made it / here / / a metonymy / of thee.” The other is really the source of me, so we’re not speaking of “the others raisd in me,” but rather “me raisd in the other.”

One of the book’s epigraphs comes from Paul Ricoeur: “Language takes on the thickness of a material or a medium.” Cognizant of the sculptural method generating these poems, readers become attuned to the materiality of language. Several of the poems go further than others to explore the concrete resources available in Sonnet 150. In poem 88 the block of letters “a win” is repeated in “a win / a wind / a window,” the steady visual and sonic pattern playing against the semantic variations induced by added letters. On the facing page we get a line followed by its concrete rearrangement in “lie still / till lies.” Starting on p. 157 there runs a series of poems constructed out of words determined by letter-count. Poem 104 features all Shakespeare’s four-letter words, poem 109 the nine-letter words, etc.

While words are chosen here for their physical attributes, Betts nudges us toward the serendipitous semantic significance through his titling. So the two eight-letter words in Sonnet 150 are “strength / shouldst”; Betts calls this poem “With Great Powre Comes Great Responsibility.” As if Betts hadn’t given himself constraint enough in this plunderverse project, in poem 111 we get a lipogram limiting the author to one vowel, ‘i’ (“thin in skill / i mist / i tilt with / wind mild” etc.) and in poem 117 he can only use the ‘o’ words – this one he titles “For Bök,” a salute to Christian Bök’s lipogrammatic Eunoia.

Crucial to a discussion of the linguistic physicality of Betts’s project is the consideration of waste. Remembering Michelangelo’s interest in how the marble “wastes.” Joseph Addison offers a like sentiment: “The statue lies hid in a block of marble; and the art of the statuary only clears away the superfluous matter, and removes the rubbish.” But what about the dust and chips that hit the floor when “david” was being uncovered? In the section of the book titled with the Shakespearean line “That in the very refuse of thy deeds,” we find some poems that appear, at first glance, like rubbish. Look at poems 52 and 53 for instance, which look to me like alphabetic shavings. But when we connect the crumbs we decipher “William Shakespeare’s sonnets refuse closure,” and then it’s the negative space around the fragments that recalls the peelings, the word “refuse” itself the clearest indication that the letters appear roughly as they are oriented in the original sonnet.

Still our visual encounter of the poetry as linguistic bits spangled across the page endures, there’s a constant interplay between forces that are non-productive (nonsensical) and those that recuperate meaning. A couple of pages later we see the series of “Progressive Vowel Charts,” which come across as piles of sticks or crumpled wire hangers you might find in a dumpster. Again the titles edify. We figure out that each of the 14 bent wires graphs the occurrence of a vowel in a line of sonnet 150. And again, the visual impact of the poem is pleasurable and disorienting enough that totalizing recuperation of meaning is interrupted. Giving us a fully articulated grid, with variables traced on x and y axes, for example, would deny us the “festive economy” Steve McCaffery argues concrete poetry offers.

This notion of a “festive economy” is one McCaffery raises in his essay “Writing as a General Economy,” in which he builds on Georges Bataille’s theory of general economy in sociocultural formations and considers it as operating in language. He speaks of a restricted economy as one that values the utility of language, conveying singular and contained meaning. The general economy manifests in ruptures of that containment, in the waste of linguistic matter not absorbed into semantic use.

All utterances and texts are composed of this matter – the vibrations on the lips, the curve of a letter C, micro sounds, shapes, and gestures, but the “poetics of the general” (McCaffery 202) he imagines would not seek to obscure or deny them. He points to concrete poetry as a practice allowing for these celebrations of waste. He suggests that “a return to the material base of language would be necessary as a method of losing meaning; holding on to graphicism and sonorities at the very point where ideation struggles to effect their withdrawal.”

Betts in his manifesto on Plunderverse points to this chain of Bataille influencing McCaffery influencing Betts, but argues that his project diverges from those reveling in “the dissolution of communication.” His stated focus is not on the material waste of language but rather the semantic excessiveness of any given text, so that he can find what he terms “genuine, divergent expression” - new poems - within Sonnet 150. As my readings of his concrete attentions suggest, I think Betts's ventures into waste management are more wide-ranging. (And here I don’t mean management in the sense of reduction or eradication, but rather more like one “manages" an actor, aims to keep them working, encourages the diversification of their performances). There are poems that spin toward the general, and those that incline toward lyric expression. As a whole, the book raises the issue of waste in complex, contradictory, wonderful ways.

One striking effect arises out of the book’s persistence. Each of Betts’s poems saves some of Shakespeare’s letters and might appear to dispose of the rest – but then comes the next poem, which arises out of different choices, taking up some of the letters the other poem discarded. Early on I decided I might read through the book, crossing out letters and words on a photocopy of the sonnet, as they were used. I suppose I hoped I might find a letter that appeared nowhere in Betts’s new compositions. I soon realized this was unlikely – impossible, in fact, given that section 11 sorts all the words by length. Poem 18 reads:

there is no

discounted

letter

Clearly, Betts is a recycler. Poem 77:

a green

brush over

the dust of

seasons

In a recycling economy, material can move, repeatedly, between states of waste and usefulness. And this shuttle of value is one of the active paradoxes animating the book.

I’d like to turn now to another of Betts’s concrete poems, on page 124 (Poem 80). Here’s another that appears, at first, to offer us refuse, the leftovers of a “david” sculpture. Engaging with it further we realize that it retains from Sonnet 150 all the letters in "love" (with a “belov’d” thrown in - we can consider that later). The poem’s exploration of L, O, V and E serves as an homage to one of bp Nichol’s most "belov’d" poems, “Blues” (see Appendix). Let’s consider that poem for a moment. Like Betts’s work, this poem performs that shuttle between restricted and general, usefulness and waste.

The letters in love are arranged so that we can read differently, appreciate them as materials building the overall structure of the poem, rather than symbols rendered transparent in the service of meaning. The chosen font highlights the elemental shapes of these letters: the bar of l, the circle of o, the chevron of v. The decelerated, meditative reading encouraged by concrete poetry frees us see the “evol” in love-backwards, explaining the title “Blues” perhaps. Because our eyes are encouraged to abandon a simple left-to-right reading pattern, we also see “evolve” (which is of course the result of love). Taking “Blues” in as a shape, we might see that the diagonal line of ‘e’s is an axis of reflection, the symmetrical letters o, v and l mirrored across it. In addition, the row of ‘e’s and ‘o’s can be read as notation for a sound poem, the "oooo" and "eeeeeeee" performable as expressions of ecstasy and/or yearning and/or joy and/or suffering, in the manner of the musical genre of the Blues. Returning to Betts’s poem 80, we can see that it too could readily be performed in that way (and perhaps we will hear that when the poem is read tonight!).

I see Betts’s reference to Nichol’s “Blues” dispersed across the book. On page 138, for example: “we make love / out of nothing / evolve” and page 176: “e v o l / devol / loved / l o v e”. Nichol’s poem is a fitting intertext here, as its lashing of “love” and “evol” echo the ambivalent sentiments of the speaker in Sonnet 150.

Now what about that “belov’d”? How did it get in there? Like “refuse” in the poem discussed earlier, it does tip the reader off that the orientation of elements matches that in the original sonnet, and it confirms Betts’s critique of the sonnet form as self-directed (it’s the speaker who wants to be belov’d). But I like to read the trespassing ‘b’ and ‘d’ as a kind of signature. Bp Nichol was always slipping his initials ‘b’ and ‘p’ into poems, and was very fond of their structural qualities; they are the same shape, after all, the ‘b’ just a ‘p’ flipped upright. “belov’d” features the ‘b’ and ‘p’ ( just rotate the ‘d’ 180˚) book-ending all the letters in "love". How could Betts resist?

“Blues” is not the only intertext in the book. “A Peeling / what power this / cinnamon sky // rust / sun-rinsed / in red” alludes to one of Michael Ondaatje’s most famous love poems, “The Cinnamon Peeler.” Blake is here too: “112. Frame my symmetry / tiger, tiger.” The titles of several poems are dedications to other writers: Aaron Giovannone, Susan Rudy, Sandra Stephenson. The intertextual scope is broad, including The Byrds, for example, in “Turn, turn, their turn // for this / end to humanity // there is a season” (210).

The implication is that not only are Betts’s words indebted to the influence of Shakespeare, but so too are Blake’s, and Ondaatje’s, and the Byrds’, and that Betts is indebted to Blake and Ondaatje and the Byrds, and as the mutuality of all this revolves through the book, we might begin to feel that Shakespeare is indebted to Betts, for recovering the waste he didn’t know we had use for. Betts’s preface declares that “The Others that rise are the self and its metal shadow,” but there are also other Others, all the others raisd in me-Shakespeare and me-Betts.

What about that "me," that "i" speaking in this book? In his manifesto, Betts suggests that “we all have our own unique way of engaging with the common system, informed and infused with the cultures and histories through which we learned to speak ourselves into being.” This notion of speaking ourselves into being points to contemporary discussions about how one’s inherited language shapes the horizon of one’s subjectivity. Several poems here speak directly to this power of language to contour the subject.

Poem 17 asks the question, “was / i / raisd / in myth? // or / the letter / i”. You could read the question as a pull between the oral tradition of myth and written text; either way, the “i” is “raisd” in language. The isolation of i as a letter in both stanzas invites the abstraction of the pronoun – that is, the poem inquires into a particular speaker "i", but also the concept of self. I enjoy the poem on page 27:

we are not

made of words

tho we is

The ungrammatical ending adds comic whimsy to the piece, but it also facilitates the abstraction of the pronoun “we.” Maybe the "we" in here aren’t made of words but the concept of first person plural is? The poem presents us with one of Betts’s paradoxes, in this case opening up the question of the ways that we - our physical, fleshly bodies and wildly creative paralinguistic minds - escape language, yet prove subject to it as well, as the way we understand, interpret, know our selves is both limited and allowed by language. The whole poem is, of course, “made of words,” the words in Sonnet 150.

Look also at page 51 (Poem 25):

i inks

methinks

This lovely little couplet means in various ways. We have the theme of the enabling practice of language; in other words, the “i” writes, and therefore can think (we almost expect the next Cartesian therefore of "i am" or maybe "i is"). But the couplet also crystallizes the procedural argument of the book, that we think we are inking (writing), but are always only borrowing, rewriting the texts of others. If the "i" is traced only through the text of another, how much sovereignty does it really enjoy? The facing page asks “who’s there? / who? / who’s there?”, suggesting the fugitive nature of the subject in Betts’s book. But its insistence also allows for three different "who"s who are there, an address to the multiplicity of voices called up in The Others Raisd in Me.

Last fall my graduate class interviewed Robert Kroetsch. In a discussion about the shift from Modernism to Postmodernism, he opposed Modernist adherence to singular narratives to the Postmodern fragment. To a challenge shouted out from the audience, “What about ‘The Wasteland?” (which is polyvocal and fragmented). Kroetsch responded, “Yeah, but Eliot called it “The Wasteland,” suggesting that the fragmentation in the Modernist example was dystopic. An acknowledgment of multiplicity, of a fragmented world view, of a porous subject, attends much current poetic practice in which the very value of “waste” is re-imagined. McCaffery claims that poetry embracing the risk of the general economy “puts the subject into process, exploding the unitary contours of consciousness”. Here he echoes Kristeva, who writes of the sujet-en-procès propelled by poetic language.

In Betts’s project the notion of the subject is at stake in a number of arenas: there’s the issue of authorial originality raised by the plunderverse method, there’s the genre of love sonnet (with its desiring speaker), and there’s the spectre of the cyborgian “metal shadow” of the self arising in the final poems. What’s interesting to me is the ambivalence of tone accompanying these various interventions.

There is something very festive (to use McCaffery’s term) about the project to plunder Sonnet 150, that so many wonderful poems can be uncovered from one sonnet topples an "anxiety of influence" model in favour of a celebration of mutuality. The unsettling of the " i" at the end of the book, however, features shades of the dystopia associated with Eliot’s “Wasteland.” The “metal shadow” foretold in the preface comes across as more of a metal usurper.

There are moments of hope for human selves (one poem claims that “at the end of things / strength of skin / exceeds // love of metal,” for instance, and there’s non-threatening ol’ William Shatner who “smiles / into the future”); but these are outweighed by more ominous sentiments: “a new act / begins / in the rushed click / after math”; “this becoming of things / that refuse us”; “What power is / science art giving? // No beast. / No centre. / No blood.”; “ towns / names / gods / gone”; “this / end to humanity.” There are only two "i"s in the final section. One of them is bound to "you" through a virgule in a poem entitled “Vows,” implying a fusion of human and machine. The other appears only to announce its evacuation:

148. A Thought, or The New Hyperion

i am

is

negated by

this

negative ability (218)

This is Keatsian territory, the Romantic poet’s term “negative capability” referring to the capacity to be comfortable with uncertainty, with mystery (incidentally he believed Shakespeare had it in spades). But “Hyperion” was Keats’s epic poem which chronicled the supplanting of the Titans, including Hyperion, the sun god, by the Olympians. Hyperion’s replacement was Apollo, god of, among other things, “civilization,” which in Betts’s chronicle produces the very metal machines that could replace it. The “i am” is destroyed by our new Hyperion; perhaps that’s the risk of being in a state of uncertainty when you “press / powre on / machines.”

The unsettling of the subject in poems directly engaging love poetry seems most hopeful and generative. To take on a Shakespearean sonnet is to contend with a generic oeuvre in which are invested many of Western Culture’s notions of romantic passion and the desiring subject. I’ve seen this in the bitter disappointment of a first-year student who, upon learning a sonnet had a male addressee, wailed “Aw, I used to think these were romantic!” Betts’s plunders actively trouble the "i" of the sonnet. In the initial section, as in the final one, there are only two "i"s. Poem 6 has no pronoun whatsoever, not even a possessive “my”:

from tongue

sight,

and words

touch;

rush

tonguewards

madly (24)

Here again we get the idea of language shaping experience, in this case the experience of the sensing body: sight arises out of the tongue, touch is activated by words. To “rush / tonguewards / madly” is to mobilize the tongue as erotic and communicative organ. With the pronouns missing, the sensations become nomadic, felt by an "i" or a "thou" or a "we." Where pronouns do appear in the first section, the "me"s outnumber the "i"s so that there is a reorientation from the first person as subject (so familiar in the Western canon of love poetry) to first person as object.

I’d like to conclude with the beginning, with the title The Others Raisd in Me. Betts’s manifesto points to one of bp Nichol’s favourite vehicles for exploiting waste, the pun. Shakespeare, too, loved a pun, and his sonnets capitalize gleefully on the naughtier variety. My Shakespeare-specialist colleague assures me that in the line “If thy unworthinesse raisd love in me,” “raisd” would signify not only ‘inspired’ but punningly suggest an erection. We know Betts would never ignore a good pun (witness his play with “refuse” and “refuse,” “ lie” and “ lie”), so how does the erection function now that it has popped up in his title? Notably, it’s the “Others” who are raised “in Me”! We might conclude that the speaker is being royally fucked by a bunch of cyborgs. I prefer to read this phrase as a further troubling of the dynamics of traditional love poetry. The penetrative act has been reversed, subverting the expectations of sexuality and gender associated with the sonneteer.

Shakespeare himself unsettled the expectations shaped by a Petrarchan tradition, for example critiquing the blazon (or catalogue of simile-bound features) in Sonnet 130 (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”) and complicating gender in Sonnet 20 (featuring the “master-mistress of my pleasure”). What Betts does is propel the questioning further, particularly in his disposition toward the speaking subject, so that the book serves, in a final paradox, as both homage to and critique of his Renaissance other. I’m sure Shakespeare isn’t rolling over in his grave. He’s probably simile-ing to himself.