Issue 2: Fruitful Disorder

The three poets we are pleased to feature in this second issue of Influency Salon—Michael Boughn, Meredith Quartermain, and Jordan Scott—address language both as problematic in their artistic lineage or personal history, and as a fertile source of tension and opportunity in their three texts. For Boughn, grammar is problematized and disrupted in “crystals” or shears and twists of dislocation that undermine lyricism with fractured syntax. For Quartermain, the historical development of a language of classification creates the opportunity for rhizomatic riffing, her characteristic philosophical probity unwinding codes of order and sheaves of chaos. And for Scott, a stutter becomes an opportunity to explore the physicality of language itself, with all the variations of phonetic or morphemic sounds rubbing up against each other in his mouth.

As issue editors we wondered about, then pushed against, the shape of chaos in these books: were these poets, in the throes of their own struggle with language, pulling between order and chaos? Was there discord in the bone? We came back to this understanding, that all three engage concepts of order and form, the nuts and bolts of normativity, as it were, to find ways of unmaking that are not strictly chaotic. Instead they describe and then break patterned, random, and then expanded phenomena into new meanings.

Dislocations in Crystal, Boughn’s collection of “seeds of the yet-to-be-thought,” (9) draws on the superstructures of ordered human thought and experience, the philosophies, histories, and chronologies we create to be both our map and voice in the void. For Boughn, each line, word, and syllable become a problem of construction: syntactical break and shatter, disruptions in grammar, all reflect and refract human experience to create a kind of fluttered life that undermines lyricism. Chris D’Iorio, in his reflection “Precipitating Otherness,” turns the poem “Next” around and says “hold the page up to the light and you can see the crystalline intersection,” recalling the Bravais lattices that describe all known crystals yet there are visible breaks, “incidents of their otherness.” The breakage is certainly prosodic—it works as technical craft—but it also reflects the poetics of a disciplined mind engaged in deep wonderments, a mind, paradoxically, also ready to rumble words apart. These poems’ polyphonic disruptions open with a critique of Old World imperialism and New World colonization, then shift through “the ordinary and the marvelous” (Boughn 9) with a sensibility alluding both to Chinese poetry and painting yet plainly within the Emerson and Whitman traditions. There is a hermit on Black Mountain: Boughn’s singular poetry is informed by deep knowledge of the work of the Black Mountain poets. “On love and barley,” Basho might say, reimagining haiku’s structural imperative of two elements—the condition and the sudden perception—divided by a break or “cutting word” that opens a sense of what lies within and beyond (Stryk, Basho 11).

In Matter, Quartermain uses Roget’s taxonomy of words as a concept to negotiate the very matter and materiality of language. Her work is an ordering project to address the chaos of the world as conventional orderings have attempted to describe it and how, in our Western culture, we have come to perceive it. She uses a plan of classification where classes and sections that should connect —if not explain—things actually subvert and break their normative order. The breakage is fundamentally conceptual. “Matter’s imperfect is fluid,” Quartermain says in “Matter 25”: “What drives us to class, define/ the perfect collection in churches of sorts/ with high importance of types, so certain/ we dwell at is pinnacle?” (56). In “Life List of Words,” sanctioned definitions sidle up close to ones lusted after: “prehensile” is “adapted for grasping/holding—as in freighters, as in ideas” (73), while “spissed” is “thickened, especially after a night at the isobar” (74).

Scott, however, works with physiological disruption or blockage as the central problem: stutter becomes an opportunity to explore the physicality of language itself, its production, delivery, and reformation. Stutter becomes, in fact, a product of language that encompasses both its body and sheer air. “Having been carried away, I have to find my difficult way back, and slowly return, to the fact of my mouth,” opens the “Preface: On Avoidance” (7). While the notion of “flow” is essential to our concept of language, of writing, Jenny Sampirisi notes in her response, “Say Arrhythmic Merengue: Thoughts on ‘Gobbledygook’ from Blert” that “much of this extends to our own mouths and our own relationships to language as something we have to negotiate daily, hourly, by each minute. The effort to ‘be clear’ to ‘flow’ to ‘make meaning’ is something many of us struggle with and as writers, something many of us wish to subvert.”

While poet-critic Michael Davidson does not suggest “that a focus on the disabled body is the only way to read postwar poetry,” he does note that physicality, in all its dimensions, is a powerful tool of language:

Its poetics of embodiment brought a renewed focus on the vicissitudes of hand and eye, musculature and voice, as dimensions of the poetic. The salient feature of poetries generated out of Beat, Black Mountain, New York School, Deep Image and other non-formalist poetries was a belief in the poem’s registration of physiological and cognitive response, the line as “score for the voice,” the poem as act or gesture. (Davidson n.p.)

Craig Dworkin observes that:

In the context of disability studies, the stutterer … offers one way to understand the full range of inarticulate effects on display in the writings of the avant-garde and its broad challenge to the ideologies of normalcy, fluency, transparently communicative expository eloquence, and any notion of a dematerialized or disembodies language. (182-83)

As readers, we come to these texts asking questions of chaos and order: whose order, what chaos, whether structure is really so aleatory and fragile, who and what is left out and why? And if the taxonomies don’t hold, become fractured, we find a way to flow with it, as with Boughn’s “intervals’ intensities relational/moment, neither then nor then but how” (Boughn 72), and we keep on creating, adding the fruitful disorder to reorder chaos. Margot Lettner, in her reflection “Descended from Chaos: Reading Jordan Scott,” notes that “physicists are now broaching the idea that in fact we’re descended from chaos, not order at all; that chaos is a central organizing principle in the universe.”

Think of things that quiver. Think of the language of poetry bringing order to our chaos, chaos to our order. Think about the lovely ragged interchange, like this one, “Matter 9: To texture to verb” (Quartermain 26). Or this one: “Here is not gone though gone is this/ twenty-foot plot at the boundary of a sentence” (Boughn 12). Or this one: “blort jam rejoice” (Scott 9).

Rejoice in the work of these poets.

Works Cited

Boughn, Michael. Dislocations in Crystal. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2003. Print.

Davidson, Michael. “Missing Larry: The Poetics of Disability in Larry Eigner.” http://www.poetspath.com/Scholarship_Project/davidson.html

Dworkin, Craig. “The Stutter of Form.” Marjorie Perloff and Craig Dworkin, eds. The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Print. http://english.utah.edu/eclipse/Editor/DworkinStutter.pdf

Quartermain, Meredith. Matter. Toronto: BookThug, 2008. Print.

Scott, Jordan. Blert. Toronto: Coach House Books, 2008. Print.

Stryk, Lucien. On Love and Barley—Haiku of Basho. London: Penguin Books, 1985. Print.

Note:

Michael Boughn, Meredith Quartermain, and Jordan Scott will be presenting at the Charles Olson Centenary Conference to be held at Simon Fraser University from June 4 to 6, 2010.