AlphaBett[sic] Mir/Oracles

By Margaret Christakos

letters are oracles

like miracles

(“27.” The Others Raisd in Me, 53)

This line from Greg Betts’s The Others Raisd in Me circulates in my consciousness all week. It’s a line that seems both profound and airy-new-agey, dense with double entendre and light with slippery wings, and so it is almost simultaneously firmly present and fully evanescent, returning repeatedly to me like a ghost with teeth. It’s the near-homonymity of “oracles” and “miracles” that makes the letters flash materially in the air, glinting their shared d.n.a, or rather their shared r-a-c-l-e-s. The r and the l and the e and the s also reoccur in the phrase’s first word “letters” —this we discover by travelling back to the beginning of the phrase, yes, there they are, all those repetitions—and more still, for continuing through the second read we confirm how the verb “are” after the noun “letters” presages the importance of the “a” soon to come in our pair of risen fraternal twins, miracles, and oracles.

I almost think I know what this line means, and then it swerves and torques out of my grasp. It’s like a loop-de-loop-de-loop with representational squiggles present in my vision momentarily, images appearing, transforming and erasing themselves, realities nameable and then dispersing as quickly as dream. That’s frankly what I really like about the line, its movement, its capacity to flip and lick its own genitals, reform as fur, as liquid, as language. It’s a good line. Something about this line reminds me why I am drawn to Betts’s intelligence, and attribute great artistry to him.

Oracle

An oracle is a being who is spoken through, a sentient body with speech apparatus that carries forth some kind of knowledge, some gift of meaning, to others who presumably need it, or can use it, or can choose to leave it. Underlying the notion of the oracle is the presence of another realm, a bigger or alternate consciousness membraned away from the ordinary human, and the need for translation of “it” to “us.” Some humans play the role of translator from this other, maybe divine, certainly mysterious, uncodeable realm, to our own. Language in oratory form is the medium for such transmissions, which re-member, give body to, the ineffable, ephemeral, alinguistic knowing we seek. Poets and artists are often positioned to be the membrane of re-membrance, through which such declarations of meaning are delivered. Here, if the oraculatory message comes in writing, well, the voice of the text is all-important. We replenish text with voice as we read it aloud or silently, raising it again into identifiably human form: identity as manifest in voice.

Miracle

A miracle is an event. Whether the “manifestation of divine intervention in human affairs” or simply something scientifically inexplicable, miracles “happen.” They’re not made by us, but occur in our midst. Letters can’t ever really be miracles, for they are a made thing, are our linguistic material, human-made, right? So perhaps it is fitting to say letters are “like miracles” at the same time as they “are” oracles.

Letter

Letters are made by people to match events. Letters comprise texts, and letters are a form of text, communication from one person to another, raising “what happened,” committing it to print.

Miracles like oracles//are letters…

Betts’s phrase speaks to me of my own poetic, how one word might pull another into the room through the attractiveness of similarity. I like pattern and I am always quick to hear how one word calls up its own semblance. Some poets write this way, led by sonic association. But does the line, however it’s read, or heard, “hold any water” if water is understood as a logical load of communication? Is something rational and knowable carried over by the phrase “letters are oracles, like miracles” to its audience? We each answer privately whether there is rational sense present in the poetry of Betts’s line; we know it is an act of interpretation, making meaning of these words. With each small poetic phrasal unit in the book The Others Raisd in Me one could pose the same query: does it mean anything?—“after us / is coming // stateless” (“38.” 68) for example. The minimalist text always sets before the reader a task of interpreting, unfolding all of the text’s unspokens to possible resonance. The attentive reader is raised to action; “Get to work,” the text ushers. “Read me.”

And reading is also remembering what’s identifiable from canon: love’s / labour’s / cost (“50.” 82) is pleasurable because we see how it springs up anew from the literary allusion, from “lost,” so old hand, so pat we barely even need to hear it, to Betts’s new twist: “cost.” This sort of manoeuvre authorizes the whole book, as we have the sonnet Betts forensically unmeshes from its origins, weirdly re-displayed as bits of textual tendon and rearranged, as decomposed nerve tissue. There’s a fascination with blatantly disturbing the unity of the original here that kind of makes me shiver. I think I said in class last week how it seemed violent and arbitrary to me to chop up the sonnet into solitary lines as if enjambment isn’t the juice of the form. The central pun of the book, reading “raisd” equally as “razed”— cut down, pared back, levelled, quite the inverse of generative production and reproduction—wasn’t discussed much during the evening, offering as we all were along with Holbrook much [deserved] generosity of sharing delight at Betts’s textual “ingenuities.” But Greg, as if to raise the double-edge before he left us, wrote in my copy of his book, “if worth is razed / more worth to love.” Now this paradox underpins what I think we all recognize is the crux of Shakespeare’s sonnet, that the more the love object is unadmirable the more impassioned the speaker seems to become about it or her or him. And diabolical predators certainly love to fetishize the killed victim, turning the integral worth of the individual to appropriated hypercharged fragments each now carrying their violent story of vanquishment as secret; to be recomposed by the impassioned reader/seeker into identifiable “body” then toward “voice” to “identity”— seeding erotic charge in that which has been human-ruined.

To go further along this line, I’ll say I think Betts really “kills” that sonnet, takes it out at the knees, and that a worthy line of inquiry about his book might be to pay more attention to its violence and predilection for power over the original. This might entail reprivilegeing the sonnet’s song, its voice, its oracular potency and miracle of poetic shimmer, all the excessive bits we can’t quite get a hold of in a Shakespearean sonnet. It most certainly would mean paying more attention to translating the “shadow” and “metal” and cyborg refigurations that take hold in the end sections of Betts’s text. In the source sonnet, it’s always as if more is being offered than can possibly be explicated. Is there something too managed, and closed in, about The Others, and in the Me of Betts’s text? It seems Betts’s text maybe avoids loss, ties reclamation up too easily. What if there is loss, utter loss, irretrievability. Isn’t that why we need poetry?

For now though, with the unexpected, hard-to-absorb death of Barbara Godard this week, I am drawn to thinking back through some of the poetic work she translated to English audiences, including the weird spillage of Brossard’s text Lovhers, a book of poetic writing whose innovation works in so many directions simultaneously that the notion of containment by constraint has no bearing. I wonder about how a poetics of constraint has taken hold as a genre of contemporary innovation, and about the focus so many poets seem to give to fulfilling formal designs of their own making. There’s a lot of making sense, manifesting plans, managing the idea of unmanageability. I find myself revisiting some of the underpinnings of poetic radicality in the 1980s, and the texts produced across linguistic and sexual categories, and reckoning with how it is that innovative texts often render readers rather speechless, as if we don’t quite have the critical tools to correspond to the new flips and unpendings going on in the poetic experimentation. The task of criticism becomes meeting the work with measures of how the work does what it does in a hybridic zone that feels a lot like engaging with incomprehensibility. We have to stare hard, really hard into its mouth, to make sense of what it is saying. What’s forming itself in front of me as I write this text is the idea of the sphinx, the poet as harbinger of the not-yet translated, and how translative drive motivates us to meet it with our own evolving fluency. We become engaged in the desire to translate a text that perhaps doesn’t make sense, or feels beyond sense to us, outside our registers of comfort and knowledge. Godard moved into Brossard’s work out of fascination with its otherness, linguistic and sexual, cultural and temperamental—she found it attractive not because of its likeness to her own speech but because of a sizzle, a rattle, a friction against the grain of her own “knowns.” As a vigil for Barbara, and all her influence on Canadian writing, I bring into class a small photograph of my daughter age 2 or so, staring intently at my mouth, as if imbibing speech, trying to absorb it for her own use. Translating me quite literally into her own individuality. I bring this in because of its totemic meaning for me about the erotics of mothering, and of intellectual mentorship, both on my mind with Barbara’s sudden death, and the slippery, uncontainable strains of likeness and difference paradoxically at work in the text of Lovhers, whose very title raises, yes, erects, makes visible, the multiple others within along the lines of Holbrook’s “feeling the tomboy now comfortably inside her.” This word adjusts the referential normativity of the word lovers, busting it up from the inside. There’s doubleness, paradox, and something dense to sort through, some unease and sensation of trying to name, categorize, critique and “get” meaning into the body. Holbrook’s text “Nursery” offers another simultaneity image I find useful: while nursing a child, the speaker notices something both mundane and mind-rattlingly wild: “I drink milk at the same time” (“Nursery,” Joy is so Exhausting, 72). Suddenly that conceptual figure 8 appears—the loop-de-loop-de-loop which I would characterize as the accomplishment driving The Others Raisd in Me, too — a connectedness that is so complete it almost dissolves. That’s one of the effects I like best about poetry; how it makes me both think and feel in ways I can’t quite name, and must reach for, with words and something beyond words, to find the words.

[Given 19 May 2010]