Duchamp Dukes It Out With the Angel of History

By Sonja Greckol

Both charmed and struck by Ben Nolan's mashup of Ruth Roach Pierson as Benjamin’s Angel of History with her back turned [and published here in the Measures section of this node], I begin to think about “perspective” in the physical and topographical sense. How, I wonder, does such perspective operate in poetry and, more specifically, in Pierson's Aide-Memoire? This in turn raises questions for me about two more poetry books we’ve read in this Influency session, Carolyn Smart’s Hooked and Sachiko Murakami’s The Invisibility Exhibit. How these connect in my mind is not immediately apparent to me beyond the obvious: they're by and about women, about circumspection in women’s lives and about the role of reflection. Their poetics are different but I’m wondering if there is a core which can be examined and compared. I wonder about memory, how agency is structured in memory. Each seems an accounting or a recounting of a female self — biographical, as in the imagined monologues and/or experiences of visible (Carolyn Smart) or invisible women (Sachiko Murakami), or autobiographical as in the lyric voice in Ruth’s work. As readers, where do we stand in relation to author/poet and in relation to the work?

Inveterate bricoleuse that I am, neither craftsperson nor theoretician, I adapt the object at hand rather than find the necessarily appropriate tool. I’d argue that most poets are bricoleurs, or is this the fate only of the lyrically afflicted? And I begin to think about Marcel Duchamp. Now, I've been preoccupied with Duchamp’s work for a long time. In my first negotiations with it, I was drawn close without much theory. Today, with seemingly some understanding, I continue to think about why innovations in the visual arts in the twentieth century are not widely paralleled in poetry (and in literature more generally). More specifically, I’m drawn to question why it is that certain forms of poetry are still labeled “experimental” despite practitioners having experimented for decades. Think of Gertrude Stein, a contemporary of Duchamp: why has her body of work not become easily assimilable alongside the work of the boundary-pushing visual artists?

Back to Duchamp. Apart from the “ready-mades’” with which we are most familiar, I'm intrigued by his paintings and his machines, in particular with an early work, a machine, The Large Glass (Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even), as well as a later work, a painting, Tu M'. Thinking in relation to History’s Angel craning a view backward over the shoulder, I am intrigued here with Duchamp’s tiled arrangements of objects, by the constantly restated horizons in these works: by their treatments of perspective. While perspective in painting was reorganized in the early twentieth century, through new insights about mathematics and painting, through understandings of overlapping views of objects and shifting, resituated planes and surfaces, it seems relatively untouched terrain in lyric poetics. I’m thinking of the protected “linearity” of language as poetry material, i.e. the perceived set of language limits about what poets can do. Beyond the writerly grasp on perspective and its potential shifts, how does perspective operate in the reader’s perception? How do I read perspective, for example, in these three works of contemporary poetry? This brings me back around, I find, to contemplating the accretions of objects.

Collage of Objects...Objective Collage...Objects Collide and Collude

These thinking-vectors take me back to Marjorie Perloff's predictably brilliant essay, housed in the collection, 21st Century Modernisms — The “New” Poetics (Blackwell, 2002), called “The Conceptual Poetics of Marcel Duchamp.” Here, Perloff reads Duchamp and Stein together and identifies the reorganization of the visual field as central to both their projects. I have a sense that somehow, the notion of a static or panoramic field, which does not overtly address the narrator’s constantly repositioned gaze within it, may be used more often in the lyric poem to connote extended, unbroken experiences of time, and the narrator’s gaze across long fields of experience.

For my purposes here, I will take up the objects that are “used” in a randomly selected poem of each of my poets and examine first, what they are; and second, how they work or don’t work in a visual field or fields. In order to complete this constrained survey quickly, I am making object selections from the “page 40” poem of each of these books, so as to span a range of pages, but not draw on the beginning or endings of the book. (Old social science habits, i.e., protocols die hard.)

Let’s first define objects. I’m specifying the “made” object, and therefore excluding people while including animals only if domestic or “defined-by-human.” First from The Invisibility Exhibit, I find the poem “Riverview” on page 40 contains: “booms,” “cargo”; “clear-cut,” “asylum,” “gates,” “masks,” “hall”; “bottle,” “tracks,” “suite,” “litter” and “logs.”

In Murakami’s “Riverview” —which serendipitously is a poem about assuming a perspective, taking a “view” — “she” stands on a log, a boom in a river surveying her surround, remembering a perhaps secret asylum visit and recalling that this precarious stance goes back to childhood. These objects exist in three distinct planes, in the present, and in two pasts, one provoked by a building, an asylum, across a clear-cut (one of the logs) and telescoping a series of similar childhood adventures. This narrator collects memory in this painting using objects: “booms” and “cargo” frame the present; “clear-cut,” “asylum,” “gates,” “masks” and “hall” frame the asylum; “bottle,” “tracks,” “suite,” “litter,” and “logs” frame a relation to a telescoped past. It is in their concreteness, and their contiguity, that I as reader frame the actions “balance” and “escape” around the focal “logs” that both connect the three planes and provide the means to cross these multiple horizons.

In Pierson’s Aide-Mémoire, on page 40 is the poem “Hiatus,” a poem in the first person about failing memory, more specifically anomia, which is the loss of nouns or names of things. This poem names many objects — “pair,” “facade,” “word,” “train,” “tulips,” “bulbs,” “virus,” “search engine,” “furniture,” “warehouse,” “storage facility,” “Voltaire armchair,” “Kidderminster carpet,” “facts,” “entablatures,” “architraves.” Such erudition in a poem about the loss of names of things! But “hiatus” is a gap not suggesting a permanent decamping of naming. This poem fades from frame to frame, naming losses which are initially mundane, the names of birds, and then compares them to similarly commonplace objects that are gone, tulip bulbs, for example, and next trains, which startlingly — by virtue of the narrator’s preoccupation and occupation — fade into a contemplation which slips across domains to classical architecture, which then morphs to the architecture of memory. This movement is a like a visual pun, the flickering figure-ground contour of a profile and a vase.

It seems to me true that the latter objects convey a particular education and class. Since I was piqued to thinking about Benjamin by Ben Nolan’s text referenced at the very outset of this ramble, I'm reminded of Walter Benjamin’s identification of historical objects and artifacts as the spoils of conquest — “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” In Pierson’s poem there appears no lyrical distance from these objects, as the detritus of history; they are fused in the narrator's identity as a “history teacher” and seem to have simply accreted as memory loss does. Mostly it's random. As I read and reread to understand the perspective or planes of the poem, I register a curious absence of emotion, a detachment like a long diversion between losing the names of nesting birds and finding oneself holding up western civilization with one’s faltering brain. While this might be very scary indeed, none of the losses is conveyed as a personal/emotional loss — each is abstract, like data or furnishings^i. Is this the contemplation of the dispassionate academic, I wonder, or perhaps is this a similar reader, only a little younger, acting to deny her own fear?

Finally, in Carolyn Smart’s Hooked, page 40 brings me to the last words of “The Luckiest Girl in the World” — which is a poem in which the monologuist is Unity Valkyrie Mitford speaking from beyond her death. She is bereft of loved ones and speaks of no objects except for those which brought about her end: “casualties,” “war,” “bullet” and “seizure” all fitting for a death in which a life before “the war” was incomparably happy. This slight poem lights a panorama, perhaps of a war’s impact on a family however unsympathetic, and on one woman, however chilling. These objects are set in a panorama, absent depth of field like the widest wide-angle shot, no perspective just breadth, a single horizon. Given the structure of the monologue, we are offered only expanse, however impoverished.

So far, I've talked about the objects inventoried within each book’s page 40, and how their placement determines the planes of the poems or the perspective. I opened a number of brackets which I've not closed here, maybe more later, perhaps not. Even this slight selection, however, suggests to me an intriguing relationship between horizons, vantage points and vectors of attention over time within each poetic sensibility. Could it be that, in these poems, perspective is firmly framed by object and event, and that the lyric gaze shifts without fracturing a perspective, without reorganizing the visual field? Perhaps here the lyric narrator remains unassailed by the kinds of multiplicity and accretion that the Duchamp object so visibly renders visible.