Let’s Get Lost, and Enjambed

On Michael Boughn’s Dislocations in Crystal and Meredith Quartermain’s Matter

By Margaret Christakos

1.

Tuesday morning—with such a delicious coffee, toggling between scary, brass-tongued children going out the door—one’s forgotten math package, another’s forgotten lunch, me on the verge of tears at the point of the kind of order I as a mother try to produce over and over only to have it be sundered—and Michael Boughn’s ever-divagating poems. Thinking about what “feels” more disorderly to me as I wake up to words this October seven 2008.I say what’s the point so many times, compulsively, antically, that my brain appears to have turned to crystal; my eyes glint in the sun flickering through glass. It occurs to me I live inside a house, and glass separates me from the out of doors. That’s what we call “nature” often. Not itself, but the “out of doors.” Which implies I suppose an optimism, that one can open the door to get back into it, trees, breeze, smell of apples. Wait, it is the sack of apples in my kitchen a neighbour gave us that smells of apples. Out of doors will smell of something else, but I am not out there yet, nor will I be out there for hours. Here I am at my computer where I spend at least a quarter of the fullness of my life because it is 2008 and I am a writer and keyboards are my technology as much as is my hand. I tap this out. M-Y H-A-N-D. The “A” so far to the left, on the border of “caps lock.” The “N” back right beside M, on the wrong side of it. Discrete letters, each found by a quick set of neurons firing so both my hands jerk and jolt and flick and pulse and tap. The fingers of one of my hands are not held in an embrace around one stem, moving liquidly to shape a blue or gray or red line of script that would spell these letters out in mellifluity. So don’t tell me my brain hasn’t changed to crystal. It may well have, and so may have yours.

What I want to do is to emphasize the intellectual rigour of the ordinary life, the lived life where we are rarely sitting with a book reading and rereading. And how this ordinary life is the source of poetry’s relevance, its eccentricity, its leaps of imagination. I do this at my peril; you may conclude I am misfit to teach you anything...

There are many ways to speak about poetry, as many ways as there are to talk about loss, and as many ways as there are to talk about community. What matters is the reach of the habits of our listening. Didn’t Meredith write “trees of knowledge, with habits for food”? (Quartermain, Matter, “Matter 17: In the Upper Atmosphere of Plants”) Well, I can rehabituate my listening practices, and so can you.

If any of you watch the TV drama Mad Men, which portrays privileged Americans building global capitalism on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s, you’ll agree that habits of private and public conversation, its cadences, its code of manners, its requirements for sequential call and response, have vastly changed. We speak at a faster clip today, we think in collage, we have a global consciousness, we have been steeped subliminally in the smarts of conceptual art, we ourselves are “multitudes” and so is our relationship to media, to language, to disparate, diverse, and simultaneous sources. Religion is not the sole source of anyone’s moral thinking. Okay: anybody I know. And I stopped eating meat loaf and potatoes every Sunday a very long time ago. But our mainstream media talks about culture and literature less, rarely referring to classical and canonical source texts. It is widely encouraged that the writer should explain his or her work and make it accessible through entertaining sound bites. The purpose of the explanation is to SELL the work. Not to change habits of thoughts. That’s the downside of speed, the dream of total access: surfaces, skimmed, spinning.

2.

Perhaps you are sitting in your seat thinking. Are you thinking: “Christ here she goes with the personal voice again, as an antidote to the heady stuff she’s scared we’re scared of.” Or are you thinking: “Okay so far I get this.” Or thinking: “An ordinary life. What an empty bottle.” Or: “How I miss my keyboard, my fingers itch for it, to tap its buttons again.”

But that’s your business, darling. I don’t want to pry.

What has poetry to do with our ordinary lives and their trees of knowledge when we’re not sitting with a book reading and rereading it? As I’ve re-read Meredith’s book now several times, there’s one passage that does reassert itself in my ear with particular traction. It is from “Matter 22: Great Guns Diembogue”: “Heaven is order. /Everything where it ought to be.//And Earth, who is she?” (51) By “Matter 26: Do Sparrows Ask,” Quartermain’s letting a more proliferant set of political questions rise: “Why must we ooze the curdled mucus/of profit and usefulness?” (59) Her poems reveal a gathering critique of the technological condition in which “we” are a class of matter wrecking the earth, clawing it with global capitalist pillage machines, and our own machinate brains may be these claws.

We want to sort and classify, we want to parse and attribute. We crane for order. But the earth is not orderly, its generative structures are subterranean and laval: eruptive and reclamative. The earth is about cycles, spiraling generations and regenerations, and maelstroms, and cyclones, and turns. Returns. Overturns. Turns.

I want to say something about this rhetorical device I have used here. Repetition. If I create a cluster of phonomes and morphemes in my speech, I slow us all into dwelling in language’s music for a moment. I slow time. I let the ear flip back into its own pleasure at hearing. I literally insist against the forward movement of text and speech that has you needing to continually ingest, ingest, ingest. So the sequence of Turns, returns, overturns, turns, allows you to gestate in sound, in the matter of language, to allow your senses to digest thought. Narrative continuity is the other device that we use most often in public speech: to bring each other along. Or we use lists, we actually say: Here’s what I’m going to do,1, 2, 3, 4 and so on, and then we do it. We live our list.

All three of these codes of entrance are subverted in Meredith’s book. The organizing principle is a suite of twenty-eight numbered free verse lyric poems, each named a Matter, perhaps a Matter for discussion. There’s an orderly system implied, but Meredith has opened her book by telling us, through an epigraph by Gilles Deleuze, that when one divides the world endlessly into smaller and smaller parts, one does not secure their inertness. Instead one releases each part’s energies to form its own small cyclone, with whirls and spinning. The last poem of the sequence, “Matter 28: Lying Under Cases,” repeats the word “spinning”and repeats it again, “spinning, spinning,” until the very last words “our brains/unraveling.” (62) Is there not a note of lament here?

3.

What is it our society likes so much about zombies? Unlike vampires who have a long history in literature, unlike Frankenstein’s monstrous revenant who gains sentience and human feeling, unlike the demonically possessed who require exorcism—remember Linda Blair in that movie, her head spinning, her language a garble of vomity profanity, so much filth and verbalized excess coming out of her, a kind of song really, it would spew over us, from screen to movie theatre seat…. And unlike tricksters and Panlike figures whose flutes take us into a panic of the senses, zombies have had their soul, their innards, their voices, their selves sucked out of them. They are the no-longer human using the autocorpse as vehicle. Matter fueled by pure will, without speech. They come at you, out of corners, and are not curious to find any response but pure fear.

College Park was a theatre of zombies on Nuit Blanche [Toronto, All-Night Art Fair, 2008].  But what is the poetry of the zombie? Zombies will eat you whole, they want your flesh. You—feeling, soulful, thinking you—would be their intuitive “food habit.” I would rather be spinning in my brain, even feel the stuffing of it unravel, than be a zombie, than succumb to the zombie succubus.

4.

One of the aspects of Michael Boughn’s work I am feeling intrigued about tonight is his use of phrasal translocations, moving whole lines or enjambed fragments from one poem into the next, and various systems that he uses to implement this implant procedure.

I’m also aroused about the specific angular form of the crystal coming into our foreground after Meredith’s interest in matter in general, and the linguistic maelstrom of its parts in relentless spin. Against and beside, as well, we’ve had the progressive paradigm of the creeping stem form of the rhizome.

In thinking about crystal, I can’t help thinking from the outset about refractions and reflections, and visual phenomenology that enter my way of then describing my responses to poems: I seem to need to shade my eyes occasionally already from light flashing and glinting off the surface of these poems’ constantly moving syntax. In this way, they seem similar to Meredith’s work. But in so many ways, curiously dissimilar, distinct. Tonight we begin to move into the inevitable practice of comparison, one poetry to another, and we’ll find ourselves seeing qualities in Michael’s work that were not present or were handled differently in Meredith’s. I like to think of this as generative context building, instead of an occasion for ranking. As you read and put these poetries into a spectral relationship with all the other poetries we look at this term, and all the poetries you know, I’m hoping that this learning is a process, too, of dislocations and deformations, as much about fit as about the interesting misfit of tongue to taste, responses that trigger new nodes of thought, new content in the mailbox, new patterns on the keyboard.
 

5.

For what happens to language when we are lost? When I read Influency registrant Chantal Perrot’s response this weekend I heard many of the particular habits of lostness, its diction: repetitions through which the speaker tries to ground and anchor, questions seeking some form of answer, fragments as if the full statement is too dizzy to complete itself, appeals where the voice rises as if into a distance, probing it, cadent cries where gravitas pulls voice back to earth, proclamations of bravery against the dark, then howls, just howls into reverberant cosmos. And it is this labour that lands you somewhere in the land of the living, instead of the field of the zombies.

Is being lost being in transit from one known to another known, mediated by a panic that this act of relocation cannot and will not be completed? Think of the figures of speech we use to express bewilderment: “I’m not sure I follow you.” “But where are we going with this?” And the plaintive, “Um, are you with me?” Well, let’s get lost some more, this time, in crystal.