Poetry: The Matter of Time

By Lola Tostevin

When I was asked to give a paper on Barry Dempster’s The Burning Alphabet I decided I would not bring to my reading any preconceived or predetermined ideas around lyrical poetry, at least inasmuch as this is possible. In choosing to read only the kind of poetry defined by categories, readers often miss out on work that could expand their knowledge.

The first poem of The Burning Alphabet, “Explicit,” is an ode to the embodiment of moments that are as concrete as a heartbeat that “billows a Niagara of the blood.” It is a great image, but it is, nevertheless, a metaphoric image. From the very first poem, Dempster’s writing divides itself. On one hand, the speaker claims to cherish, above all, the explicit which, by definition, should express unambiguously what is meant. On the other hand, the heartbeat is described as a larger-than-life image.

Why does the speaker of this poem cherish the explicit? Because those who love ambiguity apparently dissolve, disappear. “They die quietly and are forgotten.” Ironically—irony plays an important part in this collection—as explicit as the speaker of these poems wants to be, poetry remains ambiguous when things, such as the heart, remain invisible and must be represented by metaphor. The poem is split much as the speaker of the poem, “Suburban Poet,” is split. The man who lives with the demands of everyday life and who is addressed as “you,” is also the poet who is addressed as “he.” This reminds me of the split that Virginia Woolf spoke about when she said that when she’s with friends, she’s Virginia Woolf, but when she writes she’s merely sensibility.

In the second poem, “Handprints,” the speaker finds himself scrunched inside a womb-like cave where it is warm and damp “as if corpses had started to breathe again.” “As if” is a conditional clause since the corpses aren’t there. Yet, because of handprints on the wall, the cave becomes a potentially reactive space where someone from the distant past reaches out and touches the speaker of the poem. The handprint becomes a “touchstone” where the dead are given a new but different kind of life. A death/rebirth image. The traces left behind offer the writer the possibility of cohabiting, of having an exchange, with the past. To paraphrase André Malraux in The Voices of Silence, “death cannot still the voice.” It triumphs over death not to be reiterated in its original language but by constraining us to listen to a language constantly modified, as if it were an echo answering each passing century with its own voice, a dialogue undefeated by Time.

It’s often been said that loss functions as the organizing principle of all life, and loss plays a significant role in The Burning Alphabet. Death, loss of health, loss of time appear and reappear in the repetitions of everyday life, familiar events, familiar despairs. Loss underlies the speaker’s efforts to represent everyday reality with the cumulative effect of emphasizing the void at the core of a life that is slipping away. There is, in fact, a very tangible sense of time passing in this book. As Hannah Arendt has pointed out, “man is not just temporal; he is Time.” The speaker of these poems is not only temporal, he is Time passing, he is himself the matter of Time. With his own eventual passing, as with his father’s passing, there will be no time except in the traces, the handprints, the writing left behind.

Since the beginning of representation, whether they are handprints in caves or Egyptian hieroglyphs, loss and representation have been connected. Ancient Egyptian monuments and artifacts are well-known evidence of a culture’s preoccupation with the dead and writing. The Egyptians invented writing to take the place of those who were no longer amongst them. In Ancient Egypt’s The Book of the Dead, the heart is represented by an inkwell in the shape of a heart.

No one understood the connection between loss and writing better than the writers whom Dempster quotes at the beginning of each poem in the section “Sick Days,” each quote an intertextual exchange that echoes the ideas of each writer’s work. The quote from Roland Barthes defines an image as something from which the “I” is excluded, an image where the real person becomes a void. Walter Benjamin’s quote describes loss as an experience of “separation (that) penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in gentle radiance.” Pablo Neruda’s radiance, on the other hand, glows into “a burning alphabet.”  The speaker of Dempster’s poems isn’t settling for gentle radiance—he has decided to go down in flames.

I was intrigued by this collection’s title and the cover image. Why the incendiary title and why Betty Goodwin’s painting, Moving Towards Fire, an artist whose work I greatly admire? I’d like to take a little detour to better understand the connection, the echoes between Dempster’s and Goodwin’s works and in doing so I’ll be quoting from the catalogue, The Art of Betty Goodwin published for the Art Gallery of Ontario at the time of a retrospective from November 1998 to March 1999.

In the introductory essay, Anne Michaels writes that Betty Goodwin “annihilates metaphor.” Goodwin’s series of vests, many of them made from actual garments while others are lovingly rendered in soft-ground etchings, represent the raw struggle of love trying to break free of loss. “How does love leave its mark,” Michaels asks? “Through memory, possessions, an imprint on flesh” (Bradley & Teitelbaum, p. 1). How does this annihilate metaphor, I ask?

Anne Michaels’s essay is followed by one written by AGO’s director, Matthew Teitelbaum. Some of the vests, he writes:

were remnants of her life, others gathered from vintage clothing stores and chosen for
their lived-in qualities... The vest was the icon of her father-figure and art-mentor, Joseph Beuys,
who often wore a vest during public appearances. Goodwin’s works using articles of clothing
and the Vest series in particular, share a deeply felt elegiac quality. They suggest that images
can encapsulate states of remembering and communicate that quiet desperation inherent in the
struggle to hold on to an idea or a feeling that is lost or soon to be lost (p.19).

Here’s that word, loss, again. Does the fact that Goodwin uses and manipulates actual objects to convey, symbolically, the love of someone lost mean that she annihilates metaphor? Does the fact that the speaker of The Burning Alphabet cherishes, above all “the explicit” mean that he can get rid of ambiguity?

One more quote, from Betty Goodwin herself:

I am trying to realize and express my personal vision of the world around me as
vitally as possible. I want to use the elements of shapes, spatial relationships, rhythms,
color, to build a structure in which a meaningful content and the objects in the painting
possess an intense reality, revealing more than the visible. I want to obtain the very essence
of their being in relation to my idea (p. 86).

What makes Goodwin’s ideas so palpable are the various elements she uses—shapes, spatial relationships, rhythms, colour, in order to obtain the essence of their being in relation to her ideas. She’s not saying that her work embodies truth. She is saying that her work, such as the vest series, stands in place of truth and embodies her idea of truth. There is a difference.

What does the speaker of Dempster’s poems do when he realizes that the gods have abandoned him? When he feels that the past and his past self are disappearing? He sits down and “lights a fire in the first available emptiness,” the emptiness that Barthes and Benjamin write about in their epigraphs above the poems. What is Dempster’s fire made of? It is made of language that sears, language that penetrates different layers much as Goodwin’s art does. In her series, La mémoire du corps, her pastel and graphite drawings penetrate the mylar skin on which she explores her idea of bones and nerves. Instead of flowers in a vase, Dempster sets out, in writing, a display of a pet’s bones, Clytie’s tiny, white bones. What are Dempster’s bones made of? Letters of the alphabet.

The back cover ofThe Burning Alphabet claims that “underpinning Dempster’s poems lies an unswerving dedication to emotional and spiritual honesty.” In my search of reviews on Dempster’s work I encountered recurring claims describing his poetry as “honest” or words to that effect. One reviewer declares that “Dempster’s poetry is a truthful way of rendering consciousness.”

According to the old binary of opposites, these comments imply that if there is honest poetry there must be dishonest poetry. What is it, in some people’s minds, that makes some poetry “honest,” and other poetry “dishonest?” What is truthful consciousness versus untruthful consciousness? I wonder if it doesn’t have something to do with some readers’ expectations being reinforced when those readers can’t see beyond their expectations, thereby making, in their minds, the writing more honest or more truthful. Although it’s very reassuring for readers to have their expectations validated it is also dangerous for writers or artists. When a writer is expected to contract forms of insurance in writing, the writing becomes a monument, what I call cooperative writing. It cooperates with what is expected of it. It brings a kind of death to the writer: death of the imagination, death of creativity, death as the closing out of the world. It is a self-annihilating immolation, different from the immolation that Dempster and Goodwin explore through their art forms, for theirs is a mutated form of energy, a phoenix rising from the ashes in the form of a handprint in a cave, in the form of Clytie’s bones, in the form of vests in Betty Goodwin’s art.

Dempster’s words do not embody honesty or truth—they embody his idea of truth. What makes some art or some poetry better than others isn’t necessarily whether it is representational or experimental or avant-garde—it is how well each artist or writer explores genre and form as the organizing principles for the embodiment of ideas as they become the matter of their Time.

Other people’s deaths often put one’s own into perspective. As another quote used by Dempster from Elias Canetti indicates, “Dead, one is not even alone any longer.” “The Crowd of Him” is an unusual series, unusual because it is a mixture of sorrow and anger at a father, a mixture of tenderness and pain, “a bullet hole straight to the heart.” These poems take the reader to the other side of nostalgia. Nostalgia, Dempster reminds us in “Mr. Memory,” is compulsive, it is a sentimental longing for the past. Dempster’s poetry is far more about the present moment of writing, of weighing each word, of struggling with the page as a potentially reactive space.

Dempster is best known as a lyrical poet and I wondered at first if he wasn’t also a writer from the Romantic school of poetry when writers attempted to go beyond death by going through death, their encounter with death resulting as a growth of consciousness. Yet, the more I read him the more I had the feeling that the speaker of these poems kept moving towards what the poet John Ashbery has called the lyric crash. There is great conflict going back and forth between the explicit that the speaker of the first poem yearns for and his clear understanding that no matter how hard he tries to capture the autobiographical self it cannot be located in the imaging of a past. No matter how hard the writer tries to recapture his dead father, or even himself as he, too, faces illness, both remain, as the title of one poem suggests, “Missing Persons.” It is this conflict on which the poems balance so precariously that they often seem just short of the great fall anticipated by the poet, much as his father’s tumble over a Persian carpet, or Goodwin’s image of a figure falling on the cover. The “I” of these lyrical poems keeps crashing inside the gap between the lyrical “I” of the past and the “I” on the page who has to keep reinventing himself poem after poem after poem.

Wallace Stevens, another writer quoted at the beginning of “Sick Days,” claims that we live by “necessary fictions,” looking for “a new knowledge of reality,” implying that what we are presented with in literature is never the real thing—not a real heart, not the real person, not the real story. We are, instead, presented with bigger-than-life fictions necessary for the peeling back of different layers of understanding, for in the end we are all orphans in the country of our own creativity, our own thought.

To end, I would like to go back briefly to the beginning, to the first poem, “Explicit,” where coupled with a mention of the heart there is mention of thought:

            Feel each finger as it creates

            a hand, each heartbeat billowing

            a Niagara of the blood, each

            thought a circle so round

            it makes the moon look slack.

Heart and thought in this stanza can be represented only if they are given a form. The line, “thought a circle so round,” reminds me of the philosopher Karl Jaspers’s own line: “Being is round.” What does this mean, I wonder?

Rilke wrote that once a thing becomes isolated, it becomes round, it assumes a figure of being that is concentrated upon itself. Is this what Jaspers and Dempster meant? Like the figure of the father who was isolated and concentrated upon himself until, in death, he became a crowd of figures inhabiting the speaker’s world?

Or does the speaker of the poem mean that the imagination of round thought follows its own law as each artist and writer must? If so, how big is this roundness? Is it as big and round as the world is round? Is it as big as the globe that the speaker of one of Dempster’s poems carries under his arm?

The more I thought about this, the more the image of round thought became wonderfully complete in its own roundness and the more I found myself in the presence of an image outside realistic meaning. Inside and outside the explicit.

Heart and thought. Two invisible entities making their appearance at the heart of Barry Dempster’s writing.

This essay was originally presented in Spring 2007, as part of Influency 2. —Editors.