Rachel Blau Du Pleissis 22 March 2012

I wasn’t sure if Rachel would be my cup of tea but I’m really glad I went to hear her speak. Rachel is a contemporary of Ron Silliman and Rae Armantrout. She’s written a lot of critical works on women writers and the modernists – Writing Beyond the Ending, The Pink Guitar and many more. (Full bibliography here)

She’s written a ‘Life Work’ an epic poem called Drafts, which has been published piecemeal across several books. She aimed for lyrical compression but has escaped the confinement of the lyric form. She said her work was a product of the internet age in its piecemeal production (I also think it is influenced by digital culture in its form). There is an American tradition of Life Works from the likes of Pound and Louis Zukofsky. She liked the modernists but wanted to ‘do modernity in a fresh way’. She sees problems with modernity, feels respectful but critical.

She spoke of her work as the folding of ideas into each other, that poetry on the page is a wide open field. “DuPlessis asks us to take seriously Olson’s call for the poetry-page as a wide-open field on which historical, theoretical, social and aesthetic problematics unfurl, twist, evolve and mutate dialectically and/or dialogically, bouncing off each other in collision or play, interlocking in agonistic intensity or affectionate rapprochement. “ - Maria Damon.

 ‘I write what I want to read’. Her work has also been described as an un-monumental monument. ‘Drafts’ is written like Cantos – as a practise, not an Oeuvre. In her Canto Draft 98 she is poking fun at Dante in a good natured way, the way he explains himself before and after the Cantos like a stuffy professor. In her Canto she talks to her soul like it’s her daughter, I really liked it. Her soul is like a doll, a scaled down 7 year old girl the size of a baby that you can hold in your arms. (This made me think of Avatars and Simulacrum)

She spoke of trying to create vastness, from a tiny dot a ‘.’ to something huge, like constellations; something to create the feeling of awe. She was also interested in the notion of being tiny in a social and political sense.

She uses rhyme in some places even though it is an indicator of conservatism because she says she like to use all the tools available to her.

Stéphane Mallarmé said “Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.” She thinks this is crazy but also kind of interesting in that it’s good to notice the small details.

Rachel talked of the whole epic as a brain trying to remember what’s going on, hence some repetition and looping back. She sees the whole poem as a grid with 19 poems in a column and 6 columns = 114 poems. The initial reason for this form was to combat the fear of a blank page. She wrote the first two pieces – ‘it’ and ‘she’, and they were in discourse with each other, she knew there would be more but wasn’t sure how many to do. At first she thought he’d do 100 like Dante (Pound also) then after she’d done 19 she saw them as a long string without a break (she described it like a long string of French knitting!) and decided to insert a column break of sorts. This was a random number but turned out to be fortuitous in that it’s a prime number. She said George Olsen does that too (see wide-open page).

She spoke of drawing coloured lines of connected and re-occurring themes and ideas through the grid to create streams or weave. I said that I thought her work lends itself to hypertext and she agreed. Her work is like a precursor to hypertext, she’s asking your brain to create and recognise the analog hyperlinks (I guess many poets do this in a way but hers seems very intentional).

Janet Murray has referenced Jorge Luis Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths" as a precursor to the hypertext novel and aesthetic. “Borges  mentions how hypertext has similarities to a labyrinth in which each link brings the navigator to a set of new links, in an ever expanding maze.” Rachel said something similar to this in her talk – ‘You always have to make choices when you write and every choice is so complicated and affects each next one’

A hinge. Open, close, open, close. After things end they have to open up again.

‘A book is a hinge’ - -   Rachel Blau Du Plessis

A background to Crawford’s work: ‘The Human and the Computational’ in Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science. Ed Robert Crawford. & ‘Modernist C

Crawford outlines his approach in ‘The Human and the Computational’ and confirms my reading of his work. He cites a major influence on his work is Ossian (which I had to look up). Ossian is the narrator and purported author of a cycle of poems which the Scottish poet James Macpherson published. He claimed to have collected word-of-mouth material in the Scots Gaelic said to be from ancient sources. His published work was his translation of this material. Ossian is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to Finn McCool, a character from Irish mythology. Crawford describes this work as a’ great poetry of mourning’ with ‘a flickering world beyond the text’ and ‘music of echoes and loss’. He says it has ‘a fey, tissue thin quality’ and compares it to Yeats’ Celtic Twilight. He describes them as seeming like ‘a kind of dematerialization of reality and so did the computer’ Computers are part of the material world but also present a ‘kind of constant simulacrum’. In the paperless office computers denote an absence of things, rather than a presence. (p 62)

Crawford also discusses his notion of ‘Deincarnation’ – the sense of ghostliness that accompanies bereavement and connects it back to the Ossianic / Celtic Twilights Highlands and a computational, virtual reality world. ‘The computer is, metaphorically at least, both a means of remembrance, preservation, and a kind of estrangement, a screening out of the muddily or bloodily tangible.’ (p 63)

Crawford describes his work as ‘Informationist’ – ‘stealing from informational, scientific and quasi-academic texts and modes.’ (p 63) I’ve requested an interloan book with more details about Informationists. Finally, in what I see as a vital statement, he says:

Particularly now in our ‘information age’ the distinctions between ‘science’, ‘technology’, and ‘culture’ all seem oddly artificial. If a poem codes information and involves delicate balances, so does an equation, a formula, or a gene-string, and so does a computer; that is not to say that a poem or a person can be reduced to the computational, but all may be related, focused in new ways. Poems, like gene-strings, are all about ‘strands’ and have their molecular repeats, complex internal bondings and minute, intricate refrains. (p 65)

In ‘Modernist Cybernetics and the poetry of Knowledge’ Crawford establishes a tradition of an influence of cybernetics going back to the modernists, particularly Eliot, Pound and Auden (although the word cybernetics, literally meaning ‘governing knowledge’ was not coined until 1948 by Robert Weiner). He links Pound to cybernetics through his ‘scientifically expressed preoccupation with the governing of knowledge’. He claims that ‘Modernist verse, so nurtured by and alert to academic channels as well as to the relationship between knowledge and power, is very much a poetry of the governing of knowledge.’ ( 182)

The Waste land is framed by Crawford as proto-hypertextual:

The Waste Land projects a neural network that is a cybernetic system on the edge of running out of control. It convinces us by its poetic music, yet we can understand it only with notes, guides, commentary. Drawing on all Eliot’s earlier knowledge and training, it is written out of these things. The details of Eliot’s academic career are made luminous with pressure. In one light it is heartbreakingly human. In another, in terms of its ultimate textual and intellectual ramifications, it is a hypertext that only a computer could read. (p190)

And then:

Modernist allusion functions as a hypertext system, taking the reader continually from one reference to another, setting up complex relationships among texts within texts. The older, manuscript-based analogy of the ‘palimpsest’ is too simple to express how a poem like The Waste Land works. It sets up so many simultaneous relationships, transmits such a multitude of messages, that it offers us a vast database, a growing library of texts, bridges between them, and connections between cultures. Its complexity is a cybernetic one which anticipates the computer age at least as much as it derives from earlier forms…. The modernist poem is a deliberately coded work. (p190)

I was pleased to read this as I had been contemplating the history of this kind of writing after hearing Rachel Blau Du Plessis read on the 22 of March. It struck me that her work was very much a product of the internet age - had a very hypertextual nature. She had quoted Pound as an influence on her also. I hadn’t known what to call this kind of writing and described it to myself as analog hypertext.

In my notes about her I said:

Rachel talked of the whole epic as a brain trying to remember what’s going on, hence some repetition and looping back. She sees the whole poem as a grid with 19 poems in a column and 6 columns = 114 poems. The initial reason for this form was to combat the fear of a blank page. She wrote the first two pieces – ‘it’ and ‘she’, and they were in discourse with each other, she knew there would be more but wasn’t sure how many to do. At first she thought he’d do 100 like Dante (Pound also) then after she’d done 19 she saw them as a long string without a break (she described it like a long string of French knitting!) and decided to insert a column break of sorts. This was a random number but turned out to be fortuitous in that it’s a prime number. She said George Olsen does that too (see wide-open page).

She spoke of drawing coloured lines of connected and re-occurring themes and ideas through the grid to create streams or weave. I said that I thought her work lends itself to hypertext and she agreed. Her work is like a precursor to hypertext, she’s asking your brain to create and recognise the analog hyperlinks (I guess many poets do this in a way but hers seems very intentional).

So I now feel like I’ve confirmed a starting point to trace this kind of writing back to and that it is a valid notion. I am also relieved that it seems to begin with the Modernist, since that is as far back as I wanted to go when exploring the influence on the contemporary poets.

Crawford ends his chapter on Modern Cybernetics with Hugh MacDiarmid:

Yet the experience of reading MacDiarmid’s mature poetry of knowledge is often like surfing on the Internet or moving on impulse through a vast database or hypertext system. We are given aesthetic access to computational textures and the ever-reforming patterning of hypertext knowledge long before computers themselves reached such a level of sophistication, and before non-classified access was possible….Our acquaintance with computer systems makes us readier to accept this work whose form seems in constant flux as it reconfigures repeatedly along new nodes of connection. (p217)

Spirit Machines - 26 March 2012

The main focus on technology in this later collection of Crawford’s occurs in the last section of the book, with the same title. These five poems deal with the death of the poet’s father, they are about grief and trying to find the Spirit in the Machine, which echoes both Arthur Koestler’s ‘Ghost in the Machine’ and Mamoru Oshii’s animae ‘Ghost in the Shell’. They are far more personal than those in A Scottish Assembly and the poet’s relationship with technology has become far more complicated than in his earlier work. Technology is seen as a saviour of knowledge and culture – a memory keeper but it also betrays his father. The reader can see the poet struggling with a love/hate affair with technology. Crawford is not only mourning his father’s death but also the way his work as a bank teller was usurped by computers, or ATMs. There is a play on the word computer going on. Computers were originally people who made computations or calculations.

The Poems:

CD ROM explores the idea that memory can be captured on disc without change, which infers that our brains’ memories are corrupt and apt to change or re-arrangement.

Time and Motion has the repeating phrase ‘Please insert your personal number’, which ironically (and I’m sure intentionally) illustrates the impersonal nature of ATMs compared to his father’s work as a bank teller. The valuing of efficiency and speed over history and people.

Liglag has ‘screens dark as carrion crow. Databases that are like exhausted land… I key them into this computer’s empire beside a wall fatigued with hard work.’ Cyberspace is simultaneously preserving and dematerializing Scottish place names.

Similar themes appear in Deincarnation, Crawford lists the names of computer pioneers, references Silicon Glen – ‘laptops siphon off the glens’ but then the tangible becomes spirited away. ‘Digitized blue, massive Roshven/ loses its substance, granite and grass/ Deincarnated and weightless.’ Digitalization is robbing the hard landscape of its reality. By making virtual versions of things they become unreal – ‘Cybered in a world of light’.

In Alford the internet is a framing device (through the windows of a Scottish mans). It begins with a virtual tour of Scotland and its history then telescopes to the personal and specific. His father’s face ‘was a fresh roll of papyrus’ on his deathbed – the opposite of digital. The play on mans and mansion from the endlessly opening internet to the bible and the notion of Heaven containing many mansions compares ethernet to a heavenly aether. ‘There is no here. Here goes.’ The physical become virtual.

A Way In to A Scottish Assembly – 22 March 2012

I’ve put off starting a bit. Partly because of the academic year starting at the same time as Writers & Readers week in Wellington and partly because I just didn’t know where to start with such a big project. Lynn Davidson suggested a method of starting – to do a close reading of some poems by Robert Crawford. So I did, I’m glad.

I found a copy of his first collection A Scottish Assembly at the Vic library and I already had a copy of Spirit Machines and his Selected Works as Kindle editions.

There seem to be two important themes running through Crawford’s work – 1. Scottish nationalism (language & politics) and 2. Technology & Science. Both of these things pop up time and time again in his work and often in the same poem, as if they can’t be separated. I started with the first poem in the first collection. The opening poem of A Scottish Assembly is ‘Opera’:

Throw all your stagey chandeliers in wheelbarrows and

move them north

To celebrate my mother’s sewing machine

And her beneath an eighty-watt bulb, pedalling

Iambs on an antique metal footplate

Powering the needle through its regular lines,

Doing her work. To me as a young boy

That was her typewriter. I’d watch

Her hands and feet in unison, or read

Between her calves the wrought-iron letters:

SINGER. Mass- produced polished wood and metal,

It was a powerful instrument. I stared

Hard at its brilliant needle’s eye that purred

And shone at night: and then each morning after

I went to work at school, wearing her songs.

Immediately Crawford sets up a political division between North and South, High Art and Low, Rich and Poor. Instead of doing her creative work under a chandelier his mother sits under an eighty-watt bulb. As well as comparing her creative work to that of an opera singer he compares it to his later work as a writer. The sewing machine pedals Iambs, regular lines, it was her typewriter with wrought-iron letters.

I like this, the mentions of domestic technology as used by a woman. I like that he connects the creative process of sewing to words, through writing and singing.

Crawford would have been about 40 when he wrote this collection – about my age. I like that this is the first poem of the collection, it begins with a beginning – childhood – and sets up both his driving themes instantly. He’s very political, nationalistic.

The whole poem is made up of only 4 sentences; 3 long and one short in the middle. The long sentences run like a sewing machine, the short is almost staccato like a typewriter.

There’s no rhyme or regular form to this piece but it does have repeating sounds of R, W, T & Th, which echo the sounds of the machines mentioned. I’d love to hear this poem read with a Scottish accent!

The title is clever, by calling it Opera he doesn’t have to explain the first line’s ‘stagey chandeliers’ and it also infers that his mother’s work was an opera of sorts and just as important as any stagey opera.

After reading this I started wondering why technology is so important to him and why it is intertwined with his ideas of nationalism. I was hoping to find some similarities with how technology seems important to New Zealand, that we are both early adapters and, to some extent, underdogs.

Perhaps they feel remote like we do, perhaps it was about boosting jobs? From Wikipedia:

“Scotland was one of the industrial powerhouses of Europe from the time of the Industrial Revolution onwards, being a world leader in manufacturing industries, at the time, which today has left a legacy in the diversity of goods and services which the Scottish economy produces, from textiles, whisky and shortbread to aero engines, buses, computer software, ships, avionics and microelectronics… heavy industry declined in the latter part of the 20th century leading to a remarkable shift in the economy of Scotland towards a technology and service sector based economy. The 1980s saw an economic boom in the Silicon Glen corridor between Glasgow and Edinburgh, with many large technology firms relocating to Scotland. Today the industry employs over 41,000 people. Scottish-based companies have strengths in information systems, defence, electronics, instrumentation and semi-conductors.”

So that explained a lot, Crawford’s technology is all about social and political change, well-grounded in people and nationalism. I never realised the importance of technology in their history. I guess the American modernists were in a similar position in that progress in science and technology was considered hugely important and patriotic at the time, it was tied up with the wider national identity and emotions. A Scottish Assembly was published in 1990.