based on words and blank slots
object had pretty much ceased
‘a punchy line about a vegetable garden.’
never not visual any more than not aesthetic
the part of the piano which holds the
imaginative excursions, wind-swept lovelies
hidden confusions, dialogia. everybody
wants china to fail. critically – good
flour can make good bread, swinging-
and-kissing, chunks of language.
go for your life, my love. Alice safely
sleeps upstairs. nice to see you: Homage
to Ted Berrigan
doubting thomas wished to touch his lord
—tables, trees, stones, etc.—
the sugar as tasting, the stone as touchable:
persuasive adjectives are the controls of ingression &
a control is necessarily the control of progress.
instances of “smell and a pat” reminds a dog
—roughly, the body or part of the body—
of their embeddedness in all-embracing fact,
the testimony of sense or memory, my dream of
hovering, this specious present.
ebenezer the ghanaian is contacting the radio broadcaster
to say, ‘there’s too much on islam’, & ‘what else is there?’
then, as though a direct response, a story about a metal-head
monk who praises jesus in front of iron maiden fans in rome.
now, if you still need proof, try measuring the angles of
furniture built into a triangular room—try to prove that there
are angles, firstly, & then try to fit them into a number. & now
say, for example, that there is a need for these three numbers to
be split again or rejoined: what I mean is, if you boil an egg you
can’t unboil it, so who’s to say that a number can be subtracted
or added with no undoable effects? I’m interested to see if you
could find an angle, or if there are numbers, or eggs, or islam.
one, the invariableness of the basic terms of interconnection
— the connectives — (or manage or arrange or value)
two, the invariableness of the unspecified entities indicated
by the symbols for ‘real variables’ (or relieve or better like)
three, the meaningfulness of the patterns of real variables
thus connected (or not at all as nearly once compared)
four, the irrelevance to the argument of the completion of
meaning infused into the basic connectives by the unspecified
real variables thus connected (or made it to be gained).
namely, the meaning as in assumption one is not in fact
invariable but the variation is irrelevant (or finally as lost).
a note on the composition of these poems: last year, nick, fred, pat, george & i started a project in which we each recorded our voice for a full day — our waking hours — & then transcribed all the language we spoke. recently, nick & i used each other’s sound recording & transcriptions to compose a series of poems — both written & sound-based — for a collaborative performance at a night called ’semaphore’, curated by jes tyrell & kathy gray. the following are eleven poems that i wrote, using nick’s language as source material. some syntactical & grammatical liberties were taken, such as altering verb forms & in some instances adding or removing prepositions, but other than that, the language is as-is.
**
i.
but surely – if there’s no democratic resolution
– they’ve got more chances of getting chicks.
bodily memory: you know, just, the continual,
ongoing fucked up-ness of the world. is the issue
with the language, or with what he’s saying?
fuck fuck fuck! fuck! cunt! I always, I always,
sort of, need spinach, really.
ii.
or you tend to always fail. but what do you die of
when you get hung? after my second dark ale, I
push it into that category of being, you know.
you should have that threshold too. ‘shut up with
your nationalism,’ & ‘if you don’t want to, call this
number.’ it’s ridiculous, the absolute archetype of
the rightwing do-si-do. trying to start some
guerilla-vandal thing, a sort of famous new line of
cistern toilets, I think I said, that I, just, by the
end of it, I absolutely despised it.
iii.
and oh, I just crumpled inwards, inwardly,
you know: but it’s been so relentlessly
propagated that everyone else propagates it
as well. you know, and like, you forget it,
you know, because, well, I mean, some people
don’t forget it, sometimes I forget it, but every time
you see him you just recognise – you can’t have a
maverick anymore.
iv.
I’m just wandering around like a spare testicle.
that’s why I don’t have a special pen, because I
never keep a pen for more than five minutes. so
we’re going to have horseradish cream? jesus
christ. we’re going to recolonise an island for the
pièce de résistance. I always look for you up this
alleyway, it’s only natural for it extend across all
of the options (I’ve got a few ASIO connections,
I could make a few calls.) pho is really pronounced
‘fa’.
v.
so are you going to have to go back & confront
these gangsters? yeah, you know, bow ties, yeah.
um, ‘eat my pussy and suck my dick’. I would say
a contingent factor in a dynamic system, because
I’m an irrational being. it’s that manipulation that
successfully manipulates the middle-class liberals.
nice theory, not sure it really works in practice:
it’s much more serious than jerry bruckheimer.
vi.
eggplant & coke? I might go to the pisser.
you know what I like best about being scruffy
& unshaven? we don’t leave our pants in the
lounge room. after you enter the world, you
get a complimentary pronoun: it’s a reverse
tadpole type of thing. headlights turn off when
you turn off the engine, you can’t drink &
talk at the same time.
vii.
a blender goes in handy, when I go home.
you have to change the way it looks to meet
the function, just absolutely critique the shit out
of commercial industrial design. the train line
goes under it, or next to it, & they aren’t automatically
linking to all of the pages. ‘call for writers’ – piss off.
there’s definitely an edith piaf in there, white wine
& chicken stock & then heaps of olive oil. that kind
of, almost, hyper-intimacy that you can get
with animals, & with humans, I suppose.
viii.
he’s worried he’s getting too much oestrogen. this
is something you’ve got to work at, I see torrents
of water running down a road, literally shot by a
sniper. & then some smart arse journalist goes,
you know, ‘oh,’ & ‘gangsta I’m the only authentic
thing in hip-hop.’ feeling like a pork frenzy right
now, I just found one & had my way with it. I
scoured town, for that, for my sick little baby.
yeah, yeah, that’s right – I’m amazing at the gallic
shrug. I don’t mean your dad, I mean the collective
dad. they have to change the direction they’re moving.
ix.
& then lachlan lee throws his burger at you. you
should never underestimate the role of the catholic
church: it’s all fandangle & shit. ‘women are not
goats?’ anyway, so no potato, no capsicum. mute
that shit. get your priorities right. I’m going to burn
some of his books in retaliation. I wouldn’t
burn the Erotica book, though, it’s howard’s
most valuable mythology. I saw jesus in a sugar
beet field. he said, he said, he was out in auburn.
x.
rudd & gillard just played straight into a new
language; I have to say that I can think of
another way of reading it. they go there &
then they leave, & then they start attacking
& being really combative & saying ‘donnez-
moi,’ ‘give me.’ it’s obscene. that’s why need more
people like wet, silly cat, some sort of cartoon
character frown, ball & chain. that’s standard
rhetoric, you know – it is just a small bullet wound.
xi.
it’s a long way between sending people an email
& raiding them (I wasn’t referring to us, baby.)
he stood there & very calmly whispered in his
ear about a copy of machiavelli. we been shakin’
our hips together, using film conventions, sitting
& licking, there’s nothing better. self-satisfied,
smug emotions? I love you too, but I mean, who
are you talking to, what were you expecting? it’s
just a funny sounding combination of two words.
there are things about you that are almost unbearably
good, like how when you say ‘sphinx’ – to describe the way the cat
rests upright over your arms – you merge a ‘c’ with the ‘sph’
sound so that it is almost germanic, as though you were saying
the word ‘sphincter’ with a textural emphasis – sphincter is indeed
not a casual word – (both words come from sphingein, meaning
‘bound tightly’ – though not, it would seem, from german but from
latin via greek – and this is a very nice connection to discover here)
or – and this is a sensual choice to make – you say the word
‘demon’ with a small thuddy ‘d’ on the end, as though it were
too much a temptation not to echo the nub of ‘almond’,
itself a nicely finished sound, a plug, a stop, a cork.
a stocktake of things to say, listed on newly sheafed piles
‘it is my right, my rite, my desire to speak like a goat’
there are few reasons rather than this one to need to use a noun
i’m thinking here of the german language, and childhood.
there are many very impressive ways to groan a point across
like to say, ‘yeah, but… i just… but…’, that last word like a drummy
punctuation, a thing that was always discouraged in language,
putting it on the end like a plug or a soapstone book-end, shaped
like a pelican – one inverted leftwards and one rightwards – and
then falling into someone’s arms and speaking right up into
their throat (as if you were their voice box) and saying very unusual
and untruthful things, like ‘no!’ and ‘i didn’t!’ and ‘i don’t know!’
i’m remembering a time when i had thought the words
but had never said them aloud – on the subject of these
things that should be said from time to time, or never –
and then it came the time to say it and the words were
a texture i couldn’t understand – like okra or fibreglass –
and you were very quick to laugh at the performance of
me – mouth crawling with hairy grubs – trying to say small
so-and-so things to you
i’m typing this with dully blurred eyes.
maybe it’s better this way, not to focus
like blades on words and their form and
the way they knit tightly into permanent
positions. this way, they are light and grey,
shifting imperceptibly and making sluttish
geometry.
(i don’t know whether i’d consider last night’s
dinner a real dinner. it’s a classification that
troubles me greatly.)
‘What I call “feminine” and “masculine” is the relationship to pleasure, the relationship to spending, because we are born into language, and I cannot do otherwise than to find myself before words: we cannot get rid of them, they are there. We could change them, we could put signs in their place, but they would become just as closed, just as immobile and petrifying as the words “masculine” and “feminine” and would lay down the law to us. So there is nothing to be done, except to shake them like apple trees, all the time.’ Hélène Cixous
when i was researching my thesis last year, i came across a lot of writing about gertrude stein in terms of her sex. a typical analysis of stein’s work is that it is in opposition to the patriarchal conventions of narrative and poetic language: that is, it is does not follow the structures of a meaning-full*, rational, psychological language. it is not penetrative. instead, it is unknowable, disjointed, paratactic, mysterious, demanding. people who have written about stein, particularly her contemporaries (and mostly men), are dismissive of stein’s work and proclaim it unskilled and nonsensical. often, criticisms of her work are carried with a suspicion of her sexuality and her state of woman-ness. her work is understood to codify the sexual revelations of her relationship with her partner, alice b. toklas. this sensuality, a bodily joy drawn out in an oblique, discrete writtenness, can be ‘translated’ to represent a clitoris, a lip, an orgasm, or the opened-out sex of a woman’s body, but the translation is entirely interpretive. her work does not suggest a single interpretation, it offers the possibility of countless interpretations.
perelman says of stein, ‘her words displace all others’. her language is without an anchor, a vanishing point or a blueprint, it is radically geometric, radically decentred and radically spatialised. if public discourse idealises a static notion of a woman, then stein disputes this ideal radically. her work is not ‘feminine’, it is not emotionally revealing, psychologically self-reflexive, confessional, passionate or domestic**. i can imagine that it would have been an uncomfortable experience for the conservative male critic of the twenties to read stein, her language would have come up against the very limits of his linguistic understanding of a woman. his ideas of a woman’s softness, maternalism, emotionality and desire would have been challenged in an uncomfortable way. in this instance, the impossible nature of a woman’s sex as compared to a man’s ideal brings about a discussion of a woman’s art work and the failing of her femininity. by which i mean, when someone doesn’t ‘get’ stein, and they feel alienated by her poetics, they are likely to make a connection between her work and her person, her work and her sexuality.
any description of stein’s physical self is similar: she was broad, short-haired, stern-faced and wore dowdy smocks with strange indian sandals. her appearance apparently terrified many men, who saw her as a large, demanding, shrewd and loud woman whose ‘femininity’ came in a scary brand that borrowed from the certain traits of ‘masculinity’ that men felt empowered by. anne carson writes that her voice was ‘like beefsteak’, and that hemingway was scared of the sound of her laugh. her femininity, most likely fetishised by men in terms of her sexuality and her relationship with alice, was just as scary because it was unknowable, untouchable; it didn’t need a man. (no doubt a lot of her critics were flummoxed by the idea of what women actually did together, too).
though i am interested in the sex of stein’s work (as i am interested in the sex of all poetics), my own reading of stein is concentrated on the language’s surfaces, rather than its perceived inside-spaces and underneaths. whether or not there are clitorises and open thighs patchworked througout her language is not of particular concern to me. if i find, in the small poem-sentences of her work, a phrase which elicits a sensual response, then i enjoy the moment and move to the next. it is being present in her language that makes the experience of reading stein an experience of bodily and poetic pleasure.
* i use the word meaning-full here rather than meaningful to avoid the qualitative associations of the word ‘meaningful’. instead, in this instance, i mean quite literally, ‘filled with meaning’. this distinction was used by lyn hejinian, and i take it on with much appreciation.
** here i mean that her work does not conform to the historically gendered notions of femininity, it does not ‘express’ a desire for passion and an emotional interest in domesticity in the ways in which women are expected to. i am not implying here that stein is disinterested in desire, passion and the domestic space (tender buttons, for example, is a meditation on the poetics of domesticity), but that her interests are beyond the normalised understandings of women’s role in language (and in life).
