Ian Hamilton Finlay, edited by Ken Cockburn

THE DANCERS INHERIT THE PARTY. Early stories, plays and poems

Reviewed by Marjorie Perloff

Times Literary Supplement, April 29, 2005, p. 26.

HILL

Top

where, by Finlay’s own account in a letter to Ernst Jandl, the words contain “the idea of a spinning-top, the hill as a clean, green top, the sense (which one has on a hill) of the world spinning, the sound of a spinning top, and the wind on the hill, as if one felt the world spinning in space.” Nor does a previously uncollected poem like “Lucky,” which begins, “I first read Tolstoy’s ‘The Snow-Blizzard’ / In a wooden shed,” quite prepare us for Finlay’s later terse, riddling inscriptions, like the following set of nine words, carved on a tripartite wooden bench, built around a large old tree at Little Sparta:

THE SEA’S WAVES

THE WAVES’ SHEAVES

THE SEA’S NAVES

Here the metaphoric relationship of waves to corn sheaves swaying in the wind is clear enough, but in what sense are the waves “the sea’s naves,” given the decenteredness of the wave image? The relation, as so often in Finlay, is not visual but etymological: nave comes from the Latin navis for ship, and it is the ships that occupy the sacred watery spaces of the poem.

It is the short stories of the 1950s. rather than the early poems, that prefigure Finlay’s later verbal-visual emblems and epigrams, and their publication here is thus of great importance, not only to Finlay aficionados, but to anyone interested in the concrete, conceptual, and minimalist poetry of the later century, especially that of Finlay’s American friends Lorine Niedecker, Louis Zukofsky, and Robert Creeley, the last of whom the foreword to the 1996 edition of The Dancers. In the magical “Boy with Wheel” (1953), for example, the first-person narrator is walking home from the village one evening:

It was just growing slightly dark. Owls were hooting in the brown fir-woods on the one side of the road; and bats, those nocturnal swallows, were swerving and diving above my head. On the other side of the road, beyond the sharp dyke, the fields were filling up with blue dusk. It seemed to be trickling out of the woods like smoke from a wet or dying blaze.

The writing seems reminiscent at first of D. H. Lawrence, but the blue dusk and hooting owls provide the backdrop, not for a particular incident or even an individual meditation, but for the poet’s fixation on a particular inconsequential object–a detached bicycle wheel, used by a neighboring village boy to keep himself company on the long, dark way home:

It was an ordinary silver-coloured bicycle wheel, rusted in a few places

but with all its spokes seemingly intact. He had it gripped on the end of a few feet of fence-wire that secured it but did not interfere with its running. The wheel was, in a way, like a dog on a rope. There was no tyre on it, of course.

The wheel becomes a kind of icon: both man and boy, isolated though they are from one another, are fixated on its silver circle spinning in the dark and later by the scrunch the wheel makes when their journey hits a bad patch of road. In what is essentially a Cubo-Futurist composition, a painting, say, by Balla or Malevich, the bicycle wheel is juxtaposed to the “four rubber-shod wheels” of a car coming along the road, and emerges as mysteriously more pristine: “It was as if we had the first wheel of all, the archetypal wheel,” one that sets the pace for man and boy as they come down the dark hill to their respective cottages, exchanging no more than a few words about their anticipated dinners. Yet however powerful the icon, which calls to mind Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, this silver object is discarded as soon as the boy reaches his cottage:

He birled it once or twice round his head, and when he let it go it rose at a steep slant and hit the top of the bank. That was where the house had its rubbish pit. I heard the wheel strike on what was probably an old rusted kettle or a basin in the pit. Simultaneously, or an instant after, the back door of the house was banged shut.

End of story. No plot, no characterization, and not even the sort of epiphany we find in Finlay’s better-known story “The Sea-Bed,” in which the “great cod,” spied by the young hero on a fishing outing, becomes an emblem of universal beauty. Indeed, “Boy with Wheel” is more lyric than narrative, discriminating as it does between natural and mechanical, movement and stasis. The moment recalls Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”: for example, “When the blackbird flew out of sight, / It marked the edge / Of one of many circles.” It is that edge we witness in such minimalist texts as “THE SEA’S WAVES / THE WAVES’ SHEAVES/ THE SEA’S NAVES.”

Like Little Sparta, with its unique mix of the bucolic and the violent—with urns that turn out to be World War II hand grenades or a garden plaque depicting a machine gun that bears the words, “FLUTE, BEGIN WITH ME ARCADIAN NOTES / VIRGIL, ECLOGUE VIII,” Finlay’s seemingly pastoral idylls are tinged with menace. “The Blue-Coated Fishermen” (1953), for example, presents a perfectly ordinary fishing expedition, undertaken by a twelve-year old boy, as a journey that cannot quite evade the squalor of daily life. The boy travels on a dreary Glasgow tram, wearing “Wellington boots which he hoped would be taken for waders.” He is too poor to have the right clothes, the right bait, or the right “burn” to fish in. To reach the world of woods and fish burns, for that matter, he must rub shoulders with the unpleasant townspeople en route to football games and films: «The boy watched the platform in the titled mirror on the stairs; and when he looked the other way he saw the oily hair of a standing passenger squeezed against the glass, leaving round dirty marks on it like a ball.»

The sense of ugliness and revulsion recalls the James Joyce of Dubliners, but Finlay’s realism quickly gives way to fantasy. “The tram moved with a choppy motion like a boat in a swell,” and a bit later, “it pointed its bow into open country.” But—and here the perspective changes again—there is nothing bucolic about the fishing scene that follows. “The clean water had soiled . . . .Under every stone there were ants, and twisted white roots, but not a worm was to be seen in the dry soil.” Still, the day is saved by the encounter with the “blue-suited fishermen” of the title, who not only give the boy worms and a sip of tea from their billycan but six of the little trout they’ve caught, threaded together on a string so that “They looked like coloured clothes pegs dangling on a line.” The boy is elated, but his joy is soon tempered by the return trip on another crowded tram, past picture-houses and factories, railway-bridges and mean streets. Back at his tenement, he proudly shows his mother the trout he claims to have caught, but she is only annoyed that he’s so late. At story’s end, the boy is alone, pouring himself the stale tea left for him, and “improving” it by adding more leaves until the brew thickens, resembling “the real thing” that the blue-suited fishermen had put on offer, the “good tarry brew!”

“I hate autobiography and biography both,” Finlay declared in a letter of 1983 to Yves Abrioux, “because it seems to me that much of one’s life is only nominally related to oneself, yet the telling of it seems to assume that it is telling about the person in a ‘true’ sort of way.” Yet again and again, the poet’s early stories concern young fishermen and farmers, whose families have, like Finlay’s own, fallen on hard times. Fishing, in these tales, is less a trade than a mental escape from the poet’s nagging, small-town poverty. In “Advice from the Author,” an impoverished young artist, living on a farm, is invited by a well-known author to make some illustrations for his new fishing book. The narrator promptly decides to accept the invitation and arranges to go to Edinburgh to meet the famous man. He borrows the train fare from his shepherd, changes trains three times, and “Having only seven shillings in the world I thought I would take a taxi to the well-known author’s house.” It turns out to be the wrong house, and when the right one is found the famous author seems skeptical of the narrator’s talents. His main conversation seems to consist of advice to the young artist as to how to catch the right tram back to the train station. Once home, the artist proceeds with his work and dispatches the drawings to his patron. Now, as in most of Finlay’s stories, comes rejection:

His reply came back by return of post. He liked the drawings, but there were

just one or two small points that had him worried. One of these was that I had drawn him as a small boy, looking about nine years old, whereas the manuscript clearly stated that he was only seven and a half. A second point was that I had sketched him looking down into a trout pool, but would the reader, he asked me, be quite sure to know it was a trout pool? Where, in fact were the trout?

This line of reasoning is, of course, entirely absurd: no “drawing,” no matter how “realistic” can convey such “facts” as the physical difference between a seven-and-a half –year old and a nine-year-old boy. Whatever the reason, in any case, the publisher turns down the drawings. Yet—and this is the Finlay signature as we come to know it in such later visual poems as Homage to Malevich, whose not quite square shape (thirteen letters down, fifteen across) parodies Malevich’s famous Black Square in its variations on the words lack/block/black, “defeat” is greeted with a sigh of relief. Who, after all, really wants to produce these tedious illustrations? Realism, Finlay is implying, cannot be his métier. Thus the visit to Edinburgh has been a kind of blessing. for “I still had several halfpennies to jingle in my pocket, owing to the famous fishing author’s most helpful advice about the tram.”

Survival, not success, is one’s proper aim. The old man in “Over the Short Stones” who steals the rabbit snares from the keeper of the estate where he lives and then sets his own traps for the rabbits, is triumphant when he hears, “in the middle of the moonlit night . . . the shrill, white squeals of a rabbit caught in a snare.” “For several seconds his eye on the black stew-pot, he listened. Then, smiling tenderly, he lay down and at once fell fast asleep.” “Tenderly,” so inappropriate in the context of stealing and killing, is the word that gives this story its particularly piquancy.

Finlay’s plays have a similar, but lesser, appeal. Ken Cockburn sees these experiments in theatre as marking the transition between the stories and the “public” sculptures and garden works: “Inevitably,” he writes, “the writer’s isolation is ended, as he is forced to work with a range of people to realize the work. When produced, it exists not on the page but in the world; in the theatre, or wherever the radio is found.” But in another sense, drama, dependent as it is entirely on the speeches and gestures of a set of characters, is a more traditional form than the “poetic” short stories of the fifties. As Finlay wrote to J. F. Hendry:

Drama? Well, I wrote a one-act play, but it was a disaster. For one thing, it somehow came to include 2,000 sheep. Also, I required a page of stage-directions in order to make one character say—for instance—‘pass the salt’. In short, I like to say what is going on inside the people, rather than to make it appear.

Cockburn, who quotes this disclaimer, admits that the play The Estate-Hunters, for example, is less effective than the story on which it is based, “Straw,” in which impoverished father and son pretend to one another to be looking in the real estate adverts for a country property and follow these up with occasional out-of-town forays, knowing full well that they can’t afford to move anywhere. In the short story, the poignancy of this charade is heightened by understated narrative: in the end, the boy knows perfectly well that his father’s nightly notation ritual has no consequences. In the play, on the other hand, the action must be represented in speech, and so Finlay gives the son the somewhat saccharine concluding lines, “There’ll be a little country cottage . . . we can afford to buy quite easily . . . Oh, Daddy, Daddy, it will be so wonderful! We’ll never—neither of us—sleep a wink all night . . . for the rises—of the trout!” And the final stage direction reads rather conventionally, “[The stage is dark. The window throws its golden light on their faces. They are smiling and crying. Slow curtain.]

The second play, Walking through Seaweed is a somewhat schematic dialogue between two young girls, one crass and common-sensical, longing only to window-shop and go to the pictures, the other, a dreamer who describes walking barefoot through seaweed as the ultimate sensuous experience. But the third, previously unpublished play, “The Wild Dogs in Winter,” is a minor masterpiece. The scene is a village bar on a frosty night; the seven “characters” are expressionist abstractions: Publican, First, Second, and Third Domino Player, The Smith, The Woodsman, and–the only character who is named—MacLeish. The drama revolves around a horrendous tale reported in the local paper about two wild dogs (one a mere puppy) that, having destroyed fifteen sheep, remained at large for a fortnight before their shepherd owner could catch and shoot them. The Woodsman, the play’s naysayer, contests this account, insisting, to the disgust of the others, that “It was the shepherd shot the old dog but the young dog—it was shot by MacLeish.”

Just as the controversy becomes nasty, a small man carrying a book enters—the very MacLeish named by the Woodsman. Questioned by the latter, he admits to having killed the puppy, but when one of the Domino Players exclaims, “I bet it was savage!”, MacLeish responds, “Savage . . .? No . . . No, it wasn’t . . . No . . . Not a bit.” Was it on a rope? No, not at all. According to MacLeish, “It was . . . just lying in the corner in the kitchen,” and “I just whistled . . . you see . . . and it came along with me . . . as good as gold. Of course, you see, it was a wee bit scared . . . It knew it had done wrong, and . . . And well, you see, it saw I had the gun.” And the small man exits into the night, leaving the others totally confused and the Woodsman triumphant that the local paper got the story wrong.

What does it all mean? Is the paper “wrong” because it didn’t name MacLeish? Or did MacLeish tell a tall tale to appear important? Or was the dog in fact innocent, in which case MacLeish has committed a bloody crime? What is “truth” in such a context? On a sundial plaque Finlay designed in 1983, we read the inscription, “TOO MANY LAWS / TOO FEW / EXAMPLES,” followed by the signature of the French Revolutionary hero Saint-Just. Finlay, we know, has always preferred the examples to the laws—examples that infuse everyday life with its curious estrangement, its mystery already in abundant evidence in these youthful stories and plays.

Marjorie Perloff

REVOLUTION OF THE (VISIBLE) WORD

Marjorie Perloff

published in Experimental, Visual, Concrete: Avant-Garde Poetry since the 1960s, ed. K. David Jackson, Eric Vos, & Johanna Drucker (Amsterdam-Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996), pp. 335-344 and Symphoposium, passim.

The reference here is probably to Hugh MacDiarmid’s notorious dismissal of Finlay’s experiments in Concrete poetry as having “nothing in common with what down the centuries, despite all changes, has been termed ‘poetry’.” [2] Extreme as this sounds, it is still very much the Establishment attitude to a poetics that takes the visual (or aural) dimension of language as seriously as its semantic one.  Even the more “advanced” poetry anthologies like Paul Hoover’s Postmodern American Poetry (New York Norton,1994)  and Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1994) do not include Concrete poetry like Finlay’s, perhaps because such texts would be too expensive to reproduce side by side with more “normal” linear poems.  The result, in any case, is that visual poetics has become largely the domain of the museum–the exhibition of artist’s books, installations, art objects, laser works, and so on–rather than of the poetry world.

But there are signs that things are changing.  For even as Finlay and his fellow Concretists are dismissed as “not poets,” we are witnessing a quiet revolution of the visible word.   The innovations of the Concrete poetry movements of the fifties in Europe and especially in Brazil are now entering the poetic mainstream.  Small presses like tailspin, meow, leavebooks– all three of these from the Buffalo Graduate Program in Poetics — are turning out dozens of visual and even tactile chapbooks like Kenneth Sherwood’s TEXT squared , Michael Basinki’s SleVep, and C. S. Giscombe’s “Two Sections from Giscome Road,” not to mention the electronic transmission of texts via RIF/T, which now has a thousand subscribers.  From Susan Howe’s dramatically charged typography in Articulations of Sound Forms in Time (Awede 1987) and Eikon Basilike (1989), to Christian Bök’s “fractal” poems and poetic fractals in Crystallography:  Book I of Information Theory (Coach House Press),  to Johanna Drucker’s desktop production of the computer-generated and hand-painted Narratology (both 1994), “one image against another” is “creat[ing] something more subtle than thought,” as Ian Hamilton Finlay put it.

Meanwhile, Finlay’s own particular tradition is being carried on by his son Alec’s publication of Morning Star Folios.   These are collaborations between artists and poets, published since 1990 in annual series of four issues. [3] At the outset, the folios tended to keep the verbal, visual, and even musical, media distinct, as in Heiligenstadt,  Friedericke Mayröcker’s 1978 poem, illustrated by Wes Christensen’s painting An Mein Herz (1987) and packaged with the score to Brahms’s Intermezzo, which is the key to the poet’s narrative.  But soon Finlay was bringing together artists and poets who seemed naturally in sync, as in the case of Robert Creeley and Sol Le Witt (Fifth Series).   A beautiful little folio juxtaposes, on its vertical front panels,  a Le Witt abstract design in black and white with Creeley’s poem “Echo,” which begins “Find our way out / no doubts / or in / again begin.”  The panels then open to reveal on the recto  another composition (c. 15” square) by Le Witt, a hexagonal maze that is the perfect visual “echo” of Creeley’s poem, especially the stanza “Spaces wait / faced / in the dark / no waste.”

The same series contains Ian Stephen’s and Will Maclean’s witty and charming artist’s book  A Semblance of Steerage.   The only non-verbal image here is Maclean’s semi-abstract cover drawing of a stylized rudder, captioned “you learn to trust the keel that’s under  you.”  But can we so trust?  The eight accordion pages that follow each have three bands of text (top, middle, bottom of page).  The top band is a one-line title (e.g. “RUDDER for a  Mirror,” “RUDDER in teak,” “SEAN’S TILLER,” “BEN’S RUDDER,” “RUDDER to share”).   The center of each page has a little free-verse poem, usually in the form of a  proposition, as in

a semblance of steering
provides procedure

or:

an offcut rudder:
counterbalanced curves
for a wee keel

where “counterbalanced” describes the intricate sound structuring –itself a “semblance of steering”– of /k/ and /iy/ phonemes.  The bottom band provides a kind of commentary on the other two: for example,  the lineated text above is followed by a sentence in italics with justified margins: “(this rudder, claimed by my son as it fell from another rudder under construction, has not yet found a vessel).”  But on the final page, the page has only a top and center band:

SKIN of varnish

the sheen that seals the finish
on the diving blade

where the pun on “finish” provides an apt conclusion to the book’s nautical fantasy.  The “diving blade” is what remains.

In Series 5/2 (April 1994), Alec Finlay gives us a remarkable collaboration between the Chilean poet Cecilia Vicuña and the Scottish Edwin Morgan called PALABRARmas  / WURDWAPPINschaw.   The work consists of two square (5”) pamphlets, the first containing an explanatory letter Vicuña wrote to “Eck” (Alec Finlay) together with a glossary and short poetic fragments.  As the glossary suggests, Morgan provides the Scottish equivalents to Vicuña’s Spanish paragrams.  Thus the title “PALABRARmas,” an elaborate paragram on the power of the poet’s words (“palabra”= “word”, “labrar” = “to work”, “armas”= “arms”, “más”= “more”), becomes, in a sly variant of the complex original, “WURDWAPPINschaw” (word weapon-show).  Or again, the frontispiece couplet, quite formal in its articulation–“Las palabras desean hablar / y eschucharlas es la  primera labor!”  — becomes the down-to-earth “Wurds wahnt tae spik! / Lisn!  thon’s yer furst wurk.”

Vicuña’s letter to Eck, partly written in short prose paragraphs, partly in phrasal units, separated by small cruciform designs,  deserves to be cited at some length:

In the Mayan letters Olson speaks of ‘their leavings’, (what the Maya left), but in     Spanish ‘sus dejos’ would be ‘their way of speaking’, the delicate manner in which a     mother speaks to her child when no one is listening, a form of being in sound. . . .

And it is the double aspect of this ‘leaving’ that interests me, the fact that it is     practical (utilitarian) and transcendent (full of other possibilities) at the same     time.

This is how I see our own words.  Perhaps because I see Spanish from the point of     view of Quechua, and vice-versa, a word for me in any language is multidimensional,     and is charged with ‘hidden meanings’ as we can see. . . .

Vicuña’s real obsession with verbal “leavings,” she explains, began in London in1974, where she was living in exile after Pinochet’s military coup.  “This time it was a new set of words”:

ver  dad
dad  ver
(truth: to give sight)

And she explains:

Edwin Morgan’s translations (so close to cons te llation,
latir is the beating of the heart)
is more than a trans
it is an installation in the language of poetry.

“More than a trans”:  this surely is the point.  Open the second folio and you find, on facing pages, the words:

conrazón hericht

Delete the “n” from “Con razón” (“with reason”) and you have “corazón” (“heart”)– an echo, perhaps, of Pascal’s “The heart has its reasons,” as well as a representation of the familiar opposition of heart to head. In Morgan’s Scottish version, the “hert” (“heart”) contains withn itself that which is “right.”  But the isolation of “ich” “(German “I”) personalizes that heart, even as “her  t”  points back to Vicuña.  But then her paragram isolates the “co,” suggesting that these poets are truly collaborators.  Not a translation, as Vicuña has said, but a “constellation” or “installation” in the language of poetry.

Suceeding pairs like “pensar / paiense” (with their play on “think,” “sorrow,” and “weight”)    carry on the poetic dialogue.  And Morgan has an uncanny way of letting the Scots dialect draw out the implications in the Spanish words.  On the final pages,  Vicuña’s

permite

el dón

with its installation of “pardon” in the midst of gift-giving, finds a nice echo in Morgan’s

gie

for

gie

where the “gie” (“give”), repeated twice, takes precedence over the need for forgiveness.  Where Vicuña stresses the need for “perdón,” Morgan’s response stresses the gift itself.  A gift evidently “for” the reader.

If Vicuña and Morgan are still producing a fairly pure Concrete poetry, most visual writing today–I am thinking of Bruce Andrews or bp nichol, Karen Mac Cormack or Susan Howe — uses the resources of spacing and typography, phonetic spelling, rebus, and paragram so as to contest the status of language as a bearer of uncontaminated meanings and to question the one-way linear flow between poet and reader.  In this sense, visual constellation (the lamination of the paradigmatic onto the syntagmatic axis) can produce what Steve McCaffery has called a “carnivalization of the semantic order”   A stunning example of such “language graphics,” is Joan Retallack’s new book AFTERRIMAGES (Wesleyan, 1995), whose very title (“AFTER” + “RIM” + “AGES”) announces the possibilities latent in the most ordinary of words.

Newton, Retallak reminds us in her frontispiece, citing a reference in the OED, “suffered for many years from an after-image of the sun caused by incautiously looking at it through a telescope.”  But, speaking in the voice of her phonetic alter ego “Genre Tallique,” the poet revises this linear Newtonian notion:  “We tend to think of afterimages as aberrations.  In fact all images are after.  That is the terror they hold for us.”  Indeed, after– as in Wallace Stevens’s “I do not know which to prefer / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes,/ the blackbird whistling / or just after,” a passage which becomes, in Retallack’s scheme of things, “After whistling or just_________”– is a basic, perhaps the basic “form of life” today, where ever image, event, speech, or citation can be construed as an “afterthought” or “aftershock” of something that has always already occurred.  Hence Retallack’s witty example (on the same page) from the Manhattan Project physicist Victor Weisskopff, who recalls that the explosion of the first atomic bomb was accompanied by a Tchaikovsky waltz, coincidentally being broadcast by a nearby radio station.

The AFTERRIMAGES sequence which gives the book its title has 34 pages, no two of which look alike.  Each page serves as a kind of afterimage for the other,  the lamination of citations from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lilly C. Stone’s English Sports and Recreations, or from “Genre Tallique” herself, creating a set of tantalizing “language graphics.”  Here is page 7:

[figure 1]

The poem’s perspective is that of a “sage of the ectopic eye” (line 8).  Displacement–again, afterimage– is the order of the day.   “Vol low on radio”:  the initial chiasmus followed by a rhyme, rather like the pop song that may be on the air, might be glossed by Wittgenstein’s remark, in Culture and Value, that “Everything we see could also be otherwise.”  Fire (in Tangier?  in the mind?) is announced not by smoke but by an alarm, the alarm gives rise not to sound but to smell, and the tenselessness of dreams and mathematical formula is, in a “logical series of unsolicited occasions,” compared (in a tiny afterthought) to the genrelessness of poetry.  And now, unsolicited, the lines just proferred are written through (in the manner of John Cage, one of Retallack’s chief mentors) to yield phonemic and morphemic after-echoes.  The vowels e, I, and o are extracted from the displaced or “ectopic” eye in a spatial layout that makes seeing difficult.  Then the “ec” is extracted as well, “topic” (not named) taking us back to the “topic” of pre-Socratics and Augustine above.  But finally there is only the “s” of “occasions,” and that “s” also attaches itself to “ec” in the preceding line to give us an X.   “Unsolicited occasions,” it seems, produce the most interesting new poetic formations.

Page 21, by contrast, has only a tiny morphemic afterimage–

”s[     ]ent” with its visual reference to “silent”:

[figure 2]

Here Retallack uses spacing and citation for effect: “your c u p I s l e a v I n g a r I n g o n my  t a b l e”  comically deflates the distinction (the obsession of two-year olds) between what’s yours and what’s mine.  For one thing, if we’re seated at my table drinking, say, tea, “your” cup is not really yours at all, because it comes from my set of dishes.  Then too: “cupis” suggests “Cupid,” “cupidity,” “cupiscence,” and so on.  And cupidity is  just what “you” are being accused of by the owner of the table.  From here on the poem plays with mock reference, as in “RHYTHM and FORM,” which might be the title of any one of a dozen handbooks on poetry, Old English saga and Latin verse, the language always running away from its source as in “ad sequitur” instead of non-sequitur, and the “moping virgins”–or are they “versions”–of gendres/genres. There is always space for revision: the word “virgins,” etymologically quite unrelated to “versions,” does sound like it.  Then, too, a virgin is known by someone’s version of a particular woman’s history.  Might this virgin have aversion to sex?  The message, in any case, has been “s[     ] ent.”

Each of Retallack’s poems plays with such versions, with the revisions of what she calls in one of her ideograms (p. 20) “c r e e p I n g l o g o p h I l i a.”   I conclude with a meditation on coincidence (p. 11):

[figure 3]

Although she draws on remarkably varied sources  (Chaucer, Mrs. Charles H. Gardner, the Vatican Library Book), all the “events” in Retallack’s sequence go together; they really are a “thicket” (that etymologically rich word) of   “CO………………..INCIDENTS.  But the reader of the above poem can never know “what really happened”; Uncle Herbie’s ominous “last words,” for instance are followed by the line “but only one etc.”  where “one” (as opposed to “ten” in ten o’clock” can refer to almost anything.  Perhaps he only had “one hour to live” or even “one day”;  perhaps“only one” person heard him, and so on (“etc.”).    William Carlos Williams wrote a poem called “The Geometry of Trees”; Retallack’s poem refers to that title, embedding it in the phrase “nature’s soft geometry.”  But line 7 also has an interesting repeat: “nature’s soft” is grammatically like “geometry’s trees,” with the further anagram on ress and strees, two morphemes whose juxtaposition produces the afterimage stress.

“Strees” seems to contain the “riddle of the three sleeves.”  And that riddle actually makes good common sense: nature has a rinse cycle, culture a spin cycle.   But what is it that comes out of this washing machine?   Another “thicket” in the form of “TIGHT   LITTLE    GREY    CURLS.”   Those cycles embody the “rin” / “pin” of nursery rhyme:   Rinny-Tin-Tin swallowed a pin. No wonder the after-echo in this poem is

cycl

GR

The cycle has run down, ending with the mere growl of “GR.”

I am often asked whether poems like these can be recited, whether the poetry reading is still relevant, and how Retallack (or comparable poets) go about reading such texts.   Clearly, the poet (or whoever recites the work) can activate what is a visual / musical score.   But it may well be that oral performance cannot render the full pleasure of a text like the above.   My own sense is that Retallack’s are poems designed to be seen, that they require a viewer  who will take in the visual play of the lines “natures / rin/ secycle”, “culturess / pin / cycle.”   Not quite concrete poems (for here not every word or phrase participates in the process of visualization and materialization), these “afterrimages” represent the turn visual poetics is taking in the age of hypertext, the age of “random access mem-O-rees” (12).  It is a turn that suggests a genuine transformation of poetry-as-we-have-known-it.