Of Flies and Monkeys

Jacques Dupin

Introduced and translated from the French by John Taylor

(Bitter Oleander Press 2011)

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In 1871 in Charleville when Rimbaud, preparing to decimate two thousand years of poetical ‘tradition’, sat down to write his ‘letter of the seer’ to Paul Demeny, he was about to include, among other demands on the imagination, that the poet of the future would use a language “of the soul, for the soul, encompassing everything, scents, sounds, colours; thought latching onto thought and pulling. The poet would define the amount of the unknown awakening in the universal soul in his own time: he would offer more — than the formulation of his thought…”A call to poetical arms that, in many ways, has been sought out and (consistently) answered by the poetry of Jacques Dupin (1927-).

This book comprises three collections: De singes et de mouches (Of Flies and Monkeys, 2001), Les Mères (Mothers, 2001) and Coudrier (Hazel Tree, 2006), all of which, in truth, are fused of the same semantic world-surge, image-fusion, language-mesh. The poetry of Dupin, at its most intense and vaulted pressure of ink and blood, continually uproots us, gnawing at the heart, until we experience them: the sudden salmon upsurge of selves, his teeming and punctuated mind-flows, the reversed resurrections (his flesh zipped up and then unzipped to reveal exposed syntactical bone); amid a carnival concentration and concise pictograms of poetical sense, we feel at once the jolt and the jarring of the pulley-system of his sentences, those which Rimbaud envisioned for us all when he wrote that poetry would one day be “thought latching onto thought and pulling.”

And then. Ever. We wage war with our tongues. We act like

monsters where we are in love. And it grinds to a stop… and it gets

going again… Nothing is ever rewritten. Nor is death. Despite the

crucified bat. On the wood separating us.

(Mothers)

Of Flies and Monkeys

Dupin writes on the other side of logic, in a place where the survival of our personality is preserved not just by the mere clothing of our flesh, but by poetry itself, which to the reader will seem at times no more than a mutilated half-tone, a snatching of a fragmented cosmic music. Thus any haemorrhage of self, within logic, is essentially the most neutral ‘event’ to occur inside of this poet’s body, as his imagination, a painless and artificial cicatrisation, begins to reform, like ice, across the inter-dimensional terrains of his soul to glass-up and cut-off the real world, and subsequently allow him to access his counter-mind, the to and fro of the dead spaces opposing him, his nature, and silence. It is in fact Dupin’s holiest vision, that of silence, which is both a magnificent and useless outcome to everything. In every poem, he chips and chisels away at silence as if it were a giant ornament lodged deep inside his brain. When he stops occasionally (eternally?) to look up he sees only his own newly sculptured mouth, and thus is forced to smash it, that or drape it in his own shadow and hide it away. For Dupin isolates anything that might be perceived as transparent or savage, or both. The French thinker Georges Bataille wrote “The object without objective truth is the most awesome I can imagine”, a statement that could also be applied to Dupin in his ontological search for a counter-idol or anti-idol, a clay-born equivalent to subtract from man’s image in God; yet to overcome such a congenital de-population of self and poetical deficit in the body, Dupin, like any true poet, has no other choice but to draw from the scabbard of his own oracular body the blade of a newer non-religious ‘I’ and to wield it in a fresh fictional dimension, to pass into and beyond even the polar time-zones of Rimbaud’s imagination, to reach a place “Bien après les jours et les saisons, et les êtres et les pays” (“Long after the days and the seasons, and the beings and the countries” — ‘Barbarian’ from The Illuminations).

The undoubted success of these translations of Dupin’s poetry are based on John Taylor’s decision to not in any way ‘anglicise’ Dupin — anglicisation being a most repugnant activity currently practised by far too many writers/translators who sometimes even have no real or thorough knowledge of the original language they ‘translate’. The word ‘version’ (versus ‘translation’) of course has opened up the door for any ‘hack’ to give it a go, hence we are often forced to endure the barbarous and elongated CVs of poets who claim they can translate in around 10 to 15 different languages. In 1961 Robert Lowell’s Imitations left a rank stench that can still be located in many a pedagogical classroom, likewise from Pound’s (though often brilliant) foreign mutilations. Rimbaud had already warned us: “So many egoists proclaim themselves authors; there are many others who attribute their intellectual progress to themselves!” Only when translators begin to celebrate an indirect, formalized and intellectual DEFEAT, do they locate a quantifiable dislocation to advance into the mirrored corridors of another language. Yet the practice of ‘version’ has snipped the tendons of the true translator in mid-stride and has set back the ART many years. The approach of each ‘professional’ poet is to apply his own crass apotheosis (as a dumb linguist) to the mouth-movements of any puppet unable to understand the transaction taking place. The puppet (the poet being translated) is forced then into the flim-flam formula of an after-world of inarticulate, false and fettered movement; to become no more than a death’s head doomed to re-exist behind the ogling and anti-familiar mask of the hack, the all-pervasive creator of these ‘versions’. John Taylor on the other hand seeks only to re-align the poet in the most imaginative and accurate way possible when using an alternative language. The German poet and thinker Gottfried Benn pre-empted this issue many years before when he wrote: “There are no transitions from one language to another except in the way they meet, look at each other, and then look away.” With regards to the translations here Taylor is applying only the most delicate of (palimpsest) bandages to the original wound of Dupin’s language, in such a way as to allow the infection of the English language to be displayed as an outbreak of only the mildest contamination, and for this they should be celebrated.

Within these three sequences, Dupin has produced a zero-language that is potentially as significant as dumbness or deafness to an individual, for it extracts any loose philosophical and mental disorder from all cognitive processes, relying instead, once language has discovered its deepest and most primordial root, upon only an “unlimited blossoming…” At the beginning of ‘Of Flies and Monkeys’ the poet uses a quote by the American Objectivist poet George Oppen which states that ‘A poem is not made of words’, and here is an apt and future truth applicable to both Dupin’s work and to any genuine poet of the 21^st century, for the next poets to arrive will be forced to sling-shot their bodies beyond the reach even of the imagination and/or language (with the heart packed like ice with Dupin’s “godless finitude”) where the poet will begin to dust into view his own vertebrae upon a still-to-be discovered planet. The most astute and ultra-modern of critics will be intuitive enough to HEAR these poets arriving, via the supersonic whistle of the breath leaving the lungs of the former ‘poets’, those now operating on a level beyond the nominal associations of words. This will not be any kind of a new anti-poetry, a Dadaist or Burroughs-like cut-up or syntactical card-trick, no, merely the imagination will come to seem like a horrible twin to the biological cell, a new petrified mathematics of sensation that will assert time, while disclaiming History, recalling instead only the Calvary of the poet’s own will as it blood-drools and oozes itself free of the cross of ALL duplicitous creation to leave us with only a set of murmuring and (already) aborted sentences:

They are shipwrecked voices. Dragged by the moon. Pushed back by

the tide. By the precession of the crime: the dagger of the illiterate angel. Who

slits my throat. From the chanting of their name…

(Mothers)

Dupin is persuading us to walk the long and constantly splintering plank of his own sentences, as above us the pendulum of his mind swings between the pauses in our silence and his own; for he still clearly believes in poetry and has not yet decided, whether furtively or indignantly, to drop the great solution for our human race that poetry still occasionally feigns us into believing that it can be; after all, in literature, as Dupin states “the apocalypse stone / burns away on the meadow grass / from there I dictate to the stars / with a flexible idiom”. And this is of course the sound of nothing stirring, the sense of God’s face, like a bubble, rising to the surface of the original swamp of nothingness. Nothing moves and everything clots, blood and piety loosen. While all of the time we hear the irreversible maelstrom of Dupin’s imagination hiss and crackle inside of the glass-jar of his mouth. The American poet Wallace Stevens in his poem ‘Of Mere Being’ wrote of the ‘palm at the end of thought’, a “palm” that Dupin seeks to re-glove in the flesh of his own spontaneous hand as it moves across the page. Dupin, like Stevens, believes in the superbeing of the imagination, that if somewhere, someday it STOPPED imagining, then nature itself would turn in on itself, forcing the birds to grow ill from flying, the fish also from swimming, as the human ego, a satellite, it would begin to crash back down to earth, disrupting on its descent entire illogical stratospheres, before falling victim to gravity, to gamma-rays, solar electricity and all other earthly weather terrains.

The congenital and acute interconnectedness between Dupin’s work and that of the artist Alberto Giacometti cannot be over-estimated and is, in many ways, the truest synthesis in object and mind that this poet will ever possibly attain. It is as if Giacometti’s figures, lunar-travellers, have stepped free of the atmosphere of Dupin’s own imagination as it burns up, to leave them uncharred, blanched white and waiting in the studio. They seem to arrive as if guardians fresh from Dupin’s own “territory of words, sensations…” Thus Giacometti locates his own counter-idols and Dupin’s also, the half-erased trace of a figure of objectivity, which as an artist, Giacometti of course could not live without, reproducing these mental races each day as they permeated his brain. The only alternative for this artist when not ‘creating’ would have been to carry a dust-phial inside his jacket pocket, in place of them, as he walked the streets of Paris. Likewise Dupin sought out the “verse-worms” of his own forms that he watched slip like fine dust from his palms every day he did not pick up the pen. In the work of Giacometti, Dupin, in both his art criticism and poetry, found a necessary and contemporary imagination to shadow and voice-box his own end-of-the-world chimeras — those set to arrive at the end of every epoch, thought, idea, sensation, universe, to confirm and enact the great vision of the French art thinker André Malraux who in Psychology of Art wrote that on the Day of Judgement it would be “statues rather than the past ways of life” that would “represent mankind before the gods”. A conjecture Dupin undoubtedly agrees with:

Instead of the triumphant body that was dreamt, dismembered:

what is neuter, blank, absolved

(Mothers)

Dupin is a poet who when taking God’s hand in one sentence, will then amputate it in the next, for all is constantly cancelled, dispersed, lost and refound and then surrendered to, so as to leave consistently only an animal neutrality in the places where his mind was, the now crumbling chalk-cliff of “between-ness” and/or the “insane prayer below the waterline”, what “makes the stained-glass light / of your ‘soul’ eaten by flies / nothing — / nothing — unless / the bottom / of the dead gods’ / goiters” (Of Flies and Monkeys). For true originality of course is, as Dupin proves, the most utterly lawless thing, the biological equivalent of blood and bacteria inventing for themselves a new disease; ‘speech’ Dupin is telling us is a signpost that never points towards the mouth, but to the spaces outside of time and matter, although even that is only really another kind of time and matter. He explains it perfectly in an earlier poem: ‘Opened in few words / as if by a slipstream, in some wall, / an embrasure, not even a window / to hold down at arm’s length / this dark region where the path gets lost / at the end of all strength one naked word.’ (from ‘Opened in Few Words’ — translated by Stephen Romer). The natural ‘ruptures’ or ‘breaches’ (brèches) that occur in the poems of Dupin are similar to the ones that appear in time/history when a generation, or ethics, or both, begins to fail, when modes of writing begin to atrophy in the minds of readers, when “cognition as effect” (Nietzsche) begins to gain a grip on man’s consciousness, crushing homogeneity and reducing everything : existentialism, semantics, physiology, dialects, religion, silence and exegesis into a stone-clock ticking, mere neon-estrangements from our true human nature. Yet ostensibly after suffering such a series of inner and teleological shocks, man will usually register his response in language, the word etc. before land-holding the shadow of God and looking for an alternative birth-certificate for all primordial and ancient bones not his own: “to switch off the vibratory / syncopation of meaninglessness” (Of Flies and Monkeys). For the real poet, when unsure of what the “insane signs” are telling him, will always seek quickly to abandon the ‘idea’ of the megaphone that God, from behind the clouds, once spoke to man through; preferring as Dupin does to let it rust in the most terrible, timeless, deathly and intense vistas of his mind — vistas echoed via a hollowed-out language, constantly split and fragmented, as John Taylor comments upon in his subtle introduction to this book: “What impresses the reader encountering his work for the first time is Dupin’s ‘parole déchiquetée’, a poetical discourse that is ‘shredded’, ‘torn to pieces’.”

This book deals also with death, and from verse to verse, we frequently find the poet attempting to re-set the stone-dials on the side of tombs back to ‘LIFE’. But can language in anyway alter the sensation of mortality? The answer is of course no, so that even a poet like Dupin at best can only really leave us with a series of intransigent, fragmented and metaphysical footnotes to accompany Mallarmé’s never-to-be-written “Grand Livre”. It is no surprise perhaps that a writer often cited alongside Dupin is the Romanian-born poet Paul Celan, who suffered most from the protracted mental pressure of death. Celan himself seemed to bear witness to this when he translated into German a collection by Dupin La Nuit grandissante (The Growing Night), shortly before his death in 1970. And in the ‘narrowest’ poetical sense there is clearly a doubling-up and simulation between these two poets, certainly in their use of negation and paradox, and in the expounded way that they have both ground down ‘identity’ into a fine white dust; what Celan described most beautifully as the ‘inmost recess of himself’ or when addressing another of his most insoluble ‘yous’ wrote “Thinner you grow, less knowable, finer”, which to some extent was mirrored by Dupin’s equally ineffable lines “as long as my words are obscure they breathe” (The Embrasure, 1969).

Rimbaud wrote of the way that poetry “will no longer take its rhythm from action; it will be ahead of it. These Poets will exist!”, which has only occasionally been the case. But if experience is to be antedated by language, then the imagination will be forced to give up the human form and tremble anew, like a volcano, with its bodies-in-the-making; for like Dupin himself wrote “we are the non-scene and the non-object of a gravitation of insane signs”, which, to this poet and to some extent, in the work and vision of Giacometti, can only allude to the detached and sometimes brutal attempt to “ruin beauty” (Bonnefoy). French poets such as Bonnefoy, Jaccottet and Dupin take it upon themselves to communicate the fracture of the inner state, to locate not just the many ‘signs’ that point us from the void towards its ‘echo’, but towards the “tempo of the signs, the gestures” (Nietzsche). Dupin follows the signs that lead him towards silence, to that place on the other side of the moon where time’s stylus, upon a rock, can be heard still scratching… His sentences are nonetheless what might well be the last images to run through the head of a polyglot before dying; likewise if the lunar figures of Giacometti could be given a ‘voice-box’ then they’d probably utter the moods, possibilities, convulsions, travails and the mutated creative-systems still to be explored in Dupin’s head. When discussing language and the poets’ relation to it, the British poet W.S. Graham wrote “There is the involuntary war between me and that environment flowing in on me from all sides and there is no poetic outcome”; and if Dupin is to sustain the duplicitous anti-environment that he himself has created in his poems then he will have to continue to re-open those beginnings on the outside of his mind; to remind himself and us of those territories where he has so successfully colonized his own ‘I’, where continually he has freed himself from his own body, by pulling the ripcord of a secondary, more poetical lung. For Dupin has risen up from the animal base of the human form, has looked into the eye of the ego, has seen its pupil dilate, then close, and has survived to let us see, too. And for that alone, perhaps, we should be grateful.

Paul Stubbs

(other book reviews & essays)

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More information:

blackheraldpressblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/06/of-flies-and-monkeys-de-singes-et-de-mouches/

http://www.bitteroleander.com/books.html

About Jacques Dupin’s poetic language (by John Taylor)

www.cerisepress.com/03/07/jacques-dupins-poetic-language-a-process-of-becoming-of-blossoming

Various articles in French

remue.net/spip.php?rubrique90&var_recherche=Jacques%2520Dupin%252A

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John Taylor is the author of the three-volume Paths to Contemporary French Literature and Into the Heart of European Poetry — all published by Transaction. A prose writer and poet, his latest book is The Apocalypse Tapestries (Xenos Books, 2004). He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Sonia Raiziss Charitable Foundation to translate Georges Perros and Louis Calaferte. Other authors he has recently translated include Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Philippe Jaccottet, Laurence Werner David, and several modern Greek writers. He lives in France.

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(first published in The Black Herald, issue 2, September 2011)

“What will be required to make this happen is, among others, an end to the ‘creative classroom’ (this Anglo-Saxon invention—while a rarity in the major cities of Europe—was a trend started in the USA that then moved on to become a profitable plague that has completely saturated the universities and schools in Britain), or the ‘pedagogical trough’ as Rimbaud once so eloquently put it. The ‘poetry’ workshop must first, like a disused church, be boarded-up, closed down, and its ‘teachers’ forced once again to endure their own imaginative ‘slave-labour’, to pick up and use the pen (again?) as something akin to a pneumatic drill to smash and break up the rocks and gravel of those languages still trapped within the sediment of our ‘ancient’ brains. What is clear though is that these ‘facilitators’ are only capable of providing artificial respiration for ‘pupils’ unable yet to understand the imaginative measure of their own breathing.

It is only when writers have learnt to free themselves of the ‘necessity of success’ (George Oppen) and its self-satisfying burdens that they begin to attain the necessary animalistic courage to endure whatever-next-arrives and to abdicate responsibility for what they write before writing. What, at the beginning of the 21^st century, we require, is some kind of a new neural and/or glossolalic linguistics, one in which all foreign languages are assimilated into their word-streams, a syntactically insinuated pseudo-grammar on which all spheres of the modern mind might, at the same time, interact. “

To read the editorial (et pour lire sa version française)

Quartet for the End of Time
Mark Wilson
Editions du Zaporogue, 2011

a review by Paul Stubbs

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In the period after the First World War Ezra Pound reached the conclusion that England as a central core-place of the creative arts was over, had become in fact “uninhabitable”. This was the moment of not just a creative liberation for Pound, but in many ways, a significant decision for the future writer and reader of poetry since then in that country. For with this decision Pound shifted the poetical carcass of the greats from underneath him, upturned like a rock the skull of Shakespeare and all other sacred names to allow the insect-images of a larger world beyond to scuttle out into the open. In 1945, in an American prison-camp near Pisa, Pound might have remembered his own words from Canto 80:

Chesterton’s England of has-been
and why-not,
or is it all rust, ruin, death duties
and mortgages…

Quartet for the End of Time

Pound’s sudden disaffiliation and disgust with the English sensibility was accurate and more importantly a pivotal moment of perspicacity for the future of poetics in that country which, as he put it, “cares only for the transient, trivial things” and he warned England that “some other mouth (perhaps another country) might be as ‘fair as hers’.” And it is that ‘other country’ which a modern poet such as Mark Wilson has continually focused his eye on, thus allowing himself and his work to move away from the maddening insularity and limp aesthetics of England that Pound grew so weary of. But when the latter bemoaned the arrogant and self-serving obtuseness of English poetry he brought forth in spirit at least what the critic G.S. Fraser depicted as the “British Poundians” — a somewhat ineffable group of poets who comprehended and felt most the great technical innovations Pound invented, his highly serious principles of the forms of the imagination, which has allowed a poet like Wilson to in-tear the membrane of his own poetics.

It might also be said though that any one reviewing this book should already be 70 or 80 years out of date, for Wilson, like Pound in his first long great poem Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, is attempting to write poems still “out of key with his time”, striving “to resuscitate the dead art/ of poetry; to maintain the ‘sublime’ in the old sense”, and in the shadow of this tradition, he is consistently successful. But it is also medieval literature and especially Troubadour poetry which have clearly had a huge impact on Wilson’s imagination, the Troubadours who of course lauded love, especially that of the unrequited kind. The poet writes of it in the beautiful poem ‘The Garden’, drawing forth his own lady out of the shadows:

So: in a cirrus of foliage,
utterly choked,
stands the apostolic gateway.

 Diffident, you reach out a diffident hand.

It is a hand you sense that will still be reaching out in a century’s time, statue to statue, a stone-glove to stone-glove, feigning… The only outcome naturally to any such unrequited love-affair is acknowledged at the end of the poem: “So I must accept your promulgation of refusal as if / it were a gold-sealed papal-bull / issued to some maligned free- / thinker in a more-or-less: comparably / soulless age.” Appearance is a Mask is a theological notion is an ‘icon’ that Wilson seeks to explore to the full, but rather it is only a ‘mask’ in this book that struggles to feign the faces of the secondary, subsidiary dummies of Wilson’s own imagination, those he depicts as the ‘god-men’, who, century after century, in attempting to de-mystify evil, philosophize instead the charred rib of Satan back into its original match and turn Hell into a mere spark again, before fire and flames take back their sustenance from the ashes of all post-biblical bones:

…the lacerated ones,
survivors of apocalyptic. Holy
stragglers inching across scorched
plains to distant Ariel.

Wilson’s Cross is, today, infested with eschatological woodworm. His church constructed of matchsticks and unable to withstand the weight of the papyrus that first created it. It is the guilt of sin squeezed from what Janos Pilinszky depicted as the “disaster-centre” of the modern world that this poet feels compelled to confront, the tragedies which have ruined nature and constructed an arch in time which man has called History, under which the unforgiven and the damned are unable to ever walk free of. Wilson writes of the death camps and of those who crawl still uselessly through the mud of man’s misinterpretations, of the crazed dictators (“Herod Hitler Pol Pot whoever/ working the damned crowd” — Massacre of the Innocents), those who in the end are still attempting to plug Hell’s blood-geysers with their thumbs, and failing. Wilson’s poetry is clearing the path for a better understanding and rationalizing of the aperçus and metaphysical puzzles of theology, especially when he questions how his ‘Messiah’ fits into it all. He writes of religion not as any kind of an intellectual impasse, but as a basis for both an ancient and modern reformulation of Christ in piety, for either we see an ‘idol’ as an inspired prejudice to overcome, or merely, like Wilson, we shape that idol from the clay of our own intuitive understanding of theology. The only question therefore to ask, say, a theologian, priest or (in this case) a poet is where we can exactly find a greater understanding of Christ. Is it amid the grinding and mechanical histrionics of a priest at mass? or merely by attempting to pincer Christ’s own body between two praying palms, or simply as this poet has attempted, by making him once more part of a modern ‘theatre-of-necessity’ (‘Ecce Homo’), a Christ once more capable of by-passing the institutional ego of man in the church, and whose death may or may not ‘…make tomorrow’s papers’ but who will of course go on existing regardless.

Religion has failed and must naturally go on failing, for until the universe is swung free of its own newly discovered strings, every planet by man explored and/or the energy of science by God de-energized, a poet like Wilson will have to go on adjusting those props that have, so far, been our only understanding to the cultural-systems of belief that neither ourselves nor God seem truly to recognize. Wilson is left to grow accustomed to a reality that:

It is left for me to remove
            sensitive steel nails, apply fragrant
herbs and opium vinegar to disguise the
smell and the pain respectively.
(Midlands Crucifixion)

The time-zone for Christ’s wounds will elapse of course only after the duration of religion itself has expired, when man locates a suitable, prosthetic scab of his own, to return the cross back onto the arms of those aborigines who first shouldered its branches clear of the forest. In Tears and Saints, E.M. Cioran wrote: “God benefits from the peripheries of logic”, a notion that Wilson might agree with I suspect, especially when he asks himself: “for who really knows the way to Earthly paradise, who can show / me the real road to / celestial cities?” (Midlands Crucifixion). The poet is also concerned with the Armageddon, which according to the Bible is, in brief, the site of a battle during the end times, variously interpreted as either a literal or symbolic location. The Messiah will return to earth and defeat the Antichrist, then Satan will be put into a bottomless pit or psychological abyss for one thousand years, known as the Millennial Age. Which leads us to wonder what religious poetry is exactly, and if Wilson’s poetry can be described as such? yes, if what we mean by ‘religious’ poetry consists in fictionalizing a super/future self in a time before death as well as after; if it is also true that Pascal’s ‘grandeur of things’ can be accounted for in words, and if today and in the future a poet like Wilson is prepared to admit in his imagination to finger-tipping the Braille of God’s name in the dirt of every known and unknown planet in the universe, and not just our own. In his poem ‘The Circumcision’ he states clearly what some aspects of religious allegiance mean to him “A wounding as the elect’s / badge, the tribal scar of / holy belonging”.

Wilson’s approach to revealing God in language has something to do with how Geoffrey Hill suggested it in his great early poem (Shiloh Church, 1862) when he writes “Whose passion was to find out God in this his natural filth, voyeur of sacrifice, a slow / bloody unearthing of the God-in-us”. And it is this “unearthing” that Wilson himself feels most comfortable in:

So this is you: the resolute-implacable,
surrounded by jutting beards
enmeshed with

 religious offal…

  (Ecce Homo)

In another poem ‘The Maker of Masks’ in which he states “God is dead? / No wonder he has / become so religious”, it is the sound of the atom splitting and seeping blood, Christ’s. In dealing with both the historical Christ and his own actual living Christ, Wilson still, it is clear, believes in his answers, even if it involves tipping the biological mask of his own human face to reveal him. In the poem ‘The Unclean’ we witness the cold and insoluble mental struggle through the contamination of the world that has reduced sin to something like a bacterial reaction, to merely “Sinning microbes literally / crawling all over us”. But for Wilson, like for Wallace Stevens, to remove any of the theological players from the imagination would be a disaster for the creative mind, for just as the atheist only feigns his interest in the news of the celestial death of Christ, likewise this poet realizes what Stevens best summed up when he wrote “The death of Satan was a tragedy / for the imagination.” (Esthétique du Mal). The ultimate task of any true ‘religious’ poet is not to accept mortality, while accepting the mortal negation of theodicy to survive the duplicity, the haunting of both the phantom of God and doubt.

It is also through the celestial pitch of music that God is sought and sifted. Cioran wrote: “When we did not have a name, we must have heard everything. Music exists only as remembrance of paradise and of the fall.” Music of course can annihilate time and space utterly, to leave its final ‘note’ but a teardrop rolling down the cheeks of the deaf, as all human error is reversed and Christ’s crown of thorns turns back into flowers. “A serenity of movement without / movement. Your opponent all but a whiff of nitrogen. Just the chance to fade gracefully. Your / atoms’ supreme dance de-escalating / into a kind of anti-choreograph.” (‘Tabula Rasa’, after Arvo Pärt). Wilson obviously delights in such oddly subversive responses to music, as if imagining what the metaphysician hums when propounding the Alpha and Omega of the soul. It is clear that for this poet the act of composing music is akin to a God creating a planet, amid the profound absentia and luminous vassals of the universe, or what the French poet Paul Valéry so clearly revelled in, the “sensation of being everything and the certitude of being nothing”.

In this collection, the poems concerning music are undoubtedly among the very best, such as the opening one ‘Tabula Rasa’ the music of which, as suggested to me, is powerful enough to lend strings to stones, make sonorous and re-tongue the mute, while reconstructing a cubist gramophone from the bones of the human skull. In this poem each note appears like a strategic chess piece in an end-of-the-world game between sound and silence:

 And then the descent-cum-ascent.
That interminable endgame, elision of
lengthening scales world without end.

Music for Wilson at least seems to transcend the atom, re-birth the ancestry of anyone who truly hears, otherworldly enough in its impact to glass-jar the foetus of all listening beings, while suspending and emptying the soul as if a palace or great echoing hall to reveal now only abandoned celestial statues wearing our own ears as headphones. For human personae seems in this poem (as in maybe all great pieces of music) once more reduced to mere possibility, splitting our personality into a flute of bones, a nerve-instrument to transfix our limbs into a time in which sound itself is regulated by the self-dials of experience, the suddenly turned down volume of the ringing of the tinnitus caused by the Big-Bang inside of man’s head, leaving God then as the only conductor to “Espouse Kineticism” and to leave “indefatigable personae always / five or seven moves ahead of / yourself, your invisible / opponent.” When Nietzsche wrote “I cannot differentiate between tears and music” I am sure he was talking of a response that Wilson might also be drawn to. Mark Wilson’s poetics are not so easily summed up though, for while religion, music and time often combine to create a chrysalis this poet tenaciously seeks to climb free from, such grand notions for poetry offer up here a hybrid compulsion to challenge the reader, to induce what Wallace Stevens sought in creativity, to reach a place where the poet becomes a “appreciatory creator of values and beliefs” (Stevens). For in so finishing this collection, the reader should maybe check out Pound’s own lines when he asked himself: ‘Will people accept them? i.e. these songs’. The answer is undoubtedly yes, for Wilson is hell-bent on continuing what Pound confirmed is the writer’s task, to pre-date and reorganize the requirements of the age like in his poem ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’:

The age demanded an image
of its accelerated grimace,
something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace.

And maybe, like Wilson, other poets will follow in such a singular vein, those who might also comply with his visions of the universe “through kaleidoscopic time” so that we the reader might learn to be refracted also “slowly beyond our wildest / contrapuntal / visions”.

Paul Stubbs

(other book reviews & essays)

**************************************

*

Another review, by Lisa Thatcher

to buy the book

*

(first published in The Black Herald, issue 1, January 2011)

On July 2^nd, 1914, the inaugural issue of Blast magazine was published in England, a project begun by the writer Wyndham Lewis, who hoped it would cement the reputation of the new ‘Vorticist’ movement – an English-speaking response to the new Italian avant-garde and futurist movement founded and preached by Marinetti. The editorial of this first issue of Blast declared: “Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish ourselves”; and while our intent for The Black Herald does not mirror this rather outlandish aim, its birth is, in some way, similar to the Blast one: a response to what has gone before. For me it certainly is, having tired of the insular and island-bound verbiage of my own country’s literary magazines and the secular way in which the majority of the ‘contributors’ have seemed at times ‘handpicked’. The ‘mainstream’ exists in all countries and cultures, but in England especially it has become something of a ghost-ship, one shipwrecked onto the rocks of its own self-delusion and mediocrity, completely unaware of its soon-to-be obsolete passengers.

To read the editorial

(published in Critical Survey, May 2005)

Stubbs is another kettle of fish. You need to read him with the sort of intelligent attentiveness you bring to a reading, say, of Donne.

The Theological Museum is an astonishing debut. I have to admit, however, that, as much as I may admire Alice Oswald, I found her foreword disconcerting. Back-cover quotes recommending the poet to us are fair enough. But it is disconcerting to have someone, however well-meaning and enthusiastic, tell you at length, before you can begin to find out for yourself, that “These are great poems.”

That said (maybe I am just as guilty here), this is indeed a remarkable collection, original to the point of idiosyncrasy, tussling with language, much in line with Eliot’s pronouncement that the poet “must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate, if necessary, language to his meaning”. The result is not an easy or comfortable read but it is certainly a challenging and exciting one. It is quite impossible to do justice to the poems by isolating bits of them but perhaps these opening lines give a flavour:

‘Pick up your pen, as if it were a scalpel;

            open up each day your own insides, remove

            first any bones left over of the vertebrae

                        of the selves that never quite

                        managed to survive your drafts.’

            (When Writing a Poem)

.

‘Once I used to pray and hoped something

            of my entire torso would be reborn; a limb maybe,

            hoisted suddenly above me. But it wasn’t.

            (Prayer)

 .

            I am already in front of you and

            far behind.

            I shimmer a mirage of spaces,

            or like a cathedral, where inside you will find

            only other more sacred spaces.

            (Eternity)

Stubbs’s is a poetry complementing the paintings of Francis Bacon, the plays of Pinter and Beckett; poems-on-the-page that look like those of Marianne Moore, a voice as distinctively original as the later W.S. Graham, its presiding spirits, if we look to epigraphs, European.

Oswald praises Stubbs for his disregard of ‘anything that smacks of poetical correctness’ and, whatever that means (and I am not really sure), it certainly implies something alien, even hostile to the contemporary tradition. Stubbs’s museum is an imaginary one full of fragments (‘these fragments I have shored against my ruin’) existing in a present of largely lost meanings. He takes on giant themes, playing great earnest metaphysical games with religion and ways of perceiving the world. In this he resembles Philip Pullman in his ‘Dark Materials’. He is an ambitious poet of real originality.

On arriving in Paris from the provinces and clearly faced with no other plausible reaction, Arthur Rimbaud urinated on the manuscripts of establishment poetasters and summarily destroyed the ‘poetic’ Parisian lodgings the Parnassians had provided for him. In our own era, where endless droves of exhaustively honed ‘accessible’ poems preen themselves centre stage and rafts of  plaudit-festooned collections drift downstream to be sieved by deluded panhandlers against the indifferent mesh of history, we look for someone to at least follow Rimbaud’s rebellious lead, in spirit if nothing else. Fortunately there are stirrings abroad and signs of fresh voices coming in over the ether. One of the most ambitious and unsettling is Paul Stubbs. His first collection ‘The Theological Museum’ has already initiated a few darkly luxuriant ripples through poetry circles, catching the attention of high priestesses Carol Anne Duffy and Alice Oswald.

The poetry of Paul Stubbs is the antithesis to the general outflow from the poetry world depicted above. One thing is sure; here is a poet unlikely to ever leave the stubborn stain of a few narcissistic lines culled from a vigil over a sleeping lover’s form in a well-appointed pension in Umbria. Like a broadside salvo he crashes onto the well-buffed, ordered decks of English poetry. Stubbs’s pirate ship bristles with unruly syntax and is powered by a genuine visionary impulse, in his case a desire to shake something fresh and bold out of the fusty symbolism and creaking rhetoric of religion. Stubbs, as Alice Oswald observed in her foreword to his first collection, appears locked in a pitiless struggle with language, shaking it to keep it awake, harrying it to process the unrefined materials of his imagination.

                         But beyond then the glottal stop

                         of all prayed for human stumps,

what new frequency of man is God about to switch your

own human dial to? What new para-torso finally

                         to resist them, worms?

From ‘Imitations of the Blind’

Naturally there have been critics of Stubbs’s somewhat ‘difficult’ language, his eccentric grammar and ‘unconventional’ syntactical adventures. Such traits give these long poems at first sight a certain spasmodic wildness and earthy vigour, a sense of revolt and restless originality. However, this seemingly reckless headlong dash for expression at the cost of reason is a mask, for Stubbs’s language is in fact icily precise and lucid within the well guarded perimeter of his style, and as in the films of innovator Jean Luc Godard, one does not always have to feel immediately comfortable or understand precisely either language or image, but merely to ‘sense’ that it’s right in that particular moment of the film or poem’s life and somehow underpins or contributes to the overall vision proves sufficient. Only after the Godard image cascade has passed can we weigh the film in its entirety as we realise it has somehow brushed against our soul in the right way, though we are unable to explain why. The Stubbs poem leaves similar traces on our being as it passes. Reaching instinctively for support, the first thing we need to do is return to the poem and reread it, because this dense, shimmering, disconcerting, always dangerously smouldering tinder box of poetry has seeded its own quick growing plantations of confusion and questioning in the reader’s mind. How often does Stubbs propose to the reader the following rhetorical aside as a grimly serious enquiry? And how often does he ask this without stating it explicitly?

I wonder then what planet

you believe you are on?

Stubbs responds by ceremoniously crashing his cymbals over the ears of the willfully deaf. He shines his powerful beam into the eyes of the willfully blind. He yanks the ostrich heads out of the muck of believer anxiety, existential frailty and pathetic crutch wielding delusion. This poet wants to wake mankind from a lethal stupor, from the trance of believing the satisfying loftiness of established models, both Atheist and saved, jaded sinner and ecclesiastical acrobat. By relentlessly breaking their elaborate codes, Stubbs alerts the whole cast to the potential idiocy of counting on anything. In the poem After the Flood he explains:

            With a clump of forsaken flesh in each fist,

           where the thoughts of no death lie,

the saved they watch their

torsos depart the final bony-rail;

while the atheists said what

they had to say,

           faiths were secured, bibles written,

           though the DNA of Christ’s blood

failed quite naturally to match

the blood of all men…

Stubbs’ world is one operating ‘beyond religion’ where all the main players of the mortal procession are forcibly called up to re-evaluate themselves; Satan, The Priest, The Atheist, in a clutch of compulsive spell-binding poems, fall one by one to his inspired remodelling. Like voodoo dolls helplessly pinned by Stubbs, they embark on painful contortions of their physical form, struggling to exist with a meaningful representation for man when the mask of their delusion is removed. Other poems echo this supernatural transmutation, causing a dream-like drag on normal perception. In the poem The Pope Departs His Heaven, heaven itself is depicted as a landscape infected by industrial technology in which we get to ‘hear’

          the whirring of

those giant celestial turbines,

          as God he flicked

on that inestimable switch;

And then again in an extraordinary visual image we are told that heaven existed ‘before God’s birth’

           Before the great uncut canopy

           of man’s flesh, it began even

to strain

            the guy ropes of his imagination

In the remarkable poem The Icon Maker Stubbs questions both the religious and cognitive human processes that man goes through before settling on a suitable ‘representative’ of a God in the form of an icon. As the ‘last man’ he prepares to ‘destroy a matchstick model of our universe’ and we learn how ‘an enfilade of new torsos are handed the wrong rib again’. Uncanny scenes which might have come out of Bosch or Brueghel; ‘a skyful of fish-birds’ co-exist with a refreshingly uninhibited imagery. The slow motion metamorphosis image is crucial to Stubbs’ vision and often comes in a series of convulsive or dramatic movements. Limbs are ‘hoisted into the air’. The Priest hides the body of Christ ‘like a boulder behind the stitches’ of his own ‘ageing sag belly’. An almost hallucinatory impulse intercedes to establish new forms of expression.

From birth until your death, the three persons of the trinity

            they hold up in front of

themselves on sticks the face-masks

Of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kant;

From ‘The Atheist’

Paul Stubbs is that rare thing, a poet who feeds on the great themes which have been only nibbled at by most, a poet who is not afraid to take the risk of exposing his flanks through daring advances. Sustained on a European sensibility and a deep reading of key classical and mythological texts, Stubbs writes with assuredness and gravity and most importantly unlike anyone else. Like the growing number of those who are aware of that very necessary shot in the arm to English poetry delivered by the vision of Paul Stubbs, I look forward with great anticipation to his third collection which promises to take his themes and subject beyond the miraculous achievement of The Icon Maker.

© Will Stone

First published in Agenda, poetry magazine

I am in receipt of two volumes of poetry from the newly formed Black Herald Press. Blandine Longre and Paul Stubbs have taken the bold step into publishing and have begun by publishing their own recent work. I am yet to read Blandine Longre’s Clarities, though I have dipped in and caught something of the flavour and it looks very exciting. (Review to follow)

I have had a copy of Pauls Stubbs’s second published volume, The Icon Maker (Todmorden: Arc Publications, 2008), kicking around for a couple of years now. Occasionally I mislay it and I am troubled until I find it again. I read it at odd hours and have always found it strangely consoling, though ‘consoling’ is an adjective quite at odds with its visceral content. Stubbs addresses the condition of a world in which God is dead or departed and the religious impulse is atrophied. Flesh and bone remain, of course, in abundance. A review citation from Alice Oswald on the jacket states: ‘Stubbs is one of very few living poets whose work I go back to‘. I can only concur; partly because of the difficulty of consuming a whole poem in one or two or three bites – there’s always more – and partly because of its stark, discomforting originality, so jarringly at odds with a contemporary idiom. As a ‘culture consumer’, I have got used to bite-sized poetry; there is, after all, so much to read, to listen to, to see. And this is one of the ways in which I think we are all prone to behave; we don’t commonly make the effort. But Stubbs has already discerned the ‘now logocentric impulse to remove Calvary from [the] mind’ (Without Philosophy) and this very impulse is implicitly the foil for the kind of writing he is doing.

Then there’s the idiom. ‘Calvary’? There are swathes of biblical reference in his writing. It’s not fashionable to resurrect the idea of God, particularly a Christian God, or, further, to address a forgotten metaphysical landscape of apparently redundant images – and icons. But again, this is precisely the point; our atrophied sensibility can barely recognise the significance of that landscape:

After the crucifixion I found
that there was very little new
work, so, forced to wait for
the body of the next God to die,
I did this: I went back into my studio,
to create masks [...]

(The Icon Maker)

There’s also a wry, comic edge. On first reading, one is not alert to this possibility, apart from remarking the occasional parenthetic interventions, but there’s an ironic undertone at work here. The juxtaposition of the signifier, ‘Calvary’, with the matter-of-factness of ‘there was very little new/ work’ is characteristically bathetic. Then there’s the list-making curiosity of: ‘I did this: I went back into my studio’, which says so much more than the pared down ‘I went back into my studio’. This kind of repetition at first appears redundant and runs against the grain of the poetic rule of a Pound or a Frost, ‘use no superfluous word’. But Stubbs has created a distinctive idiom. His repeated pronouns, his ‘I’s and ‘it’s, at first seem like poetic tics or something approaching the French use of ‘c’est’. It is this latter reinforcement which has the force of edict, and I think this is closer to the disturbingly courageous voice which is Stubbs in flight. He is uncompromising and the disparity of idea and matter are characteristically yoked together as in the Donnean, Metaphysical tradition. As a lone, prophetic voice in the wilderness, Stubbs evokes the historical significance of other such voices and testaments and they become of a piece with the kind of writing he is doing.

The new, long poem, Ex Nihilo, is a tour-de-force. Building on the ground of The Icon Maker, here a world of new beginning and becoming is imagined and its logics and incidentals pursued. It’s a poem about the act of creation, and the poet’s rib is the Adamic starting point for a prolonged meditation on the genesis of art, creativity and poetic consciousness. The ‘I’ which begins the poem is an ‘I’ which disintegrates, fragments, as the body becomes a discorporate symbol within a Picassoesque landscape of bone-rib outcrops and Svankmajeran intrinsically motivated, corporeal assemblages. Some of the phraseology is sublime. Here we have a temporary return of ‘I’:

as I, I milk back my ink
from the first etymological gland
of language,
while checking out each new sensory terminus
for the arrival of what makeshift or barbaric form?

This ‘I’, (this not ‘I’), neatly encapsulates a tradition of dancing with poetic subjectivity, but has the matter of finding a true language been better expressed? ‘Milk back my ink/ from the first etymological gland/ of language’ is so alliteratively concise. Then there is the matter of form.

[...] Something double-breathed
and superhuman, but not yet me, no, only this,
this breaking free of a fault, of some
yet to-be-encountered sin;
(imagine a terrible but mistaken inhabitant
of your own soul)

This is a radical extension of dédoublement: eery and intensely unsettling. An unwelcome and fearful imagining born out of the naked shudder of the rawness of the new-born soul breaks in and is not readily discarded. The liminal consciousness of the poetic ‘I’ suspended in its bracketed container has both the force and the near comic innocence of a child conjuring a bogeyman. The potential for ‘fault’ or ‘sin’ always lurks, but there is a nascent purity which shimmers with all the intensity of a Blakeian, Manichean vision.

The Derridean/Lacanian/Barthesian philosophical axis, which reconstituted the language/meaning problematic, launched us all into an era of ‘playfulness’ and has, in some measure, informed quite distinct modes of production. On the one hand it has, partially, relegitimised the ludic world of the performative lyric, a mode already established in the mid twentieth century partly in reaction to T.S. Eliot’s dominance (though his homeopathic trace remains); Simon Armitage would be a prime example of this tendency. On another, there is the radically experimental world of such as Scott Thurston and Tom Raworth, in which language is ‘liberated’ from syntactic chains and relaunched in a paradigmatic dimension. The latter school has some bearing on any explication of Stubbs’s linguistic effects, in that his acts of dislocation mess with the syntagmatic apparatus and deliver new layers of meaning, and that meaning may be unbidden, novel, unsettling and affective.

Paul Stubbs’s Ex Nihilo is the antidote to a poetry publishing current which appears to admit the most trivial of efforts. Poetry is a broad church and there’s no intrinsic harm in accessibility. However, Stubbs is coming from an entirely different place. He’s not writing for the reader who is looking for the habitual ‘performative’ element, though performance there is in every scalpel’s incision. The poet as surgeon diving deep for the soul, excavates the flesh, avoids his own anaesthesia and confronts that primeval landscape in an acupunctural ecstasy with only the agony of an already conscient subjectivity echoing the necessity of intervention.

Theoretical Animals

Theoretical Animals
Gary J. Shipley
(BlazeVOX Books, 2010)

In 1959 in Paris when William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, following in Tristan Tzara’s footsteps, started in earnest to construct the ‘cut-ups’, they began the nominal process of reducing ‘conventional’ prose back down into the retinal-rush of the newsreel, the slogan, the hideously disgorged and fractious sentence, began to re-interview the brain itself in the process of writing. Burroughs, after cutting up and then ‘folding’ the pages of Shakespeare and Rimbaud, wrote: “Cut up Rimbaud and you will hear the voice. Cut-ups often come through as coded messages with special meaning for the cutter”. These ‘cut-ups’ performed semantic miracles of course, making T.S Eliot sound, for the first time, truly interesting, while creating supersonic sonnets of Shakespeare and opening perhaps a few inches wider Huxley’s Doors of Perception. The re-birth of these experiments, while not confirming the death necessarily of any other ‘modes’ of writing, paved the way at least for an attempt for literature itself to be surpassed.

The writing of Gary J. Shipley in Theoretical Animals has some common ground with these endeavours yet seems also to have over-stridden the skeletons of these writers to flesh out his own particular vision. He explains himself in a recent interview:

“I am celebrating enigma as an end in itself, an all-pervasive telos: the tangled spine of metaphysics/morality and aesthetics-enigma as driving force and (hidden) end.”

Thankfully, when reviewing this book critics will lack the necessary ‘categories’ in which to place it, though I could easily announce to the reader that it is full of little ‘counter-fictions’ and ‘anti-poems’ and/or ‘contrary-styles’ and add any other endlessly superfluous literary formulations. A French critic (Thibaudet) once described Lautréamont’s Maldoror as a “frenetic monologue” which, true enough, could well allude to that horrorful pitch of voice within. Likewise Shipley’s voice should be stored upon a disc and played back to the deaf in their dreams, in which of course they can once again ‘hear’. It has been said that Lautréamont, in his great degenerative work, reached beyond “the limits of literature”. But what lies, really, beyond those limits? Semantic disorientation? A break from ALL syntactical ‘rules’? Or is it physically just to move ahead of the shadow cast of the last stump of language? But no, for even the imagination of the mystic or the visionary must be stopwatched by eternity. In all probability, it only equals to a deliberate deviation from a supposed total knowledge of what literature has done and what it will be expected to continue doing, i.e. narrate, depict metaphor, create fictions, which, in short, will naturally continue to dominate the contemporary domain. The alternative, while being still (it is true) piteously vague, comes closer to what Shipley here has achieved, to partially/impartially hypnotize the reader into becoming ignorant again—as in the “supreme fiction” of the poet Wallace Stevens who understood that to witness truly “the inconceivable idea of the sun” each of us must become “an ignorant man again” ; for here is the making of a truly future form, one that seeks to assert its transition from narration to meaning as if meaning itself was nothing but a pathological lie. Shipley explains himself thus: “In a way, the characters embody what it is to populate a novel-world that wasn’t made for characters. They are forced to bend and mutate. They find a way to exist, to make meaning.” When discussing Bataille, the French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote: “Bataille broke with traditional narrative to tell us what has never been told before” and Shipley himself seems in the process of achieving this, to turn his pen back into “a pitiless chisel”, like Maldoror’s own.

All of the figurative forms that inhabit Theoretical Animals bear the weight of the writer’s own meaning-encrusted cross, his own “tangled spine of metaphysics” and we watch each of them move up and through the bone-gears of both the theoretical and critical apparitions of self: “never resting in time, unscrolling on ragged lakes, their costumes of wrinkled skin distilled”. The book itself is a supernatural factory: a conveyor-belt of image-carcasses eaten clean to the bone by the ferocious appetite of meaning or non-meaning. The nearest book that we have in style to Shipley’s would be The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard, he who himself described Burroughs’s greatest book Naked Lunch thus: “Bizarre and nightmarish scenes flash by, like glimpses of some exotic and decadent City. Only later do we realise that this strange City is the one we all inhabit in our waking lives”. Theoretical Animals mirrors such a statement, but also defies even this description of the bizarre, for the world within these pages is also industrial, claustrophic, nihilistic, ersatz in fact, just as in the installations of the German artist Gregor Schneider; a world of fraught interior tunnels and of corridors that turn back on themselves, as if his incubated spaces were constructed as a stage for some choreographed experiment for the damned in cybernetic heaven, a place at death where no longer does a life flash before the eyes, but is rather shouted out by a bored technician on a faulty tannoy-system, as each diabolical action of the unaccountably wronged, or evil, or mutated is followed by no ultimate regret, for all these ‘non-characters’ are as contemptuous of their own behaviour as that of their creator.

Thus the writer is celebrating enigma as an end in itself, a stupefying black-hole into which all human chance and consciousness are sucked: Heidegger once famously asked the question “why are there beings at all, and why not nothing?”; a notion that Shipley happily applies his own anti-systematic approach to, making of both myth and logic mere sterile counterparts to his own multidirectional world of rejection and nothingness.

Theoretical Animals is unwilling (rightly so) to concede any imaginative ground and implies that ALL literature is essentially useless, redundant or, how Rimbaud described it, “a vaguely hygienic distraction”, each ‘figure’ that populates this book being but an alias in the criminal act itself of imagining, for Shipley single-mindedly re-judges this ‘act’ to watch his own blood rush to the heads of each new hypothetical race:

“Negation of action is the most courageous of mutations. One becomes somebody and nobody, existing in another world confusing feeling with knowing.”

‘Identity’, Shipley is telling us, is the last extant human illusion to remain, so that it seems, in the end, no more than our own congenital mannequin wheeled into and out of the world to replace us, an all-consuming nothingness that will return once man’s original breath-canister is hurled back into deep space, leaving even the mirror itself with nothing left to reflect/repeat, and thus turning it also back onto itself, to peel back its own tinfoil-tissue from the bone of all now non-personality:

“I did not recognize my contamination. But just then a set of insectile eyes disappeared into the glass. For a fraction of a second I was guaranteed through them. Their chance warn, they run, why? I seemed to recognize their borrowed host: he/it was me. Said, ‘Hey, before I looked I knew you well’.”

Shipley’s prose prefers to steel-plate itself into inversion, mental tautness, deadly emanations, and we are all invited to wade through the desolate swamp of his imaginings as, like any truly radical writer, he unveils a world that seems to surpass our own cognizant capacity to believe in it. The writing is devastating enough to fossilize older, more redundant literary forms, his aphoristic litanies and murderous cacophonies glass-case our more conventional modes of writing forever, while breaking down the DNA of the traditional reader-writer relationship, just as Lautréamont believed that fiction writing served only its own tethered-end (“Even if I had no true event to recount to you, I would invent imaginary tales and decant them into your brain”). As readers, we are expelled by Theoretical Animals just at the moment that we try in vain to embrace it, we are spoken to ironically, but only as a pointer to what has already been displaced, distorted, re-questioned by the author, ‘irony’ here being only a subsidiary and uncompromisingly complex clause in the contract between idea and comprehension:

“A cannibal is a human that feeds on the flesh of other humans.
Ersatz humans are not humans.
Humans that eat ersatz humans are not cannibals.
Ersatz humans that eat humans are not cannibals.
Therefore, an environment that advocates or facilitates humans feeding on the flesh of ersatz humans and/or ersatz humans feeding on the flesh of humans does not thereby advocate or facilitate cannibalism.”

Many readers it is true will consider Shipley’s book to be almost unreadable, unthinkable, such is its sometimes bewildering and deliberate multiplicity of illogical registers. But it is a work in its manifold mastery of disguises and its damning implications for logical and contemporary prose that STOPS the world, empties the dust of the objects around us into the hourglass of its every word: “drag on. A montage of smoking fingers and mouths shield us from / our pulped words and swallowed screams. Nobody can make a dent in this warped shroud.” Matching the anaemic prose of Beckett in Ill Seen Ill Said, the writer becomes a phenomenologist inspecting our skulls which, like a full-stop, have rolled to the end of his questions. We watch in slow motion the lines of his prose, as unyielding as iron-bars, jut up and rip through the concrete of the page. While at his feet, in the mud, lies the abandoned rusted copper-piping of Hell’s failed sprinkler-system, yet no one seems interested. The beyond in Shipley’s world is no longer an eschatological or celestial fiction, but rather a tape-recorder found amid the bric-à-brac that is running down its batteries to the histrionics of God’s now panic-stricken voice on REPEAT; while about the slime, the mud, the bloody corpses, a series of intransigent, anonymous and flesh-aborted bodies search frantically for the OFF button. But in history any time an author deposits such a spiritual and atheistical weight of suffering into our imagination, the result is usually what the Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran described as being “an accumulation of confusions, an inflation of horrors, of frissons that date. One cannot keep renewing Hell, whose very character is monotony.” Through a constant cycle of self-cannibalism the writer’s mind regurgitates this “accumulation of confusions” for his is a remorseless mind which, like a bird-of-prey, consumes the perpetually regenerated entrails of each idea. Everything is tortured, yes, but also otherworldly, subtle, playing out the death-principle inside of the closed universe of a gesture, a space, a moment of psychosis, or propaganda. “Men’s minds need a simple truth, an answer which delivers them from their questions, a gospel, a tomb”, wrote Cioran, and Shipley applied this apocalyptic oversight of mankind by writing a characterless novel of ‘characters’, a reductio ad absurdum in which the verisimilitude of the vignettes (which could pass as chapters) is allowed to occasionally flash-up onto the page, for amid the darkness this is how we find the ‘stories’, like ‘signs’, neon-signs short-circuited by the mud left over of the time before man breathed, and thus we see them flicker at the edge of nothingness:

“regarding the reasons as to why certain individuals should have inspired laws concerning their continued existence, (…) They even speak of a day when they will deliver us from our pseudo-existence and make us real.” (from ‘There is almost universal ignorance’)

Naturally, the inherent ‘enigma’ in this writing is only that of being a homo sapiens, a living organism tethered to the reins of a universe held by hands or no-hands, depending on your belief. The humanity of this book is that of the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa: “Humanity, being a mere biological idea and signifying nothing more than the animal species we belong to, was no more deserving of worship than any other animal species” (The Book of Disquiet). And so Shipley, like Pessoa, has chosen to worship the biology of unalterable consciousness: “Our teeth give as heads bow and count on the garrulous tolls airing the week’s burdens for an amphibious and relative god.” The writing, as in this fragment, happily maintains its grotesque discrepancy between the comparison made between image and idea, between the obligatory ‘reality’ of a would-be pariah of civilization and those most deliberate creations of his own mind, for he can write of mutation in the same effortless way as Wordsworth could write of a flower, images which are both triggered by the same lawless conclusions of a mind-in-the-making. But it would not be going too far to suggest that Shipley’s mind stockpiles its own images as if an end-of-the-world refuse heap, or as in the broken-down and finished world of the Hungarian poet János Pilinszky, whose poetical vision Ted Hughes depicted as a “humanity stripped of everything but the biological persistence of cells (…) among the odds and ends of a destroyed culture.”

The construction of the book is such that it can satisfy a hundred different and varying readings AND responses, as well as give birth, at the same time, to the numerous myths of truth—as believing in a fiction is often inevitable, even when the notion of ‘fiction’ is as ambiguous as in this ‘novel’; no superliterature will be needed to be invented in which the relation between author, character and idea is destroyed completely, for even the anonymous narrator will find an inner propulsion to “shift the truth to fit need”. Bataille when writing of Nietzsche’s “mental void” talked of the writer’s destiny in the following terms: “IN SPITE OF MYSELF I slowly sketch erosion and ruin”, for the writer will always come up short before his own moral bulwark, even when his morals are themselves a ‘void’, but a necessary one, such as in this book. Morals of course create their own ‘meaning’, something which Shipley also confronts when describing Theoretical Animals as “…the meaning-making machine” which has now become “infected, is itself a disease”, deliberately restricting himself to an antithetical reality, a protracted mental state to conceive of what he himself has called “a largely theoretical construct, so that the book’s autophagia becomes a mere eating of pictures of self”; this is a pivotal statement to the understanding /overcoming of this book, for while infinite complexity can only ever negate and negate us, if we are to escape ‘reason’ we are left only with what Shipley describes as the ‘HUMANEXIT CODE’, a teleological doorway that amounts to no more than a curtain of flesh into which each of the ghost-inhabitants of the book passes into and out of, those who have embodied most it seems the writer’s own sense of alienation in the world, the necessary alienation that in a ‘literary’ sense helps tear down the walls of what limits and constricts us.

E. M. Cioran wrote of the “stupidities inherent in the cult of truth”, which the writer and critic Susan Sontag depicted as being “The implications, here and elsewhere, of what the true philosopher says that there is not something ‘true’ but rather something necessary or liberating. For the ‘truth’ is identified with depersonalization”. And if the re-birth of the imagination is to continue to locate a perpetually new and subsidiary womb for itself, for every new idea, concept, inversion, then what might well be deemed today as too intellectually obdurate a work, too unyielding a possibility of the mind, may, of course, by tomorrow, be considered necessary. Theoretical Animals embodies a lot of what Rimbaud meant by being “absolutely modern”: to decode the systems of the storyteller, reverse the ‘traffic’ of historical stimulus and thus allow the masses to be “replaced by their tomorrows” today. And whether or not the experiences endured in Shipley’s book are modern or are not, it doesn’t really matter, for no one it seems is arriving to suture our wounds, and God’s fin, in deep space, will continue to circle us, regardless.

Paul Stubbs (october 2011)

(other book reviews & essays)

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BlazeVOX books

Filed under: Book reviews, Magazine publications Tagged: Bataille, BlazeVOX Books, Brion Gysin, E.M. Cioran, Gary J. Shipley, Gregor Schneider, J.G. Ballard, János Pilinszky, Lautréamont, novel, Paul Stubbs, poetry, Theoretical Animals, William Burroughs ]]> http://paulstubbspoet.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/the-meaning-making-machine/feed/ 0 Paul Stubbs theoretical-animals http://paulstubbspoet.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/thus-spoke-zarathustra-mark-wilson-about-ex-nihilo/ http://paulstubbspoet.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/thus-spoke-zarathustra-mark-wilson-about-ex-nihilo/#comments Fri, 14 Oct 2011 17:28:23 +0000 pstubbspoet http://paulstubbspoet.wordpress.com/?p=649 Read more]]> by Mark Wilson

Review published in 3:AM magazine, Wednesday, March 30th, 2011.

The poetry of Paul Stubbs is like a severe volcanic eruption within the landscape of British poetry. In fact, to say that this small corpus of work (as to date, three books) is part of ‘British poetry’ seems a massive perversion of terminology. His radical syntax, on more careful inspection, reveals closer ties to European and World masters (Rimbaud, Jozsef, Benn, Trakl, Pilinszky, Vallejo). This volcanic simile holds true as Stubbs’ work is both ‘visionary’ (in its sheer verbal/metaphorical pyrotechnics) and a searing critique scalding the jaundiced pastures of a British poetic terrain that Stubbs has long since viewed as insular and infertile. His outspoken essay ‘The Mirage of Poetic Evolution in Britain Since Eliot’ lays down his frustration with a ‘corpse-tradition’ inherited from Eliot which has gradually petrified through Auden and Larkin to contemporaries such as Simon Armitage. There is enough molten lava in Stubbs’ essay to submerge quite a number of Bloomsburys and NewGens. Continental Stubbs, now a resident of Paris, is the self-styled exile-poet lambasting the white cliffs of a ‘little england’ that had once harboured him. Stubbs declares quite emphatically that his ‘Waste Land’ was/is Blok’s ‘The Twelve’ and/or Mayakovsky’s ‘The Cloud in Trousers’.

In a review of his previous collection The Icon Maker (Arc Publications, 2008) I called Stubbs an ‘Iconoclastic Visionary’ for, in his verse, he sets up icons and idols only to demolish them mercilessly in the very next stanza. Rimbaud’s ’seer’ with the ‘disordered senses’ is certainly floating within the stratosphere of Stubbs’ poetics in this respect (or, at any rate, Stubbs makes a fascinating ‘twist’ on this Rimbaudian theme). A ‘negative theology’ appears indeed to permeate the whole of Stubbs’ vision. This ‘theology’ stamps its ironic ex cathedra with an outrageous liturgy of irreverent images that explode within the reader’s imagination like lexical gunpowder. His autochthonous energy reminds one of Nietzsche flailing in Zarathustrian robes and spewing out his disgust at the ‘untermensch’. For, in his poetry, Stubbs seems to concur with Nietzsche that ‘art is the last metaphysical activity within European Nihilism’. At any rate Paul Stubbs possesses a prophetic imagination that can slice piecemeal through the most compromised, god-absented void and make it sing or, at least, scream. Not surprisingly the painter Francis Bacon is a tutelary spirit hovering above his poetry. A number of Stubbs’ poems have been inspired by, and have their starting-point in, Bacon’s paintings. The Icon Maker was an unstoppable convoy of complex theological set-pieces, linguistic carriages in an excruciating white-knuckle ride through the Apocalypse. A book so intense and claustrophobic that most readers must have needed to put it down every couple of poems to catch their breaths. They were then able to contemplate more clearly the dizzying parade of sick atheists, fallen priests and aborted messiahs strutting out their godforsaken lives in a desolate cosmos about to be utterly re-configured. In The Icon Maker Stubbs was like a leering ventriloquist both relishing and lamenting the Lucifer-like fall of his reprobate dramatis-personae.

Paul Stubbs’ third book, a long poem Ex Nihilo, is published by his own Parisian press, Black Herald Press (co-edited with poet Blandine Longre). The first thing to notice about Ex Nihilo is that it is more reflective in tone than The Icon Maker. The overbearing intensity has been tempered slightly by an exquisite lightness of touch:

(as I unclench my fist, and in an act of

legerdemain, produce from my palm a first rib,

laying it on a stone or any object I describe)

In his preface Stubbs states that Ex Nihilo is a poem that enacts a poem coming into being. The theological overtones of ‘ex nihilo/out of nothing’ are particularly resonant here with the poet playing the role of God in the act of creating a linguistic poem from a non-lingual ‘nothingness’. The Edenic ‘rib’ is almost like a recurring talisman in Stubbs’ work for the alchemical act of semantic creation. Paul Stubbs knows that the language of poetry is, and always has been, a protean creature that has developed over millennia. It is a slippery, untamed, chameleon-like creature which grows and bifurcates, shedding skins of language as it goes. Ex Nihilo embodies this evolutionary process and teems with imagery of this kind:

I, the self-resurrecting, uttering and muttering

myself to myself, and turning over the pages of the

dictionaries of tomorrow;

Ex Nihilo is a wild behemoth that does not play by staid, conventional rules of versifying. As is befitting for his subject-matter Stubbs invents new undisciplined forms for his language to writhe and prowl in. The ’self’ is constantly dividing into another ’self’ and its attendant doppelganger. One is reminded of Rimbaud’s ‘I is another’. As in a Cubist painting we are never quite sure who or which part of the poem is speaking to us.

The ’self’ a ruptured nebulae

imploding in the escaping mind

Ex Nihilo is, therefore, open-ended and in a constant state of ‘becoming’. And as the poem will never arrive at a moment of closure the language remains dynamic and supple rather than static or stagnant. Stubbs has a penchant for certain pronouns such as ‘I’ and ‘its’ which at first appear jarring but, after a few pages, take on a rhythmic role in the poem. A pulsing heart-beat for his ungovernable ‘creature’ that offsets some of the more radical and jagged aspects of his syntax. Stubbs’ repeated use of ‘I’ in the poem is, therefore, something of an ironic tease:

with my

            pen dictating rain, as I, I eyeball its wetness, and

unclench

            my fingertips

This pronoun becomes just another one of the poet’s personae in a depersonalised, Modernist reaction to the tyrannical ‘egotistical sublime’ of Romanticism. Astonishingly, the subjective ingenuousness of Romantic naval-gazing still needs to be challenged even in the early 21st Century and Stubbs has made this repeated, mocking ‘I’ one of his poetic leitmotifs.

Semantic regeneration, of course, reflects the ever-replicating layers of history and civilization, and how these are mythologized in the collective imagination. Stubbs is extremely adept at freezing an epoch of history or the clash of two civilizations into a few, highly-charged lines:

born into the biblical tract of my own

voice (a voice dictated

from the drafts buried like papyri beneath

my skin)

By sheer implication this compressed vignette seems to evoke (within an abstract fashion) ancient Israel enslaved in Egypt in Old Testament times, lamenting on the banks of the papyrus-producing Nile. Here we have the mythologizing of something which happened within history and voiced ‘biblically’ and subliminally by the poet. The sediments of archaeology and secretions of anthropology are also both implied. ‘Papyri’, of course, suggests the beginning of a written, hieroglyphic language which is entirely appropriate for a poem about language and poetry ‘coming into being’. Stubbs is here working within the tradition of Rimbaud and the contemporary Chinese poet Bei Dao in attempting to compress history, civilization and myth into startling vignettes. The ‘voice’ here suggests the oral transmissions of the ’seer’, poet or ‘bard’. The fact that this ‘voice’ is ‘biblical’ though certainly infers the prophetic. For there is a certain underlying ‘gnosis’ in all of Stubbs’ utterances:

(all assetoric knowledge

of myself, gods and religion

subtracted by the zero of my

eye)

This recalls Rimbaud again (who is certainly Stubbs’ true master and spiritual mentor). For Stubbs, poetry is always an act of faith even in a cosmos after God (or the gods) have faded from sight or apprehension. If the Nietzschean edict in ‘Zarathustra’ of ‘God is dead’ must be accepted to some degree then a new religion, or religions, must be created by the artist, poet or ‘over-man’. Stubbs usually leans towards a form of Deism in his poetic ‘theology’. Even when he depicts the fallen or marred Creation there is always the gnostic suggestion of a redemption or re-birth:

or by chance, a cracked basin (that looks like

my skull)

but which implies the notion

                        of a baptism.

Although everything physical appears to be irreparably damaged Stubbs perceives a spiritual ‘otherness’ which transcends this. ‘Baptism’ suggesting the renewal in this particular quotation. Stubbs’ poetry can sometimes read like a glossary of theological terms or a manual outlining theological states of being. Nevertheless there is an irony to much of this which Stubbs milks for absurd, Beckettian ‘effects’:

and with nothing but my own rapacious

and eschatological look upon their face.

This absurdity is itself a brilliant black comedy which allows Stubbs’s poem to be a genuine truth-telling rather than a glib, straight-faced ‘gnostic’ pamphlet trying to proselytize. Michael Hamburger’s ‘truth of poetry’ and its pervading tensions and ironies are never too far away. So Stubbs as poet is simultaneously ‘blasphemer’ and ‘apologist’, he is both ‘priest’ and ‘fool’ (to use Hamburger’s terminology in The Truth of Poetry – Tensions in Modernist Poetry Since Baudelaire). Paul Stubbs is a poet who has digested the best of Modern European poetry and also skillfully interpreted the paradoxical signposts of what it means to be truly ‘Modern’ in Hamburger’s incomparable volume. Ex Nihilo reflects this study and is Stubbs’ finest, single poetic utterance to date.

One last word on Stubbs’ ongoing fascination with the body. There are constant references to anatomical structures and somatic mutations in his work. An ongoing obsession with biological phenomenon with a simultaneous spiritual ‘vision’ places Stubbs firmly in the ranks of the great Metaphysical poets. And especially with John Donne. A poet whose exalted company I am sure Stubbs would be glad to share. For his poetic ‘vision’ is always anchored in the flesh and bone of human reality. Meaning that his poetry is always ultimately concerned with the human condition and its ongoing metaphysical dilemmas. Like in Nietzsche, we have in Ex Nihilo a ‘heroic’ hope that man will ultimately ‘overcome’ and surpass himself even if the future is shadowy and unknown:

But creation will come, will come…

            yes,

            fibre by fibre, entwined by rope-vein, entrails,

and bone: then more bone, innards, ligaments,

            form, shadow etc.

Stubbs declares, in ‘The Mirage of Poetic Evolution in Britain Since Eliot’, that ‘the great innovative poetry of the 21st Century will be forced to assimilate new religions, genetics, nanotechnologies, robotics’. We can clearly see in Ex Nihilo how he is incorporating certainly the first three on this list.

In short, there is real accomplishment here. Ex Nihilo re-defines the metaphysical geography of poetry itself. As a bold declaration of linguistic anthropology it announces a new beginning for British (and, indeed, World) poetry. One which is truly universal in its scope and an escape from parochialism. What we see here is a poet in full control of the rudiments of his form. Just like Valery’s potter Paul Stubbs has sifted out the gravel and shaped something truly remarkable. Maybe this book is the first installment of a ‘poem of some length’ that Stubbs will add to as he progresses in his poetic career. A 21st century equivalent to what The Cantos was to the 20th Century or The Divine Comedy was to the 14th. A long poem that seeks to encompass everything in the cosmos. We can but wait and anticipate.

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Mark Wilson works as a Teaching Assistant in Peterborough, a city located somewhere in the lost kingdom of Middle England. He completed a B.A. English Literature degree at Goldsmiths, University of London, during the 1990s where his dissertation was on the poetry of Ezra Pound. Some of his poems have appeared in The Shop, in The Zaporogue & in The Black Herald. His poetry collection Quartet for the End of Time (Editions du Zaporogue) is available here.