My review of Erika Meitner’s Makeshift Instructions for Vigilant Girls” is up at Big Wonderful Press!
Tripping the Triggering Device
The fifth issue of SpringGun is just out!
Print work by
Jeff Alessandrelli
Michele Battiste
Ethan Saul Bull
Caroline Davidson
Brian Dickson
Steffi Drewes
Christopher Funkhouser
Natasha Kessler/Joshua Ware
Kristen Orser
Meg Ronan
Michael Rerick
Jared Schickling
and ME!
Electronic Work by
Ian Hatcher
Zuzana Husarova
Mark Marino
Alexander Mouton
“No, she’ll only reject me in the end, and I’ll be frustrated.” — Ringo Starr, A Hard Day’s Night
Give those titian-topped smarties over at Redheaded Stepchild some love!
Featuring poetry by
Sarah Sarai
Gail Peck
Nancy Carroll
Scott Owens
Barry Harris
Jackie Haskins
Ralph Earle
Jeff Davis
Heidi Rosenberg
Luanne Castle
Addy McCulloch
Tim Mayo
Trina Gaynon
Ellen McGrath Smith
and, huh, look at that – Michele Battiste!
The Awl
I’m a big fan of The Awl and poetry editor Mark Bibbins, so I was thrilled when he chose two of my poems to appear to today! So go on over to The Awl and give them some love.
That’s What She Said: Thoughts on Homolinguistic Translation
Last week, as a result of a toddler potty crisis and traffic on I-270, I arrived late to a Bad Shadow Affair poetry reading and missed the first reader, my friend Aaron Angello. Afterwards, I was talking with Aaron and Noah Eli Gordon, who praised Aaron’s poem and told me it was not like Aaron’s previous work. Intrigued, I asked Aaron if he could give me the print copy, and he handed over a slightly beat-up piece of paper haphazardly folded into quarters. I took it home and read it. And it was good. But frustrating.
Aaron’s poem included an “I” and and a “she.” A very captivating “I” and “she,” characters with whom, if I met them in real life, I would be infatuated. Yet when I read the poem, I knew I wasn’t getting the whole story from the subject position, which is part of the magic of the poem, right? The idea that we only have access to one subject position, and so our access to the event/scenario/relationship/tension is limited. I imagined calling up the “she” on the phone and saying (because I would do this; I have very little discretion), “‘I’ just told me about your car ride to the amusement park and he said that you kept pestering him to take part in his survey.” And “she” would reply, “No, I never said that. God! He’s the one who wouldn’t shut up about the survey.” Then we would go back and forth with me telling her what “I” said and she translating what he said into what he actually meant or what actually happened.
And I realized that I wanted to write “she”‘s interpretation of the event, knowing that her translation of “I”‘s account is as subjective and as inaccurate as “I”‘s original telling. And I thought about how this was possible, and why I thought of this as a translation instead of a retelling or a revision. And I think it’s because language is only part of the poem. The subject position, the tone, the excluded details, the rhythm, are all part of the poem, but the most elastic element of the poem is the language. The language itself has enough give that we use these other elements to translate the language – to interpret the language – into meaning. Language isn’t fixed. It can support – it may even call for – homolinguistic translation. We do this all the time when we speak. “But I didn’t mean that.” “What I meant to say..” “When he said x, do you think he meant y?”
So I did it. I wrote a homolinguistic translation of Aaron’s poem – from English into English – by changing the subject position and capitalizing on (exploiting) the elasticity of language and its ability either to mean what we want it to mean or to mean what we didn’t want it to mean at all. I wasn’t sure what to call this (and a big shout out to Lori Emerson for giving me the term that I’m using now – homolinguistic translation)), so I solicited input from friends for suggestions. Some are writers, some wouldn’t identify as writers. Here are their responses to the question, “What would you call a translation of a poem from English to English?” I welcome everyone’s thoughts on this, as I think this is only the beginning of the conversation.
Michael Flatt: Homophonic?
Erika Sparby: Intertranslation?
Barbara Ungar: Unnecessary?
Ellen Orleans: Innovative.
Shawn Dudley: Hmm. I know you can use literary theory to translate a perfectly good poem from English into pages and pages of abstruse, impenetrable, academic English. Does that count?
Les Murphy: A travesty
Seth Landman: A poem.
Thibault Raoult: turning the page
Jen Klopp: Motmorphing? ?
Judy Costello Strathearn: Piers Plowman
Michele Speitz: textual Synaesthesia
Caryn Crotty Eldridge: Hm, depends. Very Useful, if it’s Brit-English to American-English
David Levine Writing. Was that too pithy? Now I have to remember what pithy means.
Alita Putnam: Revision? (Don’t get me started on medieval implications)
Richard K. Weems: No Fear Shakespeare
Angelo Verga: borrowing?
Lori Emerson: homolinguistic translation…but i can’t tell if i’m being a wet blanket by giving an answer. i’m like Horshack in Welcome Back Kotter
Chuck Denison: Understanding
Review of Raising Petra
A surprise and generous review of Raising Petra by Susan Jo Russell at Fiddler Crab Review! Fiddler Crab Review is one of the few (maybe the only?!) journals dedicated to reviewing chapbooks.
Speech Where it is Least Careless and Least Logical
Williams’ “Field of Action” is the progenitor of Olson’s “Composition by Field.” Similarities can be found in both poets assertion that the elements of the poem are material and the need for a new structure, a new measure. The foundation of Williams’ new structure and measure is based on the variable foot, a “relative” foot reflecting American idiom, its intonations and rhythms as sensed by the ear. Olson’s new structure is based on the syllable as a unit of meaning, as the base unit of perception as sensed by the ear and processed by the mind. However, Olson’s measure is based on the new line, which is composed by the breath, by the innate, generative rhythm of man as a natural object.
Ultimately, Williams’ “Field of Action” functions like a machine. “A poem is a machine made out of words.” The movement within the field of action drives the poem forward physically like the workings of an engine drives a car forward. Olson’s “Composition by Field” also privileges the kinetic, the driving forward motion of the poem. However, Olson’s motion is fueled by perception leading to perception, not the synchronic physical movement of the poem. Perception to perception captured by the ear and processed by the mind into the syllable. The machine has a role in Olson’s composition by field, too, but his machine is not the product of materiality; instead, it is the tool of materiality. They typewriter, it’s standardized spaces and fonts, provides a unit of measure on which to compose by breath, on which to plot the material elements of the poem. The typewriter produces the poet’s version of the musician’s stave, a universal standard through which all readers and voices can experience the line as breath. This is an improvement over Williams’ variable foot in that Williams’ measure will always be subject to the reader (which is something I believe he would like to avoid) and variable takes on idiom. Olson’s measure, based on the typewriter, approaches the new formality he was hoping to achieve.
“the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”
Expanding on Olson’s notions of the syllable and the line, it could be said that the syllable is produced through the cognitive processing of a sensed (heard) external stimulation (i.e. perception) and the line is produced through the internal generation of the breath. The idea that the poem is driven along by perception leading to perception is very similar to Hugo’s theory of association, i.e. the idea that knowledge is built through a layering of associations. Similarly, the poem is built on a layering of aural perceptions that the ear ceaselessly collects and that the mind transforms into syllables that it then plays with. The line, the rhythm of the breath, maintains and sustains the driving development of perception (now translated into syllables). These syllables and lines become material objects that then hold the tension in the poem. I imagine a thread connecting syllable to syllable, line to line, held taut by the energy of each poem object.
Then he, if he Chooses to Speak from these Roots, Works in that Area
where Nature has Given him Size, Projective Size
Size factors into Olson’s field. Successful projective poetics achieve a “natural” dimension where nothing suffers diminution. Projective poetics have the potential to “carry much larger material than it has carried in our language since the Elizabethans.” Olson is talking about the epic, and he hearkens back to classical works and writers such as Homer and Seami. How to reconcile this goal of the epic with the call for a new form, a new measure, and a new way of writing? Olson’s resulting “stance toward reality” (in other words, his poetics) speaks of “objectism” in response to Williams’ and Pound’s “objectivism.” Objectivism, while effacing the subject position, still maintains a hierarchy of poet/man and object. Objectism insists on the poet/man as an object in nature along with all other objects. Man is not the “larger force”; he is a “participant in the larger force. His goal, then, is not to demonstrate the hierarchy of man over other objects but to project “dimensions larger than man.” Projectivist writing returns to the goal of celebrating the larger force in which man participates instead of focusing on the force/source of man who sees and creates all things. This does not negate new forms, structures or measures with which to approach the epic. On the contrary, it is only through the new writing that poets can once again approach the epic.
Technique on One Hand, Content on the Other
O’Hara’s Personism is anti-poetics. It is anti-theory, anti-cultural studies, anti-craft. Personism takes the poet out of the theoretical and into the seat, physically, where he writes the poem. Personism then takes the poem and puts it in front of the reader and, as such, becomes a conduit between the poet and the reader. Personism takes the focus off the poem as an object to be studied, dissected, deconstructed, analyzed and critiqued. Instead, it puts the focus on the poet as a writer, the reader as a reader, and the poem as a mutual experience. The poem connects people. Too much poetics, O’Hara seems to be saying, severs the poem from humanity. It doesn’t matter what the reader gets out of a poem – if he gets the “correct” messages, if he understands teh context, if it changes him, if he has an epiphany, if he gets anything all. What is important is that the reader experiences the poem, and in that way is connected to another person, and humanity is sustained instead of the study of humanities.
This is why O’Hara argues against abstraction; it “involves the personal removal by the poet.” To remove the personal is to remove the person and that leaves only a vacuum – Keats’ negative capability. Negative capability has to be filled; the void must be filled. And so readers put their energy into filling the void. They empty themselves out into the void. And their experience of the poem becomes filling the poem itself with their selves. Instead, they should experience the poem as a connection of their self to the poet’s self.
The Poem Squarely Between the Poet and the Person
Are Frank O’Hara and Jack Spicer writing a queer poetics in the former’s concept of “personism” and the latter’s concept of dictated poetry? I think so. The poet Amy King, in her essay “The What Else of Queer Poetry” states, “A queer poetics is not only about what is but is equally about what is not. We live in relation to each other, regardless of our best efforts to divorce and secede.” Heteronormativity is all about separating and dividing the genders. It is about difference. It is about maintaining a social-sexual separation in order to achieve a physical connection. Heteronormative connection is based on the binary, the opposite – not only the “you are not me and I am not you,” but also the “you are the complete and utter opposite of me.” O’Hara and Spicer negate heteronormative connection.
For O’Hara, the connection remains a physical connection of one with the other – remains within the realm of the embodied person – but the source of that connection isn’t binary social-sexual physicality. It is written communication. Every person can connect with every other person; all they need is a poem between them.
Spicer effaces the barrier between the poet and the other through his theory of dictated poetry. There is the poet, and there is the Outside, but what is Outside becomes the inside of the poet, travels through the poet. The poet is the “host,” but to what? To everything. To every external thing, idea, concept, spirit and spook floating in the ether. The connection isn’t one with the other; rather it is one with everything, and everything invades the one. This “union” isn’t heteronormative, but the idea of “taking in” and letting it pass through you unchanged, a merger that doesn’t change the component parts but results in the birth of one of the component parts through the other is sexual.
Everybody as a Host to this Parasite
Spicer’s concept of poetic dictation posits externality as the source of poetry, which is very different from what someone like John Stuart Mill or Shelley or Keats or Mallarme or Kristeva or HD posits as the source of poetry. For Mill, the source of poetry is the poet’s sensibility and spirit. For Shelley, the poet’s work is his attempt to capture and interpret the eternal rhythms, which are external, but the poet does the creative work himself. Same for Keats. Keats posits the poet as a cypher, a chameleon without identity taking in and on all the external stimuli around him. Yet Keats differs from Spicer in that the chameleon poet is affected, and that affective act, that change in the poet, is the source of poetry. Spicer’s poet isn’t changed. He is the medium through which the external poem, the poem that exists itself as a thing out in the ether, travels. Mallarme finds poetry in the play of the word: the music and sound of the word where there exists no exact meaning. Poetry is found in speech. Yet for Mallarme, the poet’s craft is on understanding this and utilizing it. The poet knows where poetry can be found and gets to work digging it up, searching it out, collecting it and rearranging it on paper. The poet maintains his creative agency. Spicer’s poet has agency, too. Spicer’s poet is an agency of transportation, however, not creation. Kristeva’s chora still privileges the subject position (for Spicer, there is no subject, or if there is, it’s an understanding of the “interference” of subjectivity and the work of the poet is to “block” that interference). HD’d jellyfish, or the over-conscious, is also external, but it represents the union of the spirit/soul of the poet and the universal spirit/soul of the external community. Consequently, it is partially internally generated. Spicer’s poems are internally generated, they are internally translated and possibly regulated. The poet is the servant to the master poem.
Her Tongue Had Been Loosened in the Melting Pot
Mina Loy, in her essay “Modern Poetry,” proposes that “it was inevitable that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of America.” Loy believes that there is a new poetry afoot, one that responds directly to modern contemporary life and its vagaries. Unlike Baudelaire, who also considers art to be partly a product of its times but who also considers that art to be great because it also consists of eternal beauty, Loy finds the strength of the new poetry in the poet’s individual response to and relationship with “the modern world of varieties in which he finds himself” (158). America then, constituted by multiple cultures and ethnicities, is the best source of “the modern world of varieties.” America’s English is constituted similarly. However, Loy doesn’t say that America’s English is an amalgam of a thousand languages. Rather, it is in America that where “a thousand languages have been born.” America’s English is not unified; rather it constantly changes and develops, and expression in American English can be particular, informed as it is by ethnicity, heritage, location and character. Hence, the poet’s own particular experience of the modern world finds its expression best in American English, which provides him with her own particular language.
Parasitism, & Prostitution – or Negation
Loy’s essay “Feminist Manifesto,” makes assertions that deconstruct binaries, that explore the physical implications of heteronormative romantic love, and that privilege biological femaleness (i.e. the ability and right to bear children) over constructed femininity that subsists on dependence of the male. Her poem “Song to Joannes” attempts to do the same things.
In her manifesto, Loy argues that the feminist revolution cannot take place until the binary construction of lover (“mistress”) or mother is demolished. While I take issue with the alternative that Loy proposes – i.e. we must be both! we will be both brilliantly! (and not considering the option of being neither, or choosing to be only one instead of being assigned only one) – she is attacking the notion that the woman’s experience must be a experience of one or the other, or one after the other. In “Songs to Joannes,” Loy continues this argument not just through the deconstruction of Lover-or-Mother, but through the deconstruction of all binaries. In Song II we see the conflation of the body with the mechanical, or the “skin-sack” with the “clock-work mechanism.” The skin-sack contains desiring impulses,but those collective impulses can be perceived as working like a machine. She also conflates the holy with the secular, comparing her lover’s hair, which she braided, to “A God’s door-mat / On the threshold of your mind.” This work of deconstructing binaries is important in a poem that deconstructs the romantic notion of heteronormative love, a constructed love that is dependent on constructed binaries, and a love through which the masculine half of the binary is left untouched, but the feminine side of the binary is left battered. It’s important to note that Loy isn’t saying that women are not more fragile than men; rather she is pointing out that the construction of hetero-romantic love is one that is made to damage women.
Loy’s manifesto also claims that all women should be able to have babies regardless of their position in the world. In other words, the biology of women shouldn’t be demonized or considered subservient to men or to the relationships women form with men. While this claim is also a bit problematic (Loy then goes on to assert that intellectual women should have just as many children as poor, uneducated women to make certain things are evened out), the basic claim that a woman’s biology cannot be separated from her experience of the world helps to de-isolate the role of “mother” and brings child-bearing to the same level of importance as romantic relationship without being dependent on a romantic relationship. Loy states that children should be the result of the mother’s own development and not necessarily of a possibly irksome & outworn continuance of an alliance” (155). Loy addresses childbirth directly in Songs III and IV. In Song III, the child “a butterfly / with the daily news / printed in blood on its wings,” is the product of the speaker’s and her lover’s imagined union. The child, then, is less a child and more of a cultural and political production. In Song IV, Loy presents an “unimaginable family” of “Bird-like abortions.” The creatures are not conventionally born; rather they are abominations, creatures that might have been discarded had they been conceived from a conventional union. One of the creatures gives birth, and the speaker claims that she would live with them to learn from them what they know if it weren’t for their “abominable shadows.” It isn’t the creatures who are abominable, it is their shadows, their appearance in a conventional society that would condemn them.
Finally, Loy’s manifesto decries the idea of women defining themselves in the context of men which makes them dependent on men. Instead, women should “seek within yourselves to find out what you are” (154). The woman exists apart from man. The woman exists in her own body. This is manifested in the “Songs to Joannes” through Loy’s focus on the physical, the tangential existence of women as opposed to their construction as “other than men.” References to the body permeate the poem; the reader is unable to escape the reality of the existence of the woman as an individual entitity. The first Song introduces the physical reality of the poem with the lines “Among wild oats sown in mucous-membrane // I would an eye in a Bengal light.” The poem continues with body images: “broken flesh,” “promiscuous lips,” “pair of feet.” Loy continues throughout the poem that woman is not a constructed “other than man”; woman is separate, physical, individual and real.
The New Rhythm
In her essay “Modern Poetry,” Loy also distinguishes modern poetry as having a “new rhythm.” The poetry of William Carlos Williams best represents this new rhythm because, “Williams will make a poem of a bare fact – just to show you something he noticed. The doctor wishes you to know just how uncompromisingly itself that fact is. But the poet would like you to realize all that it means to him, and he throws that bare fact onto paper in such a way that it becomes a part of Williams’ own nature as well as the thing itself” (161). How then, is this style of writing, rhythmic? Loy is speaking not just of the rhythm of the poem or the rhythm of writing, but the rhythm of the poet’s understanding and making sense of the modern, diverse world. The key to this rhythm is that the fact that Williams writes then “becomes a part of [his] own nature as well as the thing itself.” By writing the bare fact, William changes his own subjectivity (the bare fact becomes part of the way he makes sense of the world). It also changes the thing, the object that the fact represents. It changes the fact itself. His understanding and expression of the fact becomes part of the fact, part of its objectivity if we count connotation as part of its objectivity, and we do. The associations that the subject has with the object may be part of the subject, but it is perceived as part of the object. If Williams writes about a greeny flower, his new associations may be part of his own mental process and the mental processes of the readers of that poem, but both poet and readers will posit the associations onto the greeny flower. The associations only exist in relation to the greeny flower. They can’t be conjured on their own.
This idea can, perhaps, be better understood by considering Julia Kirsteva’s “connoted mimetic object” from The Semiotic and the Symbolic. For Kristeva, the connoted mimetic object is dependent on the subject of enunciation (i.e. the subject who speaks and who therefore breaches the thetic) and his ability to attach pre-verbal associative sense (i.e. semiotic chora) to the object. The connoted mimetic object cannot exist as it is without its relationship with the subject and the subject’s ability to privilege chora instead of repress it.
When It Gets Really Difficult You Want to Disentangle Rather Than to Cut the Knot
It is tempting, when reading Stein’s “On Poetry and Grammar,” to ask, “Yes, but what is she really getting at? What is she talking about when she talks about the uselessness of commas and the movement of verbs?” This is, I believe, an incorrect strategy, one that dismisses the complexity of Stein’s argument and reduces it to a code for something else, something that must be, we believe, more important, like nationalism or institutionalization or patriarchy. So I would answer the question this way: “She is talking about the uselessness of commas and the movement of verbs.” In other words, she is talking about language and how we use it and how the way we use language either limits or opens up the text to mean. Implicated in this discussion is, yes, the large concepts of nationalism and institutionalization and patriarchy, but only in how they are either sustained or subverted through language. Language is a location of power; consequently it can disrupt hegemonic institutions or it can promote them, depending on how we use language.
What results then, is a categorization of parts of speech into two classes: the first class is static, redundant, closed, and without any other purpose than to reify the status quo; the other class is dynamic, multiple, open, and disruptive. Stein much prefers the second class. In this class are verbs, adverbs, articles, conjunctions, prepositions and periods. The first class contains nouns, adjectives, commas, colons and semicolons, exclamation marks, quotation marks, and question marks. Then there are pronouns and apostrophes that, while they don’t constitute a third class, they don’t really fit into the other two. They float in and out of the classes depending on their contexts. Apostrophes can be useful in some instances and pronouns are better than nouns because of the open space between their representation of someone/thing and the name of someone/thing. They have a greater chance of being something “other” than the exact relationship between the thing and its name (this exact relationship is what Mallarme rails against, and there is a parallel between Mallarme’s solution in the sound of words and Stein’s focus on the sound of words as she composes).
And this openness is what Stein embraces in language. It is the verb’s ability to be mistaken, to be multiple and subjectively interpreted, that she loves about it. The vagueness of articles – the implication of otherness and multiplicity in “a,” “an,” or “the” – defies phallogocentric thinking. Conjunctions and prepositions determine that meaning is relative, and therefore dynamic and multiple, depending on context and relationships of things to other things. Periods, which may at first seem very closed and definitive are, in actuality, a connector in language that goes on and on. (Stein’s need for language to go on and on prefaces Cixous’ overflow). The period is not the end. In fact, it prolongs the end and has the potential to disrupt and to be arbitrary, and to be arbitrary is to opt out of the sensus communis that is dominated by heteronormative, phallocentric hegemony. The period, in other words, is a rebel.
Conversely, the comma is servile. It is dependent. Unlike the period, it does not have a life of its own. Unlike the period, it is not active. It does what it’s told to do: to hold the place and space and time, to signal the authoritative breath, to enfeeble language’s ability to break up a monolithic essentialism. Commas are essentialism’s patsy. Whenever language starts to go on and on at a breakneck speed tangling up meaning, comma’s hold it back and slows it down so that language can fall back into the singular rut of meaning the hegemony depends on. And so nouns and naming. Nouns are Stein’s real culprits. To name, as Adam did, is to create the exact relationship between the thing and its name. The thing becomes essentialized, and to repeat the name is solely to reify the objects’ assigned singular meaning. Meaning isn’t disrupted or created; it is simply thickened (on one hand) and lost on the other. The name gets repeated so often that the name replaces the object and then the name is meaningless.
What is Poetry and if you Know What Poetry Is What is Prose
Which is why Stein avoids nouns in her prose and makes it the focus of poetry. This is the difference between prose and poetry. Prose is dangerously ontological. In order for prose language to make meaning instead of depending on language’s meaning to merely be (and that being of meaning that is then invoked by the prose), it must avoid the trap of naming names. This may seem to directly contradict Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, but she does make the distinction between the names of people and the names of everything else. Because people are constantly changing (often into their names), the names of people aren’t static. All other names, however, are “either adequate or they are not.” To repeat them is to rely on ontology, which changes and creates nothing. Poetry, on the other hand, must take the name as its object and deconstruct it through a process of renaming. Through an exploration of the noun, poetry revivifies the noun; recreates the thing that it names. It “refuses them (nouns) by using them.” It breaks down the old, empty structure of the noun, breaks up the foundation, tills the earth the foundation was laid on, and plants a new, fertile garden there. A hokey metaphor, but you get the picture. Poetry makes meaning by creating new and multiple associations, images, and connotations for the old noun.
As to why paragraphs are emotional and sentences are not; this one confuses me and it seems that Stein is unable to move beyond the idea of the axiom: “Sentences are not emotional but paragraphs are. I can say that as often as I like and it always remains as it is, something that is” (talk about ontological). It seems that Stein moves beyond this idea to talk about balance – the idea that sentences must be separate and a part of paragraphs and that to approach a melding of the two, i.e. a sentence that approaches, in length and movement, the appearance of a paragraph, is not necessarily a good thing. Text should have a balance of the sentence and the paragraph, the emotional and the non-emotional. Stein points out that it is possible to have an emotional sentence, but I’m not convinced that she believes it is good.
“Mutiny Against the Old, Tired Mold,” (he spoke, he sang)
Mallarme, in his essay “Crisis of Verse,” and llike Wilde and Baudelaire, opposes the primacy of nature that someone like Wordsworth gives it. Mallarme correlates nature with an absolutism that differs from the idea of absolute or eternal truth, which I believe Mallarme believes in. Mallarme associates nature, or to be more precise, the traditional treatment of nature in poetry, as “an exact relation between images,” or between the word and the image. There is no room for play, for ambiguation. This exactness is also what Mallarme rails against when discussing adherence to the strict rules of formal verse; refusal to accept “voluntary infractions” or “dissonance” is refusal to accept the most crucial element of verse – the play of ambiguities of meaning through the play of sound, that other element of language besides the printed word of the page that accesses thought, not through an “exact relation” but through an associative relation. Through the focus of verse on sound, and the play of sound when messing with the traditional meter and rhyme of formal verse, Mallarme suggests that we make up for language’s deficiencies. Additionally, Mallarme invokes (predicts?) Kristeva’s intertextuality when he suggests that the music of the traditional verses “haunts these approximations.” The music of strict verse isn’t lost, instead it is sustained through play.
What’s important to consider is Mallarme’ notice of language’s deficiencies. Deficient in what? I would argue, deficient in its ability to capture the “immortal speech.” Here’s where echoes of Shelley comes in. Mallarme’s immortal speech is very similar to Shelley’s eternal order, which is manifested in the rhythms and language of music. All of poetry, Shelley asserts, is the attempt to capture and communicate the eternal order in language that is metaphorical, or associative. Mallarme’s immortal speech is that same eternal order, and his way to approach it is also associative, but the associative element of language can be found in its music, in its aural qualities, in the spoke word, or speech. Mallarme writes, “‘I say: a flower! and outside the oblivion to which my voice relegates any shape,
insofar as it is something other than the calyx, there arises musically, as the very idea and delicate, the one absent from every bouquet.” His emphasis here is on “say.” It is the spoken word and the sounds of the word that enable the listener to have a sensory experience of “flower” that goes beyond the “exact relation” of the word to the image. Poetry’s focus on the sound of the words open up that associative space where a multiplicity of meaning. He calls this “Transposition,” and it includes the act of disturbing the reality of the thing, i.e. the “exact relation” of the thing to its symbol, and in this case the symbol is the word.
This is why, at the time of his writing, poetry is in crisis. Critics are upholding strict verse and decrying the play of free verse. Mallarme sees the play of free verse and the disruption of strict rhyme and meter not so much as a revolution as a transcendence of the limits of strict verse, a closer approach to “immortal speech” through approximation.
