Once trilobitten, twice

As always, Steven Fama provides comments (which see) that send me back into something I've said — and not seen — in an earlier post. This time, he responds to my too-brief commentary on Coolidge's poem, taking up the discussion of "torque" at Kasey's blog that returned me to the poem in the first place, and redirects torque to bear on the poem's sound, rather than its syntax and grammar.

In particular, he notes that the poem is built around rhythms, like drum-beats, in bursts of three, and connects this to the etymology of trilobite, "three lobed." And a surprise that the OED refers this etymology, in its gloss of the Greek λόβός, specifically to the earlobe, as though suggesting just such a way of reading the last line of Coolidge's poem.

We might extend this approach, shifting our attention from rhythm to tone. Thus, we'll notice that the poem's first line is similarly built around a repetition of three Os, each of which represents a distinct sound. The long o of code recurs in ohm, and twice in trilobite. Two of the words in the second line — a and the — have indeterminate/variable pronunciations, their doubling allowing for a total of three vowel sounds.

Given its lack of grammar, the first line does not invite a particular rhythm, suggesting that we stress its syllables almost evenly, allowing only for orange's second syllable to provide contrast. The "third line," itself broken into three (after Williams?), similarly resists determining vocal stress, but its visual "descent" points to the scansion of trilobite. And puns emerge, as trilobite's dactyl (evocative of another prehistoric creature) waltzes out to the cymbal (symbol?) crash of the terminal s.

Audible breaks

Steve Evans points me in the direction of an article that allows for a more sophisticated analysis of Spicer's sounding of the line break in the lines "No / One listens to poetry" from "Thing Language."

Reuven Tsur, arguing against the received/conventional notion that the "delivery" (his word) of a poem must resolve line-break ambiguities by sounding either one interpretation or the other, explains the process by which a poet can read both the poem's line and its syntax simultaneously, allowing for the same unresolved tension that the page provides. He writes:

when the endings of the syntactic unit and the metric unit do not coincide (that is, when syntax is run-on from one line to the other), the reciter may indicate continuity and discontinuity at one and the same time by having recourse to conflicting cues.

In "Thing Language," the first of these cues is the prolonged pause between "no" and "one," which invites a grammatical interpretation, allowing the reader to imagine a dash or comma dividing clauses. Spicer introduces "conflict" with the second cue, irreconcilable to the first, which is the lack of vocal stress one would "naturally" expect to find on either "one" or "listens," particularly in that such an interpretation of the line would place it in direct contrast with the prior assertion that "no one listens." The combination of these two allows the ambiguity present on the page to reside in the sounded poem.

Conventional speech, in normal circumstances, would of course work to resolve precisely the ambiguity in which Spicer's sounding traffics. For Tsur, this constitutes a "rhythmical" approach to reading, an alternative that combines elements of the metrical (= following the pattern of the line) with the grammatical (= following the sentence). And in thematizing this rhythmical sounding, Tsur extends the metaphor of conflict quoted above, regarding it as an "organized violence" waged against speech. As he writes, "continuity and discontinuity can be suggested at one and the same time by using conflicting phonetic cues, thus committing 'organized violence' against speech processing."

Tsur's figuration of the sort of "delivery" (to use his terminology) Spicer employs as "violence" is interesting, not least for the fact that it highlights the uncomfortable relationship between a metered use of language and the spoken version. Is it possible to extend this notion into our reading of the type of line-breaks characteristic of Spicer's work? We could approach the matter by examining the ways that the term "line-break" suggests, if not a "violence," a trauma performed on the conventions of written language...

Another quick one while I'm away

Also recently made available through PennSound is Ted Berrigan's 1981 reading of the complete Sonnets at New Langton Arts in S.F. Though the recording has been available for quite some time, it has now been broken up into individual tracks, which makes it easier for the casual listener (or a serious one who is short of time) to work with.

eyelighte

Ron Silliman's blog post today finds him discussing the work of Aram Saroyan. In so doing, he closely examines two one-word Saroyan poems originally published in 1968, in a book that is either untitled or eponymous, depending on how you read its cover.

The first of the Saroyan poems in question, reprinted here in its entirety:

eyeye

And the second, also in its entirety:

lighght

Silliman argues that the first of these is the better poem, noting that the latter "just sits there on the page doing not much of anything." In contrast, he judges the first poem "effective" in that it "calls up the double-image element involved in stereoscopic vision," which connects, and fulfills, the poem's use of the "graphic elements of language."

But exclusive attention to these poems' graphical components ignores — as Silliman does — their sonic dimensions. I'm not interested in disagreeing with Silliman, of course; his attention is focused on the visual by the parameters of his essay, and particularly by his comparison of Saroyan with Grenier. Rather, and nevertheless, I want to look at other ways of reading the poems to investigate them differently.

Read aloud — with an "eye" to its sound, rather than graphical presentation — the poem takes on, through homophony, a variety of other possible meanings. "eyeye" sounds the affirmative: "aye-aye." Or it can be read as "I I" — a doubling of the personal pronoun that, in turn, might be regarded as a doubling of the self, as in a split consciousness, or as an expression of plurality, of "we," taken as a union that does not suppress distinct subjectivity. The latter might, in turn, be read to recall Olson's "polis is / eyes," which relies in part on the eye/I/aye homophony for its meaning. And we could take this further still, substituting one homophone for each of the "eyes" that comprise the poem: "I aye," or "aye I." Operating in this fashion, "I eye" and "eye I" are also possible, as are "aye eye" and "eye aye." That some of these formulation defy grammatical conventions seems of little consequence, as we are dealing here in the realm of pun, rather than of sentence structure.

As I read it, there is no apparent connection between the poem's voicing and its visual appearance. I suppose we could look towards a reconcilitation by taking up the homophonic play between "eye" and "I," to return to Olson's statment, and suggest that we read our multiplicity, our condition as "we," in terms of stereoscopic vision, suggesting a more-or-less commun(al)istic and affirmative conception of society that emphasizes the ways we work together. But this seems, at the moment, a bit of a stretch — though I stand to stand corrected, of course.

The meaning of "eyeye" proliferates upon its utterance. "lighght" confounds its sounding. Where the former works through pun, the latter presents itself in terms of the impossibility of even the most fundmental form of interpretation that is reading aloud. It is not clear at all how to voice the poem's doubling of the silent "gh." Nevertheless, possible solutions come into view, despite its presentation: we could recall that "gh" indicates that the "i" is a long one, and draw the vowel out, effectively doubling its length. Or we could read the poem as a homophone for "light" — read the poem as a rejection of logocentrism, that is — and rely on the assumption that its difference from the conventional word exists solely on the page. Or we could recall that earlier versions of English in fact sounded the "gh" combination as the velar fricative /x/ (as in German "nicht"). This in mind, we could return to this sounding, drawing it out to honor its graphical doubling, or perhaps allowing the first "gh" to silently lengthen the "i" sound, and voice its second manifestation as either /x/ or the /f/ into which the former transformed prior to the completion of the "taut-taught merger" (as historical phonologists term the evolution of words like "taught" towards homophony with words like "taut").

As in "eyeye," puns begin to suggest themselves with these last possibilities. We can move between a short and long "i" while voicing the "gh" as /x/ or as /f/ to find: "lift," "licked" or "lick't" (if we allow a slight mispronunciation of /x/), and "liked," as well as the neologistic "lifed," which we might interpret as meaning "lived." And these might be superimposed upon the ambiguities that the conventional word "light" allows: when divorced from syntactic context, the word fluctuates between adjective and noun. And the varying meanings of "light" as adjective inhere as well.

None of these puns is, for me, as fulfilling as the working together of meanings in "eyeye." And each is somewhat unsatisfying, inasmuch as it solves the problem with which we are presented when we first look at "lighght." The very difficulty of sounding the poem reminds us — in a way that the ease of "eyeye" does not, because it moves this difficulty to the background — that one way of thinking ambiguity, uncertainty, and undecidability is in terms of impossibility. And the impossibility of reading interests me, not least because it problematizes the dominance of voice in our culture. But also because it confounds the most fundamental levels of interpretation. The verb "to read" means to interpret, but before it means interpretation, it implies a sounding that "lighght" has certainly complicated. Or, to return to Silliman's phrasing, "lighght" "sits there on the page," but doing so is doing something.






[NOTE: if you decide to read UbuWeb's reprinting of Saroyan's text, be aware that they've misspelled "lighght" as "lightght," a fact Saroyan has mentioned here. I mention this not to prevent the accusation that I've misread the poem, but to point to the difficulty of even transcribing the poem — a testament to what we might, variously, call its confounding poetics, or its poetics of impossibility.]

[ADDENDUM: There's another sense in which "lighght" does more than "sit ... there on the page." Silliman clearly intends to describe the poem qua poem — as it is on the page, if you will — but "lighght" has another life off the page that is worth mention. The poem became part of a decades-long controversy when it was discovered to have been awarded an NEA grant. "lighght" is regularly referenced in critiques of government arts subsidies, though usually without mention of its author, and has been referenced in the Senate as recently as 1997, by such luminaries as Jesse Helms (according to Saroyan) and John Ashcroft (according to the Congressional Record).]

Prosodic bodies

Dearest reader:

You keep coming back for more on Robert Kocik, don't you? Don't try to hide it — I've seen the report from Google Analytics. It's okay — I keep coming back to him, planning to write more. This will also allow me to elaborate on, and further develop, ideas I mentioned to you earlier.

"Every feature that is not meaning is prosody," Kocik writes in "Stressogony." An invitation, here, in this inclusive definition of "prosody": to acknowledge the limits of signification and reference as models of meaning, and to attend instead to gesture, to sound-as-sound, to the materiality of textual production (font choice, texture of paper, etc.). To attend, in other words, to that which exceeds meaning.

And, in the next breath, a dialectical turn: "in a fully prosodized world" — that is, a world properly attentive to everything outside the bounds of signification — "there is no feature that doesn't have meaning or can't be made to mean." That which exceeds meaning would seem to have returned as meaningful. But this return is a return with a difference; it has already passed through the first proposition.

To move these contradictions towards synthesis, then, is to note a suppressed pun at play here: what exceeds — exists beyond — meaning is simultaneously an excess — an abundance — of meaning. Once we allow ourselves to become aware of meaning's limits, we become aware of the potential for meaning that inheres in everything. Or: all is meaningful, but that meaning occurs outside the economic models (signification, reference — communication, even) according to which we typically regard meaning.

Kocik's concern is with imagining language otherwise, as initiative, rather than representational (mimetic) or presentational (performative). If his initiative language is attentive to its own "carnality" (as I used the term a while back), it also attentive to its function as incarnation: of knowledge, of "voices from the most distant past." As initiative, language is "that which is requisite for all things to appear."

What interests me here — in the final synthesis of meaning's excess and excess of meaning, and in incarnation — is ethics, particularly in terms of language's tangibility. Roland Barthes, in A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, writes:

Language is a skin: I rub myself against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.... I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.

Add emphasis, underscore "caress": Barthes' emphasis on skin rather than flesh — a subtle distinction, but nonetheless fundamental — allows us to apprehend language not only as (mere) pleasure, but as touch. And, as Susan Stewart has noted in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, touch involves a reciprocity that complicates and undermines — it presents itself as vertigo, as instability — the conventional binary relationship of subject and object, of self and other:

One hand or the other can be subect or object; one "I" or the other can take the position of the "you"; one speaker or the other can become the listener — indeed, each is waiting upon the other, anticipating the other.

But a poem is not contact with the other — Barthes' description of language aside — in the same way touch is. Rather, we might return to Barthes, to his account of the amorous gift, which shares with language a sense of "contact, sensuality: you will be touching what I have touched. A third skin unites us." The question, then, is how to regard the poem as this "third skin" without, in so doing, limiting the poem to expression between individuals, between lover and beloved.

As I read it, Kocik's idea of a prosodic body — in its insistence on initiative, on reading meaning's excesses — opens the potential for poetry (or prosody, as he would have it) to be conceived in these ways.





[Sources: "Stressogony" and "The Prosodic Body" by Robert Kocik. A Lover's Discourse: Fragments by Roland Barthes. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses by Susan Stewart.

Thom Donovan, over at Wild Horses of Fire, has also addressed the connection between Kocik's work and ethics.]

The mouth, that "channel of vocal utterance"

Mouth, from the Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (1889-1991)

— - — - — - —

[An excerpt from Vocal Sounds by Edward Search (1773):]

If on pronouncing u psilon you change to "au" you will find your under jaw drop, and your lips expand in a nearly circular form; if from thence to "o," you will find the corners of your lips draw in so as to turn into an oval; if to "u," you will find the orifice still more contracted, and the lips a little thrust forwards, the tongue in all these three operations lying close at the bottom of the mouth; if from thence you pass to "a," the lips at the corners will widen so as to form the long diameter of an ellipsis, the jaw remaining as before, and the tongue rising and spreading a very little; the transition thence to "e," is effected only by raising the hinder part of the tongue in the manner you did for an "h," and that to "i," by throwing the tongue into a convex, corresponding with the hollow roof of the mouth.

Appendix (the letter L)

L, as in:

salt. battle. sold. saddle. coolness. channel. lily. loose. shield. feel. real. reel. ideal. deal. vial. vile. would. alms. salmon. half. talk. folk. trouble. handled. struggling. awfully. pool. fiddle. like. canal. fall. full. tell. bell. foul. fool. prowl. growl. foal.

— - — - — - —


[From An American Dictionary of the English Language, by Noah Webster (1828):]

L, the twelfth letter of the English Alphabet, is usually denominated a semi-vowel, or a liquid. It represents an imperfect articulation, formed by placing the tip of the tongue against the gum that incloses the roots of the upper teeth; but the sides of the tongue not being in close contact with the roof of the mouth, the breath of course not being entirely intercepted, this articulation is attended with an imperfect sound…

— - — - — - —


[From "The Poetical Alphabet" by Benjamin Paul Blood (1879):]

L is the chilling and polishing letter…. L, by itself, makes all clear, lucid, placid, liquid; it is the polish of glow, gleam, glide, glassy, glance, glitter, etc. The l lends the cold, metallic quality to the solidity of lead; it gives lustre and ring to silver, as the r roughens and darkens iron.

— - — - — - —


[From "A Checklist: The Alphabet of the Mind," by Velimir Khlebnikov (1916). Note that Paul Schmidt's translation of this material, necessarily relies on transliteration from the Cyrillic alphabet of the author's original Russian.]

Л [L] is the conversion of motion from motion along a line to motion over an area transverse to it that intersects the path of the motion. L = the square root of -1. Lob [forehead], laty [armor], lyzhi [skis], lodka [boat], let [flight], luzha [pond] (the motion of weight), lava [cavalry charge], i.e., a laterally extended formation.

— - — - — - —


[From Khlebnikov's "Let us consider two words" (1912):]

L indicates that the distance between the comprehending mind and the object comprehended has decreased: the object leans toward or clings to [l'net] the individual.

L is the motion of a point that derives from its own force.

The active voice, where the actor embraces [l'net] the action is based on the letter l of let [lift, flight]…

So les [forest], which reaches for the sky and arbitrarily increases its distance from everything immobile, from the perceiving consciousness, independently of that consciousness, begins with the letter l…. So we can establish l as a marker for self-instigated motion toward an immobile point.

The letter l everywhere begins words describing self-initiating actions that cut through what surrounds them.

L refers to those motions where the cause of motion is a moving point.

L is the reduction of distance as an action caused by the force of a motionless body.

— - — - — - —


[From "The Warrior of the Kingdom," also by Khlebnikov:]

Л [L]—the uncontrolled movement of a great force of freedom (time past).

[A set of addenda to yesterday's post, designed to give a sense of the range of approaches to language's carnality, and to the symbolism that can be applied to a single sound.]

Language's Carnality (a French postcard)

Dearest reader:

I was hoping — hoping against hope, I suppose, as my hope came to no fruition — that you were also planning to attend the reading/talk held by Robert Kocik and Jonathan Skinner at the Peace on A reading series in Alphabet City. Since I failed to see you there, I assume you failed to attend. Of course, assumptions are sometimes wrong: you may have sat in the back, behind me, towards the kitchen. You may have left the room before I turned around. I, often a failure at the art of recognizing, may have failed to understand your face as familiar, as yours, dear reader, dearest mine. Maybe this is so, and maybe you saw what I saw, heard what I heard; this is my hope.

I bring this up now, in this peculiarly still silence, because some of Kocik's ideas were relevant to — gave voice to, if we can say such a thing without sounding our naïvety — some ideas I've been too exhausted to formulate or raise since we spoke last, last week. I mentioned then that "I often start with sound." I mentioned, and you, as in a silent response, raised your eyebrows into little question marks. I should not — and I'll admit it now, and in no uncertain terms — have used the term "sound" simply, as though it could mean what I wanted it to mean, as though it could mean more than it means. I meant more than mere sound, something more than the rush of syllables. I referred to "labiodental fricatives," "sibilants," and "the liquid L," drawing upon a linguistic vocabulary, as though doing so could speak for me.

This linguistic vocabulary interests me, with its attention to language's sound; I hope it will interest you, too. It gives voice to the qualities of these sounds we use when we mean. And it, in certain cases, at least, describes the manner with which language's sound is made. "Labiodental fricative" describes not only a noise distinct from other noises, human-made and meaningful; it also describes the manner in which the sound is made. Here, we draw teeth to lips, and breathe across the space — a space that is not created, per se, but obstructed. There is a scrape to the sound we draw as an F or and f. And we can give voice to this breath, as when we hum v's vibration into air.

"Isn't it remarkable" — Kocik asks this in "The Prosodic Body" — "that the acoustic fact 'd' can build diverse meanings while tapping at the same place on the alveolar ridge and sending forth the same frequency with the same physiological impact time after time?" When he asks this, Kocik touches on the ideas that I've been trying to explain to you for days, and that I am telling you now, right now. Kocik's desire is to situate meaning within each of the sounds that constitute language — to reinvent (for it would necessitate a reinvention) our understanding and use of English to allow us to regard each of these sounds as meaning-full, even before they are built into words. But I'm rushing ahead of myself, into a terrain better saved for a later letter...

What I am trying, by citing Kocik's work, to remind you — and what he is explaining in a vocabulary different from the one I am able to fully employ — is that meaning, at least inasmuch as it exists within language, is located in the body before it is located anywhere else, be it page or mind. But I'd like to — and I'd like to do this without detracting from Kocik's assessment of sound, if that is possible — shift our attention from the sound itself to those actions that precede and facilitate and allow the sound to come into being. He calls 'd' an "acoustic fact," but I'd call it a physical one first.

Call it langauge's carnality. Perhaps you know what I mean: before syllable or sound, before an explosion of the breath can become phoneme or letter, the tongue's tip flips from teeth to the alveolar ridge, raised and bony just behind those pearly whites, before it drops down so its back can raise and close the throat while the mouth is already closing to let breath — which has been a part of this process from the beginning, and through to the end — hiss. Tongue back up and down again, so lips can close and explode outward like a gasp in reverse and miniature... Feel, don't hear, what Dante says. Read silently, even. You need not read his Italian correctly — mouth it: "Quando leggemmo il disïato riso / esser baciato da cotanto amante, / questi, che mai da me non fia diviso, / la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante."

Let me give you another example — Noah Webster's definitions, in his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), of lip:

LIP, n. [Sax. lippa, lippe; D. lip; G. Dan. lippe; … L. labium, labrum; It. labbro; Sp. labio; Fr. levre; Ir. clab or liobhar; … It may be connected with W. llavaru, Ir. labhraim, to speak, that is, to thrust out. The sense is probably a border.]
1. The edge or border of the mouth. The lips are two fleshy or muscular parts, composing the exterior of the mouth in man and many other animals. In man, the lips, which may be opened or closed at pleasure, form the covering of the teeth, and are organs of speech essential to certain articulations. Hence the lips, by a figure, denote the mouth, or all the organs of speech, and sometimes speech itself.

LIP, v.t. To kiss.

Webster's "at pleasure" seems crucial, if not to his purposes, then to my own. Lips slips from the liquid to an explosion of breath, eases in a relaxed and hissing rush. I've suggested you — or I, or we — call this pleasure language's carnality. And, in so calling it, shift attention from sound to the activity — fleshy, muscular, breathy, and tooth-sharp — by which language is made. And, in so calling it, identify a locus of physical pleasure that, in my estimation, is located outside of meaning. Locate it on meaning's hither side; place it prior to meaning. This pleasure is meaning's, and language's, excess. What I mean is this: that this carnality — this pleasure of the flesh — happens before meaning takes its shape, as sound or as process of signification. The pleasure in language's carnality does not return to, nor is it reduced by, the utterance that produces it. It's insistence on — or striving for, or what have you — meaning does not detract from the experience of this pleasure. It is not bound by the economy of communication, though it is at once essential and intrinsic to our speech.

I locate poetry at this interstice of body and language — of flesh, sound, meaning.

Perhaps... Wait. Let us interrupt our communication to take a moment to reflect on the close of that word — perhaps the way the mouth draws to a close after perhaps widening to let the breath flee in an h, only to spring open again for s's slip, perhaps a surprise. Perhaps we cannot let our attention to this carnality get the better of us. We cannot live out our days in this trembling. Like Dante, we must swoon — not "as if in death," but into meaning.






[ADDENDUM: I've made a few alterations to this entry, as the mood has struck, and as I have decided certain elements have merited minor modification and/or addition. I've also added an appendix that examines, through the work of several writers, a single verbal sound, both in terms of the physiology of its pronunication and its (potential and speculative) symbolism.]