PHO NO TAX IS : THE WAY WE TRAVEL THROUGH EACH OTHER
JONATHAN STALLING
AND
LAURA MULLEN
Jonathan Stalling, Laura Mullen
Phonotaxis: The Way We Travel Through Each Other
EDITED BY ANDY FITCH, CRISTIANA BAIK AND VICTORIA SANZ. TYPESET BY CRISTIANA BAIK. DESIGNED BY SARAH BECKWITH.
T h e
C o n v e r s a n t
Preface Sometimes we may need to leave the grapheme nest of the Roman alphabet to seek out sounds unmarked therein, pooling out of sight, beneath its wicker fingers, that despite their dexterous width and depth cannot hold the sounds that swim forth from within and beyond the languages we speak. On January 6, 2013, I attended the MLA panel entitled: “Reading the ‘Difficult’ Poem: Experimental Pedagogies from Workshop to Literature Classroom,” which included Alan Golding (U. of Louisville), Andrew R. Mossin (Princeton U.), Marthine Satris (UC Santa Barbara) and Laura Mullen (LSU). During the Q&A we began discussing what kind of “difficulties” manifest when students (and teachers) encounter foreign languages in poetry. In the course of this conversation I spoke of accents as prosodies and introduced the term “phonotaxis” to offer a name for poetry that self-consciously explores the interlingual accent as poetic phrasing and music. Laura and I continued to talk about the subject for a while after the panel ended, and we left promising to continue our conversation. So when I arrived at the airport terminal, I began to imagine how the conversation might continue and initiated a conversation piece with a temporary “Laura” providing openings in my thinking where she could later enter and redirect the piece in whichever direction she wanted. The flight time became my compositional constraint and the first portion of this conversation was sent to Laura upon landing in Dallas. The ‘real’ (!) Laura responded, and in the months that followed her writing came to replace/displace the “Laura” markers as the piece morphed into the one below. Because the majority of my parts were composed on plane rides between Oklahoma City and Boston (both coming back from the MLA in January and to and from AWP in March), the piece reflects some of the rough/rushed tempo resulting from these constraints. However, both Laura and I went back through the emails here and there to smooth out spellings (more or less), taking up some of the loose threads and even weaving a few more new ones in—and coming to a sort of end in May. (Both of us think of the result as the trace of an on-going conversation.) Finally, the dialogue below benefited from editing elbow grease provided by Andrew Fitch at The Conversant, although he respected our desire to leave the temporal scramble of the piece as a conditional marker of the conversation’s compositional process. This reminds me, my youngest son did learn a number of signs before he could speak, and they really did relieve some of the frustrations that often accompany life within the “apex of babel.” Because the conversation that follows came into being through many different temporal layers, this answer has been delayed somewhat, and still others remain as graphonic cues tugging upon future conversations Jonathan Stalling Norman, OK, July 28, 2013 i
Phonotaxis: The Way We Travel Through Each Other
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Dear Laura, It is now June 3rd, and I am in my office reading through your final additions and questions and softly editing some of my more hastily composed passages from our in-flight conversations (both in transit between OKC and Boston). At long last I am finally becoming more comfortable with this lovely, if strange experience. I have to tell you I very nearly did not send you my first email and waited on pins and needles for your reply. I hoped you would forgive someone you had just met hours before inviting you into such a strangely structured space. At the time, I simply could not imagine writing one long uninvited letter to you as a continuation of the conversation we began at the MLA. Still I knew I needed (more than wanted) to continue our conversation, but such a talking about needed (more than wanted) to be with, not to or at you. So I tried to imagine a space where such a conversation could begin even before it had, so that I could speak with you on the plane by way of a series of ventriloquizing interruptions, temporary place holders for your later “real” questions, comments and ideas to sink roots and transform the whole. In that first email, each “Laura” played a role in moving the first line of thought forward, but was also a small plea for your counter-direction and presence—each Laura was both an empowering node in my developing, thinking but also a small prayer for a redirecting process against the monological ends of speaking “to” or worse yet “for” another. Now that most of the imagined “Lauras” have become your actual questions, concerns and ideas, this textual space has finally become one I am comfortable in. Through your generosity, we have become into conversation after all, and I am quite grateful as much for your continual forgiveness as for your sentient co-presence. While I really enjoyed reading through the more formal part of the conversation centered on this idea of “phonotaxis,” I now think my favorite part of the text is the strange palimpsests of openings that remind me of your generosity (your replies now come at the end of the conversation). I often think of Roland Barthes’ final lectures on “the Neutral,” as I am also searching for a way of being in language free from the conduits of power that undergird it. But unlike him, I feel that such freedom to be in language can only come as the gift of a listener/ reader to a speaker/writer. He/she must ultimately decide whether to judge the speaker/ writer as language, or to forgive him/her for language and its entanglements. Reading through this conversation, I am reminded that you offered me this freedom and in a way trusted the process long before it had been safe to do so. Now that the language has had time to become co-caused I hope you feel it was a worthwhile experience as I am truly grateful for your willingness to remain in process (as we remain). Yours, Jonathan
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Dear Laura, It was a real pleasure meeting you today [ January 6th] and I’m grateful for your kind words of support in the Q/A. As I mentioned, I really enjoyed your paper and hearing about the work you and your students make happen in the community of your classroom. I really wanted to talk longer but had to dash off to the airport, which is where I am presently composing this email. It dawned on me that I didn’t need to stop talking to you though, that I might still be able to answer your questions, or respond to your request to present my thoughts in long-form in the near future. But, frankly, I know what work I have awaiting me on Monday, and that it will not include writing such a piece, unless I write it now, and to/with you. So it is, in a way impossible, or somehow less truthful, to write it in another way. So as my four-hour flight from Boston to Dallas and one-hour here at the terminal awaits me, I am going to take this as my constraint. And I will email you whatever I end up with when I get to the next airport. It is my hope our conversation might also be a place to include a new(ish) video poem that practices phonotaxis in ways that I want to talk more about. So this conversation awaits your re-entry into the conversation where we can extend it beyond our first actual conversation (that is to say, I hope we can reweave more thinking into this subject). Yours, Jonathan
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Laura Mullen: Jonathan, in the Q & A at the end of the MLA panel “Reading the Difficult Poem: Experimental Pedagogies . . . ” you spoke about the difficulty and opportunity of the encounter with foreign languages within poetry—and (but you needed to run to catch a plane) I hoped to hear more from you on that topic . . . Jonathan Stalling: I want to explore or “literalize” if you will, something you have written about “Belonging to a body / To itself unrecognizable.” I want to explore some of these domains of unrecognizability within our bodies, or more specifically inside what I would call our “language bodies.” While I believe selves are radically plural social aggregates of relations (rather than something singular and autonomous), bodies present us with a powerful sense of singularity. Pain in particular is something I think presents problems to an overemphasized plurality of the self (the pain felt by a loved one, for instance, is painfully unpainful in our “own” bodies), but language bodies are strange, because their “skin” is marked by other kinds of edges, edges that I think are particularly unrecognizable to ourselves. Here I am talking about phonotactic constraints. LM: This is really tricky to speak of, isn’t it? As both language and body are given to us—to make there what home we can . . . The lines of mine you quote (from “Refuge”) come from a poem “about” seeing a homeless man sleeping on the steps of a church—I mean, the lines arise in the context of a concern about community. I’m interested in (uh, shocked by, actually) the ways we are able to withhold recognition from specific sectors of collective populations (racism and sexism are easy examples of this splitting of the social body, and I’m thinking of Julia Kristeva’s idea of abjection when I gesture toward that splitting). But the points you raise about the difficulty of sharing pain (body to body) are linked to that denial of connection—and take me back to Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, in which the difficulties of communicating pain are explored with immense thoughtfulness. (And pain requires immediate attention in a way that—it seems—pleasure does not?) (Here I am sitting, as usual, in this hideous posture that— as it is destroying my neck—is making having a body unpleasant.) We have to learn (relearn) how to listen to our bodies—and the bodies of those (in our community, on the planet) we’re harming. But the idea of a “language body” is a new one to me: can you describe your vision? And then, “Phonotaxis” was the word I thought I heard you use, can you open that up? JS: I share your concern for community and the often uncanny experience of being inside and outside large social aggregates, but introducing the psycho-physiological element of language production, I think, introduces something different into the equation. Because all languages build words from a discrete sets of phonetic (phonemic) units, the differences between languages present what we can think of 4
as body-specific constraints, based on how these sounds (phonemes) are arranged into syllables within each body. “Phonotactic constraints” (also called and somewhat more helpfully “phoneme sequence constraints”) radically limit the shape, sequence and number of syllables theoretically possible within any language. More interesting still is that these constraints disable one’s ability to say and even more interestingly to hear sounds that are not already “lexical” (meaningful phonetic differences) within one’s primary language. We have all experienced our phonotactic limitations when we attempt to speak another language for the first time (but these constraints continue to mark our bodies’ new extenuated forms by way of what we call accents, often for as long as we live. So what I find most interesting here is that while our language bodies are incredibly intimate spaces (speech organs and language receptors), they are shared across large groups of individuals. The edges that limit what one can say and the sounds we can perceive as distinct are shared, and when two languages blur into one another at the edges, in the linguistic borderlands, these spaces are also shared. I find this plurality is one that has remained largely ignored in poetics and so I believe “phonotaxis” could be a way to think through the strange singular/plural of interlanguage bodies. “Phono” of course meaning “voice,” and “taxis” meaning “arrangement” in the context of interlinguistic writing, point to a way of arranging language in accordance to actual speech production and includes principally inter-graphic transcription, transliteration and other tactics. But more on that soon. LM: Ah, I love the ideas you are opening here. Can you give me some examples? I’m extremely interested in the “interlanguage” as inflected by affect—and (national/ cultural/social) body. And . . . is this the moment where I talk about the way I’m often mistaken for British? Or just, wherever I am in the world, asked where I’m from? I had speech therapy as a child, to get rid of a bad (it still creeps in now and then) lisp (wrote “lips” by mistake there)—and what I got was a careful or proper-ish sounding enunciation that makes me a stranger, everywhere . . . JS: Right, examples will help but first to the experience you are describing with your own speech habits reflecting RP (received pronunciation). My sense of this alienation from a place would have to do with how speech therapy, which may now be thought of as a somewhat neutral form of applied linguistics, was created at a time when class was primarily marked by the internalization of overdetermined pronunciation regimes. Now that social attitudes have shifted away from accent as indexical to wealth/power to (and a primary diagnostic for interpolation) say health insurance, “correct” pronunciations are speech sounds without a home team. As a hillbilly who grew up in a “back-to-theland” family of semi-urban transplants into the backcountry of the Ozarks, I grew up in a bilingual space of SAE and various rural Arkansas vernaculars. This double consciousness has made me quite wary of claims made on behalf of regional accents (as much as those made by “standard” non-accents) which, due to the successful 5
inoculation of populisms by capitalism, seem to have been fetishized in ways that pay out certain dividends to speakers willing to wear them in social discourse (I am thinking of “good-ol’boy” identitarian politics, of rural/national politics). I do mean ambivalent though—as I also love my local speech forms and enjoy the mouth feel of all Englishes, but I do generally settle for the most natural to me, one that most Americans cannot feel in their mouths any more than their ears, SAE. So I suppose there is something to be said for speaking a form of English that can be heard at all, no? So again, I will get to examples soon, but first a question for you: Do you think learning languages requires unlearning as many sounds as we learn (or more)? My son, Rowen, who is two, was able to mimic any language sound I would toss his way almost perfectly about a year ago, but since that time he has learned how to speak a lot more, but his enunciation has become less clear now that words have meanings. Last night I was talking to the Indian poet (though he has lived in many countries including the U.S. where he now lives and works) Vivek Narayanan about this and he told about Jacobson’s “apex of babble” idea—that humans can say every sound up till about 6 months and then lose this capacity as we learn one phonemic lexicon. Do you think this is true? If so, then by virtue of phontactic constraints I think we also lose our ability to hear meaningful sounds when they do not serve as semantically charged system of differences within one’s “own” language(s). Do you think there could be a role for poetry to reawaken the ways of hearing beyond the membrane of our lexicons, to tune our antennae to perceive differences we had lost the sensitivity to hear? LM: Sheesh, Jonathan—I am soooooo unqualified to make pronouncements on the truth (!) of Jacobson’s theories! But I might say a couple of things in the general area of your interest, perhaps. One is that it’s potentially worthwhile to think about rhythm here as well as semantics? Another response would be to note the way in which your son’s shift maybe speaks to the point I was raising at the “Difficult Poetry” panel, which is that once we get focused on meaning (language as a tool, I can use this to get things) we lose a certain attentiveness to and interest in the medium itself (the body/mind binary enacts itself on the level of sound and sense.) There’s so much in the culture to support this loss of attention and rush toward what (apparently) counts. Our hurry, our urge to accelerate, our will-this-be-on-the-test-? mentality. I’m reading, just now and for the first time, Finnegan’s Wake—oh what fun!—and he has a moment where he compares the rush to meaning to imagining a woman naked, stripping away “the enveloping facts themselves.” But I (as a woman) like the image of the poem as a Styrofoam cup (maybe because of Brenda Hillman’s great poem of the same title), since literature students (because of flawed teaching) so often seem to want to chug the hot drink of the “message” and toss out the actual words, like, oh, that’s just the container. Got it, they say, this poem’s about death, or how everyone has to be an individual! Great. Next. Whereas, of course, if you look carefully at what’s going on word by word it’s a lot more complex. But it’s beautiful that you have the chance—with Rowen (great 6
name, by the by) to see this economy in action: he’s going off the gold standard right in front of you! I know poetry can help awaken attention to the function of sound, but I’m not sure there’s any way to pull against the great riptide of semantics effectively, except by insisting that everyone be bilingual: realizing that meanings are limited and context-specific, that wakes the ear up. Actually, given your work, Rowen’s bound to remain attuned and embodied and playful. But reading our children the Wake (in the cradle) wouldn’t hurt. (I was saved by Dr. Seuss.) Something, anything, to alert us early (and late) to the essential duality of language. By the by, a friend tells me the new mode, with babies, is teaching them sign language as soon as possible, because the ability to effectively communicate needs and desires early on really saves a lot of frustration and anger for the child—have you heard this? JS: One of the things I most enjoy about Finnegan’s Wake is the way it forces readers (well most readers) directly into the phonotactic space of interlanguage, because when we read the work our mouths (both visceral and imagined) trip into the sounds we throw into the task of pronouncing unknown languages. The inadequate attempt to sound out beyond the comfort of one’s primary language brings readers to the edges of their inherited language bodies, but also makes the membrane more porous at the same time. As the production of these sounds opens up the contact zone populated by other English speakers, who have sought to cast phonemes out and bring back new words from beyond. OK, back to some examples (sorry for the delay). Since languages are always already radically plural, one can see phonotactic constraints in the silent letters of modern English words. We can “see” them precisely because we cannot “hear” them (as one would have when the spelling was concretized). It is easiest to bring up interlanguage examples but it is worth noting that English speakers often encounter phonotactic constraints in English spelling conventions, as speakers cannot avoid either silencing one or creating two syllables when we see “k+n” so what we produce is not the sound it was in Middle or Old English, but a new sound, one created by way of the language shifts spoken English has undergone. Still it is easier to explore these constraints between languages. English speakers usually find it difficult to pronounce the “-ng” in the initial position common in Vietnamese, as these sounds are phonotactically present only in the final position and never in the initial position of an English syllable. So it takes some practice to initiate a vowel from the “ng+ vowel” sound cluster. It is also quite difficult to pronounce English consonant clusters for Mandarin speakers, due to the insertion of sonorants (vowels) or breath in between each consonant sound. Finals are tricky too, as very few Mandarin syllables end in consonants. This is why you will hear a vowel (called an echo vowel). Each interlanguage is unique and caused by different variables. In Chinese-English, Chinese becomes a syllabary through which English is spelled out (both on the page and in the mouth) but English has so many subtle lexical phonological differences that a syllabary cannot help but drastically alter its phonology (which you can hear in my 7
work Yingelishi). In other cases like Arabic and Korean their alphabets include only a certain percentage of functionally similar phonetic graphemes, so one finds all sorts of deletions and substitutions based on this. One can still hear echo vowels in Korean English (like “ch” for Korean speakers) due to that language’s phonotactic rules too. Anyhow, interlanguages are usually thought of as manifestations of “negative linguistic transferences” due to phonetic limitations across language boundaries, but I am more interested in their generative nature. These deletions, additions and substitutions transform languages into sonorous spaces that exist only at the edges and between languages and open onto radical possibilities for poetry, such as those that result from reading Wake but from a different set of cultural coordinates. LM: How so? LM: Did I just say “How so?” Or did you just have me (as “marker”) say “How so?” so you could continue? I forget—but it doesn’t really sound like me. Still, it’s part of the partnering, the dialogue, the way you’re working to get the parole back into the langue and vice versa. The real (??) Laura might have said “How so?” but only if she were sort of distracted, as if wondering—to herself—if she should, now that we’d hit the cruising altitude and the beverage service was underway, order a scotch. Where was it one first heard the Dewar’s, I wonder . . . I have a bit of French, as a second language, and I still recall the pleasure of rolling that “rrrrr” in a new zone of my mouth (discovered by that sound-out) for the first time . . . JS: Yes, it is strange to encounter the vestiges of my first email within what has become an actual conversation, filled out in phases. I think this “How so” was a ventriloquism of Laura, but one that originally followed a different point than it does now. So since its sounds are still just hanging around, I’ll pluck them down from the branch and use them as an example of interlanguage: the Sinophonic Spelling of “how so” could (these characters Romanized as “hao sou” and semantically meaning “good be search”), and they are similarly pronounced because both words are monosyllabic and end in a vowel sound, so the differences between them are limited to the tonal shaping of the syllables more than radical phonotactic differences (such close proximity has been called “positive linguistic transference”). But inside even these minute differences we find a powerful potential for poiesis that can only be written by crossing graphic systems. The tonal fall and lift of these characters are inside this transliteration, so the “phonotaxis” of the “Mandarin English ‘how so’” can be best written in characters, perhaps only written in characters. So my own work explores “transpronunciation” from within inter-graphic language praxis, where one language lends the grapheme to map the phoneme of another’s referent, but in so doing also creates new prosodies out of the phonotaxis inherent in the process. Here we get something new, and I find these sound spaces to be astonishingly beautiful, as the sounds of inter-linguistic accents 8
open the sonic casing of one language outward into a sonorous estuary of another. So while I do love listening to accented Englishes, I want to compose poetry and poetics within a textual interlanguage practice which I think follows from abandoning normative graphic practices (writing in our own scripts) and experimenting more by writing languages in scripts grafted from other languages. This part is really cool. Accents are for the most part reflective of vocalized transliterations. Our language bodies (psycho-physiological condition) are predicted by the cartography of our scripts, and speech organs are tuned to them and shaped by their shapes. So if we want to “sound out” the sonorous estuary of inter-linguistic accents, we can activate the possibility graphically through acts of transliteration (and/or homophonic translation), and I believe find (again) the sounds we lost, when learning our language(s). Of course, I am thinking here of languages beyond those that are Romanized in the first place. LM: Whew, dense paragraph, full of treasures! You are listening, hearing, comparing, adjusting and readjusting language with enormous speed and an exemplary playful (in Barthes’ rich sense of the word “play”) deftness. Of course I’m interested in what I see as your overlap with Gertrude Stein here: in the way she turned her attention to the words (verbs) with which one could make the most mistakes: You seem to be tugging us into an area of difficulty or even failure which turns out to be a richly generative space. But you’re moving pretty quickly in your description: Can you help us make the transition—you seem to be making—from the “inter-linguistic” to the “inter-languages”? And are you also saying something like you believe in hand-writing analysis? Or should we move the conversation back to Joyce and that thick weave of nomadic or refugee (anyway, border-crossing) languages, neologisms and sonic challenges? I have a feeling you’re also pointing to some of the concerns that shaped Charles Olson’s pressure on the page? But maybe you are also getting at (as we say—all talk is a traveling) something I’d put, perhaps too simply(?), in the form of a mere anecdote. I have a dear friend (the wonderful poet Jennifer Dick) who hails from Iowa but has lived in France for . . . it’s decades, at this point, and I can almost tell you the moment when I realized that her constant immersion in/use of/use by French was reshaping her face—beautifully, of course. JS: Wow, that is also a lot to take in and think about. So let me start with Stein. Stein’s work certainly engages questions of accent and sound as a space for poiesis and is quite different from other modern writers (especially prose writers who have experimented with accents: Chestnut and Dunbar’s African American Vernaculars, Faulkner’s Mississippi vernaculars, etc.). Rather than “following the sounds of speech” through phonetic adjustments or even mimetic variants of spoken English patterns (what I am thinking of as phonotaxis), her work seems to aim at a strangely unplaced accent, a linguistic otherness without spatial, cultural or linguistic ties to a given place, class, or 9
group, but somehow just “elsewhere,” a kind of absent mother tongue and a general orientation away from an absent source toward active contingent engagements. Still, I am not sure what to do with Stein’s “verbs” in relation to phonotaxis (especially in her prose, which is what I am thinking about here) beyond acknowledging that I share (what I have perceived to be) the view of an absent center to language, a normative source against which “accents” can become legible as “others.” Still, I feel that there is much more to explore in interlanguage that would be more akin to the composition by ear of Tender Buttons, but still more akin to the explicitly interlingual play of Zukofsky’s Catallus than to Olson (though Olson’s language about physical “organisms” and the “kinetics” of energy transfer can be applicable, there seems to be more normative assumptions in projective verse, in terms of communication with an emphasis on fluency). In all these cases we see something different from most accent/ vernacular/dialect writing found in prose fiction, even by writers like Dos Passos, whose work constitutes a tour de force of vernacular invention. While I have long found inspiration in Derrida’s short, late book Monolingualism of the Other: Or the Prosthesis of Origin, where he sums up this absent mother tongue in his quip ,“We never speak only one language,” after years of playing in formalized interlanguages, transliterated idioms and explicitly hybrid language texts, I have come to think that most theory and even poetics has been theorized from within languages not from between them, and I would like to play in that space a bit more. , Yingelishi, I have tried to explore this In my Sinophonic English opera, space, that is I have tried to create poetry within the borderzones of Chinese and English, where the formal sonority of one language speaks through another. Here1 is the short video poem I mentioned in my opening email to you. In the full opera version online, it is sung by the performer Miao Yichen, but in one of these versions I am signing the Chinese characters (and writing them out in longhand simultaneously), because I think it is important to note that the prosody of the work doesn’t exist in the singer’s body as much as it does in the trans-graphic nature of the text itself. The phonotaxis happens both within my language body and in Miao Yichen’s. LM: That’s a wonderfully uncomfortable space, the between, the “both” and “neither.” I wonder, is it equally uncomfortable/productive for all parties? One of the things I love about the poem/video above is that the discomfort of language-learning (full of mistakes and apologies) is both “example” and subject . . . as if our efforts to connect (full of shame, and apologies) also offer “impermanent mysteries”! And it seems clear that in your emphasis on listening to difference you are participating in one of the most important movements in contemporary poetry (I’m thinking here of the return to the oral/aural which stretches from the creation of archives like ubuweb and PennSound to urban “spoken word” movements). But can you discuss the distinction between what 1 Jonathan Stalling is referring to the link, http://vimeo.com/72611072#at=0 10
you (and your students) are doing with Chinese and “homophonic translation”? JS: I hope so, that is to say, I do see this work as a part of a growing movement toward aural poetics, both in terms of close listening praxis and toward more meta-aware pronunciation/enunciation etc.). Craig Dworkin recently collaborated with Arika at the 2012 Whitney Biennial, and he published a portion of Yingelishi in his book for that show, and I was quite excited to have the work included there. At any rate, I think we are beginning to work harder at tuning sentience to better perceive the acoustics of being plural. Perhaps more on that soon, but you have asked me to elaborate on the specifics of my homophonic experiments and the classroom. I suppose the first thing I would have to admit is that, in my capacity as a professor of poetics at the University of Oklahoma, I don’t teach my own work, so usually turn to Zukofsky, Zaum, Mac Low and, along different registers, Theresa Cha and Myung Mi Kim, among others. LM: I think here of Harryette Mullen’s work, those immensely productive blurs between expected sound and sense (“stasis symbol” for “status symbol,” in “Zombie Hat,” is a strong example) as well as Jerome McGann’s ongoing pedagogical mission to put pressure on sound, and the work, as well, of his sometime collaborator Lisa Samuels—but of course no verse (to paraphrase Eliot) is free from sound concerns for the (wo)man who wants to do a good job. And speaking of work, effort and jobs: at the MLA panel you mentioned doing exercises in your poetry classes along these lines, can you say more about those exercises? Give us some? JS: Sure, so in the case of Jackson Mac Low’s work, I often start with his “gatha” poems, and we read/reflect on his poetics grounded in the ethic of “Listen and Relate,” then talk about his Anarcho-Daoism, and then shift toward theories of Buddhist “seed syllables” and mantra practice, before collectively performing a work like the “mani-mani gatha” which is composed of the mantra “Om Mani Padme Hum” written on quadrille paper along vertical lines arranged by chance-generated coordinates. Mac Low asks us to read the graphemes as consonants and vowels or as individual syllables (say the letter “m”) or in combination “in any language.” Then he asks us to listen to others, and modulate oursounding in “relation” with others, as a sonorous ethics co-emerges in communal space-time. For this, I usually take the students to various acoustically interesting places on campus. Later I often offer myself as a kind of sacrifice, by attempting to read a poem in a language I do not know (in this case phonetically translucent as alphabetic utterances) to help further open students up to the possibility of feeling less pain, less shame when transpronouncing words (against mispronunciation). We have so much fear wrapped up in this act. In fact, I would go so far as to say it is something of a cultural pathology, a shared trauma based on the fact that very serious political forces undergird the social implications of accents, even if these have been mitigated in the ways I mentioned earlier. The “American” accent 11
though is different than regional accents. The so-called American accent has been, with some good reason, seen as an embodiment of Anglophonic hegemony (imagine tourists oblivious to the mangled speech they rattle off at a cab driver, frustrated at the cab driver’s inability to understand). Most Americans, myself included, continue to strive not to sound like “an American” when speaking another language, but the kinds of exercises I am speaking of are not one of apologetics, but exploration. When it comes to speaking in Sinophonic English I really do need to ask one to “Please forgive me” as these sounds are historically vexed in the American imaginary. I speak about this in the forward to Yingelishi. But I also think the accent is an offering, not inherently an abuse, as it is so commonly reduced to. Still it is important to remember that there are very real and historically grounded reasons for why phonotaxis, if you will, remains a potent, difficult space to explore as poeisis. When we open the space of “not yet one or the other” language to the free-flow of poetry, new things can and do happen though. I am unwilling to assign meaning (or form) to these potentialities (the always partially uncaused that remains something of the ontological nature of “the difficult poem”). I just think it is “good.” LM: Oh, this is wonderful—I love the word “transpronouncing”! Honestly, I think I could live there, in that word. Pronunciation has always been such an issue for me— really really difficult. I sometimes get stuck on a wrong pronunciation and become terrified to even try to say the word: I mean, English words! I have to pause, now, right now, before saying “conspicuous,” each time: hard “c” or soft? Is it conSPIKu-us or conSPISHuOUS? I know, that’s nuts: look it up, memorize it . . . I teach in the English Department! But the difficulty will only shift to another word, I assure you—this has been an issue my whole life. Language (my area of expertise?) is also the point of exposure, the place where I (must?) manifest an essential uncertainty. Whew. Which is part of my love of asemic writing . . . Maybe this is the moment to mention the Chinese artist Xu Bing? In Marina Roy’s Sign after the X_________ she mentions his work: “Between 1987 and 1991 Xu Bing designed a ‘vocabulary’ of 4000 characters which look like Chinese but are in fact illegible, entirely invented . . . ” (66). Your projects seem to have an affinity—in my dream world I’d be able to bring you both to LSU to talk/interact, with musicians! And others working on Imaginary Languages (MIT needs to reissue that great anthology edited by Steve McCaffery & Jed Rasula) . . . But (back to earth) maybe I can start by asking you if you’d tell me what “good” means to you? JS: Right, well, first I share an early and continual mixed relationship with English pronunciations, but that would be another whole conversation! And yes, perhaps I am too quick to rush to judgment here by using an unequivocal “good” (alas, I often find that this is the very condition of judgment: that it is always too quick, that my mind 12
ought to exist in geologic time, not human time, that everything we say and do is rushed beyond imagining). So what I think I mean by “good” is that parataxis can be seen to enable a decoupling of languages from their instrumentality, and this releases words into new polyvalent openings by making their materiality (sounds, shapes, histories) more attendable (which is what you so wonderfully called the universal condition of poetry). And I think phonotaxis can offer a similar opening. Here, instead of breaking down intra-linguistic determinacy by thwarting the inertia of grammar (to release words into their poetic perceptibility), we can see accent, as an interlinguistic prosody, opening language to human attention, allowing “the poetic” to be sounded out in the sonorous excess resonating within transpronunciations. There is sentience here that is hardly attendable as sound. Now Xu Bing is yet another big topic. While he is not generally thought of as a poet, I do think of him as perhaps one of the most important Chinese poets of the late ‘80’s and ‘90’s, and I adore his installation piece “Book of the Sky” (Tian Shu). Truly amazing. But the work he has done since has further elaborated on the vector of that work that most bothered me, silence. I suppose “bother” is too strong a word. I am not bothered by it as much as I am simply less interested in its silence, which continued with the graphic play of his “New Calligraphy” project, which did not introduce any interlangauge sound play. His most recent work (a book written in emoticons) has found something of a final telos—a dream of translinguistic universality, but also something of a nightmare of soundless referential banalities. The piece you have linked to here2 is also a bit troubling as it seems to hinge on normative notions of Chinese calligraphy which, despite its relatively recent demotion as an ideological aesthetic, remains a potently charged one. And Chinese aesthetics has more to do with human futures than most cultural discourses due to its inertia. So I mention these things because I have a tendency to push back on my own grappling with cultural and intercultural aesthetics (especially Sino-Western), and that vexed interest colors my reading of most transPacific poetics. I love this space though. It matters to me, as does Xu Bing. Now another question for you: Do you think we can score languages on the page (phonotaxis literally means arranging by the sound of voice) if we don’t know how to hear them? By scoring them might we be able to feel sounds more (begin to hear them as we hear lexical sounds in our primary language, tap the meanings within them, or, if you prefer, learn to resonate with them)? (As I reworked this passage, I began to wonder if I wrote this one or if this was a question you imagined me asking. I really don’t know, but I like it.) LM: Maybe David Melnick answered that question? Unless I’m not fully understanding your idea here? Men in Aida exposes the deeply homosocial aspects of the Roman 2 Laura Mullen is referring to the link, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ1mpKlIxhQ 13
epic—unless what you’d like to say is that his homophonic (hee hee) translation was influenced by his previous sense of the text? So that he found what he expected there? (Still, it’s a giddy and unexpected delight, moment by moment, isn’t it?) What would it mean to “score languages we don’t know how to hear,” really? Where does that start? I began, as a poet, writing work I wanted to read aloud—words I wanted to speak—and my work retains its status as “score,” I suppose, in that minimal way. Though when I began to realize what books were and to understand that I would have readers, people who encountered the poems without me there (oh, the first time I met someone who’d read my work and who didn’t know me, I wanted to get out the formaldehyde and the specimen jar: Look what I caught!), that changed things. The long poem that ends Subject (the poem that the astounding composer Jason Eckardt set to music) reacts to that understanding of the medium by opening itself to radical trajectories—insofar as I could do it on the page, I wanted to say choose your own path . . . How can we hold the door open without imposing a “way”? I suppose that part of the means by which we invent each other is simply (or not so simply) by our choice of a path (or flight plan?)— the way we travel over/through each other . . . JS: This is an overspilling of language across the walls of communicative instrumentality into the poiesis of what lies between and, finally, within, the expansion of sentience into the shapes of its traversal and becoming. LM: I love that: “the walls of communicative instrumentality”! That’s a great phrase for the problem I was trying to get at with “meaning” at the MLA panel: I mean our indifference to the container. Poetry is really a pressure against that indifference. There’s a quote from Michael Palmer (I think quoting Valéry) I’ve held onto: “A bad poem is one that vanishes into meaning.” We need to attend to our tendency toward what Giorgio Agamben called Means Without End. The tendency to “just” use language to get what you want and use people (or the planet) to get what you want are related. In its call to us to slow down or the opportunity it offers to slow down—to see that the “end” is either present all the time (I wrote “name” in place of time) or (maybe this is more accurate) never actually in our vision—poetry does an enormous political, ethical, ecological service. JS: Yes, for me though, I have to admit to being conditioned by Levinas’ distinction between the Saying and the Said (the Saying is vocative and an ethical response to the Other’s call, while the Said is grounded in “Ipseity” the domesticating, territorializing “I” where the vocative is swallowed by the drive to meaning and reference, etc.). The thing is, Levinas, for all that I have learned from his work, did not speak on the alterity of foreign language, which is, to my mind, actually the common denominator of language itself. That is to say, human languages in their radical diversity are 14
overwhelmingly foreign to all humans at all times (say 5,000:10 for the unlikely person who can speak 10 languages). We point our languages like flashlights into the night sky, or a better metaphor would be to think of light itself as that which a (set) of languages might shed on the nature of reality, but such light must be seen in the cavernous context of immeasurable darkness that exists not only “out there” but on the other side of all things lit. Human consciousness is so radically unknowable to me, and the small halos feigned by translation are not to be taken as synecdoches for the whole. Still, I take some spiritual refuge in the vocative as it manifests in the accented reading of a language I cannot speak. My accent exceeds the container of communicability and is not a “said” to me. I never know what it “means.” Reading and singing in languages that are not “mine” is, I think, something like a kenotic (self-emptying) experience, a kind of offering to the vast otherness of language. I have written about this somewhat in my reading of Theresa Cha’s Dictee (Poetics of Emptiness), against the reduction of dictation to a forced, abject, interpolation. But again, I am not interested in a mysticism that elides history. The fact is most examples of human beings speaking in languages they do not know have come in the form of colonial apparatus. This is the vexing nature of the voided self in Cha’s Shamanic poetics (at least to my mind). But for the mystically minded, there is ample aural poetics in mantra, incantation, chant, and Hebrew, Latin and Arabic recitation (solo and in chorus) to last a lifetime. I feel that these instances of religious use of languages, often unknown to those speaking, take us to the one place where language can feel most “real,” where the signifier, seemingly vacated of readily accessible referents, becomes what we feel in our mouths, ears and minds for the whole duration of the sounding. But truth be told, I am more interested in the ideological/social ways in which such moments of linguistichyper-reality are reterritorialized by totalizing conceptions (usually theologies), than I am in the poetential for poetics at the intersection of known and unknown, of our accented response to the vast “exo-phonic” universe. Well, perhaps I am simply a bit schizophrenic on this point. LM: Your reading of Cha is exciting: I like the directed flow of thought here, and “poetential” is going to be a favorite new word. But/or/and I seem to remain concerned about the necessity of honoring the otherness of other languages . . . I suppose even (or most of all?) our own? Where does freedom turn willful—that’s a question I inherited from my teachers, and it haunts me. But this is part of the excitement, that this thing (the medium) is both (and Adorno is just so great and clear on this) public and private: it’s cage and sky at once, if you will, or—as I’ve always thought—bridge and wall. I heft these bricks or stones (given as sound, but hewn to use) between us, so that I might reach you . . . And there’s something that seems to me to be spiritual in the work (the research) it takes to trace the history of the meaning of a word: there are stories and prayers and confessions buried in the evolution of each use. But I share your concern about language as a tool of (colonial) oppression! In the fall I’ll be teaching a 15
“Women Writers” class—and it’s radical, take-no-prisoners: thick with experiment & thin on narrative and “normal” language strategies. Getting to ways of communicating experiences excluded from “the language of the tribe,” has been and remains the great adventure of the last century and a half or so (for the West), and it seems still like an immensely moving and noble endeavor, that effort to find a new song, a way to connect, now. I like to start the class with Tender Buttons—which is, sheesh, about 100 years old! JS: I fear the question of colonialization, despite our attempts to theorize its posttraumatic pressure in the present, pointing into the future, is one that is still largely left unresolvable, and I fear that the economies of academia may pressure us to “move on” from that “post-” space to somewhere else, but I think it must remain present, pressured, and pressing into our pedagogies and poetic praxis. So one last question for you too. In your discussions of teaching the difficult poem, I gathered that there is more at stake in this work than helping students become more generous, generative and open readers of poetry, but that such dispositions toward poetic texts will impart a similar way of responding to the world beyond the page. Is this about right, and if so, do you think that more writing through different kinds of languages might also help tune us toward more receptive ethics of linguistic and cultural differences, just as it does for more complicated, un-pre-resolved language forms (say the paratactic, mixedgenre poem)? LM: Yes, absolutely. I mean, in some ways the answer to that question is overdetermined, isn’t it? Our failure to teach Arabic, for instance, cost us a lot! But, really, how can we know anything about the world at all unless we stretch ourselves to understand the on-going communications of those who differ from us? I’m a huge fan of the movie BUCK, and went, with a friend, to watch Mr. Brannaman teach a clinic up in Washington last fall. As I said to another friend (who said, “You’re doing WHAT?”), this is a guy who is able to communicate effectively across species—I’m really interested in that. And what he’s doing with horses—with people and horses—is, as one of his students points out (in the movie), something that translates across horse training into all walks of life. Probably that’s true of every discipline, but with poetry it just seems amazingly clear that the effort to respond both physically and mentally, both emotionally and intelligently, with a knowledge of the past and a full yielding to the present, transforms us in wonderful ways . . . We can learn there (if we can learn it anywhere) patience and respect and kindness, while we delight in the expansion of our capacities for learning . . . We can enter the dance (which is what both Mr. Brannaman and Robert Duncan called it), a space of structured freedom where we feel in touch and fully present. JS: Yes, I think that the trans-species listening practice and environmental listening 16
practice, is one that can very much factor in to interlanguage. I am especially interested in thinking more about how sounds (and other signals) are transduced into meanings, while others are not. Those that are not already coded can in a very real way be said to be un-audible, or at least so ontologically distinct from lexical sound as to exist totally vulnerable to being ignored, or, worse yet, interpreted/judged without recourse to a contextual nexus. What you are saying about tran-species listening is quite important. Not poets as X-Men, mind you, but still something nearly extrasensory is available and in full display in the lives of folks like Mr. Brannaman, who develop ways of perceiving contextually enfolded sounds (and body language) from within non-human sentience. Languages teach us to hear edges (and see them) with acuity so unimaginably precise as (to my mind) to represent what might be thought of as telepathic precision, yet for those sounds that are not lexical . . . we seem to have extraordinarily blunt senses. I wonder how much actively cognizable differentia can be felt as meaningful, not just in terms of biologically audible sound-waves, but consciously audible. This is, I think, some of the work of poetry, to bring sounds into meaning by bringing them into contextual weaves without necessarily attaching such sounds to referents. I think this is the kind of sensory development that can produce perceptive/receptive sentience, enabling one to hear across species and environmental soundings with greater sensitivities. OK, so another mouthful. For this incredible space to speak without and write without fear of imposing myself upon the other, has come from your infinite generosity first dreamed then found manifest, and I am so incredibly thankful for it. Such a gift was not deserved but is so very appreciated. Thank you Laura, for your questions and answers both real and imagined. I am landing in 15 minutes and the flight attendants are asking us to turn off all electrical devices so I will email this, rough as it is, to you upon finding the next hot spot. Yours, Jonathan Screen goes black.
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Dear Jonathan, It’s May 13, 2013, and I’m not in an airplane, but sitting (in—as usual—just the wrong posture) at my desk—or askew to it a little, actually, laptop on the knees as if I were in “economy” (Seat 24D?). Though I did have a frisson, at first, when I encountered the original e-mail from you, in which I appeared as an invention, extended from a moment’s (MLA) meeting. By now I’ve come to enjoy (if a touch uneasily) my status as imaginary friend—or should I say “language body”? She’s so lucky, I think, to have so informed and interesting a companion in you, and you’ve invented her as so light, so alert and sympathetic: such good company, evidently (and perhaps she speaks a touch of Chinese?). But your sense of the self as “radically plural social aggregates of relations” matches mine (in a poem called “The Self” I imagined that entity as competing radio signals), and I suspect we (at least slightly) invent everyone we come in contact with … (Your version of me is nicer than some.) And there is, “really,” some presence there, even when I’m (here) asking questions I didn’t think of, or making comments I don’t recognize. Like “Shadow” (my 6-year-old god-daughter’s invisible companion) we still have to stop and wait so that I can catch up, it seems—and doors must be held open a beat or two longer after all the visible people are in (or out). For, as you were zipping from place to place and adding to the conversation begun in a conference room in pre-bombing Boston, I was fretting at a project that wouldn’t (and still won’t) behave (and of course it wouldn’t—as it insists on expanding the expectations I brought to it), while, trying to deal with some physical issues, I fell down a medical rabbit hole … And, meanwhile my wonderful other—your creation—packed lightly, breezed through the constantly tightening security, and settled into earnest conversation, in our seats above the wing. Thank you for that! I’ve always liked setting off, in so many ways, better than arriving, and so there’s a part of me that will be sorry to see this exchange wrapped up—even in the most provisional way (god keep me, as Melville prayed, from ever completing anything), but I’m also looking forward to inviting others along for our flight. Laura
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Jonathan Stalling is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, specializing in modern to contemporary American poetry and East-West Poetics, and is the co-founder and an editor of Chinese Literature Today journal and book series, as well as the Deputy Director of the Center for the Study of China’s Literature Abroad at Beijing Normal University. He is the author of Poetics of Emptiness (Fordham University Press, 2010), Grotto Heaven (Chax Press, 2010), Yingelishi (Counterpath Press, 2011) and Winter Sun: The Poetry of Shi Zhi 1966-2007 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2012) and is an editor of The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry. L aura Mullen is the author of seven books: The Surface (University of Illinois Press, 1991), The Tales of Horror (Kelsey Street Press, 1999), Subject (University of California Press, 2005), Murmur (Futurepoem, 2006), After I Was Dead (University of Georgia Press, 2008), Dark Archive (University of California Press, 2011) and Enduring Freedom: A Little Book of Mechanical Brides (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2012). Recognitions for her poetry include Ironwood’s Stanford Prize, two Board of Regents ATLAS grants, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Rona Jaffe Award, among other honors. She has had several MacDowell Fellowships and is a frequent visitor at the Summer Writing Program at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa. Her work is included in Postmodern American Poetry (Norton Anthology, 2013), American Hybrid (Norton Anthology, 2009) and I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues, 2012). Mullen is the McElveen Professor in English at LSU.
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