PLASTIC Le livre, ruse par laquelle l’énergie d’écrire qui prend appui sur le discours et se laisse porter par son immense continuité pur se séparer, à la limite, de lui, est aussi la ruse du discours restituant à la culture cette mutation qui la menace et l’ouvre à l’absence de livre. Ou encore, travail par lequel l’écriture, modifiant les données de la culture, de l’«expérience», du savoir, c’est-à-dire du discours, procure un autre produit qui constituera une nouvelle modalité du discours dans son ensemble et s’intégrera à lui tout en prétendant le désintégrer. Absence de livre: lecteur, tu voudrais etre son auteur, n’étant alors que lecteur pluriel de l’Œuvre • Maurice Blanchot
not heard before, blurred the images: not beasts at all–these were of another world! This small drought was massive to us a farmer says, dumping skin and bones on the tray of his truck. There were so many the crevices were choked with their dumb spirits. At night you’d sense them flooding out over the malicious ochre just to give themselves space. Had some hero up here last week taking photos, telling me their expressions were excruciatingly beautiful. A splash of blue paint might bring irony if there were room for it. Yes, even scoured sockets have sight. In London it has them saying, “Don’t you feel close to it? As if it’s going to twist and squirm out of the frame and onto the carpet.” And it being such unseasonable weather– cold and raining in mid-summer, a hint of drought straining at the fence.
Marjorie Perloff Justin Quinn
Column of ash, of alphabets) (the twenty-five-needle jack moves through the air the pleasure of mezely circulating) (I live in the Marriott Convention Center float through the rooms, the house) (and the origin? the target group? Cahuenga Blvd., V domcích) (accruing, augmenting, alerting you’ll find the port in your arm) (press the fucker firmly in wondrous sights, strange visions) (it’s OK, there’s probably no-one watching I am, the house says) (the air is thick with what? oh, I’ve had it with this crap) (abruptly filliped out of the loop float through the city) (eddies, incidents, -versions a throwback, like The Times) (but chivvying forwards or not)
Louis Armand
Composition
[after
Boyd,
Nolan]
fixed in mundane matter the prone body– penumbral man–dissipates, the trace of an utterly contingent “this” ... or dispossessed & devoured by space– convulsive–the post-galvanic twitchings of (trans-)coded flesh? dead-level plains with crow & skeleton tree, concealing an interior zone of primordial elements– in-organic–substance as arcane as salt sulphur mercury–rising phallus-like from the white drought-cracked soil– the heliod genitals of a mechanised underworld–infernal seeds groping upwards to petrified light, flowering
John Kinsella
The Wanderings of Cain Sidney Nolan’s The Wanderings of Cain was painted as a response to Nolan’s good friend Benjamin Britten’s Nocturne which was composed for the Aldeburgh Festival (founded by Britten) in 1958. The work was displayed at the 1976 festival just after Britten’s death. The specific “nocturne” on which Nolan based the painting uses Coleridge’s poem-fragment “Encinctured with a twine of leaves” that was to be part of The Wanderings of Cain. Coleridge wrote: “I have in vain tried to recover the lines from the palimpsest tablet of my memory: and I can only offer the introductory stanza, which had been committed to writing for the purpose of procuring a friend’s judgment on the metre, as a specimen”–the lines ran as follows: Encinctured with a twine of leaves, That leafy twine his only dress! A lovely boy was plucking fruits, By moonlight, in a wilderness. The moon was bright, the air was free, And fruits and flowers together grew On many a shrub and many a tree: And all put on a gentle hue, Hanging in the shadowy air Like a picture rich and rare. It was a climate where, they say, The night is more belov’d than day. But who that beauteous Boy beguil’d, That beauteous Boy to linger here? Alone, by night, a little child, In place so silent and so wild– Has he no friend, no loving mother near?
Nolan painted the work shortly after the death of his second wife, Cynthia, so it is not surprising that, in keeping with the theme of dreams and sleep, there is a strongly elegiac quality to the canvas. Matching the sense of breath that Britten employs in his composition the canvas is sparse though not tranquil. The almost cyclical interruption of sleep is also evident in the Nolan,
but more tangentially; the figure-in-the-landscape, isolated and vulnerable in the lower right-hand corner of the painting seems falsefaced–the moon arcs in a blue-white sky with the stars faint but undeniable. The land itself is yellow and black and almost burnt like the moon. In keeping with Coleridge’s statement there is palimpsest–a dragging into consciousness of the memories of sleep. The “twine of leaves” is there, though the sparse trees in the distance, stark at the point where the form of the sky meets the form of the land, bare fruit that seems forbidding, almost unreachable, and not for “plucking”. Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is heavier than I can bear; thou hast driven me today from the ground, and I must hide from thy presence. I shall be a vagrant and wanderer on earth, and anyone who meets me can kill me.” In Nolan’s painting, as in Britten’s song setting, there is nowhere to hide. Refuge has been annulled. There is a mournful beauty, but no escape. It is interesting to read, “That many of the verses Britten set re extracted from larger contexts (and thus lack finality) aids this impression, while enigmatic and obsessive texts conjure up a less neatly picturesque nocturnal world than that of the Serenade.” It is not hard to see why Nolan was so comfortable working with Britten’s compositions. Nolan also works in cycles and extracts from larger contexts. Myth is not something stagnant, locked in a distant impenetrable past, but something living and moving in and out of time. It is the paradox of time and myth, of the recurring archetype that captures Nolan’s imagination and brings vitality to his work. It is this fluidity that allows European myth to be so readily incorporated into the fabric of the Australian landscape and indigenous “myth”. The sleep of the artist is interrupted by dreams from a collective inheritance. This is a case not of appropriation but of interpretation. The artist as medium. As in the case of Britten, musician as medium calling on the cyclical nature of the poem, the oral tradition. Both musician and artist incorporated all art forms into their respective crafts. Painting for Nolan was interactive, not specific and limited to a particular code of practice. He had a great knowledge of music and poetry, (and was a fair, if infrequent, poet himself). The following poems arise out of visiting the Nolan exhibition and reflecting on the peripheries of the wheatbelt Western Australian landscape I have left, from within a fen landscape that has its own desolations, despite apparent verdure. Cambridge is increasingly surrounded by the drought of genetically modified crops and geno-companies like The Wellcome Trust, who work to invert nature in the name of humanity. Monsanto has its claws in here as well, patenting seed stock. There is the subtext of a
Cain and Abel here, of Babel, of Sodom and Gomorrah. Judaeo-Christian analogies are easy to forge and are deployed in publicity against these companies. This is an issue in which the subconscious will of the people is being called upon–that the attack is not only on our physical living conditions but at the core of our ethical and spiritual selves. But there is a darkness there that is like the brilliance of the sun in the droughtriven Australian outback. The wind still blows through the GM crops and rustles their florescent green stems–the rustle still evokes comforting memories. The horror lies within. The sun on the sand, bleached bones, and steel blue skies are also beautiful. Nolan captures the beauty of horror, the Matisse-like dance of life conflated with Münch’s dances of death. The binary doesn’t work–death has beauty! Britten’s Nocturne cycle (with its moves through C and D flat), and Coleridge’s “Hanging in the shadowy air/Like a picture rich and rare” lift out of the physical. The action is subdued by the dream. Beauty is external–all of these pieces recognise this. The issue is below the surface, out of view, and this is where Nolan’s paintings work hardest. He achieves this by having us look hard and starkly. The images are iconic and like hot metal in a printer’s shop. In the dream-state, in the archetype-rich space of nightmares, the images merge and produce a profound discomfort. Nolan has sound, sight, and subtext at work simultaneously. It’s a spatiality of the subconscious. Nothing is still, the points of reference shifting their coordinates .
The Iconography of Drought Screwed up by the sun, held together by maggots, dehorned and castrated anyway it stands like a rotting ship struck by lightning. The eye is a window to unmoving space, the brain inside defrauded. Any birthmarks are made by a whip. And yet nothing is forever, this universal victim will not be knocked, it was not mummified in the belief that God is a drover. •Sidney Nolan
The colour and texture of The Dry seem to deny fuel for fire though sparks tessellate the dark hide as if its bones are burning, or the pasture is shedding its invisibility and erupting like hot tongues, lashing out at the rainless storm, declaring green fields the camouflage of the “uncomprehending” who can’t solve a riddle despite the answer staring them in the face. Worst drought on record? Taking it back like war footage–the mystification of contortion– the punters thinking over their tea or beer that these beasts might have had souls, that the abattoir might not have been up to scratch: their bones crossed and sticking up like totems. But then “surreal”, a word they’d
Peter Minter
Lust “Her remark how I fly at miotic jargon, the pluripolar distracting a method of indirect division, as if by chance you should ever be!” whose combination of incidents
I wonder,
accumulating degrees of withdrawal and glare conversationalism, that well worn mathematical limit again, like, Fucking Symbols Up in God’s Tree (“I am the live pillar, the nutgall asymptote!” all unrepentant middle though & sucking up glass channels in my mind again
he says
If only people knew what was going on
oysters slice open currents, foam out the reverb, Trojan Horse (not wanting to destroy Da Fort just sits there like any other code, all oak splinters & hydro effluvia, concept & drainage the cork floats on and on
After Language Poetry: Innovation & its Theoretical Discontents Are you sure, she asked, you’re talking of ideas? Dark, emptied of touch would be entire, null and void. Even on an island • Rosmarie Waldrop
Innovate: from the Latin, in + novare, “to make new, to renew, alter.” In our century, from Rimbaud’s “Il faut être absolument moderne!” and Ezra Pound’s “Make It New!” to Donald Allen’s New American Poetry (Grove Press, 1960) and Douglas Messerli’s From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 19601990 (Sun & Moon, 1994), novelty has been the order of the day. Think of the (now old) New Criticism, the New Formalism, the New Historicism, le nouveau roman and la nouvelle cuisine. As I was writing this essay, a message came over the internet announcing the British poetcritic Robert Sheppard’s Poetics and Linguistically Innovative Poetry 1978-1997. And in recent years, two important anthologies of women’s poetry Out of Everywhere: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK, edited by Maggie O’Sullivan for Reality Street Editions in London (1996) and Mary Margaret Sloan’s Moving Borders: Three Decades of Innovative Writing by Women (Jersey City: Talisman Publishers, 1998) have made the case that, in O’Sullivan’s words, “much of the most challenging, formally progressive and significant work over recent years, particularly, in the U.S. . . . is being made by women” (p. 9), thus leading directly to the title of this conference: “Innovation and Experiment in Contemporary Poetry by Women.” It was not always thus. The OED reminds us that innovation was once synonymous with sedition and even treason. In 1561, Thomas Norton wrote in Calvin’s Institute, “It is the duty of private men to obey, and not to make innovation of states after their own will.” Richard Hooker in 1597 refers to a political pamphleteer as “an authour of suspicious innovation.” The great Jacobean dramatist John Webster speaks of “the hydra-headed multitude / That only gape for innovation” (1639), and in 1796, Edmund Burke refers to the French Revolution as “a revolt of innovation; and thereby, the very elements of society have been confounded and dissipated.” Indeed, it was not until the late nineteenth century that innovation became perceived as something both good and necessary, the equivalent, in fact, of avant-garde, specifically of the great avant-gardes of the early century from Russian and Italian Futurism to Dada, Surrealism, and beyond. I cannot here trace the vagaries of the term, but it is important to see that, so far as our own poetry is concerned, the call for Making it New was the watchword of the Beats as of Black Mountain, of Concrete Poetry and Fluxus as of the New York School. At times in recent years, one wonders how long the drive to innovate can continue, especially when, as in the case of Sloan’s Moving Borders, fifty contemporary American women poets are placed under the “innovative” umbrella. Given these numbers, one wonders, who isn’t innovative? And how much longer can poets keep innovating without finding themselves inadvertently Making It Old? The problem is compounded when we turn to the relationship of innovation to theory. When the various French poststructuralisms of the postwar first became prominent they were known as la nouvelle critique. But as time went on, la nouvelle critique became known as poststructuralism, just as the “new American poetry” was called, in Don Allen’s revised version of 1982, The Postmoderns (New York: Grove Press). What, then, is the relation of “new” to “post”? The issue is complicated but it’s fair to say that, in the case of theory, “new” was an epithet applied from outside, for the theorists themselves were less concerned to Make It New than to establish certain truths, for example, to study the relation of literary to so-called ordi-