think like a cloud, like
the roots of the dwarf birch…
The quadrants must be crisp. Smoothing you into the long crease of a crane’s neck—everything implicit in the fastening.
I’ve come to believe that nearly everyone has experienced grammar in this way—as a “smoothing,” or a “fastening” into place. Sensations are given form and structure, made to fit within the “quadrants” of language. At first, we barely notice the small things that won’t acquiesce to grammar: the physical body, its internal logic, the way that time doubles back on itself. These absences aren’t felt, since there is no longer a way to express such longing. The little red books they place in front of us, with their endless charts and diagrams, have begun to arrange the world around us, piece by piece. The order is all we can see.
*
I think of some way of describing it uniquely and then I go through, so to speak, a sort of
mental ceremony
How does one speak outside the confines of grammar, without performing the familiar “ceremony” of creating order and coherence? Many women express a disdain for received linguistic structures, but fear they will be rendered intelligible without them. For me, this is a uniquely female problem, as grammar itself represents a way of organizing the world, an array of hierarchies, not all of which are entirely reasonable or fair. It is gendered pronouns that take precedence over the nonspecific ones, active constructions that are privileged over passive ones. The sentence itself strives for order, logic, clarity of relationships. Indeed, one might argue that language itself, in all of its beauty, embodies what we would classify as “masculine” values. Reason, orderliness, and the mind take precedence over the body. Many women have claimed that the materiality of our being represents an opportunity to forge a new logic, a new order, a new grammar, one that remains separate from the “marked” writing of an unjust society. But where to begin?
*
apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist…
Poetry in recent (and not so recent) years has seen numerous attempts to answer this same question: Where does writing the body, where does this new order, this new grammar, begin? Recent collections by Inger Christensen, Hanna Andrews, and Thalia Field (in collaboration with Abigail Lang) present compelling (and often vastly different) answers. For Andrews, it is sound, and the materiality of language itself, that we frequently overlook in search for seemingly logical connections between ideas. Andrews turns to the sonic qualities of language as a source of unity, coherence, and structure within her collection. Field and Lang, on the other hand, invoke the inimitable Gertrude Stein, dismantling the boundaries between texts, voices, and languages, suggesting that a language that is truly conducive to creativity is one stripped of hierarchies. Lastly, Inger Christensen seeks to question and subvert grammar from within its entrenched order. Without grammar, some would say there is no language. In these recent books, we see that without grammar, there is no absence, but rather, possibility.
*
The lines we draw and redraw
What survives…
Hanna Andrews’ Slope Move begins by creating a semblance of order. Grammatically impeccable clauses, one after the other: “The fast car is the thing we will not speak,” “The morning orange juice glass, cleared,” and so on. Within this seemingly ordered syntax, however, one struggles to discern semantic meaning in the traditional sense. As the collection unfolds, one realizes that there is another definition of meaning that’s been privileged. Meaning resides not in the relationship between signifier and signified, but within sonic qualities of the words themselves. We are made to experience the materiality of each line, offering us stanzas that crack, sizzle, and hum.
Where does meaning reside, then? In experience, perhaps? Or has meaning been eschewed in favor of language’s more experiential qualities? For Andrews, meaning emerges when one creates relationships between phenomena. What’s intriguing about the poems in Slope Move is that these relationships need not be made to fit within any preconceived conceptual framework. Rather, they emerge organically as she utilizes the repetition of sounds to forge connections between disparate images, ideas, and types of language. She writes, “Color clusters, spontaneous blooms: the lit match that completes the metaphor, his ghost with pale carnation hands. As storybook, the chrono-halt is elegant: a thematic connect-the-dots…” Here Andrews alliteration (“color clusters”) and assonance (“spontaneous blooms”) creates a sense of unity among images that might not be so easily matched using conventional subject-verb-object constructions. What’s interesting about passages like this one is Andrews’ self-reflexivity. She takes pride in the fact that she calls upon her reader to “connect the dots,” to learn a new way of inhabiting language, a way of understanding language through sound and the senses.
*
A rotation of sugar of slow language can really deceive a girl…
Throughout Thalia Field and Abigail Lang’s collaboration, A Prank of Georges, readers encounter language in all of its instability and equivocation. The meaning that arises organically through sound, the relationships that surface as a result of alliteration, assonance, and consonance, proves slippery, deceptive even. In many ways, A Prank of Georges reads as an engagement with (and interrogation of) poets like Andrews, who privilege the sonic qualities of language over semantic meaning.
What emerges, them, from this cross-examination? Field and Lang note the many pragmatic functions for which language must be useful. Not all language can or should circumvent logic, grammar, or reason. Through their choice of title, the co-authors evoke George W. Bush, a figure who haunts the manuscript, noting that repetition (of sounds, of names) created an artificial sense of continuity between the former president and his predecessor. Repetition becomes, within the political realm, a way of maintaining an unacceptable status quo, one more way of creating legacy and privilege.
As the collection unfolds, Field and Lang pair this cautionary gesture with a playful dissolution of boundaries between languages, rhetorics, and registers. Here we see language stripped of its hierarchies, and it is this linguistic environment that proves most conducive to creativity. While critiquing the use of poetic logic in the political realm, this same associative logic proves engaging when utilized in the proper context. The co-authors elaborate, “Very frequently alights on the trunks of trees. Having remained in a distended state for a short time, it generally expels the air and water with considerable force from the bronchial apertures and mouth..” While such fragmentation and humor would have little use in a political debate, the collaborators suggest that within the proper context, linguistic play can be a powerful vehicle for change. Fragmentation, juxtaposition, and the mixing of registers make possible an insightful critique of language that claims objectivity, suggesting that this clinical rhetoric remains as subjective as the French poetry with which it is juxtaposed. For Field and Lang, there is no flawless mode of representation, but linguistic games that are played, particularly when mixing and matching rhetorical modes.
I find it fascinating that the individual essays and poems within the book are presented as games: “Pulley-Pulley,” “Machine for a Landscape,” “Machine for Compounding Chimeras,” etc. What is the creation of meaning but a game, Field and Lang seem to ask. Because language as objective, language as scientific instrument, always fails, Field and Lang suggest that we approach it as one more sport that is played with language. Grammar, too, is merely a game, an attempt to gain the upper hand. These plays for power, because we don’t always realize their true nature, prove both dangerous and generative, beautiful and heartbreaking.
*
in mid-November, a season
when all human dreams are the same,
a uniform, blotted out history
like that of a sun-dried stone
Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, too, confronts the reader with the dangers inherent in linguistic games. The book uses parallel grammatical structures (particularly subject-verb-object constructions) to present phenomena as varied as one can imagine: “doves,” “dreamers,” and “dolls.” As these vastly different ideas and images are made to inhabit the same linguistic structure, Christensen prompts the reader to consider the ways that grammar homogenizes thought. To what extent, she asks, do vastly different ideas, dissimilar images and sensory perceptions, call for their own distinct modes of representation?
What’s perhaps most interesting about Alphabet is that this critique emerges from within the confines of grammar. Indeed, the book retains an abecedarian structure throughout. Why, one might ask, does Christensen present these ideas within a homogenizing, stifling grammatical system? One might argue that Christensen acknowledges both the perils and the possibilities of grammar. Just as language, and the structure we give it, risks homogenizing thought and expression, it creates community by giving individuals common ground. This idea comes through most powerfully in the disparate images that are gracefully unified by the book’s parallel constructions: “lightning and wheat,” “tears,” “autumn marked for death.”
Perhaps one might read Christensen as presenting not an entirely new grammar, as we see in Andrews, but rather, a call for innovation within grammar. While acknowledging the dangers inherent in the linguistic games depicted in Field and Lang’s collaboration, Christensen highlights the necessity of grammar for creating and maintaining social relations, as well as collaboration. For Christensen, the task is not to invent a new grammar, but to expand what is possible within it. And in Alphabet, we are presented with the world.
…ice ages exist,
ice of polar seas, kingfishers’ ice;
cicadas exist, chicory, chromium
and chrome yellow irises…
Kristina Marie Darling is the author of twenty books, which include Melancholia (An Essay) (Ravenna Press, 2012), Petrarchan (BlazeVOX Books, 2013), and Scorched Altar: Selected Poems and Stories 2007-2014 (BlazeVOX Books, forthcoming). Her awards include fellowships from Yaddo, the Ucross Foundation, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers, as well as grants from the Kittredge Fund and the Elizabeth George Foundation. She was recently selected as a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.