Alkali
Craig Dworkin
Counterpath Press, 2015
Paperback, 140 pp.
ISBN 9781933996479
$18
Alkali: The geo-lyric crucible
Alkali, from al-qali, the calcined ashes of the glasswort, or saltwort. Qala: to roast or fry in a pan.
The book title is a 14th century word of Arabic origin, a word-molecule that shows the history of its compound production, offering a miniature manual of the process of making alkalis: the heat applied to a specific species of plant to produce a base. Alkali is the coincidence of language and the material world. The patterns repeat. Energy transforms. The book acts as a crucible, throughout which chemical bonds and ludic linguistic reactions and recreations are offered as metaphor for all relations historical, cultural, psychological, ethical…
We’ll start at the beginning of the book—we have already started. There is something of the alchemical here, though it is couched in respectability.
Dante echoes from the title of the first section:
IN THE DARK WOOD / NELLA SELVA OSCURA.
Not the first lines of the Inferno exactly, but a strong and clear resonance of
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.(In the middle of the journey of our life/I found myself astray in a dark wood/where the straight road had been lost sight of.)
The title comes complete with virgules and English/Italian versions, as if to suggest the English is a translation of a quotation, and that the following poem is not “original” per se, but part of a response, an ongoing reaction to an interminable source.
The woods in Dante are allegorical. His speaker is lost, the journey of his book begins in medias res, in the thick of a crisis, in the woods as it were: nel mezzo una selva. But the woods for Dworkin are not only allegorical. We are invited to imagine wood in its physical aspect, a carbon-based organism expanding through a series of complex chemical reactions. Dante’s medieval religion has been replaced by natural history and science. The book we read here is placed in the middle now, between some distant origin and some future end, part of the thrum of energy exchanges that might describe where and what (and who) we are. This is not so much a personal crisis as a universal condition. We’re in the middle of this! These woods, this life, this book.
Book from Old English boc “book, writing, written document,” traditionally derives from Proto-Germanic bokiz “beech,” source of German words buch “book” and buche “beech.” The accepted theory is that the name originally comes from beechwood tablets upon which runes were inscribed. Latin and Sanskrit also have words for “writing” that are based on tree names (birch and ash, respectively). French livre comes from the Latin librum, originally “the inner bark of trees” (the origin for the English word bark is contested, being either beech via bokiz, or birch). With all these roots we find ourselves somewhat in dark woods, but they are woods nonetheless.
The poem shoots off from the bi-lingual title with what looks like a partial notation of a dictionary definition of its Italian word nella:
in the (it)
in the (fem)
The parenthetical pronoun “it” might also be an abbreviation for Italian. Either way (or both ways) the “nella” of the title has set us off on our journey through the (Italian and English) woods. The lines reference reference books, their identity tied to a text elsewhere, a trace as if the poem is the journey of this displacement, the task of reading a reading.
imine ylides
places us in the rhetoric of chemical bondings (imines are chemical compounds formed of nitrogen carbon double bonds, ylides are dipolar molecules). The shift to chemical terminology suggests a metaphorical shift from translation and dictionary definitions. But I am willing to hear echoes of the (so far) absent first person speaker laying claim to this writing in the “i” and “mine” of imine, as if the two have somehow combined into one molecule compound of selfhood and possession. Words and selves can be read as placeholders in a link of evolving reactions, the self and the poem taking their place in an eternal chain. This echo suggests to me that the speaker is not held as source for the poem but takes its part in a complex series of relations.
“Ylides” has such rich physicality as to be irresistible to a word fancier. Its semantic meaning can only be part of its impact in a book of lyrics. It’s an anagram of yields, a letter off from glides, and I’m inclined to see something like an apocryphal middle English word hovering there as well, y-lides, y-lidden, to cover with a lid. Perhaps most obviously it offers an echo of elide, or annul (which will chime with later themes). Imine ylides: The self and its possessions are continually annulled.
indium, indigane
ennead
The chemical symbol for indium is In, in, nella (“indigane” is another name for the compound indium trihydride). The chemical bonds continue as does the fascination with nella, the fact of being “in”, bonded, a part of. “Ennead” plays sonically with “in,” supported again by its meaning of being one part of nine—or in the case of Plotinus’s famous work of Platonic-Christian bonding, one in six. From here the lyric reveals its central fascination:
a knell (la glas), an echo of—
a nail (un clou)
Nella is re-bonded into “a knell”, the in of nella becomes the sound of a bell, the sonic resonance which is echoed in “a nail.” Perhaps “a nail” is a clue (“un clou”) that we are going to swing from one word to another along sonic lines that will evolve semantic resonance.
Struck, aglow, annealing
The nail is forged in the heat of a forming fire, where it is softened by heat and hammered, like a bell, as it cools, a process known as annealing. Here again we have the near homophone of anneal, and so nella is transformed in the crucible of the poem, via the annealing heat of lyric pressure into a knell, a nail, anneal. Onwards the hammer bangs, sounding
an arc, an ache,
and then—
the stand of boughs on farther march
in annuent ascent.
The “a knell” (of nella ) reformed and annealed provides the poetic trajectory, “an arc” towards “an ache,” a human pain, as if the lyric transformation is not just sound but felt sound. We arrive at our woods, in annuent ascent. “Annuent” actually means assent, but is transformed into the transcendent ascent, as if Plotinus’s Ennead had informed our metaphors to see lyric progress as a movement towards the ideal. The progress of the lyric here is via sonic resonances, but there is always an element of thoughtful substitution. A quote of Voltaire follows, “Life, is it not organization with feeling?” and we might see this also as a description of the lyric: an arc, an ache.
pebbled seeds accede to trees’ rings wrung
from ripples fixed in lignid lines
annual, annulate
seeds accede, as their sound might suggest they do, they agree to grow into trees, into the tree rings; they give their assent to ascension. The “rings” here are indications of tree growth but also of the lyric chimes at play, echoes rippling from the seed of the first line into the dark woods of the poem’s growth. “Lignid” (large tree wood) echoes in lines, the increments of growth and the lines of the poem. Annulate, having rings, marks the annual growth. The knell is sounded in the trees with annual and annulate.
the acetate of Ariel’s cry —
petrified, revenant, dissipating — static
addenda on a dendral record
of concentric nested tremors
glistening and resinous
across a knoll: the whole, in rounds, repealing
Sounds and themes continue to accrue, the trees grow, and the knell resonates, here on the hill holding the tree, a knoll. Prospero’s act as a magician is to hear Ariel’s cry and to free the spirit:
It was mine art,
When I arrived and heard thee, that made gape
The pine and let thee out. (The Tempest lines 294-296)
Like Dworkin, Prospero’s sorcery is learned from books, spells read and recited to call spirits from trees (books). The making of a poem is the planting of a seed from an earlier further tree, an additional growth, an addenda on a dendral record. Prospero reads the trees/books aloud and hears them ring. It is his skill to let them resonate and thus conjure their growth. Ariel is the freed spirit of such lyric growth. Sometimes such echoes are hidden. The pealing bell heard in repealing, a verb which means, of course, annul.
Who hears the sound in the dark wood damping?
The darkness here is one of obfuscation, of the damping, the reduction of the sound oscillations. The task of the poem here is to see, to hear, and to amplify potential resonances, to free Ariel.
to hear
in the (her)
of what inheres, inured,
innate in names (in yours)
aire over signature in Lawes
The poet’s task has been to listen to nella, and to read its translation, in the (feminine in the Italian, hence “her”), and to play those resonances into a poem. The poem is what manages to remain, inheres. “In her” becomes inheres, becomes inured becomes innate. The sounds are almost like a catalog of declensions, meaning is whatever inheres perhaps. The list reads like a practice of naming. Names inhere and become, stubbornly innate. The language has shifted from a fantasia on nella (one is almost compelled to see the whole poem as a woven love token or wedding band to Nel or Nella), to a momentary dalliance with listening to, hearing, “her.” The terms are legal here rather than chemical, and the aire is one of giving names. The contract of marriage (of human bondage?) is one of naming, and the signature of the father (the in-laws) transfers bondage to this new alliance. Ariel echoes in the song, aire, and legal parlance grows into the proper noun of Lawes.
I’m assuming it is Henry Lawes, rather than his brother William, both writers of fine aires. Henry is perhaps most famous these days as a footnote in Milton studies, a collaborator on Comus and dedicatee for Milton’s sonnet 13:
To Mr. H. Lawes, On His Aires
Harry, whose tuneful and well-measured song
First taught our English music how to span
Words with just note and accent, not to scan
With Midas Ears, committing short and long;Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng,
With praise enough for Envy to look wan;
To after-age thou shalt be writ the man
That with smooth aire couldst humor best our tongue.Thou honour’st Verse, and Verse must lend her wing
To honour thee, the priest of Phœbus Quire,
That tun’st their happiest lines in Hymn or Story.Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher
Than his Casella, whom he woo’d to sing,
Met in the milder shades of Purgatory.
Here we return to Dante, shifting from the Inferno of the Dark Woods to the milder shades of the Purgatorio. Casella was Dante’s Musician, woo’d to sing. Lawes was Milton’s. In Alkali the woods themselves are song.
skin saporous with salt, lashes matted over eyes
a succulent spray splays over sand — so named
because the ashe of it serve to make glas with
defined as any compound containing the group NH
Here we seem to be basting roasted food “saporous” and “succulent”, though sap and succulent equally refer to plants. Alkali is hidden here, its name deriving from the ash of the glasswort, or saltwort, splaying over the sand. Alkali is used in the production of soap, along with rendered beef fat, so the image of cooking meats is pertinent. The NH of the inimes and the glas (French for knell) send us reeling back to the poem’s opening gestures. “Glas” is an archaic spelling for glass, and glass, made in an as ancient a process as soap manufacturing, is annealed sand.
null law
no loss
leaving wind, in riot, ramified along the lawn
The knell of repealing is echoed here again in “null law.” “No loss” suggests that rather than loss we have transformation, seeds blown across the lawn to branch (ramify) in growth. The idea of Palingenesis seems to mark the last few pages, whereby the structure of an organism is passed through chemical changes of fire into a new form. Sir Thomas Browne mentions the theory in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica, and a footnote in one edition of his Religio Medici reminds us of Disraeli’s Curiosities of Literature where he states:
Nothing, they say, perishes in nature; all is but a continuation, or revival…the ashes of roses will again revive into roses…having burnt a flower, by calcination disengaged the salts from its ashes, and deposited them in a glass phial; a chemical mixture acted on it, till in the fermentation…[t]his dust, thus excited by heat, shoots upwards into its primitive forms…we see distinctly…the flower arise. (The Works of Sir Thomas Brown, ed. H.G.Bohn p.397)
It is the fine-tuned hearing of the poet (and the assiduous reader) that finds in the ashes the spectral form of the living organism. It is the ash of the sandwort that transforms into an alkali, and the alkali that turns catalyst in turn. “The lawn” might well be the setting for Milton’s Comus, or one of Henry’s aires. It is where seeds grow into trees.
a little pod, lavished
parfum a la vanilla
elle nie la fane, par fume
the scent of soap on skin we do not know
The pod or seed either grows or is transformed into perfume, like vanilla. As the French suggest, nothing withers, the word parfum (perfume) merely transforms into par fume, by smoke. The soap made by assistance of the (burnt glasswort) alkali offers a transformation on our skin, removing grease with the smallest modicum of frictional heat. We make the soap, as we make the lyric, and we pass it on. The poem ends
Everything, entheat, happens exactly as it must.
with a euphoric pronouncement of faith, albeit a faith in acceptance of the state of things, for they are as they have been made to be. Entheat is divine inspiration, the breath of god that produces poems, the same breath that stokes transformational flames, the heat hidden in the very word. This poem is that heat applied to words, words transformed into word-trees, word trees blossoming and cycling back to their very own seeding. The task of the poet is to follow the scent, sift the ashes, seed the soil.
As I said at the beginning, there is something of the alchemical here, a dark magic promising to raise life out of the ashes phoenix-like. One might be tempted to read a Romantic element into that faith, a sense of transcendent hope, were it not for the necessary game of materialism. Of course Alkali’s homophonic pseudo-etymological links lack the scientific foundations it often references, but it would be wrong to dismiss these poetic efflorescences as any less real for that. The convolution of images and sounds might pretend to weave an inextricable link between subject and language, sound and meaning, or if you like, between signifier and signified, which we know to be a fool’s game, but the play here is to notice that poems are made organically, that in reading/making a poem nothing is lost, just as chemically nothing can be lost. The reassurance of the final line is that a poem is itself a formidable crucible where elements are transformed into a model of ever increasing complexity. The semantics might be signs only, the masks of the Masque, but the performance itself is real, is part of the complex of exchanges, is a self-conscious encounter with making and being made. Lyrics are a part of the world as must as flowers and ash.
I’ve chosen the first section of Alkali as exemplary, and given it a brief read-through to suggest the process of lyrical/chemical bonds the poem calls into being. Other sections in Alkali riff on the fall in feldspar, scry Coolidge’s crystal text, scour the landscape mining mineral significance (in the Great Salt Lake?) and in “The Falls”, for me the grandest success, fugue a cascade of gorgeous glossolalic etymologies that offer a dizzying catalogue of scholiastic fever. Even the “Notes and Sources” flowers into a poem, as if each word and reference naturally takes root and blooms into new life even as it is dissected under the scope. Alkali is a magisterial kunstkammer, a new periodic tableau planted in a crystal garden of arcane knowledge and preposterous invention, a glockenspiel orchestration of aural augury that dances an irresistible instance of our geo-lyrical world.
Martin Corless-Smith was born and raised in Worcestershire, England. His latest books are Bitter Green (Fence Books) and a novel, This Fatal Looking Glass (SplitLevel Texts).