Читать книгу Temporariness - John Kinsella - Страница 19

A poem is a way of framing a relationship to reality. It articulates something that connects a writing entity to the world. To the extent that it articulates, it gives verbal expression to a position between other entities or spaces. It is a relational act. It is transformative. In articulating the way in which I am connected to other entities, I render explicit a relationship, or even a set of relationships, which having been allowed to advance out of a previous state of latency, now take effect in new and unexpected ways. They in turn inflect my own ongoing practices, one of them being the act of articulating myself and my place in the environment via poetic enunciation. The poem has an existential, ontological value which is condensed and clarified in ways they are not as starkly clear in other literary genres. One might call it a statement, but this flattens the poem down to a linguistic thesis, whereas it is a way of bodying forth a relation in order to position oneself actively, perhaps even thereby repositioning oneself, within that relationship. It is a way of situating oneself deliberately and consciously within ‘the Open’ (Rilke 1978: 71)—a necessary and transformative act because we are usually situated, by default, within a grid of losses and gains which rules our ordinary reality according to the regulations of economics.

A poem is a deliberate decision to eschew the monumental, the monographic, the ‘Bestandsaufnahme’, the ‘state of the art’, the monolithic summary of knowledge. Rather, it might be understood as an attempt to articulate or a moment of being, even to bring it into being via the incantatory work of language. The poem is not an effort to capture a moment of being (seizure of course indexing a mode of possession), nor to lay it bare (which in turn assumes the pre-existent nature of the fleeting, temporary moment, and the reflective nature of language). Both of these fallacies, however, point heuristically towards the real work of language.

Language is a threshold, a blurred contact zone where the agency of the poet, and that of language itself intermingle. It may transpire that it’s not so much the work on language, as the work of language (and thus only derivatively the work in language) which reveals the creativity of the moment. It would be the logic of language itself that would be a mode of participating in a much larger process of unfolding creativity—in which the point would be to be in language so as to get the subject out of the way. In the words of the British poet Charles Tomlinson (1985: vii), poetic language would be a realm ‘where space represented possibility and where self would have to embrace that possibility somewhat self-forgetfully, putting aside the more possessive and violent claims of personality’.

The theory of relativity, among other things, suggested that the observer was not a neutral, objective factor outside the experimental process itself, but rather, that the presence of an observer abolished the very idea of objectivity. The presence of the observational or measuring device could be seen to alter the gravitational fields, be it ever so slightly, within the experimental environment, in such a way as to become a participant in the process. The experimental relationship thus had to be recoded as one that could no longer be understood as pertaining between a neutral subject that recorded or measured the effects of experimental actions, and an inert, purely reactive object—but rather, as the intervention of a subject into a fields of participating subjects (as Stengers [1997] would point out much later in her work on the co-agency of experimental actors). The observer participates and influences what was hitherto assumed to be a separate realm of scientific experimentation.

Might one be able to say the same for art, and more specifically for poetry? Could the act of perception that is the work of art, an apparently neutral recording of a world, or the notation of a state of mind or recollection of emotion be also seen in a similar light? Might the work of art, in its putative autonomy and its aesthetic difference, be a mode of engagement? Might the work of art—quite apart from any notion of political intervention or polemical sloganeering designed to change attitudes—not always already be a perception that would simultaneously constitute an action? If the work of art, at the very most minimal level, arises in the flurry of the creative remodelling of an elemental aesthetic material—paint, language, wood, clay, metal, stone, earth, air, canvas, paper—that also shifts material relations with the world around it, could one not suggest the same with regard to the less tangible shift in perception that goes hand in hand with that recalibration of material forces? Would the poem, as a zone of altered perception, not exert an influence through the very fact of a transformation of our ways of seeing the world or its ways of seeing us?

To understand the world differently might then exert a tangible transformation of material relations—a reorganization of neural pathways and increased neural traffic, consuming cerebral energy and transmitting it to the environment, a tiny alteration in body temperature, a minute shift in the gravitational field of the poet or the reader, and a corresponding response in the subjects-objects close to that textual actor, a reply from the persons or things (or thing-persons) nearby.

To write or read a poem would be a way of taking effect on the world, however minimal and however imperceptible. About suffering he was never wrong, the old master, but the same cannot be said for his dictum on poetic agency: ‘Poetry makes nothing happen’ (Auden 1973: 82). Everything makes something happen, and poetry is no exception. In the face of the enormity of global warming and the continental and oceanic degradation of the environment, we are all urged to recycle our plastic packaging, compost our potato peelings, switch off lights and ride a bike. Yet who tells us to write or read a line of poetry every day? Might that not be as significant a mode of intervention into our environment, shifting ever so slightly the destructive relations of a world at war with itself? Why pooh-pooh poetry because its interventions are at such a small scale?

Perhaps these minimal environmental actions through the discrete potency of the poetic image may reconnect us to the places through which we move in participatory speech acts that can restore our sense of wonder, ‘renew our shared sensory experiences in a world that is as interconnected as it is divided’, as García Canclini (2012: xii) writes? Imraan Coovadia’s fictional Cape Town minibus taxi poems ‘which invariably made me see a new fact about the world or maybe some old thing anew’ (2014: 27), or the creators of Poetry in the Underground, or a graffiti artist with a spray can—all of them are perhaps the work of interventionist activists in the ecology of spatial relations, in the alchemy of the way we are, whether we will or not, in the world.

RWP

Threshold Failure

Our behaviour no doubt affected

by oil fumes from a leaky system,

a decentralisation of heating that makes

détournement with our bodies,

all thresholds fail. Fumes permeate

and will break through concrete in time,

the oil sitting and working its way down

and out. Fossils emerging from fuel

to hunt you down. They are still hungry.

Outside, wind blows hard off the Atlantic.

Our families came from here to escape starvation.

Mass graves everywhere, whole towns reduced

to memories, like the wolves of Mount Gabriel.

All angels, wolves and humans and formless

spirits we stop at thresholds—what will

happen now the thresholds have fallen?

Outside on the green, wet ground, gathered

in the gridwork of hedges, members of the crow

family crisscross and divvy-up territory.

On the wooden crossbeams of the fence

a dozen jackdaws, swinging in and out

of hedges, greenspace and gables.

In trees losing leaves, maybe two-dozen

rooks, maybe establishing a new rookery

in the face of jackdaw business. And ravens

on the chimneys call down and sound ‘spooky’,

distantly incarcerated voices we could draw

analogies and paradigms from. A deathly laugh

like a carnival ghost-ride. Collapsing thresholds.

And crows from home in memory.

They rule the dry and dusty places,

the zones of most intense fire risk. When

flames come, they fly slower than they could,

dragging thresholds of sparks across the tinder.

I am dizzy and less focussed than I should be.

The fumes are weirdly strongest in the vestibule.

Through the front door into the chamber.

False threshold. For another door to negotiate

before passing into the house proper. The fumes

follow but are already inside to greet you.

You can see crow species through open windows

which want the fumes out, you can hear their crosstalk.

JK