COLLOSAL
FRAGMENTS: THE WORK OF ADRIAN CLARKE
Tuneless
Numbers
The roots of an alternative formalism in William
Carlos Williams? Possibly only Zukofsky
noticed, to carry forward into his own practice. ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’, the classroom exhibit
of objectivist minimalism, is structured in verselets of 3 words and 1 word per
line. I wonder how many people have
noticed this patterning, but
considered it an accident, an embarrassing caprice. Certainly not a significant form.
Free verse as one rejection
of metrics. Measure.
Word-count as another
measure, as Zukofsky demonstrated in A
14, 19, 22, 23. All the more contentious
and combative for lacking the kind of antecedents free verse could find in the
prose poem and in cadence. The next step
on from syllabics and one step beyond ‘poetic form’.
And yet as usable as a
sonnet and as brazenly foregrounded.
Homemade homologies. Not homemade worlds.
Constraints: Oulipo (particularly Jacques Roubaud,
counting his measures; like Zukofsky, mathematically using and abusing the
sonnet).
Adrian Clarke, his defensive
humour: ‘I found my Virgil in the number 4’.
Ghost Measures (1987): 4 words a line, 16 lines a poem (= 64 words); 64 poems in 4
parts (12 months in the writing).
Sorts of sonnet, numbers
borrowed from the I Ching.
Adding up to The Ghost Trio, with part 2 Spectral Investments (1991) and part 3 Obscure Disasters (1993).
Ghost structures.
‘The Ghost Trio - which
would be a tetralogy were the sixth stage of the multiplication that also
generated Gerhard Richter’s 1024 Colours completed. Let the missing part stand as a phantom
limb.’
A choice of antecedents,
Richter, the finest contemporary painter.
And not, like Stockhausen or
Silliman, seduced by the naturalism of the Fibonacci Sequence.
Motivating the arbitrary.
Word-count as a
numerico-formal order that totals to a mock-totality, rational without reason
or content.
Countless
Spaces
The open field poetry of the 1970s was an outpost of
free verse, a map-like network, so often literally mapping ‘place’. The sparse page, its isolated phrases and
words, its asthmatic notations of self.
Bodies of knowledge littering the page.
While this caricature does no justice to the true range of poetry in the
1970s, it explains why Clarke was toying with the formalism of the Pindaric
Ode. How different a notion, or
notation, of ‘place’ in his ‘The Angel, Islington’: ‘Your post-imperial potman
/ rides the flood succumbing Euston Road’s / sinistral streams’; and yet only a
short step to the new formalism of Ghost
Measures, side-stepping the open field.
Something survives though: the abstract Latinate diction, the pivotal
pun, ‘sinistral’.
Homages and
Homologies 1986/7
Allen Fisher’s Brixton
Fractals (1985 - though heard at readings before this) closed the open
field. Syntactic and paratactic linking,
narrative energies with necessary interferences. Forward-thrusting discursive arrangements of
fragments. A polyphonic assemblage. (Very few formal constraints.)
There are two homages to
Fisher in Ghost Measures which refunction
Fisher’s materials, his words, into an appreciation of his method:
unclassified signals glow from
the walkway creates what
happens next by spins
where the culture breaks
Creation and breaking. Complexity in irregularity; precisely
fractal.
Rosmarie Waldrop, an
American poet associated with, but pre-dating, the Language Poets, receives a
single homage. (Her critial book Against Language? is a compendium of
formal techniques.) Her The Road is Everywhere or Stop this Body
(1978) is a collection of lyrics, in four parts which reflect the calendar year
of composition, like Ghost Measures. Waldrop’s syntactic play, lines often only
linking with contiguous lines or phrases, both atomises and dynamises the
discourse at once. The poems ‘barriers /
and obstacles of sense’ derive from ‘this effort towards syntax’ as Clarke puts
it (GM 64). This syntactic shifting, a kind of discursive
punning, is selectively adopted by Clarke.
The celerity of Tom
Raworth’s long sequences, and his performance of them, combine linearity with
disruptions of the processual to produce a vertigenous effect in the reader and
listener. ‘The race of thoughts spins’
as Clarke writes in his homage to Raworth.
Yet this phrase describes
equally the effects of Waldrop’s experiment, and recalls the ‘spinning’ and ‘swerving’ Clarke notes of the
fractal progression of Fisher’s sequences.
Order in discontinuity.
The energy of these three
writers, arguably harnessed in the greater tension of a strict form. Entropy.
And that
Problem is Politics
Theoretical positions and creative dispositions are
confirmed by Lyotard’s The Differend:
Phrases in Dispute. Fragmentary
resistance to the Total Society.
Fragmentary guerilla operations within language. The discourse of the State (statement) is
rejected for the phrase. Lyotard’s
words, perhaps by squinting at them, curiously offer a description of what
Clarke’s work is already doing, and Clarke was quick to adapt this material in
his paper ‘Listening to the Differences’:
The way in
which Lyotard attempts to subvert such totalising concepts is by resort to the
phrase, in a sense - wider than that of the grammatical unit - that is
contextually defined, but the strategic significance of which is as a
linguistic instance that cuts across genres and categories as it evade
closure. With phrases we are set adrift
from narrative and logic to struggle with what they present without hope of
return to safe ground: ‘for a phrase to be the last phrase, another phrase is
necessary to declare this, and thus it is not the last one’. Further, ‘That there not be a phrase is
impossible. It is rather And a phrase is necessary. It is
necessary to link.’ ‘The linkage of one
phrase with another is problematic, and this problem is politics.’ - Lyotard’s
approach attempts at once to undermine all totalising political philosophies
and a radical extension of politics into the smallest linguistic
transations.
Clarke’s last quotation from Lyotard above is also
the epigraph to ‘Obscure Disasters 15’, which opens with what reads like a
disarmingly personal note:
something unusual about this
for a first draft
language in pieces grasps
particulars as spectral hues
A fragment seems not to focus ‘contemporary particulars’ as
‘Obscure Disasters 2’ puts it in homage to Zukofsky, but to refract them into a fading
spectrum. The persistent ghost metaphor
in the Trio (spectre, geist, shade,
etc) suggests that this conceptual diffusion is at the expense of a self which
has no permanent substance (‘language found myself collapsed’; GM 24) and a mass-mediated hyperreality
that turns message to mirage: ‘overlapped phantoms narrative revives / our
simulcra’ (GM 25).
And a phrase. Re-read:
language in pieces grasps
particulars as spectral hues
stake out a fundamental
site diminishing traffic suburbanised
‘Spectral hues’ is now pivotal, turning on
‘as’. Becoming a noun phrase to link
with the unlikely physicality of the verb to ‘stake out’, with its suggestion
that the hyper-reality has an old fashioned notion of boundaries, even as it
dissolves into the dullest of realities.
As an earlier poem says, resistance is where ‘lacunae body forth’ (GM 11), embodied emptiness (ghosts)
undermines totality (itself spectral).
Yet the larger public events
that pass through The Ghost Trio, such
as the Gulf War, are not simply images (as my allusions to Baudrillard might
imply). The Gulf War’s anti-language of
premeditated adjustment offers not ghosts but dead bodies: ‘a refusal of
language speaking corpses straight / in his prepared text’ (OD 1).
Straight talking. The issue is linkage, not slippage. The dance of the intellect among
phrases. Phrasal phasing.
A swerved reading: reading
is linking (listening to the differences).
Spectral
Investments: in a double meaning where the subject gets lost
Section 2 of Spectral
Investments is a brilliant narrative, except there is no narrative, only
the brilliant story of narrativity, whose devices, according to Lyotard and
others, structure so much of our knowledge.
Which the phrasal aims to undermine.
Calvino games,
metafictionality; ‘begins CHAPTER 1 with / a pattern of flowers’ is neither a
description of flowers nor is it at the beginning. A relentless foregrounding of commentary on a
fiction that has ‘a content to be / described’ but which isn’t: ‘named
characters elaborately set up to / conclude in words’. The resulting partial details seem indexical
but empty, as in these (recurrently) noirish
images: ‘a cigarette denotes / an agony of choice’ and ‘a damp cigarette
indicative of the expository code’. No
wonder this is a world ‘begging / to be described in total’ (that’s what Grand
Narratives are for, of course) but it remains incomprehensible, ‘beggaring /
description’ as ‘the words fragment themselves a constellation fictional or /
parasyntactic in the turn of events’, and in the turn of phrases.
Both fiction and grammar
(not to mention phenomenology and politics) contain ‘subjects’ and the text
opens with what could have been its title: ‘in which the subject gets
lost’. Characters and sentences break
down in this discourse under the pressure of the indeterminacies which
structure it, ‘in a double meaning where the subject gets lost’. To take one example only from this complex
text, the slogan ‘NO REPRESENTATION / WITHOUT REPRESENTATION addressing her
image’ asserts a double meaning that articulates the problem of, and the
interdependence of, the politics of mediation and the mediation of politics.
The reader (another subject)
is lost, left ‘to struggle … without hope of return to (the) safe ground’ of
familiar narrative; my summary above only hints at the experience of reading
this remarkable tour de force. The reader’s loss is continual; but so is his
or her discovery. The text offers either
‘a duplicate reality’ or ‘an alternative universe’. Language, in the last phrase of the section,
proliferates its narratives, ‘imitations that go forth and multiply’. This is both a prophecy of the spread of
totality and of its breaking down
into resistant double and multiple meanings.
After four dense pages don’t
expect the satisfaction of univocal conclusion.
Obscure
Disasters: the catastrophe where we put our hats
Obscure
Disasters. Hommages et Tombeaux.
From Mallarmé’s ‘Calme bloc
ici-bas chu du’un désastre obscur’; for Poe.
Tributes and addresses to
fellow writers who also fall from disasters (and the opening Gulf War
‘epinicion’ reminds them of one such disaster).
(Not a call to ‘purify the
dialect of the tribe’, in Eliot’s appropriation, nor an endorsement of the
‘copyright protected lips’ of ‘defunctive authority’ satirised in ‘Obscure
Disaster 5’,
Eg ‘Ô soeur’ Maggie
O’Sullivan.
Eg Clarke ambivalently
addresses Lawrence Upton
in the common
sense utopia where we
all swop notes
(OD 7)
Which also demonstrates one of the techniques of
this book. This ending is transformed
into the ending of the poem which, for reasons of clarity and distance, I wish
to concentrate on, ‘Obscure Disaster 12’, for Salman Rushdie.
the enemy of images
faded a little picture
from the catastrophe where
we put our hats
The ‘common / sense utopia’
has transformed into Mallarmé’s ‘catastrophe’ (out of which appropriate ‘noirs
vols du BlashÀme’ will blow).
The place ‘we put our hats’ is home, a dangerous place for Rushdie; the
phrase also has an affirmative note, an echo, perhaps, of putting our money
where our mouths are. It is a statement
of solidarity with Rushdie’s catastrophe/home.
The ‘enemy of images’ who is responsible for this is, of course, Khomeni
(of a million faded images), but the phrase is Rushdie’s own to describe the
homeless exiled paranoiac Imam of The
Satanic Verses (see pp 205-9, The Consortium edition). ‘The Fellow Upstairs / skims phantasmal
scripts’, a partial reading of the Koran which amounts to an ‘authorised grand
narrative’, should be ranged an oppositional ‘petite histoire’. One example of this ‘implicit cultural
script’ is Clarke’s view of absurd authoritarianism, which echoes Rushdie:
bullet
proofed delectibubbles the sacred
frames in an inflated
era
Inflated claims. Inflated ‘currency recycled’, in a world
haunted by the ‘commerce wraith’ (itself a transformation of ‘spectral
investments’) of world capital.
The epigraph from George
Herbert may seem out of place. But
Herbert’s Christian version of ‘plain fashion’, as Clarke ironically puts it,
balances an attack on what might otherwise be seen as solely one on the Islamic
fundamentalist fatwa (and on cowardly
world opinion). Herbert’s rhetorical
questions, ‘Who says that fictions only and false hair / Become a verse? Is there in truth no beauty?’ are
refunctioned in the text. The second
becomes the poem’s epigraph (where the ‘in truth’ becomes ambiguous). The first is woven into the poem’s opening
phrase: ‘houses that fictions only / wigged become averse to circulate’ - the
houses being possibly the publishing houses which refused to circulate The Satanic Verses, except in disguise
as The Consortium.
mutabilities SHAKE
in the consistent rigour of
this formalism
in the exemplary phrasal
diffusion of these materials
in the vertigenous tension
between the two
March 1994 Pages 219-238, April 1994
