Intricately
Entangled
Rupert
Loydell
For the last decade or so my main way of
writing has been to assemble phrases into a poem. These phrases come from my
own notebooks, from books I am reading at the time (sometimes almost grabbed at
random; at other times phrases I’ve jotted down whilst reading), from songs and
CD covers, from newspaper and magazines, from in my head… a kind of ongoing
diary of experience, reading and observations catalysed and changed by writing
processes and my own creative and editorial process, which works towards poems
that ask more questions than give answers, using collage and procedural writing
as well as more traditional inspiration and personal confession.
Charles
Bernstein has suggested that ‘Poetry is turbulent thought, at least that’s what
I want from it… It leaves things unsettled, unresolved – leave you knowing less
than you did when you started’, and my poems explore the world by association
and analogy: the ‘voices’ or polyglossolalia of my work are present in the way
the poems have been constructed, they accumulate meaning by juxtaposition and
ordering; ‘conversation’ and ‘conference’ are inherent in the way themes may
continue through sequences, series or individual poems. Joseph Conte suggests
that ‘Serial and procedural forms provide alternative and complementary
responses to postmodernity. […] The divine order as a single voice of authority
has withdrawn to be replaced by a cacophony of channelled voices, or by no
voice at all […]’
Themes emerge, tentatively appear and
disappear in my poems. I try to keep my vocabulary everyday and readable, but
distort syntax and linearity to make surprises, jumps, leaps of the
imagination. What I read, see and engage with around me often gets directly
collaged into poems, so it’s very personal. It’s my voice because I made it,
the process is much more refined than ‘collage’ or ‘cut-up’.
This does, of course, means the reader
has work to do, not least in relating their own reality to the poems presented
to them. The poet Dean Young has an interesting response to an interview
question about the possibilities of misunderstanding:
Do you think your poems are defined by
misunderstanding?
I think
they’re very much about misunderstanding.
... I think to tie meaning too closely to understanding misses the
point.
This misunderstanding is also about the
discrepancy between language and reality, or object, which Ann Lauterbach has
written about:
The
world, for many poets, is apprehended as
language; language is the material of the world. Every object is simultaneously
itself and its word. For some poets, the word has more significance than the
thing itself; for others, the thing takes priority over its word, and for still
others, neither word nor thing has precedence. Although this might be seen as a
mere matter of shift in focus, the consequences, in terms of the poet’s form,
its construction, can be profound. Poets move around in the shadowy space
between a word and its object, sometimes wanting to make the difference between
the two appear seamless, and sometimes calling attention to the distinctions
between them.
Not only this shadowy space is usable by
poets, but the many diverse and specialist languages and objects the world
offers are available as subjects. Dean Young responds to his interviewer asking
about how he uses ‘the physicality of the world’ by referring to:
The junk of
the world, which is maddening and wonderful. One great thing about the
twentieth century is that any discourse can be poetic. [...] For instance in...
I used mangled quotes from technical journals, which is not that experimental –
it just allows tones to confront each other. That kind of collage is fun
because it can really undercut what I’m doing. At some point I have to know what
I'm doing, but that should be pretty far into the process.
In 1995 Robert Sheppard categorized his
poem sequence thus: ‘The project Twentieth
Century Blues is a “net/(k)not work”. One of its current aims is to link
the unlinkable’, which is perhaps what Joe Amato means when he writes about the
idea of ‘[e]verything in dialogue with everything else’. He also discusses this
in another way:
Some poets
stitch a kind of linguistic web between sites of picturing (description) and
sites of telling (narration); some poets make clusters of sound which do
neither and both at once, calling attention to the constellating properties of
language, its capacity to confound temporal and spatial reality into a third
thing: an event which participates in the construction of that reality. The
idea that a poem can be granted the status of an event that shifts the course of cause and effect in a writer’s or
reader’s life, has little to do with the idea of a poem as a bauble of verbal
expressivity.
The poet Brian Louis Pearce asked me in
an interview ‘How do you pattern your mosaic? Order your (found) dislocation?’
to which I replied ‘Same as all poets do. By theme, association, sound, rhyme,
assonance, word count, syllable counts, visually, intuition.’ I would also
agree with Dean Young , who suggests that at a certain point:
the poem takes
on some kind of density, and it starts to coalesce. I may feel like there's a
particular trace in it – like a narrative trace – that I can highlight a bit,
to establish enough of a center of gravity so that other materials can be
organized around it. Then I make selections in terms of musicality and measure.
I also like the fact that, as David
Shields states, ‘collage teaches the reader to understand that the movements of
the writer’s mind are intricately
entangled with the work’s meaning. Forget “intricately entangled with the
work’s meaning”: are the work’s
meaning.’
Rupert Loydell is Senior Lecturer in English with Creative Writing at Falmouth University, and the editor of Stride and With magazines. He is the author of several collections of poetry,
including Wildlife and Ballads of the Alone both published by
Shearsman Books. An artist’s book-in-a-box, The Tower of Babel, was published by Like This Press; and Encouraging Signs, a book of essays, articles and interviews by
Shearsman. He edited Smartarse for
Knives Forks & Spoons Press, From Hepworth’s Garden Out: poems about painters and St. Ives for Shearsman, and
Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh,
an anthology of manifestos and unmanifestos, for Salt. He lives in a village in
Cornwall, UK, with his family and far too many CDs and books, and is currently
working on a series of collaborative papers and chapters about the musician
Brian Eno, as well as a number of interviews for the academic journal Punk & Post-Punk.
