reading p.inman - part two

The other instalments can be found at the following links:

part one

part three

part four

part five

part six

And you can buy your own copy of Ad Finitum from if p then q

Perhaps I'm taking this all a little too seriously? Doesn't pleasure feature somewhere? One of the reasons I'm spending so much time on this book is that I enjoy it. There's a playfulness in the word fragments, in the placing of elements, even in the frustration of sense. And surely it's false to presume that difficulty should exclude enjoyment or vice versa. No one would argue that Finnegans Wake, for instance, is an easy book to read. But at the same time there's clearly a lot of pleasure to be taken from it. Let's move on quickly, since the two books are very different, and it won't help to suggest otherwise.

aegnus

The second poem, aegnus, is another short piece. It's simultaneously shorter and longer than ilieu (2). It extends over four pages rather than two, but contains only twenty words as opposed to twenty-eight in ilieu (2). Although as you might expect those 'words' include a range of apparent fragments, among them more or less recognisable items like a., n'owl., and ief. But the poetry really isn't about counting words. Better just to read them.

It's probably clear that I have absolutely no idea what I'm reading. Words echo other words, n'owl. and vowel. for example, but there's nothing recognisable to get hold of. Even some of the words or word fragments are unfamiliar, such as neapl.

Early on during the MA course in Creative Writing I'm currently embarked on we were offered a couple of ways to approach challenging texts. The most useful, which may be familiar, was a set of questions such as who is speaking?, when do the events take place? etc. But when the first page of a poem reads:

a.

noft.

bluff.

________

pith.

n'owl.

in its entirety I think it's pretty safe to ignore the checklist. All we have are the appearance and the sound of the words. To an extent there is meaning, but only insofar as we know various meanings for bluff. and pith. We don't have sufficient information to say which meaning it is, or what the other words do to it. Whatever any given word signifies becomes of secondary importance to what it looks like or how it sounds. Which is where pleasure comes in.

acoma

acoma is longer, more densely packed, and due to its length deploys more varied shapes on the page than the previous poems. The punctuation has changed too, semi-colons have replaced the full points. Or perhaps they haven't, perhaps they're just acting as semi-colons, it's hard to say. The parentheses have spread, and like the full points previously and the semi-colons now are misbehaving. The first bracket closes parentheses that were never opened in the first place, later parentheses open that never close.

By comparison the words are polite, orderly. They are arranged in neat rectangular groupings. There are large numbers of recognisable words, mention;, showing;), still;, and others. Old friends like st (this time unpunctuated), and whiten return. Some words have even, in spite of the efforts of parentheses and semi-colons, assembled themselves into what look like fragments of sentences, '(walked;in;but', or 'where;did;it;'. This is almost disappointing in context, so what look like fragments of nonsense are welcome, a return to impenetrability. So we have, 'cakeness;in(shoelace'. But even this is dangerously close to the sort of thing you might be able to read elsewhere.

So what's going on? Are there events, or ideas, or characters here that we can identify with? Might there even be a message? Well, no. There are names of people, places and products, braque;, Utah, victrola and so forth. They just haven't quite managed to cohere into anything conventionally 'meaningful' yet. On a strictly sequential reading of Ad Finitum sense does appear to slowly accumulate in the poems. Almost as though words and punctuation carried along on a stream catch and stick, and through the course of the book gather other words, building a kind of word dam. It's a hopeless analogy, but an illustration of what I mean comes toward the end of the book, in pluper,

'old people's weather on an island

the whole sky out of typed blanks'

But I'm not sure if this is an accurate way of reading Ad Finitum. You might equally plausibly say that these near sentences close to the end represent a withdrawal of possibilities.

Actually I don't believe that either reading is correct. I think that different approaches to writing and presenting the poetry occur and recur throughout the book. So the strategies of ilieu (2) at the beginning seem to repeat in sided toward the middle. The near sentences of pluper at the end echo near sentences elsewhere, from acoma onwards. The neat groupings of words in acoma return in 14 panels for Lynne Dreyer later on. Horizontal lines appear regularly within the text. Almost every alignment of text other than left justified is tried out. Rather than the book moving from one state to another, as intuitive as that seems, I think it switches between different approaches as appropriate.