about everything
It is some time since Philip Davenport's about everything came out. Others including Tony Trehy wrote about it more knowledgeably and perceptively at the time. What follows are a set of reflections written across the weekend that probably reflect more on my thinking about where my own approaches to text stand in relation to other innovative poets and to the mainstream. What Tony Trehy calls 'the hegemony of the banal' and Ron Silliman calls 'quietism'.
I have added some interventions into my own text in square brackets where they seem necessary.
In the title [of about everything the 'o' is replaced by an elongated box ▯ denoting an absence, an unreadable character.] there's immediately a question the symbol replacing 'o'. Or perhaps 'not o'. Then the poem starts and it splits. To read across or to read down. Or to do both. To read down continuously left column then right, then the next page. Or to read first the left column through the book and only then start on the right. Maybe something more nuanced. Read down and across, perhaps skip forward, assemble the text that makes best sense. That might be across, a little way down the the right column, then down the left, then across and back into the text on the the right you've already read [for example]. And what about the recurrences of phrases and words throughout?
The columns of text, the space between the columns, the symbol/non symbol ▯, the shape of some of the photographs, where they exist the spaces between the photographs are special cases of ▯. Both possibility and blockage. A portal and something in the way. [Scientists and mathematicians may wish to look away for the rest of the paragraph while I demonstrate my utter misunderstanding of certain concepts. On the other hand if you can bear to read on I'm happy for you to correct me.] ▯ subjects the poem to a crude analogue of quantum uncertainty [see here for the real thing]. Early on it's easy to say that 'kid▯eys' represents 'kidneys', but later examples like ▯▯▯▯ remain obscure. [But is it really possible to say that ▯ in 'kid▯eys' represents n? That is the most likely candidate, but surely ▯ is both 'n' and 'not n' while also remaining ▯. After all elsewhere ▯ appears to represent 'o' and other letters. There is no clear rule that we can use to make the substitution. Even saying that it represents the letter missing from the word most likely to exist in that context is unhelpful when some words consist of nothing but ▯.
[I've spent some time trying to track down whether the symbol ▯ has a name without any luck. The only place I've found it is within the Unicode symbols where it's known as 'White Vertical Rectangle' which is more a description than a name. If anyone knows better I'd love to know.]
When the photos come in the poem splits again. It is already split and already it's both open and closed and there are already irreconcilable uncertainties. Now it's become both more complex and perhaps also more decorative.
[The word decorative is a poor one. It was my initial thought but one for which I substituted 'superficial'. In many ways though 'superficial' is an even worse word. I have substitued it here without an immediate indication, the only time that happens here. The problem is in how I constructed my sentence. I was not referring to the poem but to how it might be read. This might help make sense of the next paragraph - which initially was continuous with the previous paragraph. This is the only paragraph that I have divided differently in this way from its original form.]
Although it [the poem]'s not wholly impenetrable there is the possibility that the reader might focus on simpler decorative pleasures. This is not a potential issue unique to this collection [by which I mean poem]. With a lot of the collections I like there is the potential to glide over the surface and only spend time on the most obvious pleasures of a few limited sections.
[Also in my mind while writing was this post from Tony Trehy in which he attacks the banality of the Manchester Literature Festival, and in which he says 'The mainstream has a tendency to raid beyond its boundaries to pick up less threatening elements of more experimental work, the flyposting is a neat absorption of street poem installations stretching back to Cobbing and beyond, and more recently Phil Davenport’s interventions in Manchester and other cities'. This also happens to chime with a discussion I had with Phil Davenport on appropriation of innovative techniques by mainstream writers.]
You could argue that this is an issue for readers. That those who read closely will get the full experience of any given poem and those who chose not to will miss much of the interest and value of the poem. I don't think that this is a credible argument - this line of reasoning comes very close to saying that it doesn't matter what goes into any poem and that the primary value of a poem derives from the reader. This kind of reasoning risks negating the difference and value of innovative poetry, of its distinctness from the mainstream.
It also misses something that seems to be happning whereby poets who are essentially using mainstream techniques and writing in a conventionally personal/descriptive/confessional mode apply a veneer of innovative poetry to the surface of their work. Such a decontextualisation of these techniques without an understanding of why they might be used, simply to apply a texture to the surface is inevitable at some stage.
This is not to say that ab▯ut everything operates unaware of these problems, or that it's in any way merely decorative. Simply that the complexities of the book occasion these thought, Primarily by providing a contrast between unyielding text and superficially more easy to read images. Nor is this a criticism of the book.
As the book progresses the poem gradually deconstructs itself, the symbol ▯ replacing more and more letters. As a result the images take on more significance and appear to relate more closely to the text.
[The poem's title and the use of the white vertical rectangle ▯ neatly sidestep one lazy critical strategy, 'What's the poem about?' 'It's about everything.' It interrogates the uses and meanings of text, the relationship of text to non-text in print and in the wider world, what it means to read or to learn to read, and how poetry is a different form of reading. It investigates how perhaps contrary to what I argued earlier there is an ongoing requirement for both writers and readers to learn new strategies of reading. Not just in terms of poetry or publication more broadly, but in terms of the wider world we live in. As technology, communications, knowledge and languages shift and change so we have to shift and change to keep in touch with them.]
The columns of text, the space between the columns, the symbol/non symbol ▯, the shape of some of the photographs, where they exist the spaces between the photographs are special cases of ▯. Both possibility and blockage. A portal and something in the way. [Scientists and mathematicians may wish to look away for the rest of the paragraph while I demonstrate my utter misunderstanding of certain concepts. On the other hand if you can bear to read on I'm happy for you to correct me.] ▯ subjects the poem to a crude analogue of quantum uncertainty [see here for the real thing]. Early on it's easy to say that 'kid▯eys' represents 'kidneys', but later examples like ▯▯▯▯ remain obscure. [But is it really possible to say that ▯ in 'kid▯eys' represents n? That is the most likely candidate, but surely ▯ is both 'n' and 'not n' while also remaining ▯. After all elsewhere ▯ appears to represent 'o' and other letters. There is no clear rule that we can use to make the substitution. Even saying that it represents the letter missing from the word most likely to exist in that context is unhelpful when some words consist of nothing but ▯.
[I've spent some time trying to track down whether the symbol ▯ has a name without any luck. The only place I've found it is within the Unicode symbols where it's known as 'White Vertical Rectangle' which is more a description than a name. If anyone knows better I'd love to know.]
When the photos come in the poem splits again. It is already split and already it's both open and closed and there are already irreconcilable uncertainties. Now it's become both more complex and perhaps also more decorative.
[The word decorative is a poor one. It was my initial thought but one for which I substituted 'superficial'. In many ways though 'superficial' is an even worse word. I have substitued it here without an immediate indication, the only time that happens here. The problem is in how I constructed my sentence. I was not referring to the poem but to how it might be read. This might help make sense of the next paragraph - which initially was continuous with the previous paragraph. This is the only paragraph that I have divided differently in this way from its original form.]
Although it [the poem]'s not wholly impenetrable there is the possibility that the reader might focus on simpler decorative pleasures. This is not a potential issue unique to this collection [by which I mean poem]. With a lot of the collections I like there is the potential to glide over the surface and only spend time on the most obvious pleasures of a few limited sections.
[Also in my mind while writing was this post from Tony Trehy in which he attacks the banality of the Manchester Literature Festival, and in which he says 'The mainstream has a tendency to raid beyond its boundaries to pick up less threatening elements of more experimental work, the flyposting is a neat absorption of street poem installations stretching back to Cobbing and beyond, and more recently Phil Davenport’s interventions in Manchester and other cities'. This also happens to chime with a discussion I had with Phil Davenport on appropriation of innovative techniques by mainstream writers.]
You could argue that this is an issue for readers. That those who read closely will get the full experience of any given poem and those who chose not to will miss much of the interest and value of the poem. I don't think that this is a credible argument - this line of reasoning comes very close to saying that it doesn't matter what goes into any poem and that the primary value of a poem derives from the reader. This kind of reasoning risks negating the difference and value of innovative poetry, of its distinctness from the mainstream.
It also misses something that seems to be happning whereby poets who are essentially using mainstream techniques and writing in a conventionally personal/descriptive/confessional mode apply a veneer of innovative poetry to the surface of their work. Such a decontextualisation of these techniques without an understanding of why they might be used, simply to apply a texture to the surface is inevitable at some stage.
This is not to say that ab▯ut everything operates unaware of these problems, or that it's in any way merely decorative. Simply that the complexities of the book occasion these thought, Primarily by providing a contrast between unyielding text and superficially more easy to read images. Nor is this a criticism of the book.
As the book progresses the poem gradually deconstructs itself, the symbol ▯ replacing more and more letters. As a result the images take on more significance and appear to relate more closely to the text.
[The poem's title and the use of the white vertical rectangle ▯ neatly sidestep one lazy critical strategy, 'What's the poem about?' 'It's about everything.' It interrogates the uses and meanings of text, the relationship of text to non-text in print and in the wider world, what it means to read or to learn to read, and how poetry is a different form of reading. It investigates how perhaps contrary to what I argued earlier there is an ongoing requirement for both writers and readers to learn new strategies of reading. Not just in terms of poetry or publication more broadly, but in terms of the wider world we live in. As technology, communications, knowledge and languages shift and change so we have to shift and change to keep in touch with them.]
Comments