Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze: Transformative Intensities 9781472542762, 9780826424242

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For Kate Oliver

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the AHRC for funding the research that produced this book: it would almost certainly not have been completed without their generous assistance. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Dr Carol Watts, of Birkbeck College, London, for her absolutely invaluable advice, criticism and belief. I would like to thank everybody involved with Birkbeck’s Contemporary Poetics Research Centre, which has, among other things, helped me to feel much less alone in my obsessions during this project. I would like to thank Professor Robert Hampson and Dr John Hall, for the combination of rigour and kindness with which they presented vital advice. I would like to thank both sides of my family for their support. Finally, I would like to offer infinite thanks to my partner, Kate Oliver, for her support, help, advice, patience and love over the years.

Introduction

The Picador poetry anthology Conductors of Chaos1, published in 1996, was for a reader like myself, revelatory. Previous contact with contemporary poetry had been minimal and largely confined to what was an almost standardized poetry written by famous poets. It was a poetry that seemed to attempt to represent me to myself; as such, it held little interest for me. It raised a response of brief acknowledgment and was gone. In Conductors of Chaos, however, was a poetry that was doing something totally different from this; something that I did not understand, could not have explained, but was excited by. Each of the 36 poets was doing something unlike the other 35, even though they obviously, in some way, belonged together. They were not what I understood contemporary poetry to be. One of the most immediately striking works was Her Weasels Wild Returning by J. H. Prynne, consisting of seven interconnected poems. It is dense and suggestive, using an unusual blend of vocabularies from a wide variety of discourses; it is authoritative but has no obvious referential basis for that authority, something that puzzled me for a long time. In fact, the sense of authority is the result of an aesthetic force that is not so much accessible as undeniable. It is not the authority of a truth faithfully represented but the authority of a thing in the world forcefully claiming its own absolute – and dynamic – existence. If it represented anything, if any meaning was signified by Her Weasels Wild Returning, then that meaning was obscure and beyond my understanding. There was no doubt, however, that it was doing something aesthetically that was very powerful. That aesthetic force I immediately felt to be significant, although what the significance was also remained obscure. However, there seemed little doubt that it was in some way at odds with ‘standard’ contemporary poetry; and it should be clear that standard here means ‘ordinary’, ‘proper’ and ‘normative’: legitimate. The poet Keston Sutherland has stated that Prynne ‘is the most illegitimate poet alive’;2 this is a statement that, when I first read Her Weasels Wild Returning, I would have understood in terms of the poetry’s sheer distance from the work of the famous, standard poetry I was already somewhat familiar with.

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It will be worth reproducing a few lines of the first poem, ‘The Stony Heart of Her’, in order to get a more distinct sense of these aesthetics: At leisure for losing outward in a glazed toplight bringing milk in, another fire and pragma cape upon them both; they’ll give driven to marching with wild fiery streaks able.3 The most immediate force here is a generalized dynamism; movement out (‘losing outward’), in (‘bringing milk in’) and onwards (‘driven to marching’), but also the elemental energy of fire that dominates these first lines. There is also a play of alliteration and assonance that foregrounds the language itself as a material force that can be felt in the mouth and in the body. This is obscurely connected to the vitality of the poetry; so, too, is the fact that both the dynamism and the material feel of the language are intensified by the undeniable difficulty of understanding what the lines might be supposed to represent. This material and aesthetic prominence in the poetry causes it to stand forwards, to exist in the way that a table or a mountain exist, rather than signalling away from itself towards, or signifying, the existence of something else. This urgent, material existence impinges upon a reader’s existence. Reading this poetry is not just an experience but an encounter. Not only the first time but every time, which is part of its value: while the initial force of the poetry might diminish with increasing familiarity, the material impact, the sensations, will remain. However, reading this poetry for the first time was also an encounter insofar as it was a shock to discover that this kind of work existed and was contemporary. Taking into account the fact that I was an English graduate with a keen interest in contemporary writing, the shock of this discovery should not be underestimated. The question of why this work was such a revelation, of why it had the impact of an encounter with the radically unknown, is not just an aesthetic question but is also an institutional one. The institution of post-war British poetry is largely synonymous with what Robert Sheppard has called ‘The Movement Orthodoxy’,4 an orthodoxy and an institution that is distinctly and deliberately anti-modernist. Its late chief practitioner and guiding spirit, Philip Larkin, wrote that ‘modern’, in the sense of ‘modernism’, ‘denotes a quality of irresponsibility peculiar to this century’5 and that there are ‘two principle themes of modernism, mystification and outrage’.6 These essentially moralistic criticisms are immediately suggestive with regard to the kind of poetry produced by Larkin and the other Movement writers. It would be ‘responsible’ (although exactly what this means might be uncertain, it certainly does not denote anything exciting or radical), it would be easy to understand (the question of difficulty with regard to modernist and innovative poetry is an important one) and it would conform to what might be called ‘common sense’. This provides a very brief sketch of what has been considered ‘legitimate’ poetry in the United Kingdom for the last half-century,

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and it is in relation to this kind of writing that contemporary linguistically innovative poetry is to be considered illegitimate. Robert Sheppard has calculated that, of the poems in the 1956 New Lines anthology, edited by Robert Conquest, which first introduced the Movement poets, half make use of the first person plural.7 This may seem like a trivial point, but it is telling, in that, the first person plural is not only inclusive but is also assimilating. The first person plural may invoke a small group, or it may invoke an entire society; the representational pretensions are what are important. Sheppard calls such pretensions ‘a moralistic embrace’ which ‘effects a rhetorical assimilation of the reader’.8 When a poet makes use of ‘we’, she or he might be claiming to represent the world to readers or the position of a reader in the world; these two forms of representation are inextricably linked insofar as in either case the poet stakes a claim on a reader’s position, declaring a fellowship with her that she may not wish to accept. The poet professes to represent but has no mandate to do so. This has been the normative model for ‘legitimate’ poetry in the United Kingdom for 50 years and more, a normativity produced and reproduced particularly through anthologies. As already stated, Robert Conquest’s New Lines anthology first introduced the Movement poets in 1956, and was followed by A. Alvarez’s The New Poetry in 1962 and, although critical of the norms already being established by the Movement, ‘the book was forced [by constraints of historical period] to contain predominantly Movement work’.9 As Sheppard says, this anthology was to become ‘a canonical schoolroom text for at least a quarter of a century’.10 In 1982 Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s The Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry11 succeeded The New Poetry, which the editors called the ‘last serious’12 British poetry anthology. This was in turn succeeded in 1993 by another anthology called The New Poetry, edited by Michael Hulse, David Kennedy and David Morley. These anthologies became normative partly through their media presence; Sheppard notes that in the marketing of Hulse, Kennedy and Morley’s The New Poetry, the phrase ‘new generation poets’ was shortened to ‘New Gen Poets’ in a campaign that ‘involved nationwide readings and promotions, a special edition of Poetry Review, the organ of the Poetry Society, which administered it, as well as Radio 1 and other broadcast media coverage.’13 However, it is probably their use in schools and Further Education colleges that has had the greatest impact in this area. Anthologies of modernist or innovative poetry, on the other hand, have been published with similar regularity in recent years, but with rather less media coverage. Certainly, none have become canonical in the classroom. Andrew Crozier and Tim Longville’s A Various Art14 was published in 1987, to be followed in 1988 by The New British Poetry.15 Conductors of Chaos, as mentioned earlier, was published in 1996, as was Out of Everywhere: linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America and the UK16 while Richard Caddel and Peter Quartermain’s Other: British and Irish Poetry since 197017 was published in 1999. The most recent addition to the fold was Rod Mengham and John Kinsella’s

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Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems18 in 2004. These anthologies might be thought of as the numerous tips of a vast iceberg in terms of the amount of almost unrecognized work being produced that is accessible through readings, little presses and, more recently, Salt Publishing. There has also in recent years been a large amount of this work made available on the internet, through online magazines, blogs, individual poets’ own websites and those of small presses.19 Despite all this activity, however, this poetry has had little impact on the media and none in schools. The Movement Orthodoxy remains the national orthodoxy in the United Kingdom and innovative poetry remains illegitimate. It is worthy of note that Morrison and Motion, in their anthology The Penguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, make the extraordinary claim that ‘very little . . . seemed to be happening’ in British poetry during the sixties and seventies, a period of great fecundity20 for what is known as the British Poetry Revival, the forerunner of contemporary innovative poetry.21 This effective pretence that a large body of challenging work simply does not exist might be taken as indicative of Movement Orthodoxy attitudes to those who might seek to challenge it. ‘You can be included,’ it seems to say, ‘whoever you are, whatever race, region or gender, you can play your part and have your voice heard – as long as, in all the essentials, you think in the same ways as everybody else.’ This book is concerned with poetry that is not inside that consensus. The poet Cris Cheek says that, in distinction from the Movement Orthodoxy, ‘Re-examinations of syntax went hand in mouth when rewriting the sonic terrains of poetries in these Englishes.’22 The use of the plural for both ‘poetries’ and ‘Englishes’ should be noted here; while for the Movement Orthodoxy a consensus is built out of a range of social groups who are all encouraged to think along the same lines in order to gain representation within the dominant order, innovative poetries strive to not only preserve difference but to extend it.23 There is no sense of the ‘monodirectional control’24 that afflicts Movement Orthodoxy poetry, assimilating all the variousness of its practitioners. Innovative poetries do not all think alike, but they do think, through radical and challenging aesthetics that tend not to accept the dominant consensus. This poetry is not just plural but, in the phrase Tony Lopez uses for the title of an essay on the English modernist Basil Bunting, it is part of an ‘Oppositional Englishness’25 (when it is English; oppositional Britishness, perhaps, to be more inclusive). Lopez also makes explicit reference to the plurality of such oppositional poetry, saying, There is not, I take it, one British or even English poetry that can now be taken over by Geoffrey Hill or Philip Larkin or the pre-eminent representative of any other literary group.26 Indeed, insofar as innovative British poetries are concerned, I take it that they cannot be ‘represented’ at all but can only exist and do whatever it is that they do.

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This assertion brings me to the question of theory. A number of philosophies and critical theories have aided my understanding of this kind of poetry over the years; Adorno is one thinker I have found particularly useful, particularly his insistence on modernism as the negation of tradition and the notion that what is most vital and significant about modern art is its immediate social uselessness (and therefore its social autonomy). However, these kinds of ideas rarely seem to touch the poetry itself; Adorno primarily helps me to understand the institutional status of contemporary poetry and the historical and material reasons for its existence (Peter Bürger has also been important in this respect); but for the most part his work does relatively little to help me to understand what specific individual poems are doing. The thinkers who have most helped me to step into a relatively clear conceptual understanding of the often visceral aesthetic experience of reading contemporary innovative poetry are Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The first, almost epiphanic, insight was the contention in their late collaborative work What is Philosophy? that all art is composed of sensation.27 This entailed an entirely different way of thinking about what happens when I read a poem, one that focused on my own encounter with poems rather than on what suddenly seemed a relatively abstract question, that of meaning. Deleuze and Guattari themselves say in A Thousand Plateaus that they refuse to consider texts in terms of meaning: We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed, and with what bodies without organs its own converge. A book exists only through the outside and on the outside.28 In other words, it becomes a question of what a text does rather than what it means, and what a poem does it does through the encounter with a reader, through a reader’s connections, functions and metamorphoses. Everything, therefore, is ‘through the outside and on the outside’; there is no inside the text (and hence no outside the text either – inside and outside become functionally inoperative as categories). In order to pursue these theoretical or philosophical insights, I have worked through the Deleuzian oeuvre to find a basis for them in his version of the notion of a univocal ontology and in his reading of the concept of the simulacrum. Moving in another direction through his work, and the work he did with Felix Guattari, these first insights have been extended into concepts that have aided me in gaining some intellectual purchase on what innovative poetry does. There is a wealth of the latter across the range of Deleuze’s work, including concepts that have been drawn not from work on literature but on other art forms such as painting and cinema.

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This, then, is a text that is primarily concerned with contemporary British innovative poetry and an attempt to understand what poems do (not an attempt to understand what is ‘in’ them); however, it is also a text that engages extensively with the work of Deleuze and of Deleuze and Guattari, to the extent that it might be considered a Deleuzian text. This latter was never my intention as such, but I recognize that that is largely what has emerged. To open with innovative poetry’s distinction from the Movement Orthodoxy, the first question asked by this book is, simply, what does British innovative poetry do that is different from the Movement Orthodoxy? This question does not imply an answer that will be capable of standing in for the poetry in question; it will not, in other words be representative as such. Any answers gained here will hopefully, rather, allow for further investigations of specific innovative poetries such that they may be understood, both in themselves (which means in their relationship with the reader) and in relation to their social and historical juncture, with greater precision than previously. The question, therefore, demands the tracing of the forces and intensities at work in such poetries in order to determine what might be said about their operations on, or perhaps with, readers. For this to be successful, it will be necessary for there to be some areas of overlap and continuity that allow an understanding of similarities in the ways poems oppose orthodoxies (Movement or otherwise). These may give rise to generalizations useful for discussion but should not mask the ways in which individual oeuvres and, indeed poems, vitally differ. Much of the theoretical work presented here may appear at times to be abstracting from the poetry itself; however, thinking through this work and the concepts it creates will allow me to approach individual poems in such a way that their unique generative materiality and their singular connections with readers are opened out for investigation. In order to even begin to answer this initial question, however, a number of other, supplementary, questions need to be asked and exploratory trajectories need to be traced. An important early trajectory involves tracing the key aspects of the modernist traditions out of which contemporary innovative poetry has developed. To understand what innovative poetry does, it is necessary to gain an understanding of where innovative poetry comes from. This does not, however, mean tracing a lineage of direct influence (such as, for example, the influence of Pound on Zukofsky on Olson on Prynne) that would end up as a survey of the history of poetic innovation. Rather, it is a question of tracing modernism as an institution. An important element of this is to consider the place of the concept of difficulty, which gained a rather bloated prominence in the era of high modernism and remains, it seems, inextricably attached to any kind of poetic innovation. While it would be inaccurate to consider difficulty a central category here, there remains a lot at stake in this concept for contemporary innovative poetries. Therefore, one of the most important supplementary questions I ask is

Introduction

7

that of the relationship between innovation and difficulty, which is to say of the necessity of difficulty and of the possibility of understanding it. However, before entering this particular trajectory, it will be necessary to begin with a consideration of certain theoretical or philosophical ideas and assumptions that will, in part, determine the ways in which the questions broached in this text are negotiated. I am led back to a consideration of Deleuze’s univocal ontology, as set out in his Difference and Repetition, and then to his thinking of the concept of the simulacrum. The first chapter, then, begins with Deleuze’s univocal ontology. I will not, of course, go into detail regarding this here. However, I feel I should say that this ontological position, which refuses to posit any external or higher power, any origin or any end, seems to me to be the only possible ontological account for someone like myself who is not a philosophical idealist, a theist or a mystic. In fact it seems to me to be the only possible ontological account that is consonant with materialism.29 I argue that this univocal ontology, and Deleuze’s related perspective on simulacra (detailed in both Difference and Repetition and in an appendix to The Logic of Sense) makes it necessary to think differently about literature and poetry. Poetry can no longer be thought in terms of a correspondence theory of truth: it does not represent a world of which it is a copy, it is itself a real part of the world (‘true’ because real) with its own forces and effects. Modernist poetry, due to its historical status of autonomy, has always approached this understanding, although modernist poets and writers themselves have tended to continue to think, conceptually, in traditional and idealist terms of representation. Modernist poetry (and poetry developing out of modernist traditions and influences) is revealed as something that exists both for and in itself, something that is real on its own account, possessing real force. This results in difficulty for two reasons: a) because readers continue to expect poetry to be representational and find poetry that confounds these expectations to be outside their frame of reference, and b) because this shift away from representationalist assumptions encourages experimentation, resulting in poetry that is always substantively new and that is therefore even more difficult for the reader to reconcile with what they already know. This latter point is, in fact, part of a wider process in which it is experimentation, encouraged by an artistic and poetic autonomy made inevitable by capitalist development, that actualizes the break with representationalism in the first place. This then leads to further experimentation and a permanently recurrent substantive poetic ‘newness’ that leaves innovative poetry always difficult for the reader to negotiate. Contemporary innovative poetry, a direct heir of modernist poetry, continues to experiment with its own non-representational status. In Chapter Two, I turn to a focus on the poetry itself, looking at the aesthetics involved in reading contemporary innovative poetries. The primary question explored in Chapter Two is what is the relationship (in particular the aesthetic relationship) between the poem and the reader at the level of the individual reading?

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This involves more detailed close reading of specific poems but also requires more abstract theoretical thought with regard to aesthetic questions. This chapter develops the understanding produced in Chapter One: if poetry is non-representational and experimental, then it must be, as Deleuze and Guattari state of art in general in What is Philosophy?, composed of sensation. The traditional assumption that poetry is composed of significations, of concepts or of ideas posits a poetry that is representational, or which at least produces the illusion of being so. Poetry composed of sensation will not represent but will act directly and on its own account on its readers. All poetry is composed of sensation, but contemporary innovative poetry is the most clearly so insofar as it has approached an understanding of its own status as real rather than derived from or representing a separate reality. I argue that readers will gain a more useful understanding of contemporary innovative poetry by approaching it as ‘real’ and as sensational. A reader should also regard her or his own reading as experimental: there is no ideal reading and each reading is different according to context and all that it entails. I develop these ideas through readings of poems by Anna Mendelssohn and J. H. Prynne. The former was chosen for examination partly because of its specific lyric force, apparently lending itself to the quite traditional lyrical reading that I develop first, while simultaneously disrupting and refusing that reading. Prynne’s poem was chosen, at least in part, because of the poet’s vital and even central presence in relation to contemporary innovative poetry. My readings of these poems draw out Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts such as the affect, the percept, deterritorialization and reterritorialization. There is a necessary bipartite split in my text up to this point, between the theoretical and institutional focus of Chapter One and the focus on the poem as an aesthetic object in Chapter Two. This, however, cannot be maintained; both are abstractions to an extent, and if this fact is not addressed then a full understanding of innovative poetry will remain obscured. In Chapter Three therefore I examine the social significance of poetic sensation, once representationalism has been problematized. This move reconnects the poetry with the world of which it is a part, but through a continued close reading of innovative poetic sensation. Denise Riley’s poetry thinks the social/individual relationship by way of experiments with lyric sensation that disrupt the traditional division between the individual subject, the social and the world at large. I extend this argument by consideration of Deleuze and Guattari’s work on language in A Thousand Plateaus, particularly on the order-word. This leads me to consider the concept of the counter-word, which was introduced by the Jewish poet Paul Celan, and thence onto a reading of J. H. Prynne’s ‘Es Lebe der König’. ‘Es Lebe der König’ approaches the holocaust (and therefore has a broad and very grave social-historical dimension) through sensations that have to be encountered by readers, refusing to reduce it to concepts that can be assimilated and thereby domesticated.

Introduction

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The consideration of the relationship between poetry and society continually throws up questions about subjectivity and selfhood and so Chapter Four considers the significance of sensation in poetry with regard to this. I consider the dominant concept of the subject as sovereign and self-contained and then open this up through a reading of an essay by the poet Douglas Oliver on the subject in poetry. This reading of Oliver’s essay revolves around the question of whether or not John Dryden is in some sense ‘present’ in his poem ‘Absalom and Achitophel’; I argue that a poet cannot be ‘present’ in a poem that exists in its own right. However, the sensations with which the poet has composed the poem do exist ‘in’ the text and are actualized, at least partially, by readers. This idea is further examined in a reading of a poem by Oliver himself, ‘The Soul As Crumpled Bedsheet’. Across the book so far, it is clear that innovative poetry has, broadly speaking, a strong tendency to (in Deleuze and Guattari’s term) deterritorialize. Significantly, one area that is particularly strongly deterritorialized is subjectivity itself. This tendency is further demonstrated and analysed through a reading first of the poet John Wilkinson’s concept of ‘metastases’ and then of his poem ‘Facing Port Talbot’. Ultimately this leads to a consideration of the concept of individuality and the vital concept (for the book as a whole), drawn again from A Thousand Plateaus, of the haecceity. I read this concept as an individuation beyond the subject, a revolutionary form of selfhood (when it is human, which it is not necessarily) that is radically situated and yet always mobile, that actively performs a lived deconstruction of the opposition between the individual and the collective. The haecceity is revealed through the deterritorialization of the subject consistently performed by contemporary innovative poems. This is drawn together and clarified further by readings of poems by Geraldine Monk. In Chapter Five I oppose the concept of space to a concept of place, which I read as essentially a static and conservative territorialization. Place is, drawing on an essay by Denis B. Walker, ‘sanctified into images and symbols’ and is where a subject (with brief reference to Heidegger) dwells; space is open, mobile, deterritorialized and provides for the ‘opening out’ of the haecceity. I look at ‘Sarn Helen’ by John Wilkinson and analyse the space that the poem composes by turning primarily to Deleuze’s work on painting, particularly in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, and turning the concepts of vibration and resonance to poetry. The concept of haptic perception is also introduced at this point. Contemporary innovative poetry composes spaces that are primarily smooth, and I examine a quite extreme example of this in J. H. Prynne’s late chapbook Acrylic Tips. Important to this examination, again derived from Deleuze’s work on Francis Bacon, is the concept of ‘forced movement’, by which three or more apparently disparate elements are brought together by an ‘intensive rhythm of force’ to compose a single matter of fact, for example the three opening words of Acrylic Tips, ‘Ever fetch promoted’, which I examine in detail. I then move the chapter towards opening up the question, to lead

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into Chapter Six, of how this notion of space might contribute to ethical or political issues, by looking at the poetry of Maggie O’Sullivan, which introduces the concepts of becoming-animal and becoming-woman. Chapter Six deliberately and directly examines political poetry, looking at work by D. S. Marriott and Riley once again and ending with work by Andrea Brady and Keston Sutherland. I begin with the notion, shared in slightly different forms, by Adorno and Deleuze and Guattari, that opinion, political or otherwise, is at best an epiphenomenon with regard to art, including poetry. The political dimension of contemporary innovative poetry is, rather, to be found in the political force of the composition of sensations that the poetry is. D. S. Marriot’s poem “the ‘secret’ of this form itself” is explored and in the process Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the missing people and minor literature are introduced, while questions of political representation in contemporary poetry are opened up. The relationship between aesthetic force and narrative (the latter having a dampening effect on the former) are also introduced through an essay by Brian Massumi and are then linked into the issue of literary political representation as something that requires some narrative element for a readerly sense of solidarity. The concept of the haecceity is revisited in terms of the impossibility of sustaining it as a form of lived selfhood within society as it is currently constituted, a society that requires the dominance of the bourgeois subject in order to continue to operate as it does. I argue that the haecceity is the unfulfilled promise of happiness (Adorno, Aesthetic Theory) that modern art, including poetry, is. I then turn again to Denise Riley’s poetry, this time focusing on it as innovative feminist poetry. Finally, I examine poems by Andrea Brady and Keston Sutherland. The two poems examined come from the same publication and both are concerned with the war in Iraq and the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib. I find that Brady’s poem utilizes elements of narrative to produce a paradoxical simultaneous solidarity with both Lynndie England and her victims insofar as England is presented as to some extent a victim (both working class and female) of an essentially hostile society, while she is never absolved of responsibility for her actions. Sutherland’s poem, on the other hand, eschews such solidarity in order to present readers with a fractured poem of nearabstraction that nevertheless compels (Western) readers to confront their culture’s responsibility for and complicity in torture and barbarism. Both poems are shown to be sensation-as-thought in related but very different ways, and both are, despite grim concerns, productive of a certain brief and unlivable happiness. All the poetry examined here has been chosen with care: each poem is composed of a distinct recalcitrant materiality, though this is deployed very differently in each of them, and it is this materiality that my text seeks, finally, to understand, both in terms of its difficulty and in terms of the possibilities

Introduction

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that it opens up and actualizes. The poems present a range of strategies and concerns from the spectrum of innovative poetry produced in the United Kingdom in recent decades. Each of them provides a different opportunity for my analyses to move from the conceptual to the viscerally real. However, the spectrum from which they are drawn is one of page-based, textual poetry only; the concepts with which this book aims to open up the encounter with innovative poetry would have to be used differently in the encounter with sound or visual poetries. I have no doubt that the thinking presented here could be adapted to those purposes. That is, however, beyond the scope of this text, which is intended to begin to realize the potential for a new, more precise, material and dynamic understanding of (initially at least) page-based and textual innovative poetry, one that takes the poems on their own terms, in all their social and historical significance, and does not aim to understand them as a conduit to something else, other or beyond themselves. However, this book is only a beginning; it does not claim to be a definitive or final statement. I hope that it will interest both readers of poetry and of Deleuzian thought and that it will provoke interesting responses.

Chapter One

‘Crowned anarchy’ – Deleuze’s univocal concept of being and the simulacrum: non-representational modernism and poetic innovation

It is not necessary to have an ontological theory in order to read or to have some understanding of contemporary innovative poetry, any more than it is necessary to understand how a body floats in order to swim. However, it will be necessary for my purposes in this book to set out as clearly as possible the concepts and the ideas that underlie the poetics of reading that I present here. It is not only my approach to innovative poetry that rests upon such an ontological theory, but also my understanding of the poetry itself and of the sources of its innovation. Modernist developments in poetic possibility constituted, I believe, an implicit paradigm shift in the understanding of what poetry is. This paradigm shift opened up a plane of poetic experimentation on which current contemporary innovative poetries have developed, altering, to different extents, both poetry and thinking about poetry. The shift in thinking about poetry, in particular, has developed very unevenly, with many pre-modernist assumptions surviving even in the thought of many modernist and innovative poets; it has nevertheless occurred and cannot be undone. I intend to show that, in order to understand this shift, it is necessary first to consider the nature of being and the nature of art. These are large and problematic areas but the way has already been cleared by Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition1 and I will be using the ontological concepts presented there as the basis for my considerations here. This chapter will begin, therefore, with a consideration of Deleuzian univocal ontology as it is presented in Difference and Repetition, with a view to unravelling the significance of this ontology for poetry. This will lead me to the simulacrum and to Deleuze’s own understanding and development of that concept. I intend to show that the Deleuzian understanding of the concept of the simulacrum necessitates a radical rethinking of what poetry is and what poetry does. I intend to show, on these bases, that poetry can no longer be thought in terms of a correspondence theory of truth: it does not represent a world

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of which it is a copy. Rather, poetry is itself a real part of the world (‘true’ because real) with its own forces and effects. I then intend to demonstrate that modernist poetry, due to its historical status of autonomy, has always implicitly approached this understanding, although modernist poets and writers themselves have tended to continue to think, conceptually, in traditional Platonic terms of representation. This will require some reference to the work of Theodor Adorno and to that of Peter Bürger, as well as to the critical work of Ezra Pound. Contemporary innovative poetry, a direct heir of high modernist poetry, continues, I will argue, to experiment with its own non-representational status. The first poem in both J. H. Prynne’s 1968 collection Kitchen Poems and his collected Poems, ‘The Numbers’, receives repeated reference in this chapter, both illuminating the ideas presented and being illuminated by them; the poem will guide the chapter to a close as it aids me in opening out the concept of poetic sensation that will be vital to Chapter Two and to the book as a whole.

‘Crowned anarchy’: univocal ontology Deleuze’s concept of univocal being, derived from the work of Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche, is a concept of being with ‘a single voice’,2 a single voice that ‘raises the clamour of being’.3 That is to say that the single voice speaks all of being in its infinite variety; if I say that ‘this telephone is on the table’, not only does ‘is’ mean the same as when I say ‘this CD is on the table,’ it also means the same as when I say ‘the car is in the car park’ or ‘my son is downstairs.’ More than this, however, it also means the same if I say ‘The unicorn is a symbol of Scotland.’ The word ‘is’, which designates being, is the same in every case. This does not mean that unicorns exist as living animals in Africa, for example, or in the North American wilderness. It does mean, however, that unicorns exist, that they have being, as an idea that has effects in the world. No unicorn has ever breathed the air, but they exist as images that are real and as a concept that is real. Everything that is, physically or conceptually, including images, is, in infinite variety. The sense of chaos in the word ‘clamour’ indicates this infinity, a vast uncountable multitude across the universe. This might be counter-intuitive; if being is spoken with a single voice, then the idea that being is also infinitely varied appears unlikely. Not only, however, is it the case, but infinite variety is a necessary consequence of the singularity of ‘the voice’. Deleuze writes, In effect, the essential in univocity is not that Being is said in a single and same sense, but that it is said, in a single and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. Being is the same for all these modalities, but these modalities are not the same . . . Being is said in a single

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Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself.4

Univocity gives rise to difference, ‘it is said of difference itself’ – it is in fact difference itself. This is because, according to a univocal ontology, there is no derivation with regard to being. This is a distinctly non- or even anti- Platonic concept. For example, there is no ‘horseness’, from which a horse is derived; there is no ideal man from which a human male is derived. There are only horses and men – or rather, there may be ‘horseness’, but horses are not derived from it; there may be an ideal man, but human males are not derived from him. Rather it is the other way around – the concept of ‘horseness’ is derived from the vast number, in principle infinite across time, of individual horses. If specific, individual examples are not derived from ideal models, then that specificity and individuality becomes absolute – for both incorporeal ideas and for corporeal existences. While two men may have similarities – shape and function of limbs, organization and function of organs, mode of beingin-the-world and so on – that allow them both to be categorized as men, each is a distinct and absolute individual being in his own right, without reference to any other being (God, perhaps, or a more abstract Platonic Ideal) in whose image he has, in fact, not been created. However, this specific and absolute individuality is not simply ‘a well-defined thing with recognisable limits’5 but is rather ‘a pure movement or variation’.6 Deleuze, therefore, does not write about individuality so much as ‘individuating differences’,7 saying, The essence of univocal being is to include individuating differences, while these differences do not have the same essence and do not change the essence of being – just as white includes various intensities, while remaining essentially the same white.8 Individuality is not a state but is rather a process, a becoming. Within univocal being, difference proliferates endlessly in a permanent process of individuation and impermanence. As there is no derivation there is an absolute process of individuation and difference. Difference is primary and univocity is ‘immediately related to difference’.9 One result of this is ontological equality; as there are no ideal forms from which specific individuals are derived, so there is no ontological hierarchy. This does not mean, of course, that there are no hierarchies as such; in a workplace, there are still gradations of workers and there are still managers and, ultimately, executives, owners, major shareholders, and so on. However, in terms of a univocal ontology, ‘the smallest becomes equivalent to the largest once it is not separated from what it can do.’10 What this means is that individuations cannot be measured ‘according to their degree of proximity or distance from a principle’,11 but are considered in relation to their own

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possibilities, ‘whether a being eventually “leaps over” or transcends its limits in going to the limit of what it can do’,12 and therefore on their own terms. All beings are equal in having to be considered on their own terms within ‘the equality that envelops them’ that is difference and the univocity of being itself: The words ‘everything is equal’ may therefore resound joyfully, on condition that they are said of that which is not equal in this, univocal Being: equal being is immediately present in everything, without mediation or intermediary, even though things reside unequally in this equal being . . . all things are in absolute proximity, and whether they are large or small, inferior or superior, none of them participates more or less in being, nor receives it by analogy. Univocity of being thus also signifies equality of being. Univocal Being is at one and the same time nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy.13 The use of the word ‘anarchy’ here is just and is instructive (quite apart from the source of the phrase in the work of Artaud): the equality of beings is not imposed upon them from ‘above’ or according to their attaining a proximity to a model of which they are the imperfect copies, but it is rather their own and is assumed among themselves. They are not ‘distributed’ in a pre-ordered space but they rather ‘distribute themselves in an open space’.14 Thus equality of being is not provisional on a higher power (which by definition cannot exist in a univocal universe) but is immanent to being. While Deleuzian univocity is developed from the thought of Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche, it is the latter that presents the highest moment in the development of univocal ontology for Deleuze. Nietzsche’s thinking ‘opens up the possibility of difference having its own concept, rather than being maintained under the domination of a concept in general already understood as identical.’15 In other words, Nietzsche overturns the presumption of the primacy of identity which still held with Spinozan univocity; in Nietzsche, difference is primary insofar as ‘To be is to become and things only acquire identity because they become, because they express pure variations.’16 Becoming, which is difference, is being while identity is based on becoming and variation, which, again, are difference. ‘Nietzsche’, says Deleuze, ‘meant nothing more than this by eternal return.’17 What returns, eternally, is difference: ‘Repetition in the eternal return . . . consists in conceiving the same on the basis of the different’,18 because what returns is difference and difference is all that returns. While everything else changes, it is only change itself, difference, that does not change but returns eternally. It would be reasonable at this point to ask what all this has to do with poetry. After all, if all being is spoken with one voice in all its variety, and if all is equal within the univocal being that is becoming, then the poem has no special status; it is in the same way that a table is or a window is. I might just as well be talking about a sheet of glass as about the power of intense language.

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This is true, and to the point. The American poet Charles Olson, a major influence on contemporary British poetry and an heir of Poundian modernism, repeatedly stated that ‘form is never any more than an extension of content’;19 thus formal attributes – meter, rhyme and so on – do not pre-exist the poem as a bottle into which wine is poured, but rather are inseparable from the poem’s content. Olson’s formulation would seem to imply that content comes first and that form grows out of it, is an extension of it, but in fact, and certainly as far as readers are concerned, the two are, certainly for modernist and innovative poetry, coterminous. This means that every poem is different from every other poem and may no longer be grouped satisfactorily according to type – Olson’s Maximus Poems are as different from Creeley’s short ‘I Know a Man’ as they are from Pound’s Cantos. Every poem is an experiment, necessarily; ultimately, as I hope to show, this also means that modernist or innovative poems do not represent, but rather simply exist on their own terms. In order to understand precisely why this is so significant, however, it will be necessary to examine Deleuze’s understanding of the simulacrum.

The simulacrum Plato made a clear and, for Western intellectual, artistic and poetic history, vital distinction between copies and simulacra. This distinction is presented by Deleuze, in the essay ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’20 (which is perhaps his fullest discussion of the concept, although it is also treated at some length in Difference and Repetition) as follows, Copies are secondary possessors. They are well-founded pretenders, guaranteed by resemblance; simulacra are like false pretenders, built upon a dissimilarity, implying an essential perversion or deviation.21 On this distinction, copies are authentic and simulacra are not. The authentic work of art, as a copy, truly represents its original, or model; it is a ‘well-founded’ ‘resemblance’. For the resemblance to be well-founded, it is necessary that it partake of the essence of the original and not simply its appearance: . . . if copies or icons are good images and are well-founded, it is because they are endowed with resemblance. But resemblance should not be understood as an external relation. It goes less from one thing to another than from one thing to an Idea, since it is the Idea which comprehends the relations and proportions constitutive of the internal essence. Being both internal and spiritual, resemblance is the measure of any pretension. The copy truly resembles something only to the degree that it resembles the Idea of that thing.22

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A ‘good copy’ has a relationship not so much with the thing that is being copied but with the Idea of the thing; it partakes of the essence of the thing. A poem need not have a specific original (such as any actual experience of the poet, for example) at all. An authentic resemblance is produced through a poet achieving a resemblance to the essence of a possibly fictional (but recognisable) experience that she or he has in mind rather than to a specific individual model. A lyric poem is an authentic work of art if it can be said to resemble the mind of the poet to the extent that it resembles the poet’s essence – which paradoxically needs no connection to the actual poet herself at all. There might be an assumption (based largely on romantic lyric traditions) that the mind being represented is the poet’s own, but it might just as well be that of an entirely fictional character. What is important is that the poem authentically represents the recognizable workings of ‘mind’ in a given recognizable situation. The importance of recognition should also be noted at this point; it is crucial for this kind of representationalist reading that a poem can be recognized by readers, which is to say it is important that the poem can be assimilated to a reader’s habitual modes of thought. There are two immediately important consequences for the relationship between a poem and its original. The first is that this is a vertical, hierarchical and ultimately authoritarian relationship through which the essence of an original is passed down into a poem. The second is that, as already noted, the relationship is governed by a logic of sameness. A copy, although ‘secondary’ in the hierarchical relationship with the original, is in some sense ‘the same as’ that original by way of the fact that it partakes of its essence. This in turn means that a poem is a means of communication – between, for example, the mind of a poet and the mind of a reader, such that the poem itself is rendered as a pure medium for the transmission of one to the other. A poem does not, therefore, exist in its own right or on its own terms. This all takes place in an equivocal universe, of course – being is not said of a poem in the same way that it is said of its ‘original’; a poem’s existence, in these terms, is derivative and it is ultimately ‘less real’ than a model that it copies and from which it borrows. However, Deleuze develops the concept of the simulacrum against equivocity, against Platonism and against philosophical idealism. He presents the Platonist argument as follows, Consider now the other species of images, namely, the simulacra. That to which they pretend (the object, the quality, etc.), they pretend to underhandedly, under cover of an aggression, an insinuation, a subversion, “against the father,” and without passing through the Idea. Theirs is an unfounded pretension, concealing a dissimilarity which is an internal imbalance.23 For the Platonist the simulacrum is a source of untruth – it does not partake of the essence of the thing that it copies because it occurs ‘without passing through

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the Idea’. This means that it is fundamentally dissimilar to the original, which is, after all, the Idea itself. It may have a surface resemblance to a thing, but this is in fact the wellspring of the falsity that the simulacrum is – the resemblance is an illusion because the simulacrum does not draw on the essence of the original, its ideal form. It is not at the bottom of a hierarchy that runs downwards from the original to the copy, it is outside that hierarchy altogether, expelled from the order of resemblance because it does not conform to a logic of similarity. Instead, it is marked with an essential and irreducible difference. However, it is also, by the same token, potentially anti-authoritarian, even anarchistic, a factor marked in Deleuze’s account by the phrase “against the father”, taking the father as a figure (even the figure in a patriarchal world) of authority. This essential difference from any ‘original’ is what makes the concept of the simulacrum so useful for developing a univocal understanding of poetry. If a poem is taken to be a simulacrum rather than a copy (which it ultimately must be, in a univocal universe), then it will no longer be taken to represent an original, which means that it is no longer expected to act simply as a conduit for the essence of an original. Poems exist in their own right; ‘being’ is said of a poem in the same way as it is said of everything else. This completely alters poetry’s relation to the ‘truth’; a poem is not true because it draws on the essence of some higher order of reality external to it and therefore accurately represents that reality (although it may make reference to facts that are true). Rather, a poem partakes of truth in the same way that facts to which it might refer do so: it is in truth because it is, it is something that is real in itself. A poem is not a true or false interpretation of any external facts, it is itself a fact that is productive of its own effects. A poem does not convey the truth; what is true about a poem is that it exists and that it does something (or a number of things) when it comes into conjunction with a reader. A poem, therefore, does not, ultimately mean. A question like ‘What does this poem mean?’ is a wrong question, or a bad question. Words, phrases, sentences and so on, within a poem, might mean but what they, taken together, ultimately compose is not a final or central meaning, although a poem might have encoded within it a particularly vital or centrally important reference. Such a reference will give the illusion of meaning insofar as the poem was composed under the assumption that it should mean and is read under the assumption that it should mean. However, meaning, at least in this sense, suggests equivocity; poetic meaning is a poem’s self-erasure in favour of a higher order of being that the meaning is. The poem only exists, under equivocal assumptions of meaning, to communicate meaning, and therefore it only has a derived and secondary being. Good questions, then, instead of questions of meaning, might include ‘What does this poem do?’ or ‘How does this poem become?’ Both of these questions might suggest the individuating process of the eternal return of difference, whereas the question of meaning suggests both a logic of sameness

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(‘This poem is essentially the same as the higher order of being that it means, from which it is derived’ ) and of status (‘Such meaning, as a higher order of Ideal being, is eternal and therefore static and unchanging’ ). What is true about a poem as a simulacrum in a univocal universe, then, is not what it (ultimately) means but what it does. It obviously becomes important, therefore, for a critic to understand the latter rather than the former, to encounter the poem on its own terms rather than trying to look through it to something else that is apparently being represented. On the work of art as a simulacrum, Deleuze states the following: Aesthetics suffers from a wrenching duality. On one hand, it designates the theory of sensibility as the form of possible experience; on the other hand, it designates the theory of art as the reflection of real experience. For these two meanings to be tied together, the conditions of experience in general must become conditions of real experience; in this case, the work of art would really appear as experimentation.24 Where Deleuze says that ‘the conditions of experience in general must become conditions of real experience’, this indicates that in order for aesthetics to be coherent, it is necessary for a theory of art to take into account the fact that art is itself aesthetic – which means that it exists as a real experience and is not, in fact, simply the reflection or representation of ‘real’ experience. Art is a real experience that proceeds by way of sensibility, the body and sensation; it is not a representation of a real experience that lies elsewhere but which a work of art is, by way of a partaking of its essence, in some sense ‘the same as’. A work of art, in this case the poem, is divergent in relation to any ‘original’. Divergence and simulacra are inseparable: a simulacrum is divergent in relation to its ‘original’ and divergence is produced by a simulacrum. Therefore a lyric poem will diverge from the mind, the feelings, the desires and the ideas, of its poet; it does not simply represent her mind, let alone the Idea of mind in general. It is doing something else. In the last passage from Deleuze quoted earlier, the work of art as a simulacrum ‘would really appear as experimentation’, and poetry necessarily experiments, producing rather than communicating. This highlights an ambiguity that crosses Olson’s statement, quoted earlier, that ‘form is never any more than an extension of content’. This implies that form is a means to aid an end, the communication of content, although if form (sonnet, sestina and so on) does not come first then, as I have already said, form and content become coterminous. Their opposition is thoroughly deconstructed the instant their poetic order is overturned. Content, for modernist or innovative poems, is form – and vice versa. As such, every poem is different, it is a simulacrum, it may refer but does not represent: each poem is a return of difference. Therefore, each poem is an experiment. ‘Experiment’ is not, of course, being used here in the scientific sense of testing a hypothesis but rather in the sense of doing something new in order to see what will happen.

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Artistic experimentation is a matter of pragmatics. The particular uses of language that appear in a poem have not appeared (in those precise combinations) before and therefore they are productive of something new. They make something happen, in conjunction with a reader, that has not happened before, even though none of the words, or even specific phrases, are exactly, themselves, ‘original’. In the scientific sense of the word, experiment is a product of thought and is the testing of the accuracy of that thought. In the artistic sense of the word, experiment is the thought itself, it is productive rather than the product. The product of artistic thought might be said to be a new world, both in terms of a new world of the imagination and in terms of a world (the real world of which the poem is an element) that has been altered (it has become, individuated), however slightly. Of course, some poems embrace this fact and push it to the edges of its own possibility, while other poems seek to deny it and work to reduce experimentation to a minimum. However, not only is each poem an experiment but so, too, is each reading. If there is no original that a poem is a copy of, so it is also true that there are no ideal poems standing above and beyond individual readings. This is always the case, even with the most conventional sonnet, but it is intensified when poems, eschewing the form/content split, stand forth in their irreducible non-derived existence. This does not mean that all readings are equal – there are misreadings, after all, and some readings are inevitably richer than others. It does mean, though, that each reading is part of a process of individuation, both for poems and for readers; each reading is different and is a return of difference. This, of course, has consequences for this book; no reading presented here can be definitive. Each reading of each poem is a specific and individuating reading that can, I hope, be understood by readers on the basis of a more or less shared historical juncture, of shared or recognized social and cultural assumptions and understandings and so on. However, within those terms each reading is different; each of my readings is not only different from those of other readers, but each reading of the same poem that I produce, at different times, is different. Therefore the readings presented here are not definitive; none are exemplary, exactly, though each is an example. They do not instruct readers of this book, certainly not as to the meanings of the poems – I reject entirely the role of priest-critic. Rather, I hope that each reading will provoke thought and response, both with regard to the critical, theoretical and philosophical ideas presented here and, of course, with regard to the poems themselves. Bearing this in mind, and in order to test some of these thoughts, I will turn now to a poem, specifically to J. H. Prynne’s ‘The Numbers’.25 The poem begins with these ten lines: The whole thing it is, the difficult matter: to shrink the confines

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down. To signals, so that I come back to this, we are small / in the rain, open or without it, the light in delight, as with pleasure amongst not merely the word, one amongst them; but the skin over the points, of the bone.26 This early poem by Prynne takes an immediately recalcitrant stance in relation to its readers. There is little certainty of reference and, while there are selfreferential personal pronouns (singular and plural, I and we) that work with a broad sense of this poem as a lyric, they are quite slight and do not help me to grasp what ‘it’ is, or what ‘this’ is. There is, in fact, a general refusal to simply ‘make sense’: there is pleasure not only, it seems, ‘amongst the word’ (‘amongst’ suggests a plurality, while ‘the word’ is singular), which is ‘one amongst them’ (who, or what?), but also among ‘the / skin over the points, of the bone’. The source of the pleasure is not located, the type of pleasure is unspecified, while how it is possible to be among a single word or among, for that matter, a single skin, is left somewhat mysterious. While the poem makes use of entirely accessible references, it does not, it seems immediately clear, represent anything. There are meanings here, or references, but there is no meaning, which is to say overall representation; there is no higher order before which the poem effaces itself. It could perhaps be argued that the poem is a lyric that represents the workings of a disordered consciousness, a schizophrenic or a psychotic mind; I would merely argue that there is no evidence for that other than the disorder that is evident in the poem itself – or, rather, the disorder that is evident to a reader who assumes that a poem must be representational. In a univocal universe, however, a poem must not be representational; a poem may, working upon ontologically equivocal assumptions, aim to present an illusion of representation, it may aim to efface its own being, but it is all the same. Here, however, is a poem that is unequivocally, univocally, that confronts readers in a recalcitrant refusal to pretend to represent, to efface itself, to cloak itself in the idea of its own secondary or derived being. It is a simulacrum. I should be absolutely clear about one or two points at this stage. First, I am in no way claiming that Prynne is a Deleuzian or that this is a Deleuzian poem. Historically, these are not real options anyway and there is no evidence for the former while the latter would be irrelevant even if it were true. I am merely taking an initial step towards the beginning of a Deleuzian understanding of a poem, of this poem, and of contemporary poetry more generally, from a reader’s perspective (mine). The claim I am making is that this poem displays a recalcitrance with regard to reading that reveals it as being in its own right, giving a

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sense of its existence in its own right as a simulacrum, neither ‘model’ nor ‘copy’ of anything in an ontologically univocal universe.

Difficulty ‘The Numbers’ begins with the line ‘The whole thing it is, the difficult’, a line that could be taken almost as a statement of intent and, ultimately, as a reference to Prynne’s own entire oeuvre. I have argued, in effect, that it is in fact the poem’s difficulty, what I have called its recalcitrance, that indicates its own being as equal to all other beings by refusing self-effacement or any idea of either derivation or representation. A response, apparently Prynne’s own, to critical thinking about his poetry cites this line in a note to the 1982 collected Poems: Much early critical response to J. H. Prynne’s work mistakenly took its cue from the first line printed in this book: ‘The whole thing it is, the difficult’, failing to establish that difficulty as being the ardent ‘matter’ and the accompanying breadth of imaginative and political reference . . . . Although the language is expensive of attention and persistence it also counts its own cost and is answerable to the changing directions of enquiry and argument igniting it.27 D. S. Marriott comments that ‘this “note” (presumably written by the author) places the politics of the poetry firmly on the side of a worthwhile difficulty in whose breadth of reference may be found a commitment to the principles of knowledge and of truth’.28 However, Prynne’s note also states that a critical focus on the first line is a mistake, ‘failing to establish that difficulty as being the ardent “matter”’. Difficulty is not denied but ‘matter’ is insisted upon. A rush to characterize this poetry as difficult has neglected the matter in hand; such neglect is a mistake, a failure. When I read ‘difficult / matter’, I take ‘matter’ to mean a situation under consideration, one that involves an attempt to ‘shrink the confines / down’. However, Prynne’s note, in which he characterizes the matter as ‘ardent’, might suggest another reading that pays less attention to syntactic insistencies. ‘Ardent’ suggests that the matter has its own force, its own enthusiasms or passions upon which it might want to insist. If ‘matter’ is read in the sense of ‘material’ then we are presented with the sense of a recalcitrant thing that exists, materially, in its own right, something in the world that offers resistance to expectations of easy co-optation by a reader. Difficulty is thereby revealed in a new light; it is not simply a difficulty of understanding. This is not a problem that may be solved by research and an application of relevant resources that would reveal what the poem represents. Rather, the poem’s difficulty is an active refusal, not so much a turning away as a direct challenge to readers to meet the poem on its own terms.

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This kind of active difficulty through which a poem insists on its own being is characteristic of the British Poetry Revival and of contemporary innovative poetry, marking a generalising difference from the contemporary orthodoxies that are in a direct line of descent from the Movement. However, this active difficulty also places contemporary innovative poetry as descended from earlier modernist and avant-garde poetic practices; a brief sketch of an institutional and historical perspective on modernism and the historical avant-garde will be a useful basis for the more detailed and closely read investigations that will follow.

Modernist autonomy and professionalization Ezra Pound, in his ABC of Reading, states that ‘Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportioned to their ability AS WRITERS. This is their main use.’29 The ‘definite social function’ that writers, as writers, have is defined as keeping ‘the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.’30 However, many critics of modernist writing, including Pound’s work, would argue that modernism and the avantgarde have worked to the detriment of this social function. Dell Floyd, in a ‘Review of Provença’, published in the Chicago Evening Post in 1911, wrote, People are saying that one of the Neo-Impressionist pictures was secured by tying a paint brush to a donkey’s tail and backing the animal up to the canvas. A jocose story like that might be invented to explain one of Mr. Pound’s poems. 31 Floyd’s is a fine example of the kind of visceral negative response provoked by modernist difficulty in those who were (and are) resistant to its operations. Juxtaposed with the quotation from ABC of Reading, Floyd’s response also indicates a difficulty with Pound’s sense that he was part of a great tradition – many fellow admirers of that tradition perceived his work as essentially unreadable nonsense. This sense of tradition did not, on other hand, mean that Pound was unaware that his work was in some sense ‘new’. In a short essay called ‘The Tradition’, originally published in the journal Poetry in 1913, Pound states that ‘The tradition is a beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us’. 32 This statement clearly indicates that Pound saw modern poetry as a kind of freedom, a freedom from a tradition that might be perceived to bind it to a set of aesthetic and prosodic dogmas but which is in fact preserved by modernism’s formal liberties. However, if modernist poetry is not to be ‘fettered’ by tradition then it must move away from the forms of which tradition is made up. It cannot conform to the dogmas of traditional models. This might suggest a break, after which the beauty of tradition could not simply be preserved. It is, in fact, my argument

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that modernist poetic experimentation did indeed constitute a break with tradition, though the nature of that break seems not to have always been clear in the minds of its producers, practitioners and theorists. The social function of poetry and of poets is not, as a result, to keep language ‘clear’, unless by this is meant, possibly, the clarification of the nature of language (which is certainly not only, or in any simple way, as Pound would have it, to be ‘the main means of human communication’33); rather, any such function is rather more complex and uncertain, and must be considered in the light, once again, of just what a poem, on its own terms, is doing. Poetry cannot be considered as a whole, all of a piece and definable monolithically. The recognition of this fact is to a large extent the result of modernist experimentation and, by extension, difficulty. On the first page of his Aesthetic Theory, Theodor Adorno states that ‘nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore . . . not even its right to exist’.34 This uncertainty regarding the status and worth of art (which, it should be noted, is an uncertainty regarding the status of contemporary art and contemporary poetry – few people question the right of, say, Shakespeare’s Sonnets to exist) is a product first of all of autonomy, a concept fraught with a various and problematic range of understanding. I will therefore try to clarify just what I mean by it. Peter Bürger, in his Theory of the Avant-Garde draws on Adorno to characterize autonomy as the detachment of art ‘from the praxis of life’,35 which for me entails a detachment from social, political and religious demands. This autonomy is an institutional fact, by which I mean that poetry is a specialized sphere of production. What I definitely do not mean is that poetry has any kind of autonomy from commodification or the market; poetry and art are not culturally autonomous in that sense, and never have been. In fact artistic autonomy is precisely a result of the development of its position within a capitalist society and is not, in itself, a resistance to it – and it never has been. Where poetry might be seen to be in some sense resistant to capitalist norms is on the level of a poem’s experimentation, its composition, which has been allowed or encouraged by the institutionally autonomous status of poetry as a whole. Resistance is not to be found in the institutionally autonomous status itself. No poetry is necessarily tied to social or political demands. Individual poems may attempt to close the gap that has opened up between literature and social use, and individual poems may even succeed up to a point, but this will not affect the institutional status of literature and art as such: as Adorno says, ‘art’s autonomy remains irrevocable. All efforts to restore art by giving it a social function – of which art itself is uncertain and by which it expresses its own uncertainty – are doomed’.36 Attempts made by the State to ‘restore’ art and literature by forcing upon it a social function (attempts associated particularly with totalitarian states, although authoritarian ‘liberal’ democracies are just as capable of this) are acts of violence.

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Even so, it is possible for poetry to take a social role upon itself (as opposed to being pushed into that role by the State). It is even possible for such writing to become the dominant mode of poetry in a national context, especially in one that is, socially and politically, broadly conservative. An example would be the anti-modernist Movement and its descendent Orthodoxy, which attempts to represent and inculcate conservative moral ideas, or more recently conservative-liberal moral ideas37 in a British context. However, this dominance still does not have any real effect on the institutional status of poetry as such or in principle; in the United Kingdom, while the Movement Orthodoxy has been dominant, the ‘difficult’ poetry of the British Poetry Revival in the 1960s and 1970s thrived, and innovative poetry has more recently also been in a very healthy condition. This would not be possible if poetry were not a specialized area of both experience and production and were, instead, tied in to the social utility (or rather, perhaps, morality: ‘responsibility’ in the passage from Larkin’s All What Jazz? quoted in the ‘Introduction’) that the Movement Orthodoxy would like to claim for itself. It should not be inferred that institutional autonomy represents the ‘liberation’ of poetry in any sense that would imply that it is the highest point of the development of the poetic in human society. It is simply the case that this is the status of poetry in a capitalist society. Institutional autonomy, however, does mean liberation from social constraints that limit formal development; poetry becomes free for experimentation. This freedom is connected to a professionalization of poetry that had been developing as an element of the institution of poetry along with the evolution of its autonomous status. This development is obvious enough: as poetry evolves into a specialized sphere of experience and production, there will necessarily also arise a specialized group of producers. In this respect, poets are a group of bourgeois professionals (however lacking a salary), just like teachers or doctors. However, the professionalization of poetry in its turn also encourages experimentation insofar as it implies specialist concerns with questions of poetic technique – at the same time as possibilities for experimentation are opened up by the development of autonomy. The simultaneous development of these factors (distinct, even though they are drawn from the same source, and for all that they are difficult to separate) made poetic experimentation all but inevitable.38 Pound mounted a defence of the professional concern with technique in his essay, first published in The New Age on 7 December 1911, ‘I gather the Limbs of Osiris’. Pound first considers what was in his opinion a general notion that poets in fact ought to be ignorant of technique, which might be thought of as the last gasp of an essentially pre-bourgeois, ‘amateur’ and ‘gentlemanly’ attitude: No great composer has, as far as I know, boasted an ignorance of musical tradition or thought himself less a musician because he could play Mozart

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Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze correctly. Yet it is not uncommon to hear ‘poets’ speak of ‘technique’ as if it were a thing antipathetic to ‘poetry’.39

As an example of this, in a precise defence of gentlemanly amateurism, the Reverend Cyril Allington, the headmaster of Eton College, wrote in 1923: The days of the amateur are passing. No one is nowadays thought worthy to take part in any game unless he is prepared to devote much of a lifetime to its practice, and the people love to have it so. No doubt there is much to be said for excellence in any pursuit; yet, after all, the amateur made no claim except that he loved that which he pursued, and the claim has surely some validity. . . . We live in days when the ordinary individual feels it increasingly impossible to resist the tyranny of the expert.40 This defence of the amateur in poetry is in fact a defence of a certain kind of privilege, whereby a gentleman was able to devote some amount of time to the arts because of a lack of necessity for paid employment, which was being eroded by the bourgeois epoch (which was replacing this privilege with new ones, of course). It is couched in the language of a defence of clarity and simplicity but is also a protest against the ‘tyranny’ of professionalism, of expertise and of a concern with technique with which the gentleman-amateur could not keep up. Pound, on the other hand, saw a concern with technique as both the ‘protection of the public’ insofar as ‘technique is the only gauge and test of a man’s lasting sincerity’,41 and also as a ‘protection to the artist’: If technique is thus the protection of the public, the sign manual by which it distinguishes between the serious artist and the disagreeable young person expressing its haedinus egotism, it is no less a protection to the artist himself during the most crucial period of his development. I speak now of technique seriously studied, of a searching into cause and effects, in the purposes of sound and rhythm as such, not – not by any means – of a conscientious and clever imitation of the master of the moment, of the poet in vogue.42 Poetry is presented here as a matter of study and of research, in such a way that it appears similar in these respects to science, also once the primary preserve of the gentlemanly amateur and also professionalized. Pound, however, also presents the attempt to gain professional status as a struggle recognizable to European poets of antiquity, rhetorically reaching beyond the modern period and modern professionalism for validation, drawing on much older notions of the ‘master’ and the ‘initiate’: But the man who has some standard reasonably high – consider, says Longinus, in what mood Diogenes or Sophocles would have listened to your effusion – does, while he is striving to bring his work within reach of his own

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conception of it, get rid of the first froth of verse, which is in nearly every case quite like the first verse-froth of everyone else. He emerges decently clean after some reasonable purgation, not nearly a master, but licensed, an initiate, with some chance of conserving his will to speak and of seeing it mature and strengthen with the strengthening and ripening of the mind itself until, by the favour of the gods, he come upon some lasting excellence.43 This is clearly an instance of Pound reaching out to connect with the tradition that he values so highly, but there is no mistaking the fact that it is indeed professionalism in a modern sense that he is invoking. It is particularly worth remarking on his concern that the work of the poet be in some sense new, not ‘quite like the first verse-froth of everyone else’. This concern that poetry is not only technically proficient (the first concern of the professional) but that it is different, marks Pound’s aesthetic out as something other than the simple neoclassicism that the reference to Longinus might suggest. It is a modern concern. The professional, specialist interest in poetic practice and the modernist development of experimentation that this has encouraged (and, thereby, the reproduction of difference and the foregrounding of individuating processes) has meant that for many readers modernist poetry is difficult. To a large extent, this difficulty has about it a sense of historical inevitability (something reflected, I think, in Allington’s lament). The difference of modernist poetry from what had gone before was not only made possible by institutional autonomy and the professionalization of poetry; it was inescapable once these developments had matured and experimentation became widespread. The difficulty experienced by many readers was an unavoidable result of capitalist development that entailed a break with the very traditions that some modernists, like Pound and Eliot, cherished.

The break with tradition For Adorno, the break with tradition is, first of all, an inevitable instance of a broader social rupture. The literary and artistic break is manifested in terms of the ‘new’, and it is the category of the new that links, first, the individual work of art with society and, more broadly, the institution of art in general with capitalism in general. The attitude of contemporary art toward tradition, usually reviled as a loss of tradition, is predicated on the inner transformation of the category of tradition itself. In an essentially nontraditional society, aesthetic tradition a priori is dubious. The authority of the new is that of the historically inevitable.44 The new, in Adorno’s account of it as a specific element of modernist art, is directly tied in to the commodity form and to capitalism. ‘The abstraction of

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the new,’ he says, ‘is bound up with the commodity character of art.’45 The new is a ‘bourgeois principle’ in general;46 bourgeois society is, for Adorno, a ‘nontraditional society’ in its essence and as a result of this a rupture with tradition and the valorization of the new in modernist art becomes inevitable insofar as art is part of capitalist society. As this break is not a break with specific ways of producing art but is with tradition, it is truly radical and of historical importance – while simultaneously being no more than an inevitable extension of bourgeois imperatives. ‘It does not, however,’ Adorno says, ‘negate previous artistic practices, as styles have done throughout the ages, but rather tradition itself; to this extent it simply ratifies the bourgeois principle in art.’47 It is worth noting that modernism, on this view, is in essence a negative phenomenon. It negates tradition as such, first and foremost, and has no role or status of its own; this is in itself an element of its autonomous status. Its status as autonomous is to have no status. It is also, however, a revolutionary situation, analogous to the wider, ongoing and permanently revolutionary situation of capitalism itself, as understood by Marx and Engels: The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. . . . Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. . . . All that is solid melts into air . . .48 This constant revolutionizing of production and disturbance of social conditions, when taken up in the autonomous sphere of literature, results in a constant drive for novelty, for the new: Nouveauté is aesthetically the result of historical development, the trademark of consumer goods appropriated by art by means of which artworks distinguish themselves from the ever-same inventory in obedience to the need for the exploitation of capital, which, if it does not expand, if it does not – in its own language – offer something new, is eclipsed. The new is the aesthetic seal of expanded production, with its promise of undiminished plenitude.49 The break with tradition is linked to a drive for novelty that is essential to capitalism and to autonomous institutions within capitalist society: if poetry does not ‘offer something new’ it is ‘eclipsed’. There are, however, important issues around the nature of the new that Adorno does not address adequately. To take the position of contemporary poetry as an example: the Movement Orthodoxy continues to hold sway in the United Kingdom as the dominant mode of poetry and has done since its appearance in the 1950s; however, this poetry offers little new but rather variations on consistent themes, both in terms

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of form and in terms of content. Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry, for example, retains an essential similarity to Larkin’s in terms of its traditional form (although it is not so reliant on iambic pentameter) and shares with it a certain moralism (even if it has a somewhat different focus). However, Movement Orthodox poetry does periodically offer itself once again with a veneer of the new that is little more than the repackaging of younger poets for the market. Hulse, Kennedy and Morley’s The New Poetry was, according to Robert Sheppard (and as referred to in my ‘Introduction’), marketed to appeal directly to this demand for novelty; but Sheppard also suggests that it is an anthology that demonstrates ‘the persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy.’50 Certainly, while the blurb on the back of the book refers to ‘a radical new poetic, rethinking the techniques, languages and processes of poetry’ and the ‘Introduction’ talks of ‘poetry that is fresh in its attitudes, risk-taking in its address, and plural in its forms and voices’,51 there is also reference to ‘accessibility, democracy and responsiveness’.52 These latter three adjectives are entirely applicable to the poetics of the Movement. They are also sentiments that are very much in conformity with liberal capitalist ideology and that echo the moralism of Larkin’s antimodernist claim to responsibility. Indeed, the poetry contained in this anthology is also described as ‘moral, representational or empirical’,53 and then ‘sceptical’,54 terms that could easily refer to the original Movement poets and at least some of which were in fact used of them in the 1950s.55 The New Generation poets of Hulse, Kennedy and Morley’s anthology were in fact always already in conformity with what already existed. Their ‘newness’ was almost entirely a marketing ploy and, therefore, was superficial at best. They offered no challenge whatsoever to the dominant mode of British poetry but were in fact its latest manifestation. There is one sense in which the New Generation poets’ claim to be new is entirely accurate and truthful: the eternal return of difference in a univocal universe. No New Generation poem is exactly the same as any other poem, the work of no New Generation poet is the same as the work of any other poet, either past or contemporary. Every poem partakes of the eternal and unchanging process of change and individuation. However, while the difference and individuation that necessarily animates every poem in Hulse, Kennedy and Morley’s anthology cannot and should not, by any means, be gainsaid, poetry that is ‘empirical’ and ‘representational’ (let alone ‘moral’) is also poetry that will work to screen or erase its individuation and difference. This is, of course, a complex situation: I am positing a poetry that is conservative in the sense that it seeks to minimize difference and change (even if, like the work of Carol Ann Duffy for example, it seeks a place for women and for lesbians within the status quo), a poetry whose conservatism is inscribed in the movements of its form and structure, but which must necessarily be different enough from other poetry to satisfy the demands of the market for novelty. More than this, the extent of its difference and novelty may be exaggerated in order to market it successfully. Ultimately, though, the force of Movement Orthodox poetry lies in

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its recognizability, its adherence to the representational illusion, its stabilizing influence. This brings me to Bürger’s forceful objection to Adorno: the new is superficial; therefore it cannot be the locus of any resistance to capitalism that poetry or art may be credited with: But it must be borne in mind that in the commodity society, the category of the new is not a substantive but merely an apparent one. For far from referring to the nature of the commodities, it is their artificially imposed appearance that is involved here. (What is new about commodities is their packaging). If art adapts to this most superficial element in the commodity society, it is difficult to see how it is through such adaptation that it can resist it. The resistance that Adorno believes he discovers in art and that is compelled to take on ever new forms can hardly be found there.56 Resistance to capitalism and to the commodity society, then, is not to be found in modernism, according to Bürger, because the modernist concern with the new remains in thrall to the commodity society. However, Bürger’s account does not consider the force and the affects of individual works. This is a founding and operating principle of his method: ‘it is not in and of themselves that works of art have their effect but rather that this effect is decisively determined by the institution within which the works function’.57 He is, of course, correct to an extent. However, individual modernist and innovative poems do affect readers in very specific and individual ways; the importance of the institutional perspective does not eradicate poetic difference. In the contemporary situation, which Bürger correctly characterizes as one in which ‘the historical succession of techniques and styles has been transformed into a simultaneity of the radically disparate’,58 this difference is of great importance – and through it there is a necessary return to the category of the new. A poem may be perceived as nothing but appearance. The appearance of a television set is a different proposition than the appearance of a poem; the form of the former does not generally have any effect on its function and is merely a means of differentiating it from other televisions in order to sell it. If a poem, on the other hand, is all appearance – if it is simply what it appears – then the ‘appearance’ is not added on to help it to sell. Form is function and is force, intensity and praxis in its own right – a poem is entirely its difference from other poems, even when the influence of other poems is clear. While the newness of the poem is (like the simple commodity – a television) entirely appearance, that appearance is entirely substantive. The modernist poem, and by extension its innovative descendant, is always substantively new. This will, of course, lead to readerly difficulties; if every poem is substantively new, then the reader’s resources of habit, expectation, or experiences will be of limited

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use in approaching poetry. Every modernist or innovative poem will be a fresh encounter.59 Newness, of course, not only is but has always been a vital element of the work of art; this is entirely consonant with Eliot’s notion of ‘historical sense’, something a writer must have in order to successfully join the tradition, which is profoundly un-historical: (T)he historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and the temporal together, is what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. 60 Eliot is quite right: if the newness of the work of art is substantive, rather than merely a fashionable veneer, then it will not date and will remain new, remain contemporary. ‘Literature’, said Pound famously, ‘is news that STAYS news.’61 However, Eliot is not paying sufficient attention to the particular substantive newness of the modernist poem. He is not recognizing the historical break that work like his own is; to a large extent, he cannot recognize this as it immediately contradicts his own sense of tradition as being without breaks, as something that evolves to accommodate the new work. There is no doubt that the break occurred; however, there is also no doubt that the break was not, simply, a rejection of tradition. It is necessary, rather, to narrow the focus: which tradition, or which element of tradition was broken with in the production of modernist poetry? The importance of this question should not be underestimated. It is an institutional question the answer to which is vital both for the understanding of modernist and innovative poetries in terms of their individual affects in relation to readers and for a broader understanding of the difficulty that often characterizes or blocks such an encounter.

The modernist break with representation The modernist break was with traditional assumptions about what poetry is and what poetry does. It was not with tradition per se but with the tradition of representational poetry. Poets began to produce poetry that was not, first and foremost, concerned with the faithful rendering of an image of something else. The development of this break was uneven and was never, indeed could never

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be, absolute. This is a result of artistic autonomy itself: autonomy makes it possible to do anything with poetry that can be done within the bounds prescribed by physical reality and technological development. Therefore the illusion of representation, while not the raison d’etre of poetry in general, remains a possibility for poets to make use of if they will. Both the fact of the unevenness of the development of the break with representation and some of the reasons for that unevenness might be better understood by looking briefly at a specific historical group. Imagism displays some of the confusions that this break engendered and also occupies a historically vital place in the development of Anglo-American modernist poetry. Pound famously coined the word ‘Imagism’, and also formulated many of Imagism’s precepts. In the short essay ‘Affirmations – As for Imagism’, he wrote, The image can be of two sorts. It can arise in the mind. It is then ‘subjective’. External causes play upon the mind, perhaps; if so, they are drawn into the mind, fused, transmitted, and emerge in an Image unlike themselves. Secondly, the Image can be objective. Emotion seizing up some external scene or action carries it intact to the mind; and that vortex purges it of all save the essential or dominant or dramatic qualities, and it emerges like the external original. In either case the Image is more than an idea. It is a vortex or cluster of fused ideas and is endowed with energy. If it does not fulfil these specifications, it is not what I mean by an Image.62 The image here, whether it is ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’, is something that comes from the mind. The subjective image is born there, though prompted into existence by something external. In the objective image, something external is purged there, and purified of all extraneous elements so that something essential and ‘like the external original’ emerges. There is a sense in this formulation that the poem is representative of an ideal image of the mind, whether subjective or objective. The image is a ‘vortex’ that occurs in the mind and is then represented on the page by the poem. The difficulty here, though, is that the image, arising in the mind, ‘emerges’ from the mind’s purging vortex. If the image, subjective or objective, ‘emerges’ from the mind then it is not contained there. This is not simply a question of semantics; what is at stake here is a sense not only of what the image is but also of what poetry itself is. In this case, the image either is, or is a vital element of, the poem. It is not an ideal mental construct or the purified essence of some other thing, it has a singular existence of its own – as poetry. Another of the founders of Imagism, F. S. Flint, believed that Imagism was the ‘Direct treatment of the “thing,” whether subjective or objective’.63 Pound similarly, in a letter to William Carlos Williams in 1908, expressed his intention to ‘paint the thing as I see it’,64 while Ford Madox Ford insisted ‘that poetic

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ideas are best expressed by the rendering of concrete objects’.65 If ‘rendering’ is taken to mean ‘making’, Ford could be insisting on the concrete objecthood of the poem. Of course, in its usual application to literature and art, the word ‘rendering’ actually implies the concrete objecthood of a thing represented and so is entirely consonant with Flint’s and Pound’s statements – and with the traditional representationalist view of poetry. However, Ford also wrote that ‘the word, written or spoken, has energies that transgress the limits of the letters that cage or the sounds that cabin it’66 and that ‘emotions have their own peculiar cadences’,67 both of which at least gesture towards some sense of the poem having some existence of its own, and having some force of its own. All of these statements are further consonant with T. E. Hulme’s statement that ‘we must judge the world from the status of animals, leaving out “truth” etc.’68 This utopian project to get behind the language of a poem and attain direct access to the concrete thing is, of course, unrealisable, not least insofar as a poem is in any case a simulacrum with no model as such. The attempt is what is important in the development of English-language modernist poetry, however; for the attempt is what produced non-representational Imagist poetry. The quotations from Ford, as well as the longer quotation from Pound’s ‘Affirmations – As for Imagisme’, above, indicate something of the moves that Imagism made in this direction. This is also indicated by May Sinclair, writing in The Egoist that ‘The Imagists are Catholic; they believe in Transubstantiation . . . for them the bread and the wine are the body and blood. They are given. The thing is done.’69 Sinclair is struggling with the existence of the poem on its own terms while tied to representationalist assumptions. She therefore invokes magic: the poem becomes the thing itself. The attempt to achieve a pure denotation, whereby poetry comes largely from the naked existence of the thing represented, freed from conceptual judgements, is ultimately impossible. It is an attempt at an absolute transparency of language, or even, in fact, an actual disappearance of language. Sinclair is correct insofar as transubstantiation is what the Imagists were aiming for, a belief in a poetic magic through which poems would disappear to be replaced by things, pristine and absolute and beyond the reach of language itself. Of course, magic, in this sense at least, does not exist. The result is that, as the best of the Imagist poems approach this condition, there is a reversal and the reader is indeed left with a pure objectivity; it is not poems that disappear, however. It is the illusion of representation. The pure objectivity with which the reader is left is the objectivity of the brute existence of a poem. In general, the varieties of literary experimentation that were definitive of the modernist break, often directed at a continuation of representationalist traditions by other means, actually served to reveal (however many have failed or refused to recognize) the fact that representation in literature and art is a technical illusion. Representationalist methods and techniques (whether symbolist, realist or naturalist) are precisely only that; the poem is revealed as a thing in the world rather than a more or less transparent window on the world.

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Which is to say that ultimately the poem is a material thing demanding to be encountered on its own terms. When this is not disguised by representationalism, the reading experience can be ‘difficult’. Readers who approach poems assuming that they will be presented with a recognizable (if, perhaps, slightly novel or faintly surprising) representation of their world are confronted instead by a recalcitrant object, intent, it would seem, on doing its own thing, prompting and goading responses apparently on its own account. The difficulty is not by any means born out of a lack of reference, but rather from the fact that reference is not the poem’s purpose but rather an element of its material, used then to a different objective (or, rather, process) beyond the representation expected by the reader. It is important to understand that the move away from representationalism occurred not by the chance simultaneous appearance of a number of maverick writers and artists but was rather a historical and institutional development inextricably connected to the realization of bourgeois artistic autonomy. Once poetry stood alone as a specialized sphere of bourgeois society, uncertain of its role, as Adorno says of art in general, without even the self-evidence of its right to exist, the freedom of poets to do as they liked, to produce something substantively new and so justify the existence of art, was always going to be realized. And, of course, the break with representation is itself absolutely simultaneous with the production of the substantively new. As the representationalist illusion falls away, individual poems gain the power to be new absolutely, to use reference to other elements of the world (not ‘the real world’ for, as the poem moves away from representation, its own simple reality is revealed) in the composition of absolutely new things in the world for readers to encounter. As a result, of course, poetry becomes openly consonant with univocity, no longer attempting to efface itself but standing forth in its equality of being with, and its difference from, every other being. An encounter with a poem as something substantively new will always have a high probability of difficulty because each encounter will be in some part unique. This difficulty can only be reduced by being what is itself expected and by readers refusing to be thrown by the unique character of the encounter. On the other hand, where difficulty is a by-product (as it very often is) of the expectation that the poem will have an ultimate signified, a meaning that is represented and of which the poem is a signifier, this difficulty can be best avoided by simply relinquishing this expectation. Simply, but not necessarily particularly easily. Representationalist assumptions, the drive for meaning and the desire to interpret, are deeply ingrained. Poetry that retains the representational illusion is more comfortable than non-representational and innovative poetry. With representationalist poetry the world always remains the same; it may be slightly brighter or fresher in the eyes of the reader, but it remains fundamentally unchanged. When a substantively new non-representational artwork comes into existence, the world (perhaps specifically human being-in-the-world, the conjunction of human

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and environment) has been changed slightly but fundamentally. This again makes modernist and innovative poetries difficult, though in a slightly different sense; here the difficulty is a result of their recalcitrance, of the fact that they refuse and transform. They are difficult in the sense that a boss finds a rebellious workforce difficult. They don’t make life comfortable. Readers of Prynne’s ‘The Numbers’ are not (or are not only) given a fresh perspective on anything but rather undergo an encounter in the moment of reading, an encounter that does not go through the poem but that is with (and even, simply, is) the poem itself. This encounter transforms the world, however slightly or briefly. Looking again at the poem, The whole thing it is, the difficult matter: to shrink the confines down. To signals, so that I come back to this, we are small / in the rain, open or without it, the light in delight, as with pleasure amongst not merely the word, one amongst them; but the skin over the points, of the bone.70 The phrase ‘the difficult / matter’ as a marker for the status of Prynne’s poetry and innovative poetry in general is more balanced now, with more weight falling on ‘matter’. The poem itself might be taken as a material difficulty that readers do not simply assimilate intellectually but encounter as a transformative reality of the world, an intensity that produces an actual transformation of readers themselves in the process of reading. Whether or not this transformation lasts much beyond that process is another question, but, however brief, it is something real that results from an encounter with a poem as real, not from an experience of a self-effacing representation of reality. This is not a meaning represented by Prynne’s poem, but merely a train of thought prompted by two of the words that the poem uses. What these lines from ‘The Numbers’ actually do is unbalance readers from the start by an uncertainty of reference that does in fact make the poem stand forth as ‘difficult / matter’. That phrase itself is rendered difficult by the fact that the difficult matter is apparently the shrinking of confines down – but the confines of what? It is of no significance; what is important is that readers do not know, and that lack of knowledge does something. It disrupts readers, leaving them open (if they have not fled for something more comfortable, or retreated into an obsessive desire to interpret) to the poem’s other operations. These include sensations of shrinking, of being confined and of being small – but also of being in the rain (which is both uncomfortable and, potentially, liberating insofar as it is immediate contact with the world and with nature), open, lit,

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delighted and in some way pleasured. That pleasure might be sexual, given the reference to skin, but the ‘skin over the points, of the bone’ again suggests discomfort and even starvation. The rapid shifts from reference to reference, from sensation to sensation, are disruptive of equilibrium, but they are simultaneously tempered by a logicality or intellectual tone of discourse. This logicality is itself a sensation, and it is one that gives the poem an air of authority (also a sensation) that pulls the poem together and allows readers to trust it and to persevere with the reading. This is just the beginning, with very little in the way of conceptual resources, of a potential reading of a few lines at the beginning of a poem. However, it begins to reveal amenability to an understanding that does not go by way of representationalism or assumptions of an ultimately discoverable final signification. The poem, an heir to Imagism and to modernist poetic experimentation more generally, does something during the process of reading, something that it is possible to understand on its own terms.

The praxis of poetry and sensation The shift away from representation gives poetry an ill-defined but real position in society, without affecting its autonomous status. Modernist poetry (and henceforward poetry in the modernist tradition) becomes praxis in its own right, an authentic self-activity rather than self-effacement before an idealized meaning. Each individual poem is praxis; each individual reading is praxis, insofar as each reading is necessarily experimental because part of the ongoing and permanent process of individuation. Poems remain autonomous, but that autonomy is itself the basis for the possibility of individual and specific poems becoming praxis in and of themselves insofar as they are real in their own right and are not transparent means of communicating something other than themselves. The role of poetry as a whole can only be outlined indistinctly, if at all, because praxis now operates on the level of specific individual works and in relation to specific individual readers. Yet it is certain that poems indeed do something and so produce their place in the world. In terms of study and criticism, one result of this is that literature needs to be studied both in relation to the institution of which it is a part and in its own right in relation to readers. This is the case not only because individual poems cannot be fully understood otherwise, but also because the situation of the institution cannot be fully understood without understanding just what it is that individual poems do. This is, due to the substantive newness of every work, a never-ending process of ever-expanding knowledge and understanding – an individuating process inscribed through the eternal return of difference. If a poem is in itself praxis, it needs to be understood in terms of what it does. However, it is not presently clear what a poem is if it is not representational and therefore not a means of communicating meaning or signification.

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I will return to the analysis of Prynne’s ‘The Numbers’ in order to consider what happens when a poem is read without trying to understand it as representation. The first thing discovered is a need, once a final or transcendent meaning is refused, to talk about what the poem does; there is no other way of discussing it. Considered in these terms, I find that the poem’s opening lines are a material difficulty that unbalances or disturbs me. In the process, I discover sensations: ‘sensations of shrinking, of being confined and of being small’. The initial sense of disturbance is a sensation too, of course. It is quite clear that this is how the poem does what it does. It acts on readers as and through sensations; I am compelled to register sensations. These sensations have some significance; for example, the sensation produced by the use of the word ‘rain’ might be considered to be in some way liberating. ‘Rain’ does not mean ‘liberation’; this is not simply a signifying relationship and to consider poetic sensations as significant is not to fall back into a traditional concern with signification. Rather, the sensations registered by readers may be particularly noteworthy, or may have particular force, in relation to a reader’s cultural, social or political milieu. Sensations provoked by the word ‘rain’ might be felt as liberating by a reader who values physical stimulation or immediate contact with the natural world, and this may be a reaction, positive or negative, to broader social attitudes to the physical body or to the urban environment. Therefore, for this possible reader, ‘rain’ does not signify liberation but is, within the context of the poem, liberating, and this fact may be significant in the ways alluded to above. So the poem which does not represent does something else; it does this something by way of sensation (and to a very great extent what it does is sensation); and what the poem does may very well have significance politically, socially, culturally, or historically. As such, the poem is real in itself. The poem does not access a representative truth and is not concerned with verisimilitude but rather is true insofar as it exists in itself and is a matter of fact. These findings are consonant with Deleuze and Guattari’s What is Philosophy? in which they state that artworks are composed of sensations: We paint, sculpt, compose and write with sensations. We paint, sculpt, compose, and write sensations. . . . [T]he smile on the canvas is made solely with colours, lines, shadow and light. If resemblance haunts the work of art, it is because sensation refers only to its material . . . the smile of oil, the gesture of fired clay, the thrust of metal, the crouch of Romanesque stone, and the ascent of Gothic stone.71 The poem is not composed, first and foremost, with signifiers and significations, but (with due recognition that these are produced through language) with rhythms, sounds, images, feelings and perceptions. A more precise analysis of the ways in which different sensational elements of the poem interact and their relationship with signification (poetic sensation is produced via signification but is primary in relation to it) will be undertaken in Chapter Two.

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For the moment, however, it is clear that the foregrounding of the sensational character of a poem will be a source of difficulty for readers who expect this to be hidden beneath the illusion of representation. Encountering a poem that foregrounds its own existence as sensation adds a whole, and for some almost insurmountable, layer of difficulty if the expectation is a poem will work to efface itself in an attempt to represent something other than itself as truthfully as possible. For a reader approaching a modernist or an innovative poem with such an expectation, the poem simply does not do what it is ‘supposed’ to do. It does not signify (even while lexical units within it continue to do so). A reader who approaches a poem in terms of sensation, however, approaches it on its own terms. It is, in a sense, ‘allowed’ to do what it does instead of having an alien purpose projected upon it. The word ‘allowed’ here is, however, too passive, for readers need to approach poems actively if a good proportion of the potential that exists virtually within them is to be actualized. Difficulty will not necessarily be thereby abolished, but the nature of the difficulty will be consonant with the poems themselves. Readers will be on a more sure footing and will be able to proceed fruitfully.

The place of innovative poetry in the social milieu It remains necessary, if specifically innovative poetry is to be properly understood, to consider further its relationship with, and position within, capitalism. There can be little doubt, given the importance of autonomy, that innovative poetry itself is a bourgeois tendency in poetry insofar as it is a specific historical development that is inextricably tied to capitalism and to the capitalist development of art in general. However, poetry in the West, including that written by (for example) workers, is in general written out of the bourgeois epoch and is inextricably tied to capitalism in some way (and often in multiple ways). All recent or contemporary Western poetry is bourgeois to the extent that the society out of which it is produced is a bourgeois society.72 This quite clearly does not mean that there is no room for dissent; there are many ways of existing inside the capacious tent of the modern liberal, democratic (bourgeois) world. There is, however, no moving outside it for the time being: if a new world is to exist, then it has to be built inside the existing one, making use of the materials to be found there. Therefore, saying that contemporary innovative poetry is bourgeois is saying very little. What remains to be considered is the specific situation of innovative poetry once this fact is understood, along with the fact that it is possible for innovative work to be both bourgeois in these terms and also, in a certain sense, inimical in principle to the continued existence of the bourgeois epoch itself. Capitalism has two great tendencies which can combine to pull those that exist within it in many directions simultaneously. Capitalism is, first of all,

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revolutionary, as stated by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party and as cited earlier. If this revolutionary drive is responsible for the obsessive production of novelty, it is also responsible for what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘decoding’: Civilization is defined by the decoding and the deterritorialization of flows in capitalist production. Any method will do for ensuring this universal decoding: the privatization brought to bear on property, goods, and the means of production, but also on the organs of “private man” himself . . .73 This is of interest not simply because innovative poetry might appear to be ‘decoded’ in some sense, but rather because this is the essential movement of capitalism in which innovative poetry is caught up. Things (many varieties of ‘thing’ – relations, ideas, poetries) are decoded insofar as they are revolutionized: ‘All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.’74 Marx and Engels’ statement here is accepted with the caveat that innovative poetry does not necessarily become antiquated at all; its substantive newness is continually re-made at every reading and it ‘stays news’. This is, however, only one (major) element defining the operations of capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari go on to say, Civilized modern societies are defined by processes of decoding and deterritorialization. But what they deterritorialize with one hand they reterritorialize with the other. These neoterritorialities are often artificial, residual, archaic; but they are archaisms having a perfectly current function, our modern way of “imbricating,” of sectioning off, of reintroducing code fragments, resuscitating old codes, inventing pseudo codes or jargons.75 Deterritorialization is (briefly: a much more detailed discussion of the concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization will take place in Chapter Two) a movement out of the territory, away from the place of habit, of recognition and of safety. It is the movement of individuation, of differentiation, of innovation itself. Reterritorialization, on the other hand, is the return to or reestablishment of the territory; it is a movement that remains part of a process of individuation but which attempts to erase it, to undo it, to fix it in the safely habitual. Deterritorialization to some extent defines capitalism, but at the same time, as I shall try to make clear, it is also the possibility of a movement beyond capitalism and so of revolution. Reterritorialization, on the other hand, is also definitive of capitalism insofar as it is necessary for the production of stability within capitalist societies. Taken to extremes, both deterritorialization and reterritorialization may ultimately be destabilizing – producing either a leap forwards into the possibility of a revolutionary future or a collapse back into a

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form of fascist despotism.76 They might be thought of as poles of opposed possibility within capitalism; they might also, perhaps even more fruitfully, be thought of as tendencies that different social and cultural (and, for that matter, economic) phenomena have. To take as an example the assimilation to a poetic subject that a conventional or Movement Orthodoxy poetic subject tends to attempt; this is absolutely in keeping with a broad individualist and egocentric ethos that is endemic, even axiomatic, to the society that produced it, and so it will have a reterritorializing force. A Movement poem’s conventional form only serves to inscribe the reterritorializing tendencies of the poem all the deeper. The form of such a poem, its representational desire and its assimilatory force are all, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, ‘artificial, residual, archaic’; however, they all also have a ‘perfectly current function.’ This function is to provide a counter-force to capitalism’s deterritorializing tendencies; such a poem is a resuscitation of old codes and their reintroduction such that readers are placed within a historically familiar territory that feels secure and that is resistant to disruptive revolutionary forces. This territory is specifically coded as that of the centred subject with national and social allegiances that provide a stable position from which to judge the vicissitudes of the world, thereby assimilating that world to the subject’s own understanding on the subject’s own terms. It is reterritorializing, and in particular it is reterritorializing on the subject. A poem such as Prynne’s ‘The Numbers’, on the other hand, deterritorializes the subject: the uses of ‘I’ and ‘we’ (‘To signals, so that I come / back to this, we are / small in the rain, / open or without it, / the light in de- / light . . .’) are caught up in the materiality of the language and gain no privileged position or perspective, offering no definitive judgements. It is impossible to immediately and fully analyse either the force or the significance of this deterritorializing movement; this book as a whole will, it is hoped, make a beginning. What is immediately clear is that the deterritorializing trajectory of Prynne’s poem is very different to the reterritorializing trajectory of Movement poetry, although both are tied in to different tendencies of capitalism and each of these tendencies is axiomatic to the operation of capitalism itself. Brian Massumi, in his book A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari77 names these tendencies as anarchyschizophrenia (deterritorializing movements) and fascism-paranoia (reterritorializing movements) and characterizes them as follows, Fascism-paranoia is segregative (tends toward exclusive disjunctive synthesis and the creation of rigidly bounded compartmentalizations – ghettoes); anarchy-schizophrenia is expansive (tends towards inclusive conjunctive synthesis and the mixing of bodies and desires – miscegenation). Fascism strives for death (strives for stasis), anarchy stretches the limits of life (fosters mutation).78

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Massumi’s is, of course, a characterization of the most extreme forms of the tendencies being outlined here, but it is certainly useful to attain a clear sense of what those extremes are in order to understand the direction of the tendency of an idea or a cultural phenomenon. I am not claiming here that the poetry of the Movement Orthodoxy is fascist. Nor am I claiming that Prynne’s ‘The Numbers’ is either schizophrenic or anarchist. I am, however, claiming that if a continuum is drawn from a reterritorializing fascist-paranoid tendency to a deterritorializing anarchistschizophrenic tendency, then innovative poetries are closer to the latter and are in this sense radical (pushing towards the limits of capitalist possibility and therefore gesturing beyond it) while Movement Orthodoxy poetry is closer to the former and is in this sense conservative (pulling away from such limits and attempting to centre itself on firmly traditional or ‘common-sense’ ground). This remains very broad, and the precise understanding of an individual poem in these terms would require a closer analysis. Some poems generally characterized either as Movement Orthodoxy or as innovative would be close to the middle of the continuum and might in fact be very similar, at least at first glance.79 Deleuze and Guattari describe the situation as follows, The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. Born of decoding and deterritorialization, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat that they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorializing unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them towards an absolute threshold. They recode with all their might, with world-wide dictatorship, local dictators, and an all-powerful police, while decoding – or allowing the decoding of – the fluent quantities of capital and their populations. They are torn in two directions . . . They are continually behind or ahead of themselves.80 Innovative poetry is of the tendency towards the absolute threshold. This is the best meaning of the term ‘innovative’:81 it is a poetry that is of capitalism’s innovative tendency, that is to say of capitalism’s revolutionary tendency that would ideally move beyond its own thresholds altogether and that potentially prefigures the possibility of something other than capitalism itself. It is in this sense that innovative poetry is both entirely of capitalism, and is even in a certain sense the fulfilment of bourgeois poetry, while at the same time being inimical to the bourgeois epoch itself. On its own aesthetic terms (terms which, acting alone, continue to have minimal force and which act primarily to indicate potentialities, even though they produce real if miniscule changes in the world), innovative poetry attempts to move beyond the bourgeois epoch that produces it. Exactly what this means in practice can only be discovered

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through the detailed analysis of the aesthetic characteristics of innovative poetry. This analysis is the task of Chapter Two. I have rethought the nature of modernist and innovative poetry in terms of a shift away from representationalist assumptions; however, this still leaves thought about this poetry on a fairly abstract plane. The shift away from representationalism means that the poetry can no longer be coherently thought in terms of what it represents; therefore it cannot be thought in terms of what it means. As something that is equal in its being to every other being and that exists materially, in its own right, a poem has to be understood as such. In order to do so I will need to move away from the institutional plane and consider innovative poetry aesthetically, taking my cue from the origins of the word ‘aesthetic’ as relating to perception by the senses, implying material existence. In order, in other words, to fully understand the innovative poem in all its individuating difference and its material recalcitrance, it is necessary to understand its aesthetic procedures.

Chapter Two

Sensation and a Deleuzian aesthetics: reading innovative poetries

I want to begin this chapter with a look at a contemporary innovative lyric and to read it according to conventional representationalist assumptions; that is to say, that the poem is in some sense representative of the essence, the soul or the mind, of the poetic subject. The poem is Anna Mendelssohn’s ‘underground river.’ what are you now? the same white horse? steed in scarlet bells & reigns of scarlet leather? heading onwards at wildest speed with the eyes of an ocean liner’s lights screaming into white flannel braided & piped & black & dull silk shift on her wooden studio hand half crippled by an ugly thing heavy levity, weightless water held tightly neither did I enter with a child ideology apart from the common sense of an unblinkered horse cat called from behind from outraged principles that could never be outraged enough searching for fuel for outrage for you not to be on a main road after dusk as though you belonged to them when you were a beauty in the twilight park when they took you they stole my heart1 This poem is in some measure a result of a long history of experimentation and innovation, both by the poet and by other poets working in similar traditions. However, this does not mean that a reading cannot be produced, out of the representationalist tradition of reading for signified meaning, which largely assimilates the poem to very traditional ideas and concerns in literature and criticism. As poetic innovation proceeding (in part) out of the lyric tradition, this poem can, up to a point, be assimilated to that tradition itself, at the expense (to an extent) of its innovation.

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For example, the lack of full stops in this poem, the shifts of pronoun (‘you’ to ‘her’ and back to ‘you’) and the shifts of focus, impression and metaphor might all suggest the use of stream of consciousness to communicate the poet’s impressions, thoughts and, most particularly, feelings to the reader. It is possible to read this poem, in these terms, as being a representative expression of the poet’s feelings, a reading firmly in the tradition of lyric poetry. It can also be identified as an example of lyric failure; the poem cannot, in terms of signification, communicate the poet’s feelings adequately. This is also quite firmly in the tradition of criticism of the lyric; the inadequacy of language to convey the full range or depth of individual experience is a conventional literary-critical assumption. In fact, this failure could even be read as the poet’s intention, written into the title if the title is interpreted as a reference to the unconscious as something the poet herself has no control over and which produces the shifts and range of imagery and ideas, a river of impressions running beneath consciousness and out of its immediate reach. The unconscious might be seen as not being amenable to direct statement and only capable of being expressed through symbols and metaphors. These symbols and metaphors might be so personal as to be insurmountably obscured from the reader’s own conscious understanding. Therefore, the poem is an authentic representation of the poet’s thoughts, feelings and impressions insofar as these cannot, in fact, be represented, or communicated, adequately by language. The poem would be said to represent the poet’s essential feelings by failing to communicate them. Insofar as they are private and personal they cannot be communicated – but this fact can be represented. More specifically, the poem can be interpreted as a representation of the poet’s feelings of loss with regard to a loved one who is addressed and metaphorically represented by the poet to herself and to the reader as the one-time ‘white horse’, a ‘steed in scarlet bells & reigns of scarlet leather’. This loved one, it is revealed at the end of the poem, was taken from the poet by a non-specific ‘they’, something that is possibly related to the loved one being (it would seem, from the poet’s point of view, unwisely) ‘on a main road after dusk’. Whether the poem is addressed to such a loved one in their absence or on a meeting after a period of absence is not made clear, but could reasonably be said to be unimportant. It is the poet’s expressed feelings and impressions, and her unconscious associations, that are important, along with the fact that, as is traditional in the lyric, the loved one is addressed and so brought into a virtual proximity. There are, however, passages through troubling obscurity; the lines ‘screaming into white flannel braided & piped / & black & dull silk shift on in her wooden studio’ seem to make little sense in terms of a signified message, or even a fragment of a message. The word ‘screaming’ continues a supernatural, or at least uncanny, theme over from the previous lines wherein a horse has ‘the eyes of an ocean liner’s lights’. This is nightmarish in the way of a folk-tale; this fairy-tale horse (the ‘scarlet bells’ and the use of the word ‘steed’ both

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suggest a fairy-tale element) is both dream and nightmare, all speed, power, life and exotic beauty, but also unnatural, supernatural, with unnaturally large and bright eyes, and therefore frightening. The phrase ‘wildest speed’, which has distinctly positive connotations in the context of the first three lines (given the associations of ‘white horse’ with heroism, the word ‘steed’ with fairy-tale notions of a knight or prince and the, again, fairy-tale associations of ‘scarlet bells and reigns of scarlet leather’, the spelling of ‘reigns’ here suggesting further associations with princes or other fairy-tale royalty), is, as the context shifts and evolves, now much more negative, taking up a resonance with ‘screaming’. This word is suggestive of fear, but also of speed itself, possibly an unnatural speed associated, like the ocean liner’s lights, with that which is man-made – aeroplanes, cars or motorcycles. The fact that it is screaming into ‘white flannel braided & piped’ suggests a crash into (or with) authority (a naval dress uniform, resonating back to the ocean liner). Whether this is a simple collision with authority or a figure for the bathetic taming of a wild and supernatural horse it would be difficult, not to say impossible, to state with any certainty. The addition to the white flannel uniform of qualities that would not normally be associated with it marks a shift in the poem, though here it is more like a bleed across than the abrupt shift from the horse to the ocean liner. The ‘black & dull silk shift’ fits more easily into ‘her wooden studio’ than it does as an element of the sailor’s white uniform. Thus the bleed across flattens out the shift a little, but the movement is a major one for all that. The wooden studio, of course, suggests an artist. The movement from ‘you’ to ‘her’ is difficult to judge in terms of reference. The ‘silk shift’ is obviously feminine, and the word ‘shift’ itself marks one; it places that particular garment against the ‘white flannel braided and piped’, which, broadly speaking, would tend to have masculine connotations. The analysis of these two lines does not go very far. It is possible to trace moves made, but in terms of overall signified meaning they remain quite obscure. Such obscurity can, again, be approached as the representation of the poet’s mind (both the conscious and the unconscious), but interpretation will quickly run into speculation. Therefore, attempts at interpretation of the more obscure elements of the poem will seem unsatisfactory and will be unable to account for the poem’s force. In any case, it seems to me that the poem does more than simply represent the poet’s mind by being incomprehensible and it should be possible to reach a clearer and more precise understanding of the poem than this. However, if I re-read the poem assuming that, rather than being representationalist it is in fact a simulacrum that exists in its own right and is composed of sensation, then the result should be much more satisfying. I should be able to move towards a clearer understanding, not of what the poem represents, or signifies, but rather of what it does. What this means is to understand the aesthetic or the sensible relationship between the poem and its reader, rather than the signifying relationship between the poem and the poet.

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It is necessary to deal with the fact that the poem appears to address someone or something. This is even more the case if an attempt is made to read the poem in terms of sensation, rather than representative or significative meaning, as address, drawing on the lyric tradition and the assumptions of subjective representation that underlie it, immediately lends the poem to a reading in these latter terms. A reader might well, on reading the opening lines (‘what are you now? the same white horse? / steed in scarlet bells & reigns of scarlet leather?’), place herself in the position of the addressee, though she (the reader) is (at least) doubled, having to simultaneously take on the role of the addressor, though one who, on a first reading, does not know what she is going to say. In this, the poem, at its beginning, draws readers into the traditional position(s) of readers of lyric poems, and it immediately moves the reading towards one that assumes a representative status for the poem that would privilege signified meaning. This is almost inevitable. However, the attempt to take up such subject-positions is necessarily disrupted by the fact that in this case ‘the subject’ (in the person of a reader) does not know what she or he is going to say, and by the fact that, for all the intimacy of the address, she does not know who or what it is (insofar as it is not the reader while also simultaneously being her2). The otherness of this unknown it is emphasized by the fact that it is referred to as a horse. There is a slight shock of misrecognition produced here, which will in all likelihood impel a desire to interpret these lines as metaphorical, while increasing the sense of unknowing; the addressee is all the more mysterious for being addressed in (apparently) figurative terms with no context. The desire to interpret metaphorically is, like the attempt to occupy the positions of both an addressing subject and an addressee, almost inevitable. However, the shock will remain, as will the sense of otherness. This shock is pushed slightly further by the estrangement or sense of the uncanny that is provided by the folk- or fairy-tale elements of the bells and the reigns (which introduces another slight movement off-centre in its spelling, suggesting, apropos of nothing at this stage, authority perhaps, particularly hereditary or unearned authority. The fact that it is apparently apropos of nothing leaves it hanging, creating an undertow of suspense that helps to move the poem forwards by expectation. Such expectation might also provide a certain paradoxically dissonant, and virtual, coherence as a result of the likelihood that readers will expect coherence. This is productive of a further expectation that the spelling will be justified later in the poem, so that readers expect that something later will refer back to this line, pulling the poem together structurally). A preponderance of sibilant alliteration and assonance threads these lines together and provides a strictly sensible coherence that provides a stable basis for the more unstable shocks and shifts, the instabilities (however slight at this stage) produced by the other elements in these lines. Rather than analysing the entire poem line by line, I will jump forwards here to look again at the lines cited earlier as being particularly obscure of

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signification: ‘screaming into white flannel braided & piped / black & dull shift on in her wooden studio’. ‘Screaming’, again, produces speed and terror simultaneously; ‘into’ suggests a crash and although the form of the poem might be expected to retain its own considerable speed at this point (a speed produced in part by the minimal use of punctuation), it is slowed by this sense of a crash and by a shift into description. However, this shift, this change of direction, is radical and so retains some of the wildness figured previously (through the word ‘steed’ and the third line’s ‘wildest speed’) as an undercurrent to the apparent slow-down. The image of the white flannel and its trimming suggests authority that, on the heels of the wild horse, may produce disquiet, assuming3 for the moment that readers associate wildness with freedom and value this, viewing authority, or at least the authoritarian, with suspicion. Such negativity is suggested by the following line which shifts yet again while continuing the slowing of the poem’s speed; ‘black’, ‘dull’ and ‘wooden’ combine together to produce an affect of the rustic that reacts against both speed and modernity. In the process, ‘black’ and ‘dull’ have already been working to produce a negativity that reacts with the authority suggested by the uniform in the previous line and against its whiteness. The possible associations here, and the affects they might produce, are complex: the rusticity works against the modernity of the uniform and its previous association with ocean liners, while it might work with the habitual appeals of authority to tradition, ‘the people’ and to the earth – there are distinctly fascist connotations at work here. Such uncertainty of sensation (does the rusticity carry negative or positive force? Or somehow both simultaneously?) helps to push the movement of the poem on, even as it has been slowed, as readers anticipate clarification. This movement, however, is not, or at least not just narrative. It goes beyond narrative in that it is not moving towards the clarification that readers might desire, or towards any revelation, either of which might be reasonably expected in a narrative. The final line, ‘when they took you they stole my heart’ produces an affect of resolution, but this is precisely an affect and is not a narrative resolution. There may be a logic of sensibility that works towards this resolution, but there is no apparent narrative, signifying logic that produces it. The poem presented in this way, while obviously having some similarities to the poem as read through the assumption that it is a representational copy, is also quite different from such a reading. It diverges at every point from a representation of the idea of the mind of the poet. It is, in fact, coupled to readers rather than the poet. The poem is not a passage of communication between the poet and a reader, whereby readers can recognize the poet as, perhaps, a more sensitive and intelligent version of themselves, but rather the poem is something that affects readers in its own right and as such is potentially productive of changes in them – whether such changes occur, and they may be very subtle, can only testified to by readers themselves. It should also be clear, from both readings, that the poem itself is an innovative use of the resources of the lyric; it does not easily lend itself to the more traditional, representational

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ways of thinking about poetry, although with some elisions it might be co-opted to those traditions, as demonstrated by the first reading presented above.

Deterritorialization and reterritorialization As the innovative movements produced by ‘underground river.’ that I have outlined above are deterritorializing movements, and as the concept of deterritorialization will continue to be of great importance in this book, I will pause here and consider it more closely, along with the related concept of reterritorialization. I have made some use of these already, of course, but further progress will be difficult if I do not clarify their function. Deterritorialization indicates, at its most absolutely basic, change, difference and individuation. I will begin to flesh this out with a quotation from Deleuze and Guattari: The function of deterritorialization: D is the movement by which “one” leaves the territory. It is the operation of the line of flight. There are very different cases. D may be overlaid by a compensatory reterritorialization obstructing the line of flight: D is then said to be negative. . . . Among regimes of signs, the signifying regime certainly attains a high level of D; but because it simultaneously sets up a whole system of reterritorializations on the signified, and on the signifier itself, it blocks the line of flight, allowing only a negative D to persist.4 Through a movement of deterritorialization, then, ‘one’ leaves the ‘territory’, the place of safety, security, familiarity and habit. A deterritorialization is negative, according to Deleuze and Guattari, when it is obstructed by reterritorialization, when its line of flight is blocked or cut short, entailing an ignominious return. However, I would argue that deterritorialization is also negative when it is out of the control of the one (if this is a human individual) being deterritorialized. A nomad, for example, traces a line of positive deterritorialization because her movements are under her control. A refugee, on the other hand, has limited control over his movements at best; certainly, by definition, his movements are initiated by a situation that is out of his control and that produces suffering. A refugee moves, therefore, along a line of negative deterritorialization. It is negative because the individual involved experiences it as such. I have already stated in Chapter One that capitalist decoding and the ‘disturbance of all social conditions’ identified by Marx and Engels is a process of deterritorialization. Capitalist deterritorialization is negative when it leads to a reterritorialization onto those reified territories that are axiomatic to capitalist stability: for example, the discrete and respectable bourgeois subject or a dominating and conformist abstract morality. However, it is also, once again,

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negative when it is beyond the control of the individual affected by it, for example, the worker whose position and income are precarious, or an individual rendered homeless. With regard to poetry, deterritorialization carries a sense of ‘defamiliarization’. However, although defamiliarization focuses some attention on the poem as a construction, foregrounding its techniques, it also very specifically implies a change in the reader’s perception of an object or event represented by the poem, thereby also implying a continued attachment to representationalism. The examples of deterritorialization and reterritorialization given above, however, indicate their usefulness beyond representationalism and beyond concepts, even, of perception. Deterritorialization has a much wider area of operation; it is active not just in relation to perceptions of the world but in the world itself. It operates, therefore, on a wider plane that encompasses defamiliarization, the effects of which can be said to be deterritorializing. When an individual reads an innovative poem, the process of deterritorialization does not just affect their perception of whatever the poem refers to, it is rather a change in readers themselves, which might be produced through, among other things, a defamiliarization of their habitual perceptions. For the most part, poetic deterritorialization is given a positive cast in this thesis; it is associated with intensity and creative potential. If it works, then it is positive insofar as it is not wholly (though it may be largely) reterritorialized and because it is under some control. The reader chooses to enter into a conjunction with the poem and may choose to stop reading at any time; the poem has to be freely engaged with. It should be understood that deterritorialization and reterritorialization are not simply concepts that are applied to poetry from the outside, but are rather generated in the encounter with poetry. However, it is difficult to approach an understanding of these elements of poetry without the concepts to identify them. These concepts are generative, in conjunction with innovative poetry, of an understanding of poetry as non-representational; however, poetry itself is generative of the forces and intensities that are to be understood in this way. These forces and intensities cannot be adequately grasped by readings that assume that an innovative poem is simply a representational signifying regime. This was demonstrated in the first attempt at a reading of ‘underground river.’, during which I found that certain elements of the poem resisted interpretation and could only be accounted for (in representational terms) with generalizations that failed to explain their specific aesthetic force. An interpretation based upon representational assumptions was able to reterritorialize the poem and to assimilate it to a conventional understanding of what a poem might mean, but it was only able to do so by failing to account for the poem’s ‘excess’, and most deterritorializing, elements. ‘Deterritorialization’ is a concept necessary for an adequate understanding of these elements precisely because they are not representational and therefore do not simply defamiliarize readers’ perceptions of represented objects. Rather,

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they deterritorialize readers in their encounters with the poem and, by extension, with the world. While this remains a generalizing term, it is one that does adequately describe the poem’s operations, even if it does not describe their composition. This latter task requires recourse to sensation rather than meaning; although the poem does not ultimately ‘mean’ it does affect the reader with sensations that combine to produce the overall (dynamic) affects of the poem. Sensations are discovered at every level of ‘underground river.’; the ‘screaming’ and its suggestions of both speed and terror are sensations, as are the disorientation produced by the poem’s sudden shifts of focus or direction and the poem’s imagery, such as the white flannel or the wooden studio. These sensations might be produced by referential signification, by a refusal of clear signification, or through a poem’s formal properties. What is clear is that where signification is directly involved in the poem’s composition, its role is the production of sensation: the latter has priority in the composition of the poem in that signification is essentially a tool used to produce sensation. It frequently cannot be interpreted on its own terms and can only be understood when analysed as sensation. Sensation is also in excess of signification: the fact that it is sometimes produced by a refusal of clear meaning or by events in a poem’s formal dimension demonstrates this. Although sensation is often produced by signification it does not rely on signification. This again suggests a certain priority of sensation over signification: signification is not essential to everything a poem does; sensation is. Sensation is active; it does not mean something, it does something. In conservative and traditional poetries that maintain a strong adherence to representationalism, sensation will remain in as close an accord with signification as possible and will be a primarily territorializing or reterritorializing force. Conservative poetry can, and ultimately, arguably, should, be read in terms of sensation just as much as innovative poetry; however, the sensations will most often either work under erasure or will be co-opted to signification and the representational illusion. In innovative poetries, however, sensations may take on a variety of possible functions, including reterritorializing functions, but the overall movement of the poem, as a ‘block of sensations’,5 will be a positive deterritorializing movement. The term ‘block of sensations’ comes, again, from the work of Deleuze and Guattari and again it is one that is suggestive and that aids in the task of thinking about poetry in non-representational terms; once again, however, it really becomes generative in conjunction with the poetry itself.

Poetry as performance Working on the basis of the notion that sensation is in excess of and has priority over signification, it is vital to investigate more closely, first of all, what

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sensation in innovative poetry does before moving on to consider the ways in which poetic sensation, while essentially non-signifying, has real significance. In the preface to his book Poetry and Narrative in Performance, the poet Douglas Oliver states, No satisfactory way has yet been developed of teaching people to hear the music of poetry. No wonder the audience for this Cinderella of the written arts remains so small when in school and university so little attention is paid to how students listen to or perform verse lines. Creating notations for stress patterns is no substitute for training novices to hear the melody within a poem’s delicately narrow band of frequencies. Until the melody is heard it cannot be properly suggested how it unites with meaning and emotional significance.6 Oliver’s point here is that, pedagogically, a vital element of poetry is not being given its full due as all the emphasis in the teaching of poetry falls upon its meaning – which is to say that poetry is only really considered as a signifying regime. Students are asked what poetry means (what a poem represents) – but this essentially means asking them to ‘work out’ what the poem means as though it were a puzzle; they are expected to reach a point where they ‘get it’. Oliver’s references to ‘music’ and ‘melody’, on the other hand, indicate an interest in poetic sensation, those elements of the poem that define it as a work of art and link it to other art forms. However, Oliver is only concerned, here, with one element of the poem’s block of sensations – its music – and he ties this into a continuing concern with the poem as a signifying regime. He appears to be concerned with understanding how the music of the poem relates to its emotional significance and meaning and so, perhaps, privileges the latter as the final point to be reached in the understanding of a poem. The question of emotional significance is a more complex one, but it will be argued in this book that such significance is sensational rather than signifying, although it is of a different order than that of the poem’s music. Oliver’s work in this area is very useful however, starting with the notion, indicated in his title, that the poem should be thought of in terms of performance. He states that by performance he means ‘a poem or fictional narrative considered as actually being written or read on one occasion, whether silently or audibly’;7 this is specifically not simply reading aloud or performance for an audience, but rather the actual practice of reading – usually silently – as opposed to an abstract analysis of the poem in terms of structure or linguistic rules: ‘we can,’ he says, ‘simply see what happens in a series of individual performances’.8 I will often speak of the sound of the poem or of the actualization of the poem in the mouth of a reader; these should not be taken to imply public performance or even, necessarily, audible reading (though audible readings can be, and often are, as private as a

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silent reading). Rather, a reader ‘hears’ a poem in her head as she reads and is entirely aware of the sounds of the words should the poem be audible. By the same token, a reader can and often will feel the language in his mouth as he reads, will read in his own accent, and feels the actualization of the poem’s language physically. This is all, at least, certainly so in my case. Analyses presented in this book will need, on occasion, to consider poetry in terms of abstract structure; however, as I have already stated as a necessity within a univocal ontology, each reading should be thought of as the analysis of an individual, experimental, performance. The principle of performance is important firstly because it implies a unique event, differentiating and individuating on each occasion. Secondly, it also implies, a relationship between a poem and a reader that is absolutely vital and that cannot be adequately thought in more abstract terms. Such a relationship between a poem and a reader needs to be at least assumed if poetry is to be thought through in terms of sensation; a poem as a signifying regime may be analysed in terms of abstract linguistic structures, but abstract linguistic structures only produce sensation in relationship with a reader. Further, a poem as productive of movements of reterritorialization or deterritorialization, as experiment, as productive in its own right of its own affects and as a simulacrum, also requires a relationship with a reader. There is nothing abstract or ideal about a poem as a simulacrum: it requires an actualization that can only occur in relation. The concept of performance is also useful because it implies an active poetry, a performative poetry that does something, which is very much in accord with a vital thread of this book. The performance of a poem is always performative in the sense that it’s actualization produces affects, is active and, however microscopically, changes the world as it produces changes in readers. It might be objected that the poem as an ‘authentic’ Platonic copy of the essence of the original also requires relation, but the relation then is between a poem and its ‘original’, an abstract and ideal relation that has no need of readers. It can be seen, therefore, that Oliver’s commonsensical and ‘simple’ seeing what happens in performance might be less simple (and, to its credit, less commonsensical) than it appears and that there may in fact be a lot at stake in the shift from abstract analysis to the assumption of a performative relationship between a poem and a reader. In fact, I intend to advance a view that a poem is only ever actual as performed; an actual poem is the performative conjunction of reader and poetic text.9 A particularly important element of Oliver’s analysis of poetry and performance is his consideration of poetic stress. This is of special significance for my concerns as stress is apparently almost pure sensation, located in a poem’s formal dimension; tracing its operations, therefore, is particularly illuminating with regard to the functioning of poetic sensation in general. The investigation of stress will then also lead to a consideration of poetic movement and time, also vital for approaching a full understanding of innovative poetry.

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Poetic stress Oliver produces two definitions of stress; a short, initial definition in Chapter One, and a much longer and more detailed revised definition in Chapter Eight. The first of these runs as follows, A poetic stress is apparently an instant when we unify into a single conception some of our sense of the form of the poetic line’s sound as it has been developing over a small period of time. It necessarily involves unifying with our perception of the sound some conception of the meaning and emotional significance of the stress-bearing syllable in relation to the overall meaning and emotional significance of the poem.10 Stress, then, on this account, is a unifying element of a poem, bringing together, and into focus, its sound or music. It also, according to Oliver, unifies sound with meaning and poetic emotion, both in terms of the stress itself and in relation to a poem as a whole. Before proceeding further, I wish to pause and reflect on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the percept – because poetic stress is a percept. A percept is a sensation, an element of a block of sensation that is an artwork, and it is related to (although it is, in fact, not) perception: ‘Percepts are no longer perceptions; they are independent of a state of those who experience them.’11 The percept is that in a work of art that might be perceived, but it goes beyond perception and is beyond assimilation by a perceiving individual. Percepts, say Deleuze and Guattari, are ‘nonhuman landscapes of nature’;12 not only of nature, however. This notion that percepts are landscapes of nature (a concept within which Deleuze and Guattari explicitly include the townscape or cityscape) implies that percepts are specifically elements of poetic content. However, I have argued, after Olson, that form and content are indivisible; a poem’s ‘music’, its formal asignifying element, is an integral element of its composition. I would say, therefore, that the percept is also an element of the nonhuman landscape of the poem itself and that this landscape includes the most formal elements of the poem and as such includes poetic stress. Stress is an important, not to say privileged, element of the landscape of the poem. Its unification of the sound of the line with the meaning and the emotional significance of the stressed syllable itself (and then by extension with the entire poem) makes stress a site (or, more accurately, a passage) of great intensity, notwithstanding the fact that it occurs (differently), in lines of more that two or three syllables, more than once in a line. Stress is a sensation that often has great force and may have great significance. To understand that force, first of all, in a general sense, I will turn back once again to Deleuze and Guattari and their conceptualization of artistic sensation.

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The percept and its twin, affect (which I will return to below), are the two broad concepts for the essential forces of sensation that work or play off each other, whether in harmony or dissonance, as a block of sensations. A block of sensations is, say Deleuze and Guattari, ‘a compound of percepts and affects’13 and those percepts and affects are essentially non-human insofar as they exceed and are independent of the human: Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exists in itself.14 The concept of a poem as an authentic copy in the Platonic sense, particularly of a lyric poem as an authentic copy of a poetic mind, is further away now than ever. A poem exists independently of the human; the forces of poetic sensation do not rely upon a human reader for their existence but rather exist in their own right – they must do, in a univocal universe or they would be derivative and secondary. This notion not only of the independent existence of a poem but also of the sensations that compose it can be clarified through an examination of stress. Stress is a percept. As such it is a force that exists within a poem and that acts upon (and in conjunction with) a reader, having a real and material existence. In a performance of a poem, a reader actualizes stress through the dynamic process that the performance is. Readers do not decide where the stress will be; stress is not a result of readerly intention. On the other hand, stress does not simply get activated by a reader and then lie prone once more as she passes on. The process of actualization involves a readerly embodiment of stress in a performative reading process: which is to say that stress produces a physical, material response in a reader. To put it another way, a reader enters into the landscape of a poem during a performance: the relationship is a mutual conjunction of independent existences. It should be made clear that, just as stress is independent of readers, so stress is also independent of poets. Unlike readers, poets do decide where stress will fall (at least in a certain sense and as a result of the process of composition). However, when a poem is read an author is no longer present (even when it is the author who is reading: their function as a reader is different from their function as an author). Stress, once again, exists in itself and is ready to independently enter into a relationship with a reader. Stress is real but virtual in the text of a poem; when a poem is performed, stress is actualized in the conjunction of reader and text. It is actualized as a force that is also called a percept because it is actualized in the mode of perception (when it is actualized, it is perceived). It is not a perception as such,

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however, because it exists independently of perceivers and while virtual it is no less real a force for all that it remains unapplied. In his revised definition of stress, Oliver states: In the sound of a poem, the correlates of stress are pitch, loudness, duration and quality, although duration is, in other respects, its paradoxical opposite. Duration is that period which gives content to the stress, whether this be the duration of a syllable or some wider (suprasegmental) duration.15 Pitch, loudness, duration and quality are the directly sensational aspects that produce stress; that are stress (although I will argue that the notion that duration is the opposite of stress is an error). The position of stress in poetry is often determined, or semi-determined, by what Oliver calls an ‘abstract metrical pattern’16 such as iambic pentameter, although as he points out, the abstract metrical pattern is not necessarily the same as the rhythm of the line and even in conservative and very rule-bound poetries there are usually exceptions from the rules, metrical or otherwise.

Stress in Mendelssohn’s ‘underground river.’ and J. H. Prynne’s ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’ This thinking on stress will aid my analyses of both Mendelssohn’s ‘underground river.’ and J. H. Prynne’s poem ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’. First I must locate the stresses in Mendelssohn’s ‘underground river.’ in order to try to determine, based on the readings already performed with this text, the extent to which their force does indeed unify the sound of the line with meaning and emotional significance. Taking the first two lines once again, what are you now? the same white horse? steed in scarlet bells and reigns of scarlet leather? The stresses in the first line, determined by pitch, loudness, duration and quality, seem to to me to fall on the words ‘what’, ‘now’, ‘same’ and ‘horse’, although it should be noted that this is my reading; other readings might also stress ‘white’. ‘What’, ‘now’, ‘same’ and ‘horse’ are, in any case, as predicted by Oliver, the words in that line that carry the semantic load (‘What now? Same horse?’). Emotional significance is also involved; the apparent metrical irregularity of the first phrase, ‘what are you now?’ wherein the stresses fall on the first and fourth words, starts the poem off with a slight rhythmic dissonance (for all that it is, other than that initial ‘what’, a fairly ordinary phrase), which has an unsettling emotional timbre. The second phrase, however, is iambic – unless ‘white’ is stressed, which would make it sprung. In either case, the introduction

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of relative metrical regularity within the same line might actually heighten the slight dissonance set up by the first phrase, giving the lie to the jauntiness of the regular rhythm. However, there is a sense in which the stress runs back into the first word, (‘what’) from the rest of that first line. The word ‘what’, with a lower-case ‘w’ in particular, is not in itself aggressive, even when it is stressed, but here it picks up a certain belligerence produced by the unsettling play of dissonance and regularity across the line as a whole. The production, both of stress itself and the significance of the stress, is not a question simply of either the spatial position of the stress in the line or of purely formal considerations. It is worth pausing to note that the emphasis here is falling upon sensation – music and emotion – rather than signification that, while present and clearly important, is contributing to the sensation (what I am still calling for the moment ‘emotion’) rather than the other way around. The second line is already affected by the slightly aggressive tone of the first line. It is metrically regular, but the fact that the poem as a whole is free verse already indicates that such regularity, when it appears, may be significant (form and content are indivisible). Infected by the edge of aggression of the poem’s first phrase, this line’s jauntiness has a sardonic edge. In terms of stress and signification, there is stress on the syllable ‘scar’ twice in this line, which might suggest imperfectly healed wounds. Stress here also undercuts the fairy-tale heroism of ‘white horse’ and ‘steed’. Although the ‘scarlet bells and reigns of scarlet leather’ have certain fairy-tale connotations of their own, the stresses on ‘scar’, ‘bells’, ‘reigns’ and ‘scar’ again work with sardonic dissonance to do something else. ‘Scar’, as already noted, suggests some kind of wounding or injury; in conjunction with ‘bells’ such wounding may be felt to take the form of a certain undignified domestication that resonates with, of course, the second stress on ‘scar’, but also with the stress on ‘reigns’, the peculiar spelling of which (given the context) was noted earlier. That spelling adds to the dissonant, or even subversive, resonance of the way these words have been brought together by stress in that it again suggests domestication, dominance, a notion perhaps that the steed has been ‘broken’; these might all be suggested by ‘reins’ anyway, of course, but the pun on royal sovereignty gives such suggestions greater force.17 In these two lines, which are relatively easy of understanding or recognition in terms of signification, what the stress-percepts do is tied quite closely to the signified meaning of the lines; it would be easy to read these lines as a signifying regime. Of course, to some extent, drawing heavily on the traditions of the lyric as they do, these lines provide the territory from which the rest of the poem traces lines of flight, deterritorializing the lyric form and deterritorializing readers along with it. However, things are already slightly more complicated than that. The way in which stress brings together elements of signification with musical force, producing a dissonance and a subversive resonance that undercuts what might appear to be the dominant conceptual or signifying

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elements of recognition, is already deterritorializing. These lines, on the level of signification, are entirely amenable to recognition and conceptual assimilation (which is to say that, on this level, they produce or stake out a territory). However, on the level of sensation that makes use of signification and is not subordinate to it they produce a deterritorializing movement that anticipates the still more radical deterritorializations of the rest of the poem. This movement in these two lines is most obviously in the tonal and emotional elements – the affects, which strictly speaking are not truly emotional at all – that are in turn built partially on the poem’s ‘music’, in this case the stress-percepts. This is to say that the lines are composed as a block of sensations, of affects and percepts, with the former to some extent emerging from the latter; this situation, whereby affects are at least in part produced out of percepts that provide their ‘ground’, is often, though not always, the case. J. H. Prynne’s ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’ was originally published in the collection Wound Response in 1974. This poem is again quite clearly an innovative lyric, although it also moves beyond lyrical conventions very quickly. There is little sense of personal address and the mix of discourses that compose it is an immediate challenge to such conventions. However, there is an address in the first line and elements of form and many of the affects that compose the poem clearly draw on the lyric tradition. I will quote the poem in full: Of Movement Towards a Natural Place See him recall the day by moral trace, a squint to cross-fire shewing fear of hurt at top left; the bruise is glossed by ‘nothing much’ but drains to deep excitement. His recall is false but the charge is still there in neural space, pearly blue with a touch of crimson. ‘By this I mean a distribution of neurons . . . some topologically preserved transform’, upon his lips curious white flakes, like thin snow. He sees his left wrist rise to tell him the time, to set damage control at the same white rate. What mean square error. Remorse is a pathology of syntax, the expanded time-display depletes the input of ‘blame’ which patters like scar tissue. First intentions are cleanest: no paint on the nail cancels the flux link. Then the sun comes out (top right) and local numbness starts to spread, still he is “excited” because in part shadow. Not will but chance the plants claim but tremble, ‘a detecting mechanism must integrate across that population’; it makes sense right at the contre-coup.

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Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze So the trace was moral but on both sides, as formerly the moment of godly suffusion: anima tota in singulis membris sui corporis. The warmth of cognition not yet neuroleptic but starry and granular. The more you recall what you call the need for it, she tells him by a shout down the staircase. You call it your lost benevolence (little room for charity), and he rises like a plaque to the sun. Up there the blood levels of the counter-self come into beat by immune reflection, by night-lines above the cut: Only at the rim does the day tremble and shine.18

Again, the stresses often fall on the words that carry semantic weight. Before moving into a close analysis however, it should be noted that this poem, too, begins with a direct address, an injunction, ‘See’, that links the poem to the traditions of the lyric. However, the addressee is not in this case the subject of the poem to the extent that it is with ‘underground river.’; the addressee might more clearly be identified with readers as the poem indicates a third party, the subject of the poem in the sense of that which is examined by the poem. The first line has a relatively regular rhythm that eases readers into the poem, producing a territory from which the rest of the poem may take flight – and of course ‘the rest of the poem’ includes other elements of the same line. The first two lines of ‘underground river.’ perform a similar function, but in that case the signification is a part of that function; the first two lines signify relatively conventionally and provide a clearly recognizable territory that the rest of the poem then deterritorializes, taking readers with it. With ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’, signification and recognition are immediately disrupted – first by lack of reference whereby a reader will have no idea who the third-person ‘him’ refers to, and then by peculiarity of reference whereby how or why the day might be recalled by ‘moral trace’ (indeed, what that phrase signifies at all) is immediately enigmatic. As such signification is disrupted, producing a deterritorializing movement while the relative regularity of the stresses provides a territorializing underpinning in counterpoint to this movement. This underpinning might be thought of as a place of safety for the duration of the first line, allowing a reader to orient him- or herself to some extent. The stresses in the second line (‘to cross-fire shewing fear of hurt at top left; the’) follow a speech pattern that develops a poetic function for an apparently unpoetic style, increasing the speed of the line and giving the clause ending with the semicolon a sense of authority. The particular unpoetic phrase that I am referring to here is ‘at top left’, an impersonal and bureaucratic turn of phrase that also stresses both ‘top’ and ‘left’, providing the sense of increased speed and authoritative force. This phrase is, like a Dadaist ready-made, converted into poetry by means of its context. Recognizable as a specific form of

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phraseology, it has a territorializing function and also draws the attention readers, if it has been missed so far, to the apparent objectivity of the language being used. This objectivity begins in fact from the very first (stressed) word: ‘see’. This both draws the attention of the reader (interpellating that reader as a subject and thus already constructing a recognizable territory) to a third party, ‘him’, that is being observed and, as an injunction, claims the kind of authority that is readily assumed by both bureaucratic and scientific discourse. Both of these forms of discourse, of course, also claim objectivity and the right to examine or observe, characteristics not unconnected with their claims to authority. This quasi-objectivity (which is, to state this in passing at this stage, an affect) has a deterritorializing function that is precisely simultaneous with its territorializing function. This is due to the fact that it is not, in the normal run of things, a function of the poetic to lay claim to the authority of objectivity in this way – as already stated above. The usual expectations of reading poetry are disrupted even as the poem provides a recognizable place, a territory, for the reader to inhabit. This is characteristic of Prynne’s poetry of this period, the poems often involving a number of different discourses grafted together so that they form blocks of sensation that have a certain poetic coherence composed, in part, of dissonance. There are often major discursive shifts, breaks and jolts that are a large element of the work’s aesthetic, its poetic affect. This is also the case with this poem, although the objectivity-affect remains fairly constant throughout. The stress on both ‘top’ and ‘left’ underlines, then, not simply an authoritative affect suggestive of expertise but also an authoritarianism. However, this authoritarianism will provide the comfort of the safety of the recognized territory (as authoritarianism often does politically), pulling the lines together, and readers with them, through the deterritorializing aspects that are also powerfully active. The stress pattern, for all its disturbing authoritarian resonance, strengthens a reader’s handhold and allows him or her an intake of breath before moving on to see what adventures the rest of the poem holds in store.

Movement, time and the location of stress Oliver’s concern with stress leads him to consider it in relation to temporality via the question of pinpointing the former’s location: ‘If we wanted to express exactly where . . . the stress actually occurs we might try to tap it out.’19 Oliver is interested in the issue of tapping out stress in order to pinpoint its location because it raises a ‘familiar temporal paradox which arises in all questions of artistic form’;20 this paradox certainly arises for poetry and, to some extent, for music and for the human understanding of time generally. It is a paradox that is not only ‘familiar’ but ancient. Oliver goes on, Probably they will site the tap at vowel outset [if the stress is on the word ‘stick’ in Yeats’ ‘Sailing to Byzantium’21]; where doesn’t matter so much as the

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Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze fact that they will think it sensible to tap at a precise, conceptual point. But at the point chosen the full duration of the vowel and its change in pitch haven’t happened yet. Nor has the pause that comes afterwards. And the quick syllables before have already happened. Judged as an isolated point in time, the loudness has no meaning without relation to the loudness of other syllables. And yet we try to tap a single point of time . . .22

To put it simply, the immediate question that is raised is how it is that the complex of elements that go into the production of poetic stress are believed to be reducible to a single point or instant in the performance of the poem. The elements that Oliver details relate to ‘Sailing to Byzantium’: if I wanted to make a similar point with regard to ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’ I might cite, for example: the slight pause between ‘at’ and ‘top’ in the phrase ‘at top left’; the differences in pitch between those two words; the carrying over of pitch level from ‘top’ to ‘left’; the near-silent ‘t’ in ‘at’ compared to the forcefulness of the ‘t’ in ‘top’ that is then carried over to the force of the plosive ‘p’ at the end of the word; and so on. The question remains the same: ‘How is it, since the present moment takes no time at all, that we seem to experience the passing of time through a succession of present moments?’23 Oliver believes that stress is essentially present in the instant and that the instant of stress draws all the complex elements together into itself: ‘A stress is born in time, and in sound, meaning and emotion; but it also stands outside time in a sort of minor, eternal present, a trembling instant which half stands still, partly resisting the flow of the line that creates it.’24 This, however, risks the transformation of time into space. An instant of time is an abstract concept that treats time as though it were somehow ‘the same as’ space. Of course space and time are inseparable, as is indicated by modern physics and the notion of space-time (whereby time is not ontologically separate from space but is rather the fourth dimension of a four-dimensional universe). However, it is still the case that space is not time. Space and time may be inseparable but they are also distinct. The question of time is also, importantly for the concept of poetry as performance, a question of movement. In the first volume of his work on the cinema, Deleuze considers Bergson’s theses on movement: According to the first thesis, movement is distinct from the space covered. Space covered is past, movement is present, the act of covering. The space covered is divisible, indeed infinitely divisible, whilst movement is indivisible, or cannot be divided without changing qualitatively each time it is divided. This already presupposes a more complex idea: the spaces covered all belong to a single, identical, homogenous space, while the movements are heterogeneous, irreducible among themselves.25 The performance of a poem is a movement occurring in time. Stress is a part of this movement, but it only occurs as an element (or rather a complex of

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elements) of the movement that the performance of a poem is. As something distinct from the space of the poem as text, the movement of performance is not divisible and as such stress can only be ‘placed’ very approximately – as, traditionally, around or across a syllable rather than at an instant. The stresses on ‘top left’, for example, are easy to place across the entire syllables, but they exist across the syllables and cannot be located without taking into account the factors, outlined above, that produce the stresses across the movement of the poem. These stresses are also, however, embodied in performance. The plosive ‘p’ of ‘top’, the carrying over of the pitch from ‘top’ to ‘left’, the pause indicated by the semicolon before the end of the line and the enjambment over to ‘bruise’ and the sensation of ‘harm’ that that produces – all are sensations (phonic sensations, but also the corporeal sensations of articulation) that are actualized in performance and are actualized in the body of a reader. Performance is a sensational and temporal unfolding of a poem in conjunction with a self and body of a reader. This is a conjunction that produces a third body, the body of an actualized poem, that exists only in this conjunction and that is a movement of a poem in performance. Just as the living body of a human individual exists not only in space but necessarily also in time, so the body of an actualized poem must be temporal and in fact can only exist in a movement of performance. Brian Massumi, in Parables for the Virtual: movement, affect, sensation, considers movement as follows, When a body is in motion, it does not coincide with itself. It coincides with its own transition: its own variation. The range of variations it can be implicated in is not present in any given movement, much less in any position it passes through. In motion, a body is in an immediate, unfolding relation to its own nonpresent potential to vary. That relation, to borrow a term from Gilles Deleuze, is real but abstract.26 The movement of the performance of poetry is transitional, an unfolding of an actualized body of a poem in all its variability. This variability might be said to be both ‘in’ a poem-text and ‘in’ a reader but is, ultimately, not really ‘in’ either but is, like the actualized poem itself, the conjunction of the two. The conjunction of reader and poetic text that is the actualization of the poem through performance, in other words, ‘is’ ‘its own nonpresent potential to vary’ and, as such, ‘is’ variability.27 That variability includes stress. Stress occurs as a part of the unfolding of a poem, as an element of its variation, even though it will almost always (through different performances and different readers) occur at approximately the same time, around the same syllable. The stress on that syllable is written into poems and is a part of the musical landscape that unfolds in the movement of performance. It is not, however, present to itself, it is not present in an instant, but unfolds and arises as the result of the unfolding present of the movement of a performance. This is also the case with every other element of a poem. A poem is a performance of an unfolding movement of a

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block of sensations in conjunction with a reader (who is also, for the time of the performance, the actualization of the poem). The belief that stress may be isolated and pinpointed at an instant is essentially the ancient problem of Zeno’s arrow, which is the result of an erroneous conversion of time into space. Oliver states that time is experienced as a ‘succession of passing moments’; time is indeed often thought of that way and is measured that way – it is the easiest way to conceptualize time – but my contention is that time is not that and it is not experienced that way. Thinking of time in this way is a result of the difficulty of thinking movement, as movement, at all; but spatializing time by dividing it up into successive moments, instants or points, while often useful for everyday thought about time, destroys living time by stopping movement: When Zeno shoots his philosophical arrow, he thinks its flight path in the commonsense way, as a linear trajectory made up of a sequence of points or positions that the arrow occupies one after the other. The problem is that between one point on a line and the next, there is an infinity of intervening points. If the arrow occupies a first point along its path, it will never reach the next – unless it occupies each of the infinity of the points between. Of course, it is the nature of infinity that you can never get to the end of it. The arrow gets swallowed up in the transitional infinity. Its flight path implodes. The arrow is immobilized.28 However, an arrow in flight does move, as does a performance of a poem. Stress, or any other element of a poem, cannot be located at an instant without, by implication, dividing the entire poem up into an infinity of instants and thereby stopping the reading and making reading, as performance, impossible. Massumi goes on to say, The path from bow to target is not decomposable into constituent points. A path is not composed of positions. It is nondecomposable: a dynamic unity. That continuity of movement is of an order of reality other than the measurable, divisible space it can be confirmed as having crossed.29 This is a return to Deleuze on Bergson’s theses on movement; movement is indivisible while space is infinitely divisible. The attempt to locate stress at a specific instant divides poems and immediately converts them into space rather than movement. This is tantamount to an ontological shift whereby a poem is transformed from an indivisible dynamic unity to divisible static space; it is also a transformation of the present of movement to the past of space. The possibility of locating stress is therefore dependent on whether a poem is analysed as a linguistic structure or encountered as a performance. If it is the former, then stress may be identified in a very specific place, but only as an

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abstract principle. In performance, stress as sensation is movement and so cannot be isolated from the movement of a performance of a poem as a whole without halting that movement and pushing the entire poem, as static space, into the past. Stress is therefore only actualized in performance. Attempts to isolate it at an instant of time render it virtual within the text of a poem where it might be located in space. This virtual stress is real, but its operation is only actualized in performance. This makes it relational and singular (although complex) and therefore, though it may be comparable to stress in other performances, it cannot be comparable to some ideal form of itself – there is no perfect instant at which it may be located. Consideration of a poem as performance and movement means that each performance is singular and irreducible and therefore is not a copy of some ideal performance. A poem, as a simulacrum, is not only itself not a copy of some ideal original, from the essence of which it draws its being, but it is also not itself some ideal original that has an essence; an actual poem is a performance that is a living, moving and embodied conjunction of reader and poem, not some separate ideal that the performance mimics. This, however, does not mean that all performances are equally good or equally valid. The more fully the forces that exist virtually in the unperformed poem are actualized in the performance, then the better that performance is. A performance that failed to actualize the stresses across ‘top’ and ‘left’ for example, that only mumbled them if read aloud, or that stressed ‘at’, would be a relatively poor performance of the poem. Stress is obviously only one element of a poem’s music, only one element of movement through the formal landscape of a poem. It is of particular interest in the discussion of the primacy of the movement of performance because it is so easily reduced, conceptually, to an instant or a point, giving the illusion that poems are static and spatial rather than dynamic and temporal. Of course, it is in movement and performance that the force of stress is most clear; its status as primary sensation in unity with other elements of a poem (even if its position is a dissonant one) is most obvious when it rises up out of, and is fed by, all the elements (in all the poem’s dimensions) around it. It thereby becomes clear that it cannot in fact be reduced to a point or an instant but is an element of a poem’s flow or movement. Again, it is sensation that comes to the fore in performance; it is sensation that is revealed to be the primary element of all those that make up a poem.

Sensation and signification A poem’s musical line is only one of its dimensions, and a poem is made up of signifiers that do, of course, signify. If, as is the contention here, a poem’s signifiers operate in the service of sensation then I will need to look more directly at the relationship between signification and sensation.

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Stress has, of course, a relationship with signification; the most direct and complex relationships between sensation and signification, however, occurs in a different dimension. As already stated, a poem in performance has at least three dimensions, two of space and one of time.30 That is to say that the poem as it is performed has two spatial dimensions – the formal landscape of the poem’s music and the imaginative landscape of the poem’s images and nonimage-based sensations that are produced via signification. The poem also has a temporal dimension of movement through these landscapes (a movement that is, of course, through both dimensions simultaneously, just as you cannot move through any one of the everyday spatial dimensions without moving through the other two), a movement that releases, or actualizes, the forces that the sensations of the spatial dimensions virtually are when the poem is unperformed. These dimensions, intertwined, feeding off each other, in all places concurrent, are distinct but indiscernible during the performance of the poem much as the four space-time dimensions of the everyday world are distinct but indiscernible in lived life. Looking at any one of these dimensions in isolation is an abstraction, but this is sometimes critically necessary and useful. Having looked, in relation to stress, at one of the spatial dimensions in conjunction with movement, I will now examine the other. I will also shift the focus, at least initially, from percepts to affects (though percepts will inevitably be of importance in what follows as they are inseparably an element of a block of sensations along with affects). I have referred to affects a number of times already, but it is now necessary to clarify exactly what these are and what they do. ‘Affects’, say Deleuze and Guattari, ‘are no longer feelings or affections; they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them.’31 There are two immediate points to be drawn from this: as the percept cannot be reduced to perceptions or assimilated to the concept of perceptions, so the affect cannot be reduced or assimilated to the concept of ‘feelings’. This is because the affect is, like the percept, nonpersonal; this fact is indicated here by the use of the word ‘undergo’. Individuals do not have or produce affects; affects come to individuals from the outside. They, this word ‘undergo’ might imply, assault the individual. Like percepts, affects are monumental forces that exist virtually in a poem and that are brought into an encounter with the reader when they are actualized in a performance. ‘We attain to the percept and the affect only as to autonomous and sufficient beings that no longer owe anything to those who experience them or have experienced them’;32 affects are non-personal and nonhuman, ‘nonhuman becomings of man’.33 Nonhuman because non-personal in that they assault or infect, and conjoin with, readers from the outside and in that they exist as virtual forces and intensities within a poem and do not depend on a reader for their existence. For example, in Mendelssohn’s ‘underground river.’, the lines ‘& black & dull silk shift on her wooden studio / hand half crippled by an ugly thing’ are composed of (among other elements) an affect of rusticity that is produced by

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(or arises out of) the percepts of ‘black’, ‘dull’, ‘wooden’ and even ‘hand half crippled’ and ‘ugly thing’. Working somewhat against this affect of rusticity is an affect of sophistication that arises out of ‘silk shift’ and that is a continuation of an affect produced by the ‘ocean liner’s lights’ and the ‘white flannel’ in the previous two lines. The fact that, narratively, it is the silk shift (sophistication) that is ‘black & dull’ (rusticity) and therefore contradictory affects are at work in the same narrative (and for that matter grammatical) element of the poem is itself a factor in a larger, more over-arching deterritorializing affect of this poem (though I will note, in passing, that the use of alliteration has a territorializing or reterritorializing effect that helps to ground readers). I will attempt to explain how the specified percepts produce the affect of rusticity. ‘Black’ and ‘dull’, while grammatically and narratively tied to the silk shift, suggest both earth and the wood of the studio and so suggest a closeness to both earth and wood. This in itself is enough to produce an affect of rusticity. This affect, once established, is further strengthened by ‘hand half crippled’ in that this latter phrase is suggestive of the hard physical labour associated with rustic life, the struggle that is also suggested by the ‘ugly thing’ that is of a piece with the crippled hand (having, narratively, caused it). This latter phrase specifically suggests a ‘timeless’ rusticity, which would mean a mythic pre-modern rusticity of the peasantry and associated connotations of ignorance (through an apparent inability to identify the ‘ugly thing’) and, again, a struggle that is beyond mere hard work but is a struggle for even a meagre existence – a level of struggle that is already suggested by the half crippled hand. Whether or not these associations and connotations are historically accurate as regards the peasantry is irrelevant to an understanding of the poem as a block of sensations or of the place of affects in that composite block. These lines are not ‘about’ the pre-modern peasantry and this analysis is not an interpretation of their meaning. It is an analysis of the way that a sensation is produced. Similarly, ‘rusticity’ is not a concept in this case; it is an affect, a sensation, a force or intensity. ‘Rusticity’ is not what these lines mean, it is what they do. Turning to ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’, the poem’s apparent objectivity is, as I have already stated, an affect and I have argued that this affect is in part produced out of the performance of the poem’s musical percepts such as stress. I will now focus on the way this affect is both produced and undercut through a movement of signification and a production of image, concentrating on the sentence from the first stanza that runs: ‘His recall is false but the charge / is still there in neural space, pearly blue with a / touch of crimson.’ This sentence’s initial statement continues the production of the objectivityaffect by placing the male figure as an object under observation, about which observers have superior knowledge. This objectivity is further underwritten by the more specific affect of scientificity that rises out of the phrase ‘neural space’. Such scientificity, of course, again implies an authority; it does not necessarily imply authoritarianism, though this might be implied by the fact that ‘he’ is

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spoken about but is not addressed. He is an object of study. All of these elements feed into the objectivity-affect of the first two phrases of this sentence. The word ‘charge’ is interesting because of its association with concepts of force or intensity; however, the concern here is with the way this word works for the composition of sensations rather than concepts. The fact is, of course, that it is precisely those conceptual associations that produce the word’s sensation; the force of the word is force itself. While ‘charge’ is perfectly consonant with the affect of scientific objectivity, it also introduces (not for the first time in the poem, but for the first time in the sentence) a specifically aesthetic resonance. Scientificity and objectivity, as affects, are again not concepts here but are themselves aesthetic, forces of sensation; however, their force is one of distanciation. As intensities, their role is to deny intensity, to erase themselves; however, that erasure has its own force and that force is aporetically the aesthetic force, the affect, of objectivity or scientificity. ‘Charge’, on the other hand, although it is entirely in keeping with scientific discourse, also suggests, and so produces to some extent, intensity itself. However, given that it is, also, a common term in scientific discourse, its power to undercut that discourse by producing an intensity that works against distanciation would remain at best weak and only barely actualized, were it not for the phrase ‘pearly blue with a touch of crimson’. This introduction of colour and delicacy (the latter produced by ‘a touch of’) transforms the sentence and undercuts the scientificity, without in any way eradicating, or even erasing, either it or the broader objectivity of the poem. This introduction of colour is also the introduction of beauty into the poem’s imaginative landscape, a beauty that increases the aesthetic force of ‘charge’ because the pure sensation of colour has a consonance with ‘charge’ that runs counter to the distanciation of scientificity. The blue is not however pure like an Yves Klein painting, it is rather ‘pearly’, which gives to the colour a luminescence that works with the delicacy of ‘a touch of’ to ensure that the overall affect is not only beautiful but gentle. This again works against the cold force, the austerity, of the objectivity-affect. Similar movements and affects are at work through the second stanza. The first sentence of the second stanza, ‘What mean square error’, again produces a powerful and powerfully authoritative objectivity-affect by way of ‘mean square error’. The word ‘error’ is very formal and works in conjunction with the mathematical resonances of ‘mean’ and ‘square’. However, ‘mean’ also works with ‘What’ (‘What mean’) to produce an affect of unkindness, making the whole sentence read like a judgement upon the unkindness of an other, an emotive affect that is at odds with the objectivity-affect that is produced simultaneously. Similarly again, just a couple of lines further on in the same stanza, the word ‘patters’ in the phrase ‘patters like scar tissue’, is an aesthetic percept that undercuts the medical scientificity of ‘scar tissue’. This also works directly against the attempt, in the previous phrase, to render ‘blame’ as somehow objective, as something that might be ‘input’ (‘the expanded time-display depletes the / input of “blame” which patters like scar tissue’).

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The compositions of affect in this poem are very complex and, again, work to deterritorialize and reterritorialize the reader simultaneously. The affects of objectivity and scientificity are deterritorializing because they are not what is expected when encountering a poem; they disrupt the habits of reading. At the same time, however, they are also and simultaneously reterritorializing because they are authoritative, providing the reader with something to trust. The intrusion of the ‘properly’ aesthetic, however, subverts this authority and trust even as it is produced, which has a further deterritorializing effect, although apparently bringing the reader back to the ‘proper’ place of poetry. The play of deterritorialization and reterritorialization is complex and continuous, but as with most, if not all, contemporary innovative poetries the overall movement of the poem is deterritorializing, productive of a line, or a number of lines, of flight. Where, and through what landscapes, these lines will take readers remains to be seen.34 Even if sensation is primary in relation to signification, there is often a direct relationship between them and sensation is, as in Prynne’s ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’ and its use of the word ‘charge’, often reliant upon signification. However, I still need to make the relationship between signifier and sensation more explicit. Brian Massumi’s essay ‘The Autonomy of Affect’,35 in which he considers the relationship of image and language in the production of affect, is of great importance here. He argues that there is no necessary correspondence between the force of an image and any meaning that might be connected to it through explicit signification, a distinction that he makes between what he terms effect and content, or, with greater precision, intensity and quality: What is meant here by the content of the image is its indexing to conventional meanings in an intersubjective context, its sociolinguistic qualification. This indexing fixes the determinate qualities of the image; the strength or duration of the image’s effect could be called its intensity. What comes out here is that there is no correspondence or conformity between qualities and intensity.36 The content, or the quality, of an image is its shared meaning, its ‘sociolinguistic qualification’ or signification; the force of the image is its effect or intensity. It should be noted that in this essay Massumi is writing about the visual image, specifically the televisual image, so that, when he considers the relationship between the image and language, language is an external element imposed on the image. However, in this distinction, the image is considered as the carrier of affect while language is considered purely as signification, which renders Massumi’s considerations very useful, at least initially, for my purposes. There is, in fact, a necessary relationship between signification (or quality) and sensation (or intensity) when what is under consideration is an entirely linguistic text. However, that relationship is not necessarily one of straightforward

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correspondence. Massumi further specifies the relationship between intensity and qualification, the affect of the image and its linguistic signification, as follows: The relationship between the levels of intensity and qualification is not one of conformity or correspondence but rather of resonation or interference, amplification or dampening. Linguistic expression can resonate with and amplify intensity at the price of making itself functionally redundant. When on the other hand it doubles a sequence of movements in order to add something to it in the way of meaningful progression – in this case [the television programme under discussion] a more or less definite expectation, an intimation of what comes next in a conventional progression – then it runs counter to and dampens the intensity. Intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback that momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future.37 For Massumi, then, language does not simply provide information of one sort or another with regard to the image, but rather it either resonates with the image or it interferes with it. If the language provides a narrative, if it conventionalizes the image, or if it simply translates the image into signified concepts – in short, if language has priority over the image, over sensation – then language dampens, or possibly even destroys, the intensity of the image. Intensity is, of course, sensation; in his essay, Massumi identifies it provisionally (for, he says, ‘present purposes’38) with affect, but it could just as easily be percept. What Massumi refers to as language is, on the other hand and for the purposes of this book, signification, given that in poetry language is both signification and sensation, both quality and intensity. Massumi is also very clear on the relationship between affect and emotion: An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized.39 Emotion is the conventionalization of affect and its transformation into personal and social meaning. It is, in other words, the non-personal sensation of affect, a non-human force that assails the reader, tamed, transformed into meaning, assimilated and thereby in a sense destroyed – for, as Massumi puts it, ‘Intensity is the unassimilable’.40 Which is to say that intensity cannot be assimilated and remain intensity. Assimilation here means yoking intensity to ‘the same’, to identity and recognition, and this is the link with narrative. Narrative literature is composed of

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sensations, which is to say of intensities and individuating differences, but the narrative itself, as the structuralists demonstrated so convincingly, largely conforms to recognizable structures that vary around central tropes. Narratives within a genre, for example, are all ‘the same’. Of course, without difference and individuation, narratives would become painful, beyond a reader’s infancy, in their repetition, and are therefore not the same. Narrative always escapes, is always in excess of its own most essential structures – but, in principle (unless disrupted by complexity (Joyce, Pynchon) or reduced to the point of destruction (Beckett) or left open beyond the possibility of resolution), it conforms to the logic of the same. On the other hand, because sensation, whether affect or percept, is not assimilable (insofar as it remains sensation and is not conceptualized) by the personal, it has the power to connect the individual to that which is non-human without converting it to conceptual meaning, without assimilating it to a logic of the same that effectively tames or destroys it. Contemporary innovative poetry, composed of sensation, the non-human landscapes and becomings of the human, confronts and opens the human to the cosmos of difference through its deterritorializing forces. However, poetry is composed of sensations that are in large part themselves produced out of language, out of signification. In poetry, language does not come to sensation from outside in order either to resonate with or dampen it; signification works to produce the sensations that compose the poem. Deleuze and Guattari argue that, Art undoes the triple organization of perceptions, affections, and opinions in order to substitute a monument composed of percepts, affects, and blocks of sensations that take the place of language. The writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry or even sing . . .41 Literary language, perhaps poetic language in particular, as it ‘passes into’ sensation and moves away from signification, away from the concept, is imbued with force that is actualized in conjunction with a reader, in the body of a performed poem. It becomes effective and significant in ways that signification cannot be; it is intensity, it is force, and it acts upon and with a reader with whom it is conjoined, and upon the world. I wish to look again, briefly, at the short phrase ‘His recall is false’ from the fourth line of Prynne’s ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’: the words in this phrase are perfectly recognisable, they would appear to signify, their meaning ought to be easily recognized and assimilated. However, their meaning is not recognized: they signify only in a very general and almost abstract sense. This is because they have only general reference: ‘his’ indicates a male, but that is all. A reader will not know who ‘he’ is. Readers also have little sense of what ‘he’ is recalling other than the sense that it may have involved violence

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due to the bruise referred to in the preceding line. There is no sense of why that recall is false. For all its simplicity, this phrase can only signify incompletely. However, what is signified is that ‘he’ is observed from the outside and that the observer understands ‘his’ past better than ‘he’ does. It is this that produces the sensation, the affect of authoritative objectivity, which is not a concept but a force, an intensity, a sensation. The signification produces the sensation, although each word may have no sensation of its own and the phrase does not produce an image. The phrase is entirely conceptual and signifying, and yet the signification is short-circuited and the phrase passes from concept into sensation. The language is simple and authoritative and yet it stammers and produces a deterritorialization, a line of flight, because signification breaks down and it does not fulfil its standard, habitual function. As poetic language passes into sensation it also passes into the present – at least as long as it remains in performance and in movement. Sensation in poetry is movement when it is actualized, though in its virtual form it continues to exist in the spatial dimensions of the poem. It follows, therefore, that actualized poetic sensation is always in the present. This is a question that impacts upon the relationship between sensation and meaning in poetry. Importantly, poetic sensation as the present has an immediacy that signification does not have. Given that the poetic sensations that issue from the imaginative dimension of the poem are produced initially by signification (although signification may be short-circuited in the process), this introduces a serious complication into the relationship between poetic sensation and signification. Writing about the Francis Bacon’s paintings, Deleuze states that, ‘The Figure is the sensible form related to a sensation; it acts immediately on the nervous system, which is of the flesh . . .’42 This immediate acting upon the nervous system by sensation is just as true for poetry and is also a problem for understanding poetry. Sensation certainly acts immediately upon the nervous system; however, sensation is, in part, produced through signification, which is characterized by deconstructive differance, which is to say by a simultaneous and eternal difference and deferral from and of itself. If sensation is produced by a signification that is the destruction of immediacy and presence, then it surely cannot itself be present and immediate. There are two, equally valid, responses to this problem. Firstly, signification and sensation are not the same, for all that the former may produce the latter. Signification acts primarily through the intellect rather than directly on the nervous system and is itself a system of nonpresence, of differance. However although signification has to pass into the intellect, it is that passage itself that actualizes sensations that exist virtually in an unperformed poetic text. Sensation does not in any case have to pass through the intellect before acting immediately upon the nervous system but with poetry the intellect is itself also the site of sensation’s actualization. The intellect is one interface, a point of conjunction, of a reader and a poem; therefore poetic sensation, sited in a reader’s intellect as it is actualized out of signification, acts directly on that reader’s nervous system from an ‘internal’ site.

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Secondly, there are two different concepts of time at issue. With relation to differance and temporality, Derrida writes: It is because of différance that the movement of signification is possible only if each so-called “present” element, each element appearing on the scene of presence, is related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element, this trace being related no less to what is called the future than to what is called the past, and constituting what is called the present by this very relation to what it is not: what it absolutely is not, not even a past or a future as a modified present.43 To some extent, this is consonant with the view of movement set out above. As Brian Massumi says, in movement a body does not coincide with itself, ‘it coincides with its own transition’; in differance, each element of signification is present only in relation. Signification ‘is’ only as not-past and not-future, thereby carrying both of them with it such that, ‘really’, there is no present of signification. Or rather, the present is not insofar as it is considered as a locatable presence in space. The present is movement. However, it should be recalled that differance is concerned, first of all, with signification and not with sensation. Signification moves on in eternal differance while sensation produced out of signification in the intellect of a reader makes an immediate assault on that reader’s nervous system. What is present in the movement through differance of signification is the process of the production of signification, while it is signification itself, as such and in the fullness of being, that is never present. If signification were fully present, it would not signify but would simply be. Sensation does not itself signify (although it may have great significance); all the same, with apparent similarity to signification, sensation is not in a fullness of being, because then it would exist squarely in space rather than being a process of movement in time. Unlike signification, however, it is fully present, acting immediately on the nervous system of a reader. Sensation is not beingpresent; it is, however, present-becoming (and not becoming-present, which would imply that it was not fully present and is closer to differance, the movement towards, without ever reaching, signification), a differentiating individuation. The movement of a performance of a poem is both present, as stated by Deleuze, and a nonpresent potential to vary, as stated by Massumi.

The non-linear dynamic of the reading-performance Returning to ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’, it is my belief that the objectivity-affect of ‘His recall is false’ is a dynamic presence that acts upon a reader’s nervous system but which is born in her mind out of an understanding

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of the signification of the words and of the failures of signification of that phrase. The dynamic present-becoming that sensation is as movement is not, however, simply linear. A performance of the poem (in the sense being pursued here, which is primarily that of an individual reading to him or herself whereby an actualized poem is that reading, embodied and dynamic, rather than the text on the page) would appear at first sight to be a linear movement, and forward movement is clearly involved. However, movement through the space of the poem is simultaneously forwards but also often back through the poem as well. This movement back is not a movement into the past, but rather a non-linear movement that picks up and actualizes, in relation to what is being read in the forward movement through the text, sensations that have remained virtual on the first pass over them. Thereby new sensations are actualized or the intensity of sensations already actualized is heightened through resonance. For example, towards the end of the third stanza of ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’ there is the phrase ‘and he rises like a plaque to the sun.’ This phrase increases the intensity of the poem overall through ‘rises . . . to the sun’. The phrase could be conceptualized as composing an expansive-affect that increases the intensity of the poem as a whole. This expansive-affect builds on earlier affects such as the composition of beauty in the phrase ‘pearly blue with a touch of crimson’ in the first stanza or, in the third stanza, on the corporeal percepts such as ‘starry and granular’, which are an immediate counterforce to the scientific ‘neuroleptic’ – which is to say that it increases the intensity of those elements in the composition of the poem that are productive of aesthetic force rather than the elements that produce the force of aesthetic deadening. This general resonance with particular elements of the poem’s composition is not the only way in which the phrase picks up on already past elements of the poem, however. A reader who does not know all the possible significations of the word ‘plaque’ might take it as a marker of (which is to say productive of) the enigmatic, an affect that is already a major element of the poem’s composition through a general lack of clear signifying reference. A plaque in the sense of an inscribed piece of metal or stone does not generally ‘rise to the sun’, rendering the simile non-signifying. However, the word ‘plaque’ also signifies, in medicine, a small raised region of tissue that is a result of localized damage. Knowing this alters the expansive-affect of the phrase in which it appears; it has a constraining, deadening effect. The notion of rising to the sun, suggesting flight and freedom, gets only a very short way when it is the rising of damaged tissue, the swelling of an injury. Yet at the same time the rising is and remains ‘to the sun’ and pushes against this constraint. Again, the phrase has a radically deterritorializing force both in the expansive-affect that continues to exist despite ‘plaque’ and in the combination, the composition, of this sensation with the affect of constraint produced by the word ‘plaque’. There is a frustrated yearning for the line of flight that the

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phrase promises and refuses, a swelling of the heart, perhaps, that is pulled down bathetically by the swelling of wounded tissue. However, the word ‘plaque’ also casts its own light back over the poem and makes fresh connections with the ‘fear of hurt’ in the second line, the ‘bruise’ of the third, the ‘damage control’, perhaps, at the end of the first stanza, and so on. These wound-percepts (and it is worth bearing in mind that the poem was originally published in a chapbook called Wound Response) build on each other across the poem, producing through a non-linear movement across them (each occurrence resonating with those that have gone before) an affect that might be called ‘harm’ that is an element of the composition of the poem but which is not to be identified with a single word or phrase. It is composed non-linearly. The final line of this poem, ‘Only at the rim does the day tremble and shine’ holds a privileged position signalled by the fact of its separation from the rest of the poem, symmetrical to the title. It might be expected to perform an analogous function to that of the title, conventionally either providing some sort of information about the poem or summarizing it. The title ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’ does not do this, though it resonates with the poem as a block of sensations. The final line, which is often similarly expected to have some kind of explanatory or defining function for the rest of the poem, again does not appear do so in this case. However, the line is authoritative and definitive. It is rhythmically regular and its grammar suggests that the reader is being told something definite. To this extent it continues the authoritativeness of the objective- and scientific-affect elements of the poem. There is a sense of coming to rest in this line, of coming to rest in something certain and secure. It is a line that reterritorializes. Despite this, it also fails to signify anything definite, or at least anything recognisably so. Rather, the line is definitive in terms of sensation. The presentbecoming of the poem might be said to culminate in this line in that it pulls the composite sensations that are the poem in one direction, which is that of sensation and the aesthetic itself. That is to say that the objectivity-affect is finally subordinated to the more positive sensations that have been working both with and against it throughout the poem, although the poem retains the objectivityaffect’s sense of authority. Looking back to the phrase ‘and he rises like a plaque to the sun’, for example, the final line picks up forcefully on the expansiveaffect of the earlier phrase and extends it, rather than the constraint and frustration of ‘plaque’, which is therefore, though not by any means erased (the interplay of the objectivity-affect and the other aesthetic affects and percepts at work in this poem is a large part of its remarkable overall force and dynamism), downplayed or subordinated. This is partly because, although the regular rhythm and authoritative grammar of the line actually pick up and extend some elements of the objectivity-affect, so providing a movement of reterritorialization that brings readers to rest, the imaginative space of image-percepts and signification-based percepts are overwhelmingly deterritorializing.

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The word ‘rim’ – clearly, and by definition, a figure of decentring – pulls readers out onto itself; it is a percept that produces an affect of marginalization that is a line of flight away from the territory of the centre and yet, because of the opening phrase ‘Only at’, which suggests significance, it draws the ‘centre’ – in the sense of the place of significance and importance – with it. Therefore the movement of the line is already deterritorializing, often a forceful sensation in its own right. This deterritorialization picks up further force by way of the fact that ‘the rim’ is non-specific (which is to say that it is not specified what it is the rim of) but is simultaneously associated with ‘the day’, which would normally not, as composed of time rather than being an object in space, have a rim. However, as an entity composed of time rather than being an object in space, the day would not normally be considered capable of trembling and shining, either. These percepts, ‘tremble’ and ‘shine’, end the poem with (and as) forcefully deterritorializing sensations. The specific affect that they produce is, again, an expansion-affect. This expansion-affect, then, picks up on, extends and intensifies the similar affect produced three lines previously. However, the reasons for this affect are more difficult to discern here. It is partially the result of the deterritorialization that is produced: positive deterritorialization is often exhilarating, carrying with it a sense of liberation, of fresh possibilities and possibly of flight in the sense of moving through the air rather than escape, which the phrase ‘lines of flight’ primarily refers to. However, ‘tremble’ also suggests great force held precariously in check, about to burst forth, while ‘shine’ can also suggest force or power – specifically as heat – but also beauty. All of these individual sensations combine to compose an intensification of the expansive-affect to produce, as the coda to the poem, a euphoria-affect (though one tinged with an anxiety that attends any forceful movement of positive deterritorialization) that simultaneously unfolds across the rest of the already-read poem to resonate with the dynamic forces that have been at work there. However, once again, this does not mean that the colder, harder, objectivityaffects are erased. They play a vital role in the dynamic composition of the poem, but also in the significance of the poem as a block of sensations – for the poem is not simply consumed by readers and discarded but has, or has the potential for, profound effects on readers. In this case, a reader will be deterritorialized in the direction of the object; a reader, in conjunction with the poem, is placed as an object as a part of the world alongside other objects. The dynamics of the poem – the movements produced both by the objectivityaffects and the various other percepts and affects that both subvert such objectivity and enable it to transcend itself – allow readers to place themselves as objects in a way that is not a reduction implied by the conventional subjectobject opposition or the usual use of the word ‘objectification’ but is rather almost a spiritual objectification whereby an individual is conjoined via the poem to the world as a part of that world and not opposed to it – yet also with all due regard to the absolutes of difference. Such objectification is not what

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the poem is ‘about’ in the sense of what it signifies, what it means: it is what the poem does. To sum up slightly reductively, I have argued, then, that what is of real interest in the study of innovative poetry in particular is not ultimately what a poem supposedly represents or signifies. For me, the object of study is rather what a poem does. As a poem is composed of sensation it is upon sensation that critics need to concentrate when attempting to elucidate what the poem does. It is also necessary for such study to consider poems as performed and thereby actualized and active (in conjunction with readers) because to consider a poem as a text, rather than as a performance, is to consider it in its virtual form and is to fail to grasp it in its full material and active potential. Contemplating poems in abstracted isolation, however, will still fall short of a comprehensive understanding of what is at stake in contemporary innovative poetry. I now wish, therefore, to return the poetry to wider questions as I investigate the ways in which poetry, considered as composed of sensation rather than signification, remains significant beyond immediately formal concerns. The primary mode of investigation will remain close reading – I am still interested in what the poetry does rather than in its sociological references, for example – but these readings will demonstrate the ways in which an innovative poem, far from being a rare and discrete aesthetic object, is rather one that remains vitally in touch with the world of which it is a part. Chapter Three will therefore consider the significance of sensation in contemporary innovative poetry as a form of social thought.

Chapter Three

The significance of sensation: innovative poetry as social thought

The question of the relationship between poetry and society is not simply a question of the perspective of writers, their political opinions, gender or class. Given that an actualized poem is a conjunction of poetic text and reader in performance and is therefore an embodied relationship between them; given also that the sensations of which a poem is composed are non-personal and even non-human, then a poet’s existence, whether personal or political is not a priority (bearing in mind that my focus is on reading rather than production). My initial questions here are those of the manifestations of society in contemporary innovative poetry, of that poetry’s subjection to, and possible transcendence of, society and of the social significance of the sensations that compose contemporary and recent innovative poetry. I intend, in short, to focus on the relationship between poetry itself and the way in which society is manifested in or through poems. In the essay ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’,1 Adorno wrote: Such work, however – the social interpretation of lyric poetry as of all works of art – may not focus directly on the so-called social perspective or the social interests of the works or their authors. Instead it must discover how the entirety of society, conceived as an internally contradictory unity, is manifested in the work of art, in what way the work of art remains subject to society and in what way transcends it.2 From Adorno’s perspective, then, the exploration of poetry’s relationship to society must proceed via an ‘exacting examination of the works themselves’;3 in other words, it is not a question of applying sociological concepts or of tracing the role played by poetry in society. Certainly, such procedures are not directly concerned with poetry itself; this does not mean that they are uninteresting or unimportant, but that they are essentially institutional questions. The primary concern in this book, on the other hand, is with what poetry does in performance, which is to say in conjunction with a reader. The most obvious mediation between an individual and social or collective forces is provided, in part, through poetry by language. There are, therefore,

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linguistic aspects to these questions that require investigation. However, it will be useful for me to move immediately to an example, to a specific poem, to begin to address these issues. Denise Riley’s poem ‘Wherever you are, be somewhere else’ (the title of which is taken from a Nintendo advertising campaign4) is, like Mendelssohn’s ‘underground river.’, a poem that draws on modernist traditions to innovate on a basis laid down by the lyric form. It is very much concerned with an individual in the world, a lyric subject: Draw the night up over my eyes so that I don’t see and then I’m gone; push the soft hem of the night into my mouth so that I stay quiet when an old breeze buffets my face to muffle me in terror of being left, or is that a far worse terror of not being left. No. Inching flat out . . .5 The concern with the lyric subject is most clearly figured here by the predominance of the words ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘my’; it is also clearly figured through the withdrawal-affect of which this extract is in part composed. This withdrawalaffect appears at first sight to be a protest against the social in the classic Adornian mould, although there is an ambiguity in the final two lines, which are composed in part of an indecision regarding ‘being left’ and ‘not being left’. Before reaching this point, however, the passage is composed first of a comfort-affect in the dimension of the poem’s imaginative landscape. This comfort-affect is drawn out of a child-percept that is the lyric subject, although the lyric subject is not exactly a child as such. The child-percept is itself drawn out of a plaintively anxious address that has a naïve faith in the childish notion that to be unable to see is to be invisible, or even to disappear altogether (‘and then I’m gone’). The addressee is figured, meanwhile, as a parent or responsible adult tucking the child into bed, the night presented as a blanket or duvet; these are further elements of the comfort-affect, that simultaneously coexist with the plaintive anxiety-affect. The comfort-affect quickly evolves, however, into something darker, though something that may be, to an extent, prefigured in the authority of the parentfigure that the addressee is cast as. The subject is forcibly silenced, gagged with the night-blanket, a percept of violence that gives rise to an affect of assault, though the assault is not only not entirely unwelcome but is demanded (‘push the soft hem / of the night into my mouth so that I stay quiet’), as the comfort was. The ambiguity here prefigures the directly stated ambiguity of the indecision between the two evils, being left or not being left. All of these affects, whether cast as comfort or as ambiguously demanded assault are ultimately withdrawal-affects. This withdrawal-affect may be seen as a protest against society and a desire for a Platonic purity of the nonmaterial and invisible soul

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(given that the poetic subject in this poem wishes to disappear from view); it may be seen, therefore, as a movement of reterritorialization onto traditional metaphysical notions of the subject. However, the fulfilment of such desires are disallowed by this poem right from the outset, due to the pronounced material investments of the title’s origin. Given this, there is still a line of flight being traced that is itself prefigured in a general way by the title (which is, it should be recalled, ‘Wherever you are, be somewhere else’). The combat between the material and the immaterial that is an essential element of this passage is directly figured in the percept of the night-blanket that is used as both comforter and gag. Night and blankets are associated in any case, but here they are conflated such that darkness and the sublime immensity of the dark, light-prickled sky are materialized and domesticated for a physical affect of safety/comfort and of material violence in quick succession. This percept of the night-blanket is such that its two primary constituents cannot be separated; they are indiscernible and yet distinct. Yet they are of such difference that they must remain fruitfully in combat with each other even as they are locked together. This is almost a figure of poetry and society. Returning to the poem’s title, having marked the ‘pronounced materiality’ of its ‘origin’, it seems necessary to similarly mark the fact that it is, in this instance, a title of a poem and not an advertising slogan – or at least it is not any longer only an advertising slogan. The poem transforms that particular enunciation; instead of simply suggesting escapism (a move from one area dominated by means-ends rationality to another, where play is for profit and/or for the rest and recreation of the workers, preparing them for a return, unchanged, to the fray), it suggests a potential for escape that is more profound, an escape from the dominant practices of enunciation, from simple utility, by transformation itself. It suggests a line of flight, a process of deterritorialization. Broadly considered, the poem is this deterritorializing process, a transformative act, composed of intensities, that produces a situation that is other than that of reigning social practices, even as it makes use of (and is caught in a productive combat with) material produced by and for those practices. In ‘The Education of Desire’,6 Robert Sheppard writes of poetry that is specifically not the language of advertising, that ‘is a way of criticising the way society uses language, the way it thinks’;7 he goes on to say, Another result of the poem not being written in the language of advertising or the language of our society is that it is a thing apart from it. It exists independently of the controls of our society. It must start out from the world, because that’s where the writer is, where language is. He or she must create with bits and pieces of the world.8 This indicates the notion of institutional autonomy. Sheppard is, however, positing something more: the transformation of language through innovative

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poetry is, for Sheppard, a crucial element of poetic autonomy, poetry’s difference from and opposition to the dominant social practices that surround it. It presents a direct and immediate challenge to contemporary social modes of thought and experience. The title to Riley’s poem is ‘written in the language of advertising’, but that language is thereby transformed. She has created the poem ‘with bits and pieces of the world’ that are crucially altered by taking on a new position and entering into new relations with the world, including with language itself, which are also lines of flight and processes of deterritorialization. The poem traces shifting positions and interactions, but it also produces, or composes, them. These relations are those of a reader insofar as a reader is, in performance, a poem; this is what it means to say that the poem is itself ‘real’ (paradoxically because it is a simulacrum rather than a representational copy) and has real effects. In an innovative lyric such as ‘Wherever you are be somewhere else’, a reader’s position in relation to the poem’s address (doubled as both the lyric ‘I’ and the addressee of the poem) allows for a self-reflexivity that means that the poem’s tracing of shifting subjective positions becomes a tracing and even inscription of those positions in the body of a reader. This is, again, all the more the case insofar as the poem, as actualized in performance, is in part the body of a reader. It should be stressed that all poetry, and all art, does something analogous to this. All art is real and has real effects on a viewer, a reader or a listener. In terms of poetry, if a poem is of a traditional and conservative cast, then that poem will inscribe (or rather, in such a case, reinscribe) stable subject-positions and relations with the world (and with society) into a reader’s body. Conservative poetry reterritorializes readers, whereas innovative poetries deterritorialize readers; what I am emphasizing here, though, is that this is a physical and material process. Returning these observations to the passage cited, the poem’s subject is both enveloped and invaded by the night while buffeted by ‘an old breeze’. The comfort, the invasive assault and the violence of the buffeting compose a constellation of distinctly problematic relationships with the world, and with society. But these problematic relationships are not settled in a turning away and a refusal but come down to an ambiguity: ‘in terror of being left, or is that a far worse terror of not being left. No.’9 This is what the poem, or rather at least this section of the poem, does. It composes and ultimately inscribes in the body of a reader this combat, this continual process of deterritorialization, that is the instability of the subject in relation to itself and to society. An element of this combat and deterritorialization in process involves ambiguities of identity, a recurring concern across Riley’s work, both in her poetry and in her philosophy. Here is a figure or affect of a child, a child-affect that is an element of an adult, demanding comfort, demanding its own assault that it might hide or be kept hidden. Yet the ambiguity (and the self-reflexivity) goes further. The imperative may be read as being addressed to the speaker, the poetic subject, which would render the violence as not only demanded but

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directly self-inflicted. This is underscored in the formal dimension of the poem’s musical landscape, whereby the paucity of punctuation produces a rush of language across the passage, a childlike burst of conflicted desire. This rush is broken by the semicolon after ‘gone’, a temporary dam in the flow of language that provides an even greater force in the rush that follows, up to the hesitation of the comma after the first ‘left’. The semicolon divides the initial comfort-percept from the invasive assault-percept, but it does so with only a pause, a brief slowing of the sensational rush of language that, all in all, tends to a smoothing of distinction between addressor and addressee, of demands, desires and terrors. A similar ambiguity attaches to the word ‘muffle’, sharing as it does a sense of a silencing, possibly violent (referring back to the silence of the night and forwards to the ‘terror of being left’ – silencing screams or moans of fear perhaps), and a sense of wrapping up for warmth, which refers to the ‘old’ (an echo of the more usual and perhaps expected ‘cold’) breeze – although in fact, grammatically, it may be the breeze itself that does the muffling (giving the violent sense of silencing the upper hand). This is an intensely ambiguous passage, and indeed poem, and as such traces a very fraught relationship between the poem and society (and by extension between an individual and society). It should never be forgotten, though, even for an instant, that this is not a purely, or primarily, intellectual process. Riley’s innovative lyric inscribes itself as a sensational thought of this ambiguity in the physical body of the performed and actualized poem. The poem’s ambiguities militate against the instrumental rationality that dominates society insofar as they resist assimilation to such rationality. While these affects may be understood conceptually, such understanding cannot fully grasp them; they are aesthetic and must be encountered as such. This means that, while they are thought, they are a mode of thought that is non-representational and non-signifying and beyond conceptual assimilation. This is a central element of a protest and a resistance that is produced in the performance of contemporary innovative poetry: it is productive beyond the utilitarian considerations that conceptual assimilation would tend to service. Of vital importance to the conceptual understanding of the social significance of this aesthetic encounter, however, is a clearer understanding of the role of language (in a broad sense, not merely as signification) in its production. This must begin with an understanding that language is fundamentally social and that poetry, therefore, is also fundamentally social. We may already find in language itself something of the ambiguous relationship between the individual and society, and between poetry and society, that was found in Riley’s ‘Wherever you are be somewhere else’. Adorno states: . . . the lyric work of art’s withdrawal into itself, its self-absorption, its detachment from the social surface, is socially motivated behind the author’s

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back. But the medium of this is language. The paradox specific to the lyric work, a subjectivity that turns into an objectivity, is tied to the priority of linguistic form in the lyric; it is that priority from which the primacy of language in literature in general (even in prose forms) is derived. For language is itself something double. Through its configurations it assimilates itself completely into subjective impulses; one would almost think it had produced them. But at the same time language remains the medium of concepts, remains that which establishes an inescapable relationship to the universal and to society. Hence the highest lyric works are those in which the subject, with no remaining trace of mere matter, sounds forth in language until language itself acquires a voice.10 This is a dense paragraph and requires some unpicking. Lyric poetry (and especially conventional lyric poetry) presents a withdrawal from the social into the self; such a withdrawal is paradoxically social because of what Adorno terms the ‘priority’ of language in poetry. Adorno’s statement that the poem is ‘socially motivated behind the author’s back’ is justified by the notion that language is necessarily social in itself; the social motivation of a poem is mediated by language, as well as by the fact that a poem’s withdrawal from utilitarian concerns is a protest at a society that is based on the dominance of means-ends rationality. Language is, according to Adorno, both subjective and objective. It both expresses ‘subjective impulses’ and provides a relationship with society and with the notion of the ‘universal’ through concepts. The purity of private subjective expression, freed from matter and from utility, becomes through the transformation of poetic production objective and social; the voice of the subjective ‘I’ is transformed into the voice of language itself and so becomes objective. The barrier between the individual and society, subject and object, apparently so firmly set up in lyric poetry in particular, is in fact rendered at least permeable if not entirely illusory by the poem itself. On the other hand, the notion that there is ‘no remaining trace of mere matter’ glosses over the question of the materiality of language itself and so too of the poem. One of the vital features of innovative poetries, I’ve argued, is their tendency to foreground their own recalcitrant materiality; this materiality is productive of a real relationship between readers and poems that is, by extension, a real relationship between readers and the world, even with the cosmos. This is in distinction to the projected ideal relationship between readers and poets, or between readers and ideal essences assumed by more traditional or conservative poetries. Adorno’s own arguments in fact set up a vital interrelationship between the subject, society and language that is undermined by his apparently idealist reversion to a concept of ‘mere matter’, however much this latter is couched in terms of an opposition to dominant material practices. Denise Riley’s poetry, on the other hand, is often specifically

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concerned with precisely the kind of interrelationship that Adorno’s argument otherwise reveals. As Carol Watts states: Significantly, even as her poetry mines its intense introspection, it acknowledges a radical externality within identity itself, which works through the affective material that appears to take the most personal of forms.11 The ‘radical externality’ that is an element in the self and its production includes language, the most basic material of poetic production; in fact, language is precisely ‘the affective material that appears to take the most personal of forms’. This is not to say that language is, simply, radically external itself. It is neither internal nor external. Language, as social, has its materiality and cannot simply be separated or abstracted from material social practices, utilitarian or not. There is always, at the very least, a ‘trace of mere matter’. Both the materiality of language and its sociality include the pragmatic realities of the ways in which it is used. If my concern is with what poetry, as composed of sensation, does rather than what it means then it is important, when investigating the social significance of sensation in innovative poetries, to think more broadly of what the language, the material basis of poetic sensation, also does. One of the things that language does is to refer. Saying that language refers is very different from saying that it represents. Although reference is only one of the things that language does, it is vital and it is vitally non-hierarchical; rather than a copy referring to an original, there is one thing referring to another. The play of the references that are actualized in any one performance of a poem determine the actualization of sensations that takes place in that performance. In other words, the ways in which reference is actualized through the conjunction of text and reader determines ultimately what a poem, as the sensational body of the performance, is in that movement of actualization – and for all that the actualizations of reference might on one plane be essentially private, the references themselves, are essentially social. A reader, as an individuating human, is always and through every second entirely situated, always social. For example, while Riley’s ‘old breeze’ references more than ‘cold breeze’, it does reference this other phrase through the implied assonance between ‘old’ and ‘cold’, strengthened by the expectation, entirely social in nature, of ‘cold’ as the more usual construction in everyday speech. As well as this sociallinguistic reference, though, ‘old’ also refers to notions of age. Although the phrase might suggest that the breeze may be cold, producing a discomfortpercept, it states that it is old. The coupling of ‘old’ and ‘breeze’ couples age with an elemental force, the air, in an ambulant state; these references taken together then produce an affect that is ancient, primeval and vital. This affect is in turn underscored by the undecidability of reference for the phrase itself. It is associated, by juxtaposition, with night, again suggesting the primeval, but the reader is given no indication of where the breeze might come from or

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in what sense it might be said to be ‘old’. This referential undecidability reinforces the affect of primeval force by the production of an enigmatic quality, a mystery and non-knowledge. The preceding association with night and the associations produced in the lines that follow promote further the resonance of this affect: over a glacier overhanging blackness I see no edge but will tip where its glassy cold may stop short and hard ice crash to dark air.12 Just to briefly mark the relevant associations: ‘glacier’, ‘blackness’, ‘no edge’, ‘glassy cold’ (‘cold’, of course, resonating again with ‘old’), ‘hard ice’ and ‘dark air’; these, for this particular associative train, are effectively key words and phrases that at least gesture in similar directions of affect and percept – the primeval, the dark, the powerful and the powerfully non-human. The poem itself goes on to disparage these very gestures and the forces and sensations put into play here, referring to them flippantly as ‘these gothic riffs’.13 However, they remain a legitimate element of the poem and the attempt at flippant dismissal cannot entirely dissipate their power. In fact, this gesture of dismissal is premised on the notion that the ‘gothic riffs’ are simply a disguise, ‘a black twitchy cloak to both ham up and so / perversely dignify my usual fear of ends’,14 but the gesture itself seems ultimately impermissible here, given that the poem is concerned with complexities of identity. The fact that the ‘gothic riffs’, while dismissed, are not excised from the poem but remain in place indicates the bare fact that they cannot be simply despatched insofar as they already exist. Their power is autonomous of any directly signified attitude expressed elsewhere in the poem. It cannot even be said that they are ‘unconscious’; they are simply there, elements of the complexity of the poem that continue to function, to produce affects. In order for these passages of the poem to work they need to refer via sedimentations of meaning that have built up through pragmatic language-use. As such, for all their appearance of individual expression, they necessarily draw on the social, conventional elements of the language. In this respect the poem’s language clearly operates, as Adorno says, as ‘something double’, both subjective and objective. Although the conventional (and therefore social) production of meaning (and ultimately, in poetry at least, of sensation) is necessitated by the arbitrary nature of the sign, the very same factor (the production of meaning by social convention) provides limits to the hypothesis of the arbitrary sign. This is because once reference is conventionally established then some relative motivation must enter the construction of actual acts of enunciation. As Prynne has stated in an essay from 1992, [What is excluded by the Saussurean system are] secondary relations within the abstract schedule of language structure that ramify operative connections

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At first sight, Prynne might seem to be asserting the importance of the diachronic development of language over against the synchronic system for the possibility of motivated meaning production in poetry; he talks, for example of codes developing ‘a history’ and, again, of ‘the pragmatic history of . . . the social and generically-coded uses of a specific language’. There can, indeed, be little doubt that the primeval, non-human and ‘gothic’ affects and percepts produced by the sections from ‘Wherever you are be somewhere else’ that have been quoted here are drawn from a history of usage of language that, by definition, cannot be provided by a synchronic system in and of itself. Even though such associations are part of the synchronic system (or else we would have no access to them), the fact is that they had to have to come from somewhere; they necessarily need to have developed – and still be developing. The fact that these associations may gain greater resonance by the enigmatic-affect produced by a refusal of referential connection that is also enacted by the poem is further evidence that language cannot be accurately figured or studied simply as a synchronic system. Such a refusal of referral produces new and different routes to significance through sensations that are a-signifying; such movement signifies nothing other than the movement itself and yet is productive of something other than self-reflexive textuality because it proceeds via an intersection with reference. In short, the refusal of reference works as an element in the referential resonance of the poem that produces sensations and blocks of sensations; rather than leaving these sections of the text as free-floating and non-referential as a whole, new connections are made, or the connections that are already in place are strengthened – providing an intensification of the, in this case, overall anxiety-affect that is produced. On the other hand, Prynne characterizes historical and pragmatic factors as secondary; in other words, the sign remains primarily arbitrary. It is true that the sign is arbitrary, but it may be possible to fruitfully question a hierarchization of motivation and arbitrariness. The purely arbitrary sign exists on a plane of abstraction where it is true that ‘old’ has no necessary connection with the physical process of aging or with the passage of time or with the past as such. Pragmatically, however, the word ‘old’ has a certain conventional place within the linguistic system and cannot be used arbitrarily – it has to refer to some advanced state of aging and to a certain pastness because these are the pragmatic context of the word. This is to say no more than that, once again, signification is conventional. Yet such conventionality allows for possibilities of motivation – Riley’s use of ‘old’ in conjunction

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with ‘wind’ produces force through the resonance with ‘cold’ that this conjunction sets in motion, drawing on pragmatic associations between age and low temperatures – the cooling of a living or once-living body as it loses, or once it has lost, vitality. In this case, therefore, the phonic or graphic element of the word adds to the sense through its conjunction with other words beyond, but inseparable from, direct reference. So the possibility of this kind of motivation would seem to depend upon the conventionality of meaning that in its turn is a product of the arbitrary nature of the sign. On the other hand, the arbitrary nature of the sign is impossible to trace to a historical origin. The examination of linguistic history or the examination of language in different cultures will only ever uncover pragmatic usage productive of some kind of intensity or force. It is really only possible to discover arbitrariness as a structuring principle, through the analysis of an abstract synchronous system. While the sign may be logically arbitrary prior to any secondary motivation, these two elements of the sign – the one a vital aspect of its existence, the other one of its vital possibilities – actually co-exist within its fractured and multiple reality. This co-existence marks an articulation within the sign between the individual and the social. This is the doubleness of language referred to in the quotation from Adorno cited earlier. The experimental poetic motivation of language, particularly in the kind of innovative lyric produced by Denise Riley, would seem to be exemplary of the assimilation of language to subjective impulses. Language as a synchronic system, on the other hand, would seem to represent language’s objective, and so social, aspect. This is, of course, entirely consistent with the classic structuralist opposition between langue and parole where the former is the objective system of language and the latter the ‘merely’ incidental, subjective individual act of speaking. As Deleuze and Guattari point out, however, this is a problematic formulation: William Labov has clearly shown the contradiction, or at least paradox, created by the distinction between language and speech: language is defined as the “social part” of language and speech is consigned to individual variations; but since the social part is self-enclosed, it necessarily follows that a single individual would be enough to illustrate the principles of language, without any outside data, whereas speech could only be studied in a social context.16 The motivation of language, whether in speech or in poetry, is itself both individual and social because the production of meaning is the result of social usage, not simply individual usage; it is a product of accretions of meaning that can only occur over time and through social linguistic interaction. The dialectic implied by Adorno between subjective and objective, individual and social, with language taking on the synthesising role, does not quite work because social and individual, objective and subjective are not exactly antitheses in the first

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place. While the ‘objective’ language system relies on the social for the conventionality that provides the arbitrary sign with its power to signify, it remains separate from that social aspect of itself as long as it is regarded as a pure objective structure of ‘scientific’ study. Yet such separateness is impossible to maintain if the linguistic system is to retain any functionality as a linguistic system, which requires both individual and social aspects of actual language-use: It makes it impossible to maintain the distinction between language and speech because speech can no longer be defined as the extrinsic and individual use of a primary signification, or the variable application of a preexisting syntax. Quite the opposite, the meaning and syntax of language can no longer be defined independently of the speech acts they presuppose.17 ‘It’ here is the ‘theory of the performative sphere [whereby speech is primarily action; before naming, before expressing, speech-acts], and the broader sphere of the illocutionary’;18 in fact, Deleuze and Guattari’s approach through speech-act theory and pragmatics does more than deconstruct the opposition between the individual and the social in linguistics.19 They go further and state that there ‘is no individual enunciation. There is not even a subject of enunciation.’20 This does not in fact mean that there is no individual but rather that all enunciation is in fact always already social and pre-individual. There can be no individual enunciation because all enunciation is primarily social: The social character of enunciation is intrinsically founded only if one succeeds in demonstrating how enunciation in itself implies collective assemblages. It then becomes clear that the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified, only to the extent that an impersonal collective assemblage requires it and determines it to be so. It is for this reason that indirect discourse, especially free indirect discourse, is of exemplary value: there are no clear, distinctive contours; what comes first is not an insertion of variously individuated statements, or an interlocking of different subjects of enunciation, but a collective assemblage resulting in the determination of relative subjectification proceedings, or assignations of individuality and their shifting distributions within discourse.21 The ‘collective assemblage of enunciation’22 that Deleuze and Guattari are working towards here is made explicit in Denise Riley’s poetry in the course of its deconstruction of the traditional lyric ‘I’; the subject in that poetry performs a kind of indirect discourse that, in a seeming paradox, is coupled to the subject itself. As Carol Watts states: [T]hat ‘I’ is extended into the world almost prosthetically (often through technological means), picking up past and present frequencies of sound and

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imprints of sense – the lyrics of songs, the ‘stammering’ of the motors of language, the shape of clichés, lines from film scripts, and slips of the tongue – through which it comes into being.23 One example of this is the title ‘Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else’, which, as stated earlier, is drawn from the world of advertising. This is just the most obvious and visible instance of an apparently subjective enunciation drawing on a collective assemblage; all enunciative acts do so. Riley’s poetry, though, again as seen earlier, is not content to simply use the collective linguistic material available within the culture and society that it is born of. Such material is transformed by such use. The transformation that this material undergoes does not remove it from society and it is certainly not removed from the collective assemblage of enunciation. It does not become ‘subjective’ and absolutely does not become freed from the constraints of ‘mere matter’ – but it does become a singularity. Singularity, as I am using the term, has a double aspect: it is something that is singular in the sense of single or unique; but it also denotes a stronger sense, derived by analogy from mathematics, of not obeying the usual rules by which it might be expected to be governed (often, in a poem, those of language) and being unique in terms of its operations. Such singularity is an element of larger structures, blocks or syntheses and is a part of their production. It is also produced by such structures and syntheses; yet it cannot be entirely assimilated to them. Such a singularity may be a product of a transformation of context or of syntactic or rhythmic placement and it must still necessarily draw on the resources of the collective assemblage of which it remains a part in order to produce the sensation that, in poetry, defines its singularity. A poem (or the elements of a poem – while a poem is singular, there will often be elements of it that are themselves singularities, internal differences, within the overall production of the poem) as a singularity is its opposition or resistance to the society of which it is a product. The singularity, says Deleuze, ‘as differential determination is pre-individual’:24 The world of ‘one’ or ‘they’ is a world of impersonal individuations and pre-individual singularities; a world that cannot be assimilated to everyday banality but one in which, on the contrary, we encounter the final face of Dionysus . . .25 Again, a contemporary innovative poem, a product of singularities and itself a singularity, is precisely that which ‘cannot be assimilated to everyday banalities’: banalities present in a poem are transformed and transformational, productive of difference, singularity and individuation, opposed therefore to society, to commodification and to reification. A singularity, as I use it here, is that which provides the possibility of an encounter that is precisely opposed to an experience of recognition that is both the source and the result of habit.

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Recognition is a repetition of the expected. It is habit, producing a sense of safety; therefore, recognition dovetails with what are usually thought of as ideological modes of experience and militates against thought and against the encounter with otherness. Even when there is an apparently radical political element to what is being recognized, recognition is often reified experience and conservative. It is true that recognition and habit are necessary elements of life, but their negation or disturbance is also necessary if there is to be any chance of escape from the deadening effects they produce – if there is to be any chance of thought. In order to understand singularities and their subversion of habit and recognition as this is performed by contemporary innovative poetry, it will be necessary to take a couple of steps back at this point, into the collective assemblage of enunciation, and examine Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the ‘order-word’. The understanding of this concept is central to an understanding of language’s sociality and ultimately to an understanding of poetry as both a challenge to that sociality insofar as the latter encodes dominance and as a singularity that exists only in terms of the social. According to Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.’26 This does not place orders, power or the order-word, as Deleuze and Guattari call it, at the origin of language ‘since the order-word is only a language-function, a function coextensive with language’.27 Nor are order-words only or even essentially imperatives as such: We call order-words, not a particular category of explicit statements (for example, in the imperative), but the relation of every word or every statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words to speech-acts that are, and can be, accomplished only in the statement. Order-words do not concern commands only, but every act that is linked to statements by a “social obligation”. Every statement displays this link, directly or indirectly. Questions, promises, are order-words. The only possible definition of language is the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech-acts current in a language at a given moment.28 Order-words are not only to be discovered in the denoted meaning of enunciation but in connotation, implication and presupposition. The most obvious examples of this might be found in politics or advertising – a text that supposedly communicates or transmits information is also, and primarily, saying ‘buy this’ or ‘vote for us’. A less obvious example, given by Brian Massumi, is of the traditional and most likely patriarchal head of a household asking who has the salt at the dinner table. The interrogative is simultaneously imperative: ‘Don’t just sit there, for Christ’s sake, hand it to him’.29 Order-words, however, do not simply communicate demands but also produce order. As Massumi states: ‘Order’ should be taken in both senses: the statement gives an order (commands) and establishes an order (positions bodies in a force field).

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The order-word culminates transformations that place the concerned body or bodies in a position to carry out implicit obligations or follow a preset direction.30 It is not so much that the order-word means two different things simultaneously but rather that to command and to produce order are the same operation, as the quotation above indicates. To produce order is to set a body moving in ‘a preset direction’; to do so is effectively to issue a command. The order-word is an element of the collective assemblage of enunciation that is productive of that assemblage itself in that it is productive of the order that such an assemblage requires. Deleuze and Guattari refer to the definition of language as ‘the set of all order-words, implicit presuppositions, or speech-acts current in a language at a given moment.’ Language appears to be divided up into three categories here, but these categories are not distinct. Implicit presuppositions are what enable order-words to operate as such; presuppositions are necessary to the production of order. They are constitutive of the possibility of pragmatics in language-use and pragmatics are constitutive of order; otherwise there would either be a chaos of explicit explanation of intent, or language would cease to function altogether as the necessary accretion of meanings failed to occur. As for speech-acts, order-words are of course precisely that. There seems at first sight to be a lack of space for anything other than the re-production of a preestablished order as all of language is given over to the activity of order-words. A response to this problem is in the fact that the order-word is a variable rather than a constant: The order-word is precisely that variable that makes the word as such an enunciation. The instantaneousness of the order-word, its immediacy, gives it a power of variation in relation to the bodies to which the transformation is attributed.31 Order-words do not all produce the same order. This opens up the question of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘incorporeal transformations’,32 the acts that speech-acts perform: These acts seem to be defined as the set of all incorporeal transformations current in a given society and attributed to the bodies of that society. We may take the word ‘body’ in its broadest sense (there are mental bodies, souls are bodies, etc.). We must, however, distinguish between the actions and passions affecting those bodies, and acts, which are only noncorporeal attributes or the ‘expressed’ of a statement.33 An incorporeal transformation is the act performed upon a body by an enunciation; it is incorporeal because the body isn’t actually affected as such, but is rather transformed in terms of its relation to other bodies and to itself.

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Deleuze and Guattari give the example of the accused in a criminal trial being transformed into a convict, a transformation that is the ‘expressed of the judge’s sentence’.34 Another useful example is in the categories of human maturation: Bodies have an age, they mature and grow old; but majority, retirement, any given age category, are incorporeal transformations that are immediately attributed to bodies in particular societies. ‘You are no longer a child’: this statement concerns an incorporeal transformation, even if it applies to bodies and inserts itself into their actions and passions.35 Returning this to the concept of the order-word, they have a ‘power of variation in relation to the bodies to which the transformation is attributed.’ One way of moving towards an understanding of this might be to say that the order-word is a site of political contestation; which would be to say that language as a whole is a site of political contestation. The transformations produced by acts of enunciation are political and the variations that Deleuze and Guattari refer to have social and political consequences. Thus, to declare with the authority of the mass media, as happened in the United Kingdom in the 1980s, that the Labour Party was ‘unelectable’ (read ‘don’t vote Labour’) was effectively to make it so. Without altering the body of the Labour Party itself as such the declaration was an intervention, an act that produced certain political effects. A different intervention would have produced different results. Similarly, but with greater complexity, contemporary poetry intervenes in language itself through language and so intervenes in the articulation of the individual and society. The phrase ‘Wherever you are, be somewhere else’, as used by Nintendo ‘is’ also, as with almost all advertising, the order-word ‘buy this product’. Positioned as the title to Denise Riley’s poem this act of enunciation becomes more ambiguous with regard to its function as an order-word. As a title it has its place marking out the beginning of the poem and differentiating it from any previous poem in its published context. It produces a certain order. Yet its function must be more complex than this. The important position of the second-person pronoun ‘you’ appears (amongst other possibilities) to address readers; this might indicate that the poem is going to express a concern with readers – the suggestion that they might escape perhaps, or at least shift position. The poem itself shifts position a number of times, keeping readers off-balance between, for example, the ‘gothic riffs’ and their disavowal. Or later in the poem the lines, Or no, I can earn nothing, but maybe some right to stop now and say to you, Tell me. That plea for mutuality’s not true. It’s more ordinary that flying light should flap me away into a stream of specks a million surfaces without a tongue and I never have wanted ‘a voice’ anyway, nor got it.36

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This short section contains three shifts, two clearly marked and one less so. The first is a shift from the previous section of the poem, marked by the phrase ‘Or no’, a clear disavowal of the previous section (which stated that the poet has ‘earned a modern, what, a flatness’,37 drawing on that commonplace of critical discourse, stylistic flatness in modernist art forms); the second shift is marked by the phrase ‘That plea for mutuality’s not true’, refusing the previous attempt to communicate directly with readers, denying not only its efficacy but its sincerity, playing with the complexities of subject-positions and address of lyric poetry. The third shift is in the form of expression itself, from the conversational and the demotic to the more clearly poetic, vital and energetic lines that ironically follow the phrase ‘It’s more ordinary that’ with a sudden upsurge of beauty. These shifts echo what might be called the ‘literal’ sense of the title. Within the development of the poem as a whole, the title as order-word seems to become capable of a return to its original reference in advertising, with its suggestion of escapism, while transforming it into a suggestion of the possibility of transformation itself. As an order-word it could be read as the imperative ‘transform’ or even ‘deterritorialize’. The poem, of course, cannot simply be reduced to this; the irreducibility of it to the order-word of its title is an element of its singularity, for if it could be so reduced then it would be just an exchangeable symbol. The performance of deterritorialization, in a number of registers not least of which is the fact that this is an innovative transformation that is still recognizably a lyric poem, is the vital factor in the singularity of the poem. The poem produces a singularity from a banality through a step, or a number of steps, of transformation; it does so in opposition to the society that produced it. This is accomplished through the linguistic manoeuvres and experiments performed by the poem; as such the transformation is produced out of a performative pragmatics that is inseparable from poetic experimentation. On the other hand, the attempt to produce an order-word the order of which is ‘deterritorialize’ more directly would only produce a concept at best and may well be reduced back to a banality. Deterritorialization in poetry can only be produced as a performance that inscribes itself in a reader’s body as it becomes the body of the performed poem. This inscription cannot be a straightforward order-word that simply stands in opposition, binary or otherwise, to dominant order-words. It must be understood as something that, inscribed through sensation in the body of the performed and actualized poem (and so in the living body of the reader), is productive of corporeal transformation. It may remain, to some extent, an orderword but it also works against itself if this is so, as it works against language as comprised of order-words in general. There is, says Paul Celan, a ‘word against the grain’;38 D. S. Marriott has translated this concept as the ‘counter-word’.39 The counter-word ‘is an act of freedom, it is a step’;40 it ‘is homage to the majesty of the absurd which bespeaks the presence of human beings’.41 Celan also states, ‘This, ladies and gentlemen, has no definitive name, but I believe that this is . . . poetry.’42 Marriott, on the other hand, states that ‘in the transformatory moment of the counter-word and

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the occasion of its occurrence, human being is opened up to the irrational in the fullest sense’.43 For Marriott at least, this moves the human beyond itself: This recognition of the uncanny other within the self is a recognition that poetry reveals the non-human within the human. It is here, too, that poetry’s moment of ethical encounter or ‘conversation’ can begin, a moment which gathers the other into a ‘thou’ . . .44 There are two elements of this quotation that are of central importance here, one of which is the question of the non-human (and by extension the place of the uncanny), the other being the ‘encounter’. This latter, already an important concept here but left largely unexamined so far, will perhaps best be approached via a reference back to Celan and a detour through Deleuze. This approach will ultimately lead back to the non-human insofar as the encounter is an important concept for reaching beyond assumptions of ‘humanness’ and the assimilation of otherness to ‘the human’. Celan states that the obscurity of poetry ‘is not congenital, has been bestowed on poetry by strangeness and distance (perhaps of its own making) and for the sake of an encounter’.45 The ‘strangeness’ of poetry, or perhaps rather its difficulty, is of course a major concern of the first chapter of this book. There, difficulty was found to be in part a result of the historical development of Western poetry’s institutional position, the development of autonomy, of professionalization and the historical shift away from the assumption of the necessity of the representationalist illusion in favour of the resources of difference and individuation provided by our ontologically univocal situation. This tension between the autonomous development of poetry and its social situation is to some extent reflected in Celan’s statement. The peculiarity of poetic strangeness (its own strangeness) is that it is two things at once; or rather perhaps that it faces at in least two directions at once. Responsibility for this strangeness seems to lie with poetry and yet to be beyond its control; it is ‘of its [poetry’s] own making’ and yet it, seemingly autonomously, bestows obscurity on poetry. Obscurity and strangeness are inseparable; they are produced by innovative poetries and yet such poetries are not producing them willy-nilly. They are ‘for the sake of an encounter’. These formulations run the risk of becoming almost mystical; they certainly run the risk of mystification. They can, however, be unravelled satisfactorily. The ‘strangeness’ of innovative poetry is a product of the ways in which it exploits the resources opened up to it by the modernist shift away from the illusions of representationalism. As such, it is produced by poetry and yet at the same time it is thrust upon poetry by historical circumstance: it becomes virtually inevitable in principle as poetry develops institutional autonomy. This strangeness, this sense of the uncanny, renders poetry obscure for those who would read innovative poetries according to representationalist assumptions.46 The deterritorializing effects of strangeness and the sense of the uncanny may

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be termed ‘encounters’. The strangeness and obscurity of innovative poetry is ‘for the sake of an encounter’ insofar as ‘encounter’ is another word for the transformations wrought by the bodily actualization through performance of an innovative poem. Celan calls the encounter a ‘mystery’,47 but there is no reason for there to be anything strictly mysterious about it. Deleuze characterizes the encounter as follows: Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. . . . It may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition.48 This opposition to recognition is important. Recognition is a habitual element in the experience and welcoming acknowledgement of that which is expected; it is opposed to the intensities that Deleuze cites here (wonder, love, hatred, suffering) and is a powerful element of reification and the acceptance of dominant order-words. The encounter, on the other hand, is fundamentally deterritorializing, disrupting habits of recognition and providing what Deleuze refers to as the ‘conditions of a true critique and a true creation’.49 It is a condition in which presuppositions, however necessary for everyday life, become problematic insofar as they block the encounter itself and so block the potential of thought. Opposed to everyday recognition, the encounter touches on otherness, on that which is other than a subject and potentially other than human. Marriott writes of ‘recognition of the uncanny’, though ‘encounter with the uncanny’ might, on the strength of the above, be a more precise phrase. Celan also speaks of a movement towards the uncanny and the other: But I think – and this will hardly surprise you – that the poem has always hoped, for this very reason, to speak also on behalf of the strange – no, I can no longer use this word here – on behalf of the other, who knows, perhaps of an altogether other.50 For Celan, then, this is one purpose for poetry – a poem speaks on behalf of the other, of otherness. Given that a poem is itself non-human – the sensations that compose it exist independently and virtually in the unperformed poem – yet can only be actualized through a performative conjunction with a reader, a poem is itself already both human and other. The fact that actualized poetic language is a performative conjunction of a reader and the world, in all their joint materiality, that inscribes itself in the body of the reader, takes this further and suggests that an innovative poem is always an encounter as long as a reader is prepared to do whatever is necessary to actualize the poem. This inscription

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in a reader’s body, the counter-word, is an expression of freedom, is on behalf of the other and is poetry itself. The counter-word is an expression of freedom because it is in opposition to the dominant discursive forms of society by definition; if the counter-word did not operate counter to a society’s dominant order-words then it would not be a counter-word (it would have no deterritorializing force). What still requires some clarification, though, is whether or not the counterword is also an order-word (though one that runs counter to the dominant order). The fact that it is actualized as deterritorializing sensation and is therefore inscribed in the body of the reader (as the body of the poem), rather than producing an incorporeal transformation (like an order-word) suggests the latter; as does Celan’s reference to the ‘absolutely other’. So, too, does the example from Danton’s Death, by Georg Buchner, that he presents: . . . here where it all comes to an end, where all around Camille pathos and sententiousness confirm the triumph of ‘puppet’ and ‘string’, here Lucile is suddenly there with her ‘Long live the king!’ After all those words on the platform (the guillotine, mind you) – what a word! It is a word against the grain, the word which cuts the ‘string’, which does not bow to the ‘bystanders and old warhorses of history’. It is an act of freedom. It is a step.51 The first reason for saying that this ‘Long live the king’ is not itself an orderword is that it does not represent an ‘allegiance to the “ancien regime”’;52 it does not produce new order, or attempt to reproduce an old one, but stands, in essence, in defiance of the existing order. Within the immediate context of its singular production it is simply the sensation, the inscription within Lucile’s body (and then in the bodies of the audience) of defiance itself and so of freedom. Prynne’s poem ‘Es Lebe der König’, dedicated to the memory of Paul Celan, takes its title from the original German form of Lucile’s ‘God save the king’ in Buchner’s Danton’s Death. If the phrase in the context of the play is a counterword, then Prynne’s poem transforms its operation without necessarily transforming its status. As long as readers of the poem know the reference to both Buchner and Celan (a clue being provided by the dedication) then the title would seem to be offering a specific reference to the concept of the counterword itself; as such it may be offering itself as an order-word that implicitly indicates the poem as a counter-word, or as being composed of counter-words. If, on the other hand, readers are unable to translate the title, do not know German or are unable to complete the reference to Buchner via Celan, then the title becomes a problem that the poem cannot solve. It will hang over the poem as a difficulty that the poem cannot dispel, an enigma; there is nothing in the poem that will throw light back upon the title if the references are not picked up from the outset (or from external research). The encounter with

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such an enigma can produce certain affects on a reader – agitation or befuddlement perhaps. If this is the case then the title works as a counter-word itself, refusing the usual referential expectations, running counter to the usual ordering function of a title. It will have, however, diminished force because it is less focused. The first stanza of the poem runs: Fire and honey oozes from cracks in the earth; the cloud eases up the Richter scale. Sky divides as the flag once more becomes technical, the print divides also: starlight becomes negative. If you are born to peaks in the wire, purple layers in the glass format, re-enter the small house with animals too delicate and cruel. Their throats fur with human warmth, we too are numbered like prints in the new snow.53 This stanza is in part composed of a block of sensations that might be called ‘cataclysm’. It consists of percepts of eruption, earthquake, mortality, the negation of starlight and the collapse of meaning as well as a terror-affect that is inevitably produced out of these. In the dimension of the poem’s imaginative landscape there is a continual movement-percept that is an element in the intensity of this terror-affect: ‘Fire and honey oozes’; ‘the cloud eases up the Richter scale’; ‘Sky divides’; ‘the print divides’; ‘starlight becomes negative’ and so on. This is a continual deterritorialization, of course, that is not only the necessary movement of the performed poetry (the poem’s third dimension, a movement that Prynne’s poetry often intensifies and exploits through rapid switches in discourse, tone or address) but is a percept of inexorable shifting that is produced out of present-tense verbs (oozes, eases, divides, becomes). These sensations are inscribed in the body of the performed and actualized poem (that of a reader) and their non-signifying nature (words and phrases of course signify but there is no apparent ultimate signification) stands somewhat in defiance of the dominant instrumental rationality, in accordance with Adornian thinking on the social position of lyric poetry. Despite the fact, therefore, that the force of the block of sensations is cataclysm and the most forceful affect is terror, the poem would be the performance of a step of freedom: a counter-word. The movement-percept is continued in the second stanza: It is not possible to drink this again, the beloved enters the small house. The house becomes technical, the pool has copper sides, evaporating by the grassy slopes. The avenues slant back through the trees; the double music strokes my hand. Give back the

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Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze fringe to the sky now hot with its glare, turning russet and madder, going over and over to the landing-stage, where we are. We stand just long enough to see you.54

Just to focus on the relevant verbs once again: enters, becomes, evaporating, slant, strokes and turning. ‘Slant’ would not usually indicate a movement so much as a direction, but it picks up a kinetic force here due to the more active verbs that surround it; this particular force is especially deterritorializing as a result, as the percept is of the landscape itself (‘The avenues’) moving away at an angle from the speaker. Again, none of these deterritorializing movements have any apparent cause or signification; and once again, it is this lack of meaning that gives them their particular cataclysmic force. The block of sensations ‘cataclysm’ therefore is composed of counter-words insofar as a disorientating, deterritorializing affect of disorder is inscribed in the body of the poem. This remains, however, a relatively simplistic sense of the concept of the counter-word; if left at that, the poem would be doing little more than being strange, standing in a position of petulant refusal of the society of which it is inescapably a part. There is, however, very much more to it than this. Firstly, cataclysm may be related to the death of Celan, whose suicide in 1970 is marked by the poem’s dedication. There is a sense of the poem enacting mourning, a disruption of the world at the loss of a great poet, much in the manner of the disruptive events on the death of Christ, as reported in the gospel of Matthew: And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many of the bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city and appeared unto many.55 The poem as counter-word performs a disruption of order in response to a specific event and for a specific purpose. It is not representative as a result, it is entirely performative, although it becomes possible to reduce the performance to the signifier ‘mourning’. However, although this is one of the poem’s modes of operation, to leave matters here would still be a gross simplification. Thinking again in terms of the poem’s explicit reference to Celan, its deterritorializing performance may be related to the negative deterritorializations forced upon, in particular, the inmates of concentration and death camps by the Nazi authorities during World War II. Celan’s life and work were deeply scored by the holocaust: both of his parents died in an internment camp in Transnistria56 and it was a latent fear of persecution rooted in the holocaust that

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‘flared up after 1960 & led to his suicide in 1970’.57 Through readerly knowledge of this, and the force of the cataclysm-sensations, the deterritorializations performed by ‘Es Lebe der König’ steer towards the black hole of the rigid and merciless but arbitrary and absurd rules binding life in concentration camps. The poem’s movement towards one of the most serious and extreme historical instances of negative deterritorialization is given greater impetus by its terroraffect. Of course, a poem could never do much more than make a referential gesture in this direction (that of a negative sublime); even the illusion of a successful representation is impossible. Despite this reference, however, the overall movement of deterritorialization performed by this poem is positive: it remains ‘a step’; it remains ‘freedom’. The disruption and the agitation produced oppose the dominant modes of contemporary experience – dominance, reification, means-ends rationality – through their aesthetic subversion and refusal of these, even though their performance is composed partly of a terror-affect and is, in these first stanzas, cataclysm. It needs to be borne very much in mind that reading a poem is a very different thing to the daily denial of your right to exist by an implacable, sadistic enemy. This is why, of course, the black hole of the holocaust may only be referenced by ‘Es Lebe der König’ and cannot be invoked or reproduced in any stronger terms. The performative actualization of the poem is something that is chosen by readers; not only that, but it is chosen as some form of pleasure. As such, it is the absolute opposite of the holocaust: it is a choice of life. It is necessarily in opposition to that which it references and, obliquely, uses as material and therefore stands in solidarity with Celan – and all the holocaust’s other victims – without falling into the twin traps of either sentimentality or impotent political sloganeering. This poem, like almost the whole of Celan’s own oeuvre, is something of a riposte to Adorno’s claim that to ‘write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’58 and is perhaps more in keeping with his later reconsideration of this position: All culture after Auschwitz, including its urgent critique, is garbage . . . Anyone who enters a plea for maintaining this radically guilty and shabby culture becomes an accomplice, while anyone who rejects culture is directly furthering the barbarism that culture showed itself to be.59 This horrific circular trap laid for culture and for poetry by history is not circumvented by ‘Es Lebe der König’, but the solidarity that is necessarily actualized in its performance, along with a choice of life that is also necessary, and even defiant, in the face of the historical weight of the holocaust is a refusal to capitulate to it. Adorno also wrote, Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you

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Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living . . .60

The answer provided to this question by the poem’s actualization of both solidarity and the choice of life is ‘yes’; Celan’s own suicide notwithstanding. Ironically in the face of this, the third stanza of the poem begins with a refusal of any solidarity – and it is refusal rather than blindness or a simple failing, in that it is presented as a definite choice: we hear your fearful groan and choose not to think of it. We deny the consequence but the outset surrounds us, we are trustful because only thus is the flame’s abstract review the real poison, oh true the fish dying in great flashes, the smell comes from shrivelled hair on my wrist. That silly talk is our recklessly long absence: the plum exudes its fanatic resin and is at once forced in, pressed down and by exotic motive this means the rest, the respite, we have this long.61 This refusal is marked with shame; the combination of a ‘fearful groan’ and a choice not to think of it suggests a choice of comfort over solidarity with another’s suffering. This solidarity might imply the possibility at least of ending the suffering insofar as it is acknowledged and action can be taken. It is refused, however – and these percepts produce a shame-affect that dominates these two lines. This ethical movement is continued with a denial of consequence while surrounded by ‘the outset’: the denial of consequence while ‘the outset surrounds us’ is a percept of a process the final result of which is contained in and determined by its beginning. Attention to the outset might therefore prevent the consequence, but once again, in order for action to be taken, it would be necessary to understand and admit the consequence, precisely what has not taken place. What any of these events might be is not stated, and they are not important in that sense – what is important is the sensations that are produced by these linguistic movements and the ways in which they compose the poem. In this case, the unstated consequences are assumed, coming so soon after ‘your / fearful groan’, to be dire; their denial produces what can be termed a negative responsibility-affect. Although the specificity of these events is unimportant – and in fact nonexistent – their context cannot avoid, once again, reference to the holocaust. At the same time, however, their lack of specificity is one element that works to prevent this poem becoming an exercise in moralism. The guilt-affect and the responsibility-affect of the first few lines of the third stanza do not signify a hand-wringing post-war guilt of ‘why didn’t we do something?’ but rather are

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guilt and responsibility for the other. This refers via the figure of Celan to the holocaust but does not represent it, or reactions to it. Rather, the performed poem situates itself (assuming a certain level of biographical and historical knowledge on the part of a reader) in a relation to the holocaust that takes it very much into account but is not restricted to it. In this sense, this is very a ‘social’ poem, one that might even be thought of as ‘socially responsible’: it places readers in a position of responsibility with regard to others. On the other hand, its deterritorializing forces and the extent to which it refuses both straightforward signification and reterritorialization mark it out as composed of counter-words and as therefore anti-social insofar as the social is marked as the dominant order. The inscription of the deterritorializing counter-words that this poem is in the body of a reader as the residue of the performed poem itself is in this sense a protest against society, at least as it is presently constituted. It is not quite, however, a protest in Adorno’s terms in that it does not valorize some kind of pure subject ‘with no remaining trace of mere matter’. On the contrary, the inscription of the poem within the body of a reader is all the deeper for the poem’s intractable materiality. This, in fact, is what the counter-word is: an act of freedom (or more precisely, perhaps, a line of flight) rendered as a material inscription in the body of a reader as poetic sensation. ‘Es Lebe der König’ is certainly, in any case, more than protest because it is not simply an expression of dissatisfaction, or even of horror – just as ‘Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else’ does more than express a dissatisfaction with the relationship between the individual and society but rather thinks it, explores it and performs it as sensation. As a performative event, ‘Es Lebe der König’ deterritorializes readers in their relation to the society in which they live; the fact that it does so by way of sensations that refer to the holocaust and pay tribute to one of its victims makes it difficult to think that this is a kind of happiness. The counter-word is (unlike deterritorializations more generally, which can be and often are negative), however, always productive of a certain happiness; a step away from safety but one taken freely, as a deliberate experimentation that might be lost in movements of reterritorialization but is never obliterated. This may not always be the secret of pleasure taken in, for example, tragic literature, but it is a part of the secret of pleasure taken in innovative poetries that appear to refuse pleasure or are apparently intent on attacking or terrorizing the reader with difficulties that cannot be resolved. These are steps freely taken away from legitimate and legitimising ease and from reification; but they are steps into a more forceful, if unsustainable, happiness. Some of the poem’s force is produced out of percepts that almost directly reference the holocaust, but which remain oblique. They build as the performance of the poem unfolds, which is to say that they not only unfold forwards across the dimension of the poem’s temporal movement but in all directions across the poem’s imaginative landscape. Each indirect percept of the holocaust, glimpsed almost out of the corner of a reader’s eye, builds on those that

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precede it as the glimpse is confirmed as unmistaken. The first of these is the phrase (in the first stanza) ‘as the flag once more becomes technical’; I have already touched upon the force of this ‘becomes’ as part of a generalized movement that denies rest or recuperation. The juxtaposition here of ‘flag’ and ‘technical’ are also important, however, in that ‘technical’ suggests something of the modernist design of the swastika flag. This suggestion is insecure; it proceeds out of a vague sense of a connection between something being ‘designed’ as having undergone a technical procedure, with a sense that the swastika flag, with its striking use of colour and geometric shape is a very modernist design (for all the Nazi’s loathing of modernist art), and with modernism itself being concerned with technique. This sense is strengthened by the poem’s dedication to Celan. There is little in the way of clarity here: ‘the flag once more becomes technical’ is a complex and shifting percept that is connected to a very vague affect that might be clumsily labelled ‘unease-inthe-face-of-the-possibility-of-Nazism’. This unease is, of course, fed by and feeds into the overall cataclysm-sensation of the first stanza in particular. Once established, this Nazi-unease-affect is strengthened by similar individual instances across the poem. The wire in ‘you / are born to peaks in the wire’ might suggest barbed wire and concentration camps; the ‘small house’ might, again remarkably vaguely but in its context, suggest gas chambers or ovens; ‘we too are numbered’ suggests the inevitability of death but, again in context, ‘numbered’ might suggest the industrialization of death (a very condensed use of language insofar as the single word ‘numbered’ suggests death itself and then by reference to its context the industrialization of death). In the second stanza ‘the small house’ appears again, and then that house ‘becomes technical’, which throws us back to the flag and its implications while at the same time suggesting, once again through context and the further use of ‘technical’, the industrialization of death. In the third stanza, this affect reaches its greatest clarification with the phrase ‘the smell comes from / shrivelled hair on my wrist’, an oddly disturbing percept that catches this Nazi-unease-affect and intensifies it enormously – despite being, once again, very indirect and somewhat vague (in terms of reference; the percept is, in and of itself, one of great clarity). While ‘the flag once more becomes technical’ (for example) is affectively uncertain due to underdetermination, this phrase is rather difficult to grasp due to overdetermination. The smell of hair suggests burning because that is when hair smells most strongly: in this context, by this point in the performance of the poem, burning hair will inevitably suggest the burning of human bodies. The fact that the hair is ‘shrivelled’ also suggests death, and may even suggest the emaciated bodies of many concentration camp inmates. Finally, the fact that the hair is juxtaposed with ‘wrist’ (and, indeed, is ‘on my wrist’) brings in another, different, holocaust reference, which is to the numbers infamously tattooed on concentration camp inmates’ wrists. All of this ‘forced in / pressed down’ (like the plum that ‘exudes its fanatic resin’, ‘fanatic’ again feeding further into this

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affect) into the one image makes it difficult to discern any of it clearly. This is important, however; the affect that has been produced across the poem has attained great force and has been greatly intensified by the overdetermination of this percept – but without any danger of the sentimentalism or simple expressions of horror that fall back into moralist and conceptual representation. This chapter has focused primarily on the relationship between the poem and society, but has had need, on a number of occasions, to touch on questions that involve the subject and its relationship to society as figured through poetry. The question of the relation of the subject to poetry, and its production or deterritorialization through poetry, is both important and necessary; therefore it is to this question that I now turn.

Chapter Four

The significance of sensation: the self

The still-currently dominant actualization of the human self, the bourgeois subject, is classically figured as ideally autonomous, self-reliant and discrete. However, this construction has been challenged by all of the innovative poetry examined so far. This can perhaps been seen most readily in Denise Riley’s ‘Wherever you are, be somewhere else’, figured through the ways in which the poem thinks (through sensation) the complex relationships between self, society and language. The classic bourgeois subject has, of course, also been extensively challenged in conceptual terms by work from other areas and disciplines. One of the most useful of these for opening up the question of the subject, especially for my uses in this chapter, is Louis Althusser’s relatively straightforward concept of ‘ideological interpellation’, in which the individual is ‘hailed’ as a subject by the dominant ideology of the society in which she lives: I shall then suggest that ideology ‘acts’ or ‘functions’ in such a way that it ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’1 The transformative power of ideological interpellation has similarities to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion, referred to in the previous chapter, of incorporeal transformations. The body of the individual is transformed by ideology into a subject on the uttering of order-words. That Althusser’s ‘hailing’ is a performative order-word is made especially clear through his specific reference to the police. The ideological hailing that transforms the individual into a subject is a police action: a command and a production of a certain order. Innovative poetry’s counter-words will, almost by definition, work to undermine, or perhaps mutate, the incorporeal transformations of ideological interpellation – though they will not, as I seek to demonstrate, ‘return’ the individual to some mythical purity of pre-subjective individuality. Rather, they are productive of further transformation. My investigations into and readings

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of innovative poetry so far have demonstrated this already, although the focus has not yet been on subjectivity itself. However, I now aim to produce a much more detailed and extensive understanding of the ways in which innovative poetry works, through sensation, to subvert and transform the classic bourgeois subject. Ironically, perhaps, this will begin with a turn away from contemporary innovative poetry and towards the Restoration poet John Dryden, by way of Douglas Oliver’s essay ‘Poetry’s Subject’.2 Quoting lines from Dryden’s ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ that refer to Lord Shaftesbury,3 Oliver notes ‘the way it uses the speech apparatus as you perform it’: Its consonants make you gag at the back of the throat or puff out little explosions of scorn or hiss or fffff – the way the sounds change place from lip to palate to throat twists the mouth – and the poem catches up the sounds into runs of speed, turned by contemptuous pauses, then spun onwards, so that Lord Shaftsbury’s turbulence is mimed in a way that is both easy to describe and also transcends definition.4 A silent performance will, of course, not literally make use of the speech apparatus in this way, but will produce analogous affects through the use of a virtual speech apparatus in readers’ minds. The effect is to mime not only ‘Shaftesbury’s turbulence’ but also Dryden’s contempt for Shaftesbury’s turbulence insofar as the contempt was written into the poem; which is to say that the performance of the poem impels readers to mime Dryden – ‘in performance a quasi-fictional sharing of minds occurs between ourselves and a Dryden that our imaginations create.’5 On Oliver’s own account, however, the Dryden with whom ‘a quasi-fictional sharing of minds occurs’ is not simply created by a reader’s imagination. This ‘creation’ of Dryden occurs through the way in which the mouth ‘has to mean the words spoken’6 and, according to Oliver, both reader and poet become responsible for the scorn that they ‘express’.7 The author, however, the poet, is in this case literally dead. Scorn is produced in the process of performance; it is an affect that exists virtually in the poetic text and exists actually in the fully actualized, performed poem. ‘Scorn’ has, therefore, become non-human because it exists as a sensation that in part composes material surface of the poem, independently of any human, including Dryden. It is not simply the expression or representation of a dead poet’s feelings; it is independently real in its own right. A reader is responsible for it insofar as she is responsible for its actualization; she is not, however, responsible for its existence. However, Oliver is correct in the important point he makes, identifying the real, material existence of the poem in its performance as the body of a reader, which becomes the body of the performed poem. What this might indicate with regard to the subject and to Althusserian ideological interpellation is that the subject is ‘hailed’ (if this is the right word, implying as it does a call coming to the ear from elsewhere) internally, as it were,

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by its own utterance, and by the form of that utterance as much as by its signification. At the same time, there is an interesting anomaly here in that the production of the subject is seemingly in both reader and poem. It is neither, strictly speaking, in the poem itself, not in a reader her- or himself, but in the actualization of the poem in performance (which is to say in the relationship between a reader and the poem). Therefore, it is necessary to revise the statement made earlier: the subject is not hailed ‘internally’; rather the border between internal and external is rendered problematic at best. The interpellation of the subject is both ‘externally’ determined and ‘internally’ performed. At the same time, the scorn expressed is linked to Dryden the historical subject and is, in some way, ‘his’ scorn. He wrote the poem using language in such a way that, when performed over three hundred years later, scorn would be inscribed again in readers’ bodies, even if those readers do not know who Shaftesbury is. In fact, given that Shaftesbury is long dead, it would seem to be a scorn that ultimately has no object and that has nowhere to go. The scorn is like that of a ghost resurrected through performance, retaining its affective force but impersonal and non-human. Yet it is still scorn – it is an impersonal affect rather than a personal feeling towards a specific individual, but it is scorn nonetheless. This reveals something of the possibilities in poetry for the transcendence or subversion of the bourgeois subject. The subject is not entirely in control, and is not the absolute source, of even his or her ‘own’ feelings. This would perhaps tie in with Althusser’s account, yet as I have already argued, while such feelings, supposedly so integral to the subject, do not necessarily have the individual subject as their source, they do not simply come from ‘outside’ either. In any case, the assumption of the subject’s self-sovereignty is put immediately into question. The next question is whether the scorn expressed is still, or was ever, strictly speaking, Dryden’s scorn. To some extent this question has already been anticipated and answered by the above. It can’t simply be Dryden’s scorn: not in the twenty-first century, but not even in the seventeenth century either. In a twentyfirst century performance, the scorn is not simply being expressed by Dryden back in the seventeenth century and reaching out to the present. The apparent relationship that a reader may feel with Dryden is, Oliver says, ‘quasi-fictional’; I would go further and simply call it fictional. Scorn is an affect that composes the poem, an aesthetic quality that exists only (or at least this specific scorn for Shaftesbury exists only) in the poem, impersonal, pre-personal and nonhuman. This was just as much the case for the original context of poetic production as it is for a twenty-first century context of poetic performance. A poet produces an embodiment of feeling through manipulation of elements that pre-exist him or her in the collective assemblage of enunciation and the results of that manipulation, however closely they conform to the poet’s intentions, are then that feeling. The feeling pre-exists the poem, but the sensation of scorn composes the poem, not only for later readers but also for the poet

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him- or herself. It might be said that a poem is both the expression and is also itself that which is expressed. Dryden doesn’t haunt the performance of the poem because he produced it, so much as he haunts the poem because it produced him, or at least the scorn that seems to be ‘his’. Dryden was interpellated by the ideology of the society in which he lived, yet he is also interpellated by his own poem, as it produces a ‘Dryden’ who is scornful for as long as the poem is read. This is partly a product of the form of the poem in that it seems to issue from a stable subject-position (although in a sense it actually produces that subject-position) that is easily identified with the subject ‘John Dryden’. On the other hand, it should be noted that Dryden’s is not a Romantic or post-Romantic lyric; it is a neo-classical poem that makes use of a particular rhetorical form for the sake of political argument. As Lillian Feder states, Dryden believes that the poet, like the ancient orator, employs reason and sound argument for a moral end. Clearly, Dryden regards the poet as a figure who deals with material of public interest and who presents that material in a logical, organized, and often argumentative manner. Literature, in his eyes, is inextricably connected with man’s political and social life.8 In pursuit of such moral, logical, organized and, ultimately, political ends, Dryden deployed the resources of a neo-classicist rhetoric that cannot simply be said to ‘express’ Dryden’s feelings on Shaftesbury. The whole question of subjectival attribution is complicated from the start. At the same time, there is no doubt that a subject is produced by the rhetorical strategies employed by the poem, or even two or more subjects. One of these subjects would be ‘John Dryden’ – yet this John Dryden is a fictional character who is a production of the poem; another would be a reader of the poem, who is haunted and perhaps even possessed by this fictional character for the duration of the reading. A question of sovereignty has been opened up here because both Dryden and the poem’s readers are produced as subjects and yet the poet would normally be considered to be in a sovereign position over the production of the poem while readers are subject-to the poem. Complications in the various meanings of the concept ‘subject’ are obviously in play as the notion of the subject in recent philosophical history would seem to imply sovereignty itself, even while in a wider, or longer, history of the term a subject is subject-to the authority of another, typically a monarch. The subject as it is associated with the bourgeois epoch in the West is associated with a sense of autonomy and therefore sovereignty over him- or herself (this historical development of the concept being in part a consequence of the development of liberal democracy); this is the subject as the personal performer of the active verb. This sense of performance is useful as it might suggest action that is somehow constrained by circumstance, the necessity of acting in certain ways within specific contexts.

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This is certainly the case for a reader of a poem in that she is constrained to read what is written, not what might be written. This being the case, though, where is the subject’s personal sovereignty? A reader is to some extent interpellated by the poem as subject-to in the political sense of the word, just as, in Althusser’s scenario, the subject is interpellated as subject-to the society in which she or he lives. What does come into focus here is the way in which the personal and apparently active sense of ‘subject’ cannot be separated from any political and usually passive sense of the term, and that there is complex interweaving of the notions of subject, interpellation and sovereignty that needs to be teased out. At the same time, the contemporary innovative poem complicates this situation still further, not least through the deployment of both counter-words and specific poetic techniques that problematize or undermine the stability of the poetic subject. It will be worth looking at one of Douglas Oliver’s own poems to see to what extent a fictional ‘Oliver’ seems to haunt it and to see to what extent it produces a stable subject-position and interpellates readers. I will quote the poem in full: The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet Moon shoots into fumy night sky, worn down coin in fulgurous green, as we arrive at Tompkins Square after hotly debating a medieval sermon at Sheila’s house: has the soul a pure core and a penumbra of ideas through which alone the shadowy events of every day come nearer the disc’s intense white centre? We go in, to watch Star Trek’s portentous races against time: a scientist looks at his daughter’s soil samples – their planet is dying; oh yes, their love is pure, as pure as I’d wish the daughter-love to be in a Britain from which I’m self-exiled. This is the night of the eclipse: by 12.30 a thumb print blurs half the moon, and something restless and unachieved follows me through sleep. The roar of the garbage truck wakes me up and releases through my window screen the ill smell of the weekend on St Mark’s Place like a distillation of sweet-foul bodily corruption

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around the perimeter of the untarnished soul, as that haunting medieval language says. One side of the bedsheet’s rumpled by my writhing last night. Your sheet, under you, is a broad lath or a smoothed stream in your peace last night and again this morning within the whorls of our anxious river. My back is stiff; it’s urgent to pee. I crawl down the bed, wagging my naked ass, over a deep blue mohair blanket, so that if you opened your eyes my hot core asshole would be seen by the cool core of your soul. From the bathroom I turn aside to my stepson’s soiled green armchair, an hour to go before I make coffee. He’s away in Europe; so I can sit down to read Religion and the Decline of Magic – when I remember I was dreaming of an Elizabethan child’s translucent face contorted in sorrow at the absence of her father.9 This poem might appear on a first reading to be fairly straightforward, even conservative; it has a distinct and easily distinguished narrative and what appears to be a relatively stable narrator or poetic subject. There are, however, subtle complications involved here. There are a number of different affects that compose the poem, though an essentially domestic restlessness-affect dominates: the concern with exile and the ‘daughter-love’ that is somehow impure, the restless sleep, the ‘whorls of our anxious river’ and the urgent need to get out of bed to urinate. This restlessness-affect is also inscribed in the poem’s formal landscape: there are no ‘explosions of scorn’ here, but there is a rapidly shifting assonance, for example, that produces a play of harmony and dissonance. This is in tune with the domesticity and a sense of happy intimacy with the ‘you’ of the poem that is also being disturbed by the sense of exile and family problems, such as the impure ‘daughter-love’. At the beginning of the third stanza, the onomatopoeic ‘roar’ and the harsh consonants of ‘the garbage truck wakes’ also suggest disturbance, as does the alliteration of ‘rumpled’ and ‘writhing’ which produce an almost onomatopoeic resonance with the restlessness of the night and its immediate material effects in the state of the bedsheet. This restlessness is connected to the recurrent figures of pollution; from the green of the ‘worn down’ coin through the dying planet on Star Trek to the ‘ill smell of the weekend on St Marks Place’ that in its turn figures the corruption of the body around the ‘untarnished soul’.

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The soul is of course a vital element of the poem, and I could read the repeated images of circles as metaphors for the soul. To do so would be to endorse the traditional and indeed, as the poem makes clear, medieval notion of the soul as an essential unitary core of the self that pre-exists Althusser’s interpellated subject (and which would be the primary source of the self, the interpellated subject being only a secondary derivation – a construction that requires an equivocal ontology). I could also read the phonic qualities of the poem as issuing, for all their restlessness, from a stable poetic voice in the manner of a Romantic lyric; yet it is clear that the poem is worked rhetorically to produce certain affects. It could be easily objected that, even if this is so, they are also composed so as to express (and to represent) the poet’s experience. There is certainly some sense that this illusion, at least, is produced. However, the various roundness-percepts do not, for all the temptation to read them as metaphors for the soul, necessarily work together in the production of a central metaphorical development and it may be more fruitful to read them as images in their own right rather than interpreting them as signifiers of something else. To ask, in other words, what it is exactly that these images do – and how they work with the poem’s formal landscape. They contribute to the composition of a landscape, non-human and prehuman, for the affect to work with in the broader composition of the blocks of sensation that the poem is. The soul becomes an element of the landscape, the third appearance of the roundness-percept after the moon and the ‘worn down’ coin. The fact that the soul is one example of this percept among others, that it has no necessary priority, suggests that the notion of a metaphorical development in which all other images may be ultimately referred and reduced to this one is already profoundly unsatisfactory. This figure of the soul in the first stanza as ‘a pure core’ and then as ‘the disc’s intense white centre’ is, of course, already a metaphor in the terms of the medieval sermon in which it apparently appears and as such is an expression of something that it is itself not. This is, it should be noted, ‘as that haunting medieval language says’ and is not necessarily endorsed by the poem; the word ‘haunting’ might suggest a seductiveness of the notion, but the reader is never told on which side of the debate mentioned in the first stanza the narrative voice stands. The repetition of percepts of roundness through the poem produces a coherence that the poetic subject is connected to but from which it is distinct. The disturbed coherence produced by the phonic elements of the poem plays into this repetition and together they produce an affect of a play of exclusion and integration, of being simultaneously at home and in exile. This is a different situation to the Dryden poem in which the voice is the primary producer of coherence in the poem. The poem seems to be subordinated to the poet, language to the ‘voice’, and the illusion of an expression of a feeling that comes from the poet himself, despite (and to some extent as a result of) its neo-classical rhetorical working. In ‘The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet’, however, the roundness-percept that runs through the poem is, for all the strength and

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apparent personality of the subjective and poetic ‘voice’, clearly impersonal. The repetition of roundness-percepts produces a territory that is not the poetic subject but which is the landscape, impersonal and non-human, in which the subject stands and from which it emerges. At the same time, the phonic percepts, such as assonance or alliteration, compose the formal landscape from which affects of coherence or disruption, again pre-personal, are produced that contribute to the more over-arching affect of restlessness from which the poetic subject, again, emerges. This block of sensations will be actualized through performance so that the emergence of the poetic subject is also actualized through the performance and a reader becomes that poetic subject through conjunction with the impersonal affects and percepts that she or he actualizes. This is not to say that readers ‘mimic’ the poet but that a reader forms poetic connections with the world through the poem that are entirely singular and will differ for every reader and even every reading as every repeated reading occurs in a different context. In fact, as will be seen, this process does not just form a new subject but, as it forms new conjunctions with the world, it forms a new process of individuation that opens out beyond the apparently stable fixity of the subject and beyond interpellation, even as elements of these remain necessary for the process to take place. The performed poem is a dynamic three-dimensional landscape in spacetime that weaves through an individual and constitutes him/her without being reducible to perceptions or to feelings that can be claimed as subjective or personal, composed of a block of sensations that is actualized anew with each performance. A reader becomes through this process just as the poetic subject apparently does, though differently as the context alters. From the opening, cinematic percept of the moon – cinematic in that it ‘shoots into fumy night sky’, suggesting time-lapse photography – through the flashing (‘fulgurous’) green coin, the ‘disc’s intense white centre’, the dying planet, the eclipse of the moon, the perimeter of the soul, the ‘asshole’ and the ‘cool core of your soul’, there is a differential repetition of ‘external’ and ‘internal’ percepts, which is to say external events, images of the imagination and external events imaginatively re-worked. The landscape is that within which an individual stands and yet is also inside the individual, the landscape of individuality and individuation itself. The ‘asshole’ and the ‘cool core of your soul’, which would see the asshole, suggesting a further repetition of the same image, if at a remove, in that there is a suggestion of the eyes as the windows of the soul, have a particular resonance within this play of inside and outside as figures of passage, of marking boundaries between the inside and the outside that are there specifically in order to be breached. They are portals, providing explicit connection between the internal and the external; figures of ingress and egress. As images, the roundness-percepts are not simply suggestive figures of signification but elements of blocks of sensation that produce an encounter with the poem and are productive of that encounter in conjunction with

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(and productive of) affects of restlessness and anxiety. In this production there is an interplay of territorialization and deterritorialization that I wish to clarify. The repetition of the roundness-percept might usefully be labelled a ‘refrain’. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the refrain produces a territory: ‘it is territorial, a territorial assemblage’.10 They go on to say, What defines the territory is the emergence of matters of expression (qualities). Take the example of color in birds or fish: color is a membrane state associated with interior hormonal states, but it remains functional and transitory as long as it is tied to a type of action (sexuality, aggressiveness, flight). It becomes expressive, on the other hand, when it acquires a temporal constancy and a spatial range that make it a territorial, or rather territorializing, mark: a signature.11 The quality of roundness in ‘The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet’ would be ‘functional and transitory’ if it were tied to a metaphorical act, but the repetition beyond metaphorical functionality produces a spatial and temporal constancy that produce a territorialization that marks a kind of signature. The signature is not that of the poet in this case but of the poem itself. The repetition of roundness-percepts produces the territory of the poem, a constancy and a coherence that are beyond the ‘voice’ of the poet and that are non-personal and indeed (being of the poem and not of the poet) non-human. The repetition of the percept forms a certain rhythm, although it is not strictly regular; which is to say that its appearance is not metronomic but, in the manner of free verse or open field poetry perhaps, it makes its appearance at what seem the perfect moments for the rhythmic development of this one, singular, poem. In this sense they are productive, along with other elements, of the poem’s singularity. To the extent that they also produce the poetic subject, the ‘I’, in this poem (because the poetic ‘I’ remains singular and does not exist apart from or outside the poem and is a product of the poem’s percepts and affects, which explains the fact that the percepts of roundness are woven through the space of the poem and pass both around and through the ‘I’ as it is presented here) they mark out the space of the subject within the world. In this sense the poem refers to or mimics the territorializations that produce subjects in general, quite apart from such production in poetry where such territorializations also work to produce a reader as subject. Deleuze and Guattari state that a ‘territorial or territorialized component may set about budding, producing’;12 in the case of ‘The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet’, each instance of the territorializing roundness may produce, may bud, as each instance is different from the others. The cinematic, time-lapse moon is different from the ‘worn down’ and flashing coin, for all that their juxtaposition may encourage the reader to read the latter as a metaphor for the former. In fact such a reading requires such a difference; if the difference were not there, then there would be no metaphoricity but only a repetition of

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sameness via a positional difference that necessarily haunts any repetition - and the metaphor would not be dead so much as still-born. As it is, the difference between the images that allows the operation of metaphorical interpretation also provides for the possibility of reading them as images in their own right such that the flashing coin is no longer subject, in the sense of subordinate, to the shooting moon. Each is productive of its own encounter with a reader, even if their proximity encourages a superimposition of one over the other. This remains the case with the other percepts of roundness; linked by a repetitive similarity that produces a territory of the poem, their difference from each other simultaneously separates them in a way that produces relative deterritorializations that give birth to new connections and encounters. These deterritorializations seem to be figured in the poem by a general ‘pollution’ that repeatedly threatens the purity of the roundness-percepts, that disturb them either explicitly as in the eclipse (‘a thumb print blurs half the moon’) or the smell of garbage that is ‘like a distillation of sweet-foul bodily corruption / around the perimeter of the untarnished soul’, or implicitly – for example, the faeces that will at some point emerge from the asshole and foul it. There is a further ambiguity here, then: that which is productive and gives birth to encounters is also threatening and polluting – as is the process of deterritorialization. Deleuze and Guattari, again, state: This ambiguity between the territory and deterritorialization is the ambiguity of the Natal. It is understood much more clearly if it is borne in mind that the territory has an intense center at its profoundest depths; but as we have seen, this intense center can be located outside the territory, at the point of convergence of very different and very distant territories. The Natal is outside.13 Such talk of an intense centre is clearly very appropriate to the poem under discussion. In fact, the whole notion of the territory is appropriate to a discussion of circles and percepts of the round, given that Deleuze and Guattari’s initial opening on to the problem of the refrain cites, first, the production of a ‘stabilizing, calm and stable, center in the heart of chaos’14 and goes on to speak of it being ‘necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile center, to organize a limited space.’15 Now, though, the centre is found outside the circle, separate and different from the territory; and it is this ambiguity in the play of territorialization and deterritorialization that is productive. I need to shift away from this perhaps obsessively narrow focus on one element of the poem; a further vital aspect to this discussion still remains to be examined. The repetition of the roundness-percepts makes the titular bedsheet easy enough to overlook, but the very fact that it is such a striking element of the title means that it must be accounted for. The movement from moon to coin to soul to planet to eclipsed moon to soul again to asshole, is a movement, as has been stated, that provides a territory

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for the poem and a territory for the poetic subject. It is around the subject as the ground on which he stands and through the subject as that which he is, in that he is nothing without the percepts that form him both ‘externally’ and ‘in his imagination’ (within the diegetic space of the poem). Of course, these are not the only percepts of this poem; they simply hold a particular territorializing function because of the geometric repetition that distinguishes them, precisely because that repetition of necessity occurs through differences. As has also been seen, these differences produce a deterritorialization that, although relative (because ‘the line of flight it draws is segmented, is divided up into successive “proceedings”’16), is nonetheless real and has real effects involving moves out of or beyond any apparent self-sufficiency of the poem or of its subject (which is clearly the case as it is deterritorialization that reveals the way in which the subject is intimately connected ‘outside’ himself through the lack of a firm distinction between inside and outside provided by the movement from percept to percept that produces, at the same time, his territorialization). The poetic subject is therefore in a position in which sovereignty is once again opened to question. As bourgeois-subjective sovereignty is supposed to involve self-sovereignty and therefore self-sufficiency (and this is often figured in the traditions of Romantic, post-Romantic and contemporary conservative poetries through the apparent controlling centrality of the poetic subject), the lack of self-sufficiency of the poetic subject in relation to the poem as a whole would seem to undermine the very concept of subjective sovereignty. Furthermore, in the third stanza, without drawing attention to itself and as if in passing, a more radical movement of deterritorialization occurs – and an element of this radicalism lies in the simple fact that it does not offer further repetition and yet decentres the poetic subject more violently than the constellation of roundness-percepts can manage. This is the bedsheet; prefigured in the title, five lines produce and then dismiss it: One side of the bedsheet’s rumpled by my writhing last night. Your sheet, under you, is a broad lath or a smoothed stream in your peace last night and again this morning within the whorls of our anxious river. What initially makes this figure of the bedsheet radically deterritorializing is the connection with the title that announces its importance to the poem. The most tempting move would be to take this as the ‘centre’ of the poem; to do so would also be to take the bedsheet, as the title demands, as a figure for the soul of the poet-narrator. Given that the dominant affect of the poem is restlessness this would make good logical sense. On the other hand, the bedsheet-as-soul provides a direct riposte to the concept of the soul as central to and foundational of the subject, which is in any case under pressure from the roundness-percepts that trace the poem’s territory. The repetition of the figure seems to mock this

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concept of the soul as it is reinscribed in every repetition and simultaneously ejected from each one, failing to achieve, as was noted above, any hierarchical dominance of the figure as each repetition inscribes and insists upon its own deterritorializing difference. The bedsheet, though, as the soul is the soul in a sense, playing between identity and resemblance; certainly, it is not just a metaphor for the soul like the intensely centred medieval disc. The sheet is an intensity, both affect and percept. If either of these sensations is dominant then it is the percept; the bedsheet may be the poet-narrator’s soul, but it is also a banal element of his everyday landscape, a thing, and it is presented as such. It bears the imprint of a body’s unconscious behaviour, it is a landscape of a soul that is produced by a body. Yet it should not be taken, as might again be tempting, as a mere map or tracing transmitted through a body. It is a direct expression of unease and of restlessness that has no original to copy; such restlessness is only ever its own expression and therefore the bedsheet is the soul as it is this restlessness. The soul, traditionally the ultimate and unchanging basis of the subject, is thrown into the material world in a relatively lowly form and is shown to alter regularly, perhaps on a daily basis – bearing in mind that ‘Your’ sheet is ‘a broad lath or a smoothed stream / in your peace last night’. The bedsheet is a percept of restlessness (a landscape of a certain nocturnal restlessness) and an affect of restlessness (it is the production of this affect, along with other elements, in the poem). It is an intense block of sensations that reverberates between affect and percept and comes close to sublimity as the whole concept of the soul is deterritorialized. Even as the poem appears on one plane to present a straightforward narrative centred on a single poetic voice, the bedsheet pulls away from the repetition of roundness-percepts that are already upsetting that comforting representation even as they shape its territory. The concept of the soul is shifted through its material presentation in a kenotic movement that serves to produce the restlessness and uneasiness that the sheet also, within the space of the poem, is. This uneasiness, as it is produced by the poem, concerns the subject in that it moves the subject outside itself into the world. The soul is of the world and is ‘in’ things, or perhaps more accurately is things as the subject and the world are in a necessary relationship that, at the very least, blurs and problematizes any distinction between the subjective and the objective. Oliver’s poetic subject is pushed, dragged and plugged into a world that it doesn’t entirely control and that operates both around it and through it, inseparably interacting with it rather than simply being acted-upon by it. The poet John Wilkinson makes use of somewhat similar techniques (the repetition or patterning of images or other elements), which he calls ‘metastatic’,17 to those used for ‘The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet’. He states: What gives the poems such coherence as they exhibit is not a metaphorical development, but a set of linked and transforming entities, which can be syntactical gestures, vowel and consonant patterning, imagistic or discursive

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modes. ‘Metastasis’ is a term in rhetoric, but my use derives from a brief experience of nursing in a cancer hospice, the way metastatic tumours echo about the body and these nodes define the shape of the body subjectively, through pain.18 To say that metastases ‘define the shape of the body’ is to say that they produce the territory of a body, that they territorialize it. Yet, as with Oliver’s poem, the fact that these entities are ‘transforming’ as much as they are ‘linked’ indicates a movement of deterritorialization. These deterritorializing transformations keep the poem on the move, unfolding in ways that are not necessarily linear. Readers are therefore also kept on the move; it might be said that a reader, providing the body of a performed poem, also unfolds as she or he unfolds the poem, re-produced as a deterritorialized individuation in conjunction with the poem. This may be clarified by an examination of one of Wilkinson’s poems and the obvious choice for this is the poem that Wilkinson specifically refers to in his essay, ‘Facing Port Talbot’.19 In ‘The Metastases of Poetry’, Wilkinson picks out one group of repetitive images, what he calls ‘imagistic nodes’,20 because these are ‘the easiest to demonstrate without becoming bogged down in local exegesis.’21 This group ‘revolves around the torus which is also the life-saving ring, the lobster pot, the body, and the starry envelope echoed by the bedcovers’.22 He goes on to explain: ‘What relates this group of images is the outside turning to form the inside. The torus is all lip, at every point of its surface.’23 Obviously, I need to cite a relevant section of the poem here: What little mutes within our mouldy covers, has weight, drew devotee manikins would scrunch through cracker stars inflate a life-saving ring, their sacs were frictionless, were sterile with the buoyancy of a head start, itinerary wired to upstage their processors’ conveyor facelift – such pressure for renewal, lightsome at their spread wings would shut the hatch, taught on each approach they flicker never touching, who else’s natural chaos billows free above a hard-bitten surface, abstrusing out in a sphere of No disturbance; theirs alone the fires supported wicker harmlessly, unmeasured on those scales the breath skews. Turn over, bed down, hollow. Keep your head down under laths of heavenly light, hair-schemes of forgetfulness, pull the impetiginous stars.24 The ‘imagistic nodes’ that Wilkinson refers to take, here, the form of bedcovers (‘mouldy covers’), a life-saving ring, the reference to the ‘starry envelope’ via

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‘cracker stars’, a body and the bedcovers again (‘turn over, bed down’), ‘hollow’ and the night sky again (‘heavenly light’ and ‘impetiginous stars’). Once again, these nodes are also percepts, repeated through transformation and difference; as a poetic technique this shows a family resemblance to the techniques employed in the production of ‘The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet’. Once again, this technique works to produce a territorialization of the poem (giving it, as Wilkinson says, ‘coherence’); once again each specific instance of the torus or the torus-like figure produces its own relative deterritorialization through the necessary insistence on its difference from the other elements of the group and through the virtual connections that might be made through it that are waiting to be actualized. The ‘linked and transforming’ torus-percepts identified by Wilkinson are, as he also notes in the citation above, only one group of such territorializing constellations of elements in the poem. Sound patterns in the poem’s formal landscape are another. There is a fair amount of alliteration in the lines quoted, through ‘mutes’, ‘mouldy’, ‘manikins’, for example, or ‘sacs’, ‘sterile’, ‘start’. There is also a certain interplay between alliteration and assonance (‘sacs’, ‘frictionless’, ‘sterile’, ‘buoyancy’, for example). These phonic percepts produce a territorialization of the poem as much, perhaps, as the imagistic percepts. It is often possible to read significance into such patterning and its relationship to the dimension of a poem’s imaginative landscape. Oliver reads, for example, ‘Dryden’s’ scorn out of his poem’s ‘hiss or fff’, a sounded rather than signified expression of that scorn that, through such expression, takes on a signifying function. In this case, though, especially given the at best marginal character of the poem’s narrator as a subject-position (certainly in the lines quoted) such an interpretive move would be problematic. Rather, the sound patterns of the poem, a complex interplay of rhythmic and melodic elements, help the poem to cohere beyond any need for narrative or a central poetic subject. Deleuze and Guattari typify a similar musical interplay in terms of character and landscape: We should say, rather, that territorial motifs form rhythmic faces or characters, and that territorial counterpoints form melodic landscapes. There is a rhythmic character when we find that we no longer have the simple situation of a rhythm associated with a character, subject, or impulse. The rhythm itself is now the character in its entirety; as such, it may remain constant, or it may be augmented or diminished by the addition or subtraction of sounds or always increasing or decreasing durations, and by an amplification or elimination bringing death or resuscitation, appearance or disappearance. Similarly, the melodic landscape is no longer a melody associated with a landscape; the melody itself is a sonorous landscape in counterpoint to a virtual landscape.25 The rhythm of the poem takes over the burden often carried (in more conservative poems) by character (whether explicit dramatic character or the

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implied character that is a poetic subject); it might be said that the subjectivity of the poem, instead of being invested in a represented personage, is more directly and explicitly an aspect of the poem itself (as it always, in any case, is), specifically its rhythm. While the rhythm of this poem is not strictly regular, it is closer to regularity than many innovative poems (though of course the most irregular rhythm is still rhythm and works in much the same way, generally speaking, as the rhythm here; different rhythmic patterns are particular elements of the poem’s singularity), and forms a consistency over which the melody of alliteration, assonance and other elements of the sound patterning, play. In fact, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, it would be more precise to say that the melody, as the landscape of the poem, plays around the rhythmsubjectivity of the poem and it in some sense forms the medium within which the poetic rhythm moves. These two elements, rhythm-percept-subjectivity and melody-percept-landscape, are of course so closely intertwined that any actual separation of them would be unfeasible, and while the rhythm provides a certain consistency for the melody, working together as an element in the larger block of sensation, they both provide a further consistency that works alongside (and intersects) the image-percepts that are at work through repetition. The poem is, therefore, both its own impersonal individuation and its own non-human landscape. To some extent this is always true of any poem, indeed of any literary text, but this poem brings that fact to the fore and puts it to work as a resource rather than as something to be masked through an illusion of a representation of a personal poetic subject behind or at the centre of the poem. If the poem is its own impersonal individuation, it is an individuation that is actualized in the relationship that is its performance – which is to say its conjunction with a reader. This conjunction in its turn produces a fresh becoming of a reader, whose own individuation undergoes a deterritorializing production that is always real and valid, even if they later fall back on the older and safer pre-encounter territory of the subject. The poem is encountered by a reader who finds her or his individuation thereby transformed, if only momentarily, by the encounter; the impersonal territorialization actualized in the poem’s performance in fact produces in its turn a deterritorialization of the reader’s individuation, disrupting and pulling it away from the subject – the personal and ego-centred territory of habit.26 This is also the case with ‘The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet’; the image-percept repetitions that operate in that poem gather imagistic forces together to provide a certain territorial consistency to the poem that is beyond the poem’s apparently straightforward narrative (which provides a different, more ‘traditional’ consistency), that a reader necessarily inhabits and which, again, shifts away from a habitual and ego-centric personal subjectivity that would assimilate the landscape rather than encountering it. In other words, there is a territorialization at work in both of these poems that allows and provides the ground for deterritorialization and for lines of flight.

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There is a connection between the production of poetic style and the production of the subject. Style involves territorialization across a body of work in much the same way as there is territorialization across an individual life, an individuation across disparate elements that, via such individuation, come to form a block; not a block of sensation in this case, but not a simple narrative arc either. Rather there is a block of resonance; certain repetitions come to produce metastases, and therefore a certain coherent territory, across an individual’s life and across more than one poem. There is a production of style that individuates the disparate and the singular. In The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony, Denise Riley states: Style in its idiosyncratic rarity is often recognisable without its author’s written signature. This tone isn’t produced by my deliberation, any more than I can alter my stature by taking thought. This fact can be an irritant. It’s all well beyond control.27 The first point here is the recognition of style beyond signature. A poem written by John Wilkinson, for example, that produces an impersonal individuation through style, that cannot be satisfactorily centred on a specific ‘voice’, or on a specific personality, may be recognized as a poem by John Wilkinson by a reader familiar with his poetry on the basis of the style alone. The same could be said of the work of J. H. Prynne, despite the multiplication of styles and sources of enunciation that that poetry puts to work, or of Riley’s own poetry, despite the multiplication of the subject and the shifts between tone and register that her poetry makes use of. Douglas Oliver’s poetry, despite radical shifts in style, may also remain recognisable throughout such shifts because of singular elements of style that remain constant. Poetry would seem to be open to an interpellation that posits poetry itself as a subject, across a range of stylistically interconnected texts, which is to say through stylistic repetition that produces a territory of the text that would traditionally be centred on the figure of the author (and still is, of course, even in the most radical critical discourses, if only for the sake of a metonymic simplicity). And yet style comes unbidden: it is not ‘produced by my deliberation’. A recognisable style of an individual poet is not consciously produced, any more than a person’s metalinguistic conversational gestures. It seems to come from elsewhere and yet it is as distinctive as a signature. The chapter from which the previous citation is taken is entitled ‘Linguistic unease’ and style, beyond deliberation, is one of the reasons for that unease. Style may not be claimed authentically by a poet, yet it marks an ‘I’ behind a poem, or at least somewhere in vital connection with it. This is perhaps because each poem, like each roundness-percept in ‘The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet’ or torus-percept (or for that matter each phonic-percept) in ‘Facing Port Talbot’, is both a singularity and, at least in some aspect, a repetition.

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Singularity and repetition require each other. Each poem by a particular poet will repeat aspects of other poems by that same poet, and yet each poem is different; at the same time, each poem draws on some collective assemblage of enunciation, including especially that formed by other poems, and so is a repetition in that sense – and yet is entirely singular. As such a poem may appear to eschew or deterritorialize the ‘I’ but remains marked by it, and marks it, in the singularity of repetition. For each repetition is itself singular and is always marked at least by a new context and new deterritorializations, even as it produces an apparently individual territory. This is a situation that goes against all ‘common sense’, or at least the common sense of the bourgeois epoch. Here is an individuality that is absolutely individual (individuation) and yet is indissolubly connected to the collective; that is both difference and repetition; that is territory and, vitally, deterritorializing. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the haecceity will be extremely useful for grasping this: There is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. We reserve the name haecceity for it. A season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. They are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.28 Despite distinguishing the individuality of the haecceity from both a person and a subject, the ‘relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected’ identified by this citation are suggestive. The haecceity is relation; by implication, the haecceity is an individuation that is defined (insofar as it can be) by context. Riley writes: My I never does exist, except (and critically) as a momentary spasmodic site of space-time individuation, and its mocking promise of linguistic originality must be, and always is, thwarted in order for language to exist in its proper communality.29 The ‘spasmodic site of space-time individuation’ can apply equally well to a poem, a body of work or a person. This notion might suggest a synchronic cross-section of a development that can never really be reduced to that crosssection; and the cross-section itself can only have meaning in relation to what it leaves out, which might be the communality of language, relations of movement or capacities to affect or all of these. On the other hand, individuation does occur; a poem, a body of work, a reader, are all individuals; a haecceity is individual. The individuality of a haecceity (a poem or an oeuvre), consisting entirely of relations, including of course of movement, is in a continuous state of becoming (is a process of

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individuation). The movement of the actualization of an innovative poem occurs in its performance and, in that movement, the relations between singular elements may shift as a reader’s focus shifts, for example, or such relations may shift in performances by different readers, or even in separate performances by the same reader. This does not mean that the order of relation changes – Oliver’s moon will not suddenly appear after the coin – but that each reading carries its own difference that will cast the relationships in a new light. These movements (often contextual) are in principle potentially limitless. Again, this is a question of repetition being of itself productive of difference and only ever able to occur through and as difference. This process obviously also occurs across an oeuvre, as well as the variations that necessarily accompany the repetitions that produce an identifiable style. This is the individuation of haecceity, which may underlie the possibility of a formation of subjectivity, the latter an ordered ossification (a territorialization) of a haecceity’s movement. The momentary spasm of individuation identified by Riley is a process not of individuation per se after all, but of (still impersonal) territorialization and subjectivation. It is the production of recognizable ordered stability. It might be thought of as an instant in which the performance of a poem effectively ends as the poem is returned to a condition of static textuality. An innovative poem might, then, produce a territory through repetition and patterning. This territory is not static, however, but, in performance, is always in motion and always dynamically contextualized; it also moves through various and often complex processes of deterritorialization. The territory of an innovative poem (in performance) is therefore in a relationship with dynamic contextualizations and deterritorializations that produce an individuation that Deleuze and Guattari term ‘haecceity’. A production of an ossified order out of a haecceity is effectively the production of an impersonal almost-subjectivity of the poem, which can only occur through effectively shutting down the performance of the poem. Such an ossification reveals most clearly something that has gone unremarked in this chapter up until now. This is the fact that a poem’s territorializing repetitions are, in part, order-words. In the last chapter I said that innovative poetries also, and vitally, consist of counter-words; but territorializing repetitions, as order-words, are necessary for the production of an order (a territory) from which the counter-words will simultaneously produce deterritorializing lines of flight. Order-words (always social and collective) do not only produce an external, social order but also produce the subject in its most ‘internal’, ‘private’ space of consciousness and orientation to the world. The inseparability of subject and world is clear here – especially when the fact that counter-words, which vitally disrupt the subject, are just as social and collective as order-words is taken into account. The full and lived assumption of this inseparability is the transformation of the subject into a haecceity and this transformation can be the result of a fully engaged performative encounter with innovative poetries.

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Such a radical contextualization would appear to mean that ‘internal’ and ‘external’ aspects of the poem are indistinguishable. It would be more accurate, however, to say that these terms lack meaning because everything occurs on a single surface. Therefore the order-words that produce the territory of a poem and the counter-words that deterritorialize it work with and against each other on a single surface across both rhythm and melody, character and landscape, as these latter work around each other and intersect as different planes of the same surface. An individual poem, a material and sensational singularity produced out of a play of order-words and counter-words, is connected to both a collective assemblage of poetic enunciation (a poetic tradition of one kind or another, although such a tradition should not necessarily be thought of simply as a unified canon) and to the individual oeuvre, which is itself connected to the same collective assemblage of enunciation. It may also draw on other collective assemblages of enunciation, from the demotic to the esoteric and it is, as performed, connected to the various collective assemblages of enunciation of which a reader’s individuation is in part composed. A poem is both an individual and a collective thing. The repetitions that produce a poem’s individual territoriality are drawn from Riley’s ‘communality of language’, which is to say that they are always already repetitions; and yet, the deterritorializations that are also produced, that transform the subjective individuality of a poem, and hence its reader, into a haecceity, becoming beyond the subject and still more completely singular as the always-new (and both absolutely individual and absolutely collective) also draws on resources that already exist within collective assemblages of enunciation. As Riley says, Poetry in its composing is an inrush of other’s voices, and in this respect it is no more than a licensed intensification of the very same property in prose. So ‘finding one’s voice’ must be an always frustrated search, fishing around in a strange fry-up or a bouillabaisse in which half-forgotten spiky or slimy things bubble up to the surface. Words crowd in uninvited, regardless of sense, flocking not through the brain but through the ear, like the Byzantine iconography of Christ’s conception.30 Riley goes on to quote Tristan Tzara, ‘“Thought is made in the mouth”’, and comments, ‘but it reverberates also in the ear, a more passive orifice.’31 Once the thought is in, on the other hand, it is ready as material for use in further productions that may transform it beyond simple recognition. What is produced is style, which is not the same as voice. Going back to Riley’s poem ‘Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else’, the poem says ‘I have never wanted / “a voice” anyway, nor got it’; the voice is the illusion of a coherent lyric subject in the traditional bourgeois sense, standing behind and shining through the poetic enunciations that are its expression. Style,

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on the other hand is just as individual but cannot easily be claimed by the personal subject as an expression of ‘them’; Jean-Jacques Lecercle states: there is a subject of style, but this subject is the end-product of a process of subjectivation (thus the subject is not the origin, but the effect of her style: the author does not have a style, it is style that has an author, that is inscribed, and in a way embodied, in an author’s name), and this subject, both individual (an ‘inimitable’ style) and collective (an assemblage is speaking) is in no way reducible to a person . . .32 The ‘subject’ as the product of style is the ossification of style; in conservative poetry it is the illusion of a personal voice, but it is, as an ossification of elements of a poem or an oeuvre, ultimately non-human and therefore non-personal. This non-personal subject of style seems similar to the ‘subject’ produced by the neo-classicist rhetoric of Dryden, and this may help to illuminate the difference between such a poetic subject and the haecceity of the contemporary innovative poem (or, for that matter, oeuvre). Dryden’s rhetoric is explicitly rule-bound and as such is both necessarily and intentionally conservative, politically and poetically. Deleuze and Guattari state that ‘the task of the classical artist is God’s own, that of organizing chaos’33 – in other words, the task is that of territorialization, the production of a place of safety: He or she breaks down the milieus, separates them, harmonizes them, regulates their mixtures, passes from one to the other. What the artist confronts in this way is chaos, the forces of chaos, the raw and untamed matter upon which Forms must be imposed in order to make substances, and Codes in order to make milieus.34 Such a task is necessarily a conservative one involving the production and imposition of order. It is a production of shelters, of hatches to be battened down against a chaos raging ‘outside’. This is a historically necessary poetic task, the production of such a safe territory having a certain priority in a kind of artistic hierarchy of needs. The modern poet or artist, however, has a different task: The assemblage no longer confronts the forces of chaos, it no longer uses the forces of the earth or the people [as in Romanticism] to deepen itself but instead opens itself onto the forces of the Cosmos.35 This reference to the cosmos is suggestive and possibly even a little unsettling – it is a big claim, perhaps – but for the moment I am concerned with the notion of opening. Innovative poems open: they open themselves and in the process

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(as this opening will only occur through performance) they open readers, however briefly. An opening is a line of flight that disrupts and, potentially, transforms subjects: it is an opening in the settled territory of the subject that puts it back into process and transforms it into a haecceity. It is not produced (in poetry) by concepts or by signification, as these are elements of the order or orders that counter-words disrupt or subvert. Rather an opening is produced by affects or percepts and the manner or their arrangement in blocks of sensation. Thus ‘The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet’ and ‘Facing Port Talbot’ both produce openings through percepts in both of their spatial dimensions that are conjoined, in the case of Oliver’s poem, with restlessness-affects, while Wilkinson’s poem moves rapidly among affects of beauty, sublimity, blankness, anxiety and desire, amongst others. In terms of interpellation, it is almost as though the poetry simultaneously interpellates itself and resists or rejects that interpellation. Writing about Althusser’s scenario of interpellation Riley states: any half-competent villain would refuse the temptation to glance round but would carry on purposefully walking or leaping insouciantly onto a bus; while most passers-by would, if the shout was forceful, crane round themselves.36 The poem is both a police officer and a ‘villain’ in this scenario, hailing itself – as the product of a certain culture, as gendered perhaps, as any kind of recognisable subject – and simultaneously walking off, getting on a bus, tracing a line of flight out of there, becoming something else that disrupts or subverts that recognition. For example, returning to Wilkinson’s ‘Facing Port Talbot’ the third part of the sequence reads, Mattresses still smoulder like the depths of slept hay are burnt by urine; loving voices have been packed & steam an eye for an eye, put one over, fortunate, I’d swear this, wincing dead theatrically.37 The sudden appearance of cliché (‘an eye for an eye, put one over, fortunate, I’d swear this, / wincing dead theatrically’) in this extract, clichés echoed on the following page (‘Tit for tat I’d call it, serves them right’38), strung together with little apparent signifying connection to their immediate discursive context, tends towards the revelation of their basic status as order-words par excellence, both ordering and authoritarian. Derived from a particular collective assemblage of enunciation, they mark the poem as itself deriving from the culture that that assemblage forms a part of. The poem is self-hailed as British (the ‘dead’ in ‘wincing dead theatrically’ seems peculiarly British) and JudeoChristian (‘an eye for an eye’) at least. At precisely the same time, within the same space, the clichéd phrases are here displaced through decontextualization and

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juxtaposition and so deterritorialized, entering into a dissonant but conjoined relation with their poetic context that undercuts their authority and opens them out. This deterritorializing and opening out of territorializing order-words and their transformation into counter-words (the deterritorializing sensation inscribed in this case in the body of a reader is the sensation of deterritorialization itself) suggests some reflections on subjectivity and sovereignty. Given the self-hailing, drawing on authoritative collective assemblages of enunciation, of poems that, at the same moment, go through a process of deterritorialization, it would seem that in fact the subjectivation of the poem (and again, therefore, of readers) through the interpellating hail once again transgresses any apparent boundaries between the internal and the external in that the interpellation comes both from the poem (and so is internal) and from the collective assemblage of enunciation (and so is external). Both sources of the subjectivating interpellation are necessary for the process of poetic subjectivation. As indicated previously, although the bourgeois subject is generally supposed to be self-sufficient and self-sovereign, problems with boundaries between inside and outside suggest that any notion of a discrete and self-sovereign subject is deeply problematic. The way in which innovative poems play on these problems to open out to the world (and in fact to reveal that openness as much as to produce it) through deterritorializing aesthetic strategies and so to produce a haecceity rather than a subject, chimes usefully with the thought of Georges Bataille on a sovereignty that would seem to be both immediately political and existential. Bataille writes of the sovereign life without limit: ‘Let us say that the sovereign (or the sovereign life) begins when, with the necessities ensured, the possibility of life opens up without limit.’39 This promise is what is offered by innovative poetries; indeed, the necessities ensured (in terms of the poem itself, the territory is established; in the life of a reader, she or he is perhaps unlikely to be in desperate need of food or physical safety if she is reading poetry), poetry produces deterritorializing affects that open up the limits or even abolish them. This is an individual sovereignty for Bataille, which in the past ‘belonged to those who, bearing the names of chieftain, pharaoh, king, king of kings, played a leading role in the formation of that being with which we identify ourselves, the human beings of today.’40 There is no doubt that such figures once enjoyed a degree of sovereignty, but they are also among the chief builders, or clients of the builders, of the territory, including that of the subject; there is also no doubt that they have policed that territory jealously. This, of course, is to say that these figures have worked to deny sovereignty to the majority of individuals. It should be easy to see, therefore, how this notion of sovereignty is immediately both existential and political. Sovereignty, Bataille states clearly, is life ‘beyond utility’;41 he gives an example of a worker drinking wine: As I see it, if the worker treats himself to the drink, this is essentially because into the wine he swallows there enters a miraculous element of savor, which is

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precisely the essence of sovereignty. It’s not much, but at least the glass of wine gives him, for a brief moment, the miraculous sensation of having the world at his disposal.42 This is a wonderful evocation of a sovereign moment, though it may bear some criticism. It evokes a moment beyond simple utility, and yet Bataille is surely right to say that ‘it’s not much’. It is not much because it presents a moment of sovereignty as consumption, and a similar experience of art would be what Adorno referred to as ‘cuisine’, art or poetry that is consumed by readers. Of course, given that the worker is drinking wine, this is only to be expected. The point is, though, that while Bataille writes of the ‘miraculous’, such miracles are always linked to consumption and opposed to production, in which, like a worker on the production line, all action is performed merely for the sake of something else and is mortgaged to futurity. This opposition of sovereignty to utility, a point well taken, clearly links up with Adorno and is the major element in a political reading of Bataille’s concept of sovereignty in that it is opposed to any kind of subservience or servility.43 However, sovereignty cannot be limited to consumption and must be extended beyond it. Adorno writes of ‘the emancipation of art from cuisine’ and he goes on, They were not a higher order of amusement. The relation to art was not that of its physical devouring; on the contrary, the beholder disappeared into the material; this is even more so in modern works that shoot toward the viewer as on occasion a locomotive does in a film.44 However, readers are not swallowed up by a poem (which suggests obliteration) but opened up with it as an often recalcitrant material element of the world; opened to and conjoined with the world (and possibly the cosmos) by way of a poem, precisely insofar as a reader cannot simply consume or assimilate it. There are, in fact, two primary possibilities for sovereignty beyond consumption in the reading of innovative poetry. Either the performance produces a kind of anti-consumption through which a reader is absolutely (if often only briefly) opened up by the poem; or the production of cracks or faultlines in the subjectivity of the reader through which the world may enter and the actualization of a haecceity may be germinated. The first of these possibilities involves the near-absolute, but temporary, deterritorialization of the ossified subject whereby this is transformed, however briefly, into a haecceity (in the context of the performance of a poem and therefore the oeuvre of which it is a part, the tradition to which it is connected, the worlds of its reference, ultimately the cosmos, all of which may be drawn, at least virtually, together as a single individuation, a haecceity unified in the moment that becomes an impermanent eternity of the encounter, as in Blake’s ‘eternity in an hour’) in a finite but borderless rhizomatic system in which all elements are connected to all other elements. The second possibility prepares the ground for the potential

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of the first, the deterritorialization is relative and incomplete but nonetheless real and positive for all that and provides the possibility of the opening of the first. In a movement that is only paradoxical if the concept of sovereignty is associated with the domination of others rather than with the absence of servility identified by Bataille, sovereignty is most powerfully realised beyond the subject and beyond consumption. I should point out that the openness produced by an innovative poem, productive in its turn of (and in fact virtually synonymous with) the sovereignty the concept of which is outlined above, is always already there, both for the human individual and the poem. The French philosopher Maurice MerleauPonty wrote: Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world. We are true through and through, and have with us, by the mere fact of belonging to the world and not merely being in the world in the way that things are, all that we need to transcend ourselves.45 In a near-paradox, human transcendence of self is immanent to the necessary openness of the self to the world. This would seem to imply that the territorialized subject is illusory. In fact, it is not an illusion as such; as long as existence is experienced in this way then such a subject is real – but the individual as a haecceity is other than the subject and continues to transcend it. It becomes with and into the world, for all that it might be continually reterritorialized. As such it is always in existence and to an extent underlies the existence of the subject; but its existence is largely virtual and it is for the most part a potentiality for selfhood. Language, in an inseparable, deeply intimate relationship with the human community and the human individual, is in a similar position. Prynne, with reference to his own poetry, states: It has mostly been my own aspiration, for example, to establish relations not personally with the reader, but with the world and its layers of shifted but recognisable usage; and thereby with the reader’s own position within the world.46 The relations formed with the world via language (insofar as these relations are formed through poetry) reveal an already-open language, opened through the ways in which it is ‘shifted’ and through its formation in ‘layers’ – the word ‘usage’ in the quotation above clearly suggesting an at least near-coincidence between world and language. The quotation also suggests that language forms an articulating relationship between a reader and the world, which is to say that language may be viewed as an object that is simultaneously in relation with the reader and with the rest of the world. A poem makes connections

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(that are beyond the poet’s control) with a reader’s worldly context via the collective assemblages with which that reader has his or her own individuating and haecceitic relation. At the same time, of course, a reader, from his or her own position, makes new connections and new haecceitic relations through a poem and undergoes a process of becoming, the outcome of which cannot be entirely determined beforehand – which is to say that a reader is ‘made’ by the poem in the sense that she or he becomes something new that would never have existed without the poetic encounter. Such relations cannot be strictly determined because it cannot absolutely be known what the various complex and impermanent relations and conjunctions are in advance. They are always open to an extent. The shifts inscribed in and performed by an innovative poem push this and open up these relations, creating new connections and new individuations through the foregrounded materiality of the sensations that compose the poem. What should also be clear from Prynne’s statement is the impersonal nature of the process – relations are ‘established not personally with the reader’; it is precisely the impersonal nature of the blocks of sensation that are produced and put into play that allows for the unfolding or opening out of a reader’s individuation and her transformation via the productive intensities of the poem into a haecceity. Thus readers attain a sovereignty that is other than utility, servility and consumption, beyond both the personal subject and political subjection. However, interpellation, order-words and territorializations remain necessary elements in this process; as Prynne says, the layers of shifted usage remain, importantly, recognizable. Denise Riley suggests not only the necessity of recognition and interpellation, but also its desirability: If it’s accorded a far more tender-hearted and anodyne coloration than it ever possessed within Hegel’s portrayed struggle for supremacy, then what is it to feel oneself ‘recognised’, if not to respond to what becomes, here, a benign and successful interpellation to which I can gladly assent, not because I am admired (which is always insupportable) but because I am correctly seen? That rare and relieved acknowledgement of ‘Yes, that’s me: I can tolerate being seen since I feel myself to be known’, marks, if fleetingly, the sense of being loved – not beyond interpellation, but in interpellation.47 Innovative poetries tend to work against recognition as against habit, towards the production of an encounter that is defined precisely against recognition. Yet readers frequently love individual poems and love a particular author’s oeuvre, and do so on the basis of a play of recognition and deterritorialization. Again, such recognition works through repetition that occurs only through difference and the production of deterritorialization. The benign interpellation is only benign when it is fleeting and productive of a safe ground to take off from and land on, or a support for skimming or surfing over, and doesn’t

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exert a gravitational pull so strong that no kind of flight is possible. Such interpellation is a basis for becoming rather than a naming of being. I wish to pull these explorations together somewhat in the examination of two poems from Geraldine Monk’s chapbook Insubstantial Thoughts on the Transubstantiation of the Text.48 This particular chapbook develops a sensational thought about poetry itself in various contexts, but more importantly for my analyses it does so through a complex interplay of references, auditory and visual techniques that situate performed poems (and so readers) in an exemplary manner both in terms of what the poetry does and in terms of the poetry’s ostensible content. There are a number of repetitions through these poems, the first being a repetition from Monk’s own ‘Interregnum’:49 More than meat or drink. Better than stars and water. Words birthed. Made flesh. Took wing. Horrids and enormities. Chantcasters. Daubing lunarscapes.50 This quotation or repetition of the previous poem is both an epigraph and a fully functioning element of the text in its own right. It appears not only at the beginning of the first poem of the sequence but also at the beginning of the other four as well, while fragments of it are also repeated both at the ends of and within the poems. The sequence is firmly placed by the self-citation within the territory of Monk’s oeuvre, but the territorializing repetition also functions through the deterritorializing difference of its new contexts. Also, the ‘original’ references to witchcraft in the context of ‘Interregnum’ that draw on the collective assemblage of folk-historical enunciation (with some overlap, perhaps, with literary and Hollywood or other cinematic assemblages) undergo their own transformations. In ‘Interregnum’, ‘Words birthed. Made flesh. Took wing. Horrids and / enormities. Chantcasters’51 reference the casting of spells, a reference made more secure by ‘lunarscapes’ (given the conventional associations of witchcraft and of the pagan goddess Hecate with the moon). Already carrying an affect of horror via ‘Horrids / and enormities’, the association of witchcraft with the diabolic (rather than with, for example, the pagan religion of Wicca) is then extended further: Stench polluting skies. Broodcasting vile tales. The abortus embalmed. Babyface on the chopping block. Death of Our Perpetual Succourpap. Swingalong with Satan. Donkey cock. Hot crosses. Jack Nazarene and the Five Bleeding Wounds of Passion sing in a-boo.52 The quite serious affect of diabolic horror produced by these lines is already undercut and transformed by a blasphemous humour in the casting of Christ’s passion as a Rock ’n’ Roll band and by the phrase ‘Donkey cock’, which

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draws on both the folk-historical assemblage to suggest the mythology of the orgies of the black mass and witches’ familiars and on the contemporary colloquial assemblage to suggest a male lover with a large penis – Satan, in this context. The affects of horror and humour produced through these lines are intensities that will shift readers in two directions at once, deterritorializing them and therefore producing transformations that open up her or his subjectivity and put her/him in motion, producing an individuation that is (momentarily at least) freed from the confining stability of the territory, and that is the anarchistic sovereignty alluded to earlier. Insubstantial Thoughts on the Transubstantiation of the Text, in its recontextualization and repetition of the lines from ‘Interregnum’, produces transformations of the text that necessarily alter their function. They retain their reference to witchcraft, yet that reference is coupled, via the title of the sequence, to the officially sanctioned transformative ‘magic’ of Christianity and of the Roman Catholic Church in particular. Exactly how a reader will perform this, assuming that he or she has some knowledge of the assemblages to bring them into play, will depend on their own relation to those assemblages; the devout Roman Catholic performance will be different from that of the atheist reader but may be precisely mirrored by that of the Wiccan. In all cases, though, the conjunction will produce some level of deterritorialization, opening conceptual questions of difference and similarity that interrogate easy assumptions based on the ordering functions of the assemblages and their apparent oppositions to each other. Again, the deterritorialization produced is only available because of the simultaneous territorialization in the different assemblages through which the text functions and the recognition of which are required for that functioning. It is, here, the overlaying of the different ordering assemblages and the simultaneity of apparently opposed territories fashioned by the poem that produces the deterritorializing affect. This is all before giving consideration to the properly aesthetic dimensions of the text, although such deterritorialization is an essentially aesthetic response to conceptual problems raised by the complexity of reference or articulation provided by the text on the plane of conceptual signification. The first poem in the sequence concerns a private, silent performance of poetry and is titled ‘Unvocalised (private)’. It reads (in part), The Lone Reader. Incommunicado. Unutterings sucked in silent body folds. Unstretched organs. Sonic un ♦temporal nuances subsistent. Inflexion depopulated.

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Accentuation dis♥embodied. The . (pause) . can be defiled. Rhythm skpt. KipPered. Throat sob ~s ~ caught breath Θ scored ♠ out.53 Regarding the act of private, silent performance (‘The Lone Reader. / Incommunicado.’), the most immediately obvious thing about this poem is the way in which it cannot be adequately vocalised due to its visual, graphological elements, such as the diamonds, hearts and spades. They might be performed as an absence, a pause, in any vocalised reading, but inscribed on the page they remain defiantly and materially there, refusing both vocalisation and obvious or easy interpretation. Being apparently beyond vocalization, they might seem removed from the body, refused bodily expression by readers – which would mean that they have no place in the body of the actualized, performed, poem and can only remain virtual. Yet they are, of course, conjoined with reader’s bodies by vision. They are ‘Unutterings sucked in silent / body folds’ – and yet, while this suggests consumption, they are not after all consumed but continue as material existents, recalcitrant, on the page, and thereby produce, in an exemplary manner, a conjunction between readers and the world through the text as a part of the world rather than simply being reflective of it or on it. They are a performative reference to the ostensible ‘subject’ of the poem – and in this, it must be stressed, they do not mean via that reference, they do, and what they do is further actualize the materiality of language, to which they are here co-opted in a necessarily unvocalised relation with a reader. They embody language beyond idealistic assumptions of representationalism, foregrounding the material existence of the poem in its own right. As such they are ‘Words birthed. Made flesh’, despite not being, strictly speaking, words; in fact they are words birthing, becoming flesh, and they affect the words around them and the relationship between those words and a reader actualized in performance. They therefore, as birthing and becoming flesh, refer obscurely but absolutely to the initial repetition of the text from ‘Interregnum’ and are a repetition of it, despite an absolute difference from it, a purely sensational, aesthetic repetition of the concepts signified. As such, they remain grounded, or at least connected, to the territory marked out in the opening lines of the poem and in the reference-through-repetition to ‘Interregnum’ and on, at least virtually, and at least, to the rest of Monk’s oeuvre. Simultaneously, though, through the aesthetic and materializing transformation they produce, they deterritorialize the conventional relationship between a reader and a text, opening readers to language as language rather than

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allowing readers to assimilate the text as a representational medium for the consumption of already-recognised ideas. A reader used to vocalizing poems, even silently, will stumble over those elements of the text that are unvocalisable or of problematic vocalisation (which include not only the playing-card symbols but also the stage-direction-like ‘. (pause) .’, the lack of vowels in ‘skpt’, the apparently random italicization and capitalization of some letters or parts of words, etc.); in the process, the rest of the poem is affected to a greater or lesser extent. It is, as Deleuze would have it, made to stutter: But if the [language] system appears in perpetual disequilibrium or bifurcation, if each of its terms in turn passes through a zone of continuous variation, then the language itself will begin to vibrate and stutter . . .54 The poem’s repetitions are elements of continuous variation, as has already been demonstrated, but such variation is underscored and taken further by the poem’s unvocalizable elements. Through such stuttering the language of the poem is put to flight: . . . they [great writers] make the language take flight, they send it racing along a witch’s line, ceaselessly placing it in a state of disequilibrium, making it bifurcate and vary in each of its terms, following an incessant modulation. This exceeds the possibilities of speech and attains the power of the language, or even of language in its entirety.55 The power of language ‘in it entirety’ is the power of the opening and the articulation of individuation and the world beyond signification or representation. This does not necessarily mean the abolition of signification, but it means rather that signification is only one non-central, non-organizing element in an on-going process, always begun-again, of flight out of the ossified territory of the subject towards the opening up of a haecceity and the production of a reader’s sovereignty. Moving on to the third poem of Monk’s Insubstantial Thoughts on the Transubstantiation of the Text, ‘Vocalised (public)’, the reader finds after the title the same three lines of repetition from ‘Interregnum’, but once again transformed by its new context. Like the repetition that stands at the beginning (after the title) of ‘Unvocalised (private)’ it references both the previous text and the title of the sequence as a whole in the ways examined earlier. What wasn’t considered earlier, though, was the way the repetitions reference forwards as well as backwards; the transformations referenced in the first poem concern the ways in which the text is embodied in or through the silent, private performance and the ambiguities of such embodiment. As such, the lines from ‘Interregnum’ are drawn into these considerations by implication as well as through a fragment of repetition at the end of the poem.

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In ‘Vocalised (public)’, the lines are drawn into a consideration and presentation of the ways in which text is transformed through the vocalizing, public performance. This is similar to the previous poem but is marked by a necessary difference of context. This mirrors the ways in which the text is necessarily transformed differently in the context of the public reading. The lines therefore cast a light over the rest of the poem that can only be fully appreciated backwards as they pick up connections to planes of significance as the reading of the poem progresses. Readers also find that there is nothing here that cannot be vocalized and that therefore that line of flight is unavailable. Instead there is an emphasis on vocable possibilities – linguistic affects and vocable sensations, rhythm, assonance, alliteration, and so on – that are in excess of signification and yet which work in combination with it. These suggest the somatic affects of the public reading: Voice exitings: inc(h)ants/ warbles/ sprechgesang/ gutturals. Nerves: edgling up arterials of interior weather maps. Humours: four and growing. Corporeal compass points. Text-gesturals: Rhythm. Ythmm. Timing. Timbre. The Happening-stance: The preposterously loud death-thud of the fledgling against the bedroom window. Max somatic dynamics. Rod-ram. Downy. Took wing.56 The vocable affects produced are sound affects that work as such even for the privately and silently performing reader; they always remain sound affects even when the sound is not actualized. One of the affects in these lines is an almost-onomatopoeia, from words like ‘warbles’ and ‘gutturals’ to ‘death-thud’, ‘rod-ram’ and ‘downy’, which possess haptic qualities that produce distinctly somatic affects, foregrounding the embodied nature of the actualized poem. This, therefore, is another line of flight that clearly opens readers to the world, or rather deterritorializes readers in such a way that they may more readily realize the openness to the world that they already are and allows for the (momentary) actualization of a non-subjective, sovereign haecceity.

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Each of the poems examined in this chapter brings readers into substantively new contact with the world in such a way that an encounter is produced, a bodily, somatic thought that is radically contextual. I have found that although individual readers embody a poem, a poem necessarily refers beyond the reader to produce itself as an inscription across and through the reader’s body that it conjoins with for the duration of the performance. This referentiality cannot help but be contextual insofar as it is language, for all that signification is subordinated to sensation; in fact, as openly sensational and material, the contextual necessity of innovative poetic language is greatly intensified. Thus readers are transformed and actualized as haecceities, always briefly and often only in singular patches of deterritorializing intensity. The embodied nature of a performed and actualized poem is complicated by the fact that a body both takes its place in a landscape that is produced by the poem and yet has that landscape sensationally inscribed within it. This complication is given particular stress when the radical contextual necessity of the haecceity is considered. I need, therefore, to think through the significance of sensation in the context of the composition of the poetic landscape that both gathers supportively around and runs through the embodied and performed actualization of the poem.

Chapter Five

The significance of sensation: the composition and force of innovative poetic space

I indicated, in Chapter Four, the importance, in a kind of hierarchy of poetic needs, of the production of a territory that will serve as a bulwark against chaos, from which innovative poetry may then trace a line of flight (such a bulwark providing the walls of poetry’s, and the individual’s, prison as well as their defence), producing a movement of becoming rather than a stasis of being, transforming a closed subject into an open haecceity. Therefore the place in which a poetic subject dwells and from which it may take flight is a territory of its own initial production. Its earth, its soil and its ground, produced by itself as itself, as the song that it is. The dwelling-place of the poetic subject is a self-reflexive production of its own territorializing song. I’ve chosen the word ‘place’ (for all that it is an ordinary, everyday word) with reference to Denis B. Walker’s essay, ‘The displaced self: The experience of atopia and the recollection of place’1, in which he states: Place, unlike space, with its connotations of emptiness and abstraction, is replete with value and feeling, with what Mikhail Bakhtin calls the socioideological, and thus with the subject itself. . . . Place is subjective, of the subject; it is forged by the inwardness of the subject against the absolute positionality and abstraction of space and sanctified into images and symbols. Space thus becomes place, non-abstracted, broadly religious and political in character, and knowing of the relativities of historical, cultural, and social contingency.2 Place is the dwelling of the subject, ordered, full of value and meaning, that the subject itself produces. The fact that its sanctification and its broad religiosity proceed by way of ‘images and symbols’ might suggest that place is always already poetic or artistic. A poetry of place would be Classical or Romantic, a subject-poet as God’s instrument against chaos or a subject-poet territorializing the earth and the people.3 This observation itself suggests that innovative poetry, modern in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms and productive of haecceity rather than subjectivity, may have a different aesthetic-ideological agenda than the construction of place.

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So, the (poetic) subject dwells in a place. If, however, the conjunction between a reader and an innovative poem as it is actualized in a performance, particularly with regard to a poem as a block of sensations, is productive of an individuation that moves away from the classically conceived subject, traces a line of flight from or deterritorializes that subject in the production of a haecceity, then in what kind of space does this poetic individuation move? What, in short, is the significance of sensation as regards the space of the contemporary innovative poem? I will begin to address these problems by returning to the poetry of John Wilkinson. ‘Sarn Helen’4 references a route (currently used by walkers and mountain bikers) that runs north-south through Wales, following the path of Cambrian Roman roads for 160 miles from Aberconwy to Camarthen. The title of the poem therefore suggests, to those who know, or are concerned to research, the reference, movement from the outset. However, this is a straightforward referential signification that only hints, at best, at the space or the landscape produced through the poem’s performance. The poem is divided into nine sections of varying length and form, though a dominant sensation on reading the poem is perhaps a forbidding monolithaffect; of the nine sections, five are subdivided into relatively lengthy, longlined, dense subsections, daunting walls of recalcitrant text. The other four sections are constructed of either short- or long-lined quatrains, except for one occasion on which the lines remain short but the sub-section lengthens as the tone becomes apparently more personal. I shall return to this later. On entering the poem, there is an immediate encounter with violence. The beginning of each section is marked with a forward slash that often (when heralding the start of any one of the five monolithic sections) seems to cut into an on-going discourse. I will quote the first section in full: / bayoneted. If any will hear the truth must cling best avoid blow dragonflies, cling on by nail-feasance over a cataract which scours a giant curtain wall, or was it short-of-time shrunk the unseeming aimless river to a bank’s sediment? Common seals luxuriate transmitters pinned behind their perked-up ears, breezes buffet from all directions Body-build them into a race of top achievers, filing across hillsides mewl within their gathering blades, a scopophilia shrink-wraps the forest in its retailer’s proud image Preserving it while it speeds, dragnetting seagulls, seagulls, choughs, a tinkers’ brood they desolate with far cries. Filaments shall creep through bated shear the nucleus, threads by which I still revolve

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shook where a deadeye holds the swarm by scent, from bracken rising augural, on white stuff lightsome. Bindings dishevelled dry & tighten on their windlass mummify, screwing a bridge’s tension dip and straight, machines tramping open cropped ground beneath go incognito in a high wire infant parsing T-cells Nose squashed on a greyprint, how will molten tar fuse the cracks, the drought shall visit? Canefrogs jump the continent, leaf through springy signatures closer than a razor-blade’s width. Co-dependency was our sick tract, gluey exudates we thought to pill, thought in lieu of reagent so a pancake could solidify honeycombed poor silicate, quivering to adjust hand-to-hand remedial lets the day-out skaters pass They throng the pentangle straw-fringed, slip-slide through turnstiles like windows read seasons’ entry.5 First I will identify some of the percepts that are produced in just the first five lines: bayoneted, full stop; blow, cling, cataract, scours, giant curtain wall, shrunk, aimless river, bank’s sediment. The violence of entry to the main body of the poem, an affect that is connected to the image-percept of the bayonet and the more purely linguistic percept of both being suddenly thrown into the apparent midst of a sentence and then cut off by the full stop, is underscored by the equally and variously violent percepts that follow it. These include violences of direct attack (blow), desperate action (cling), rapidly flowing and falling water and/or disease (cataract), abrasion (scours), sheer intimidating size (giant curtain wall), reduction (shrunk), hopelessness or pointlessness (aimless river), and erosion and possibly thirst (bank’s sediment). Such violence is not only the poem’s affect but is also, as a constellation of percepts, itself a percept and the opening landscape of the poem. It is specifically the landscape of the poem’s imaginative dimension, but also of its formal dimension (seen in the abrupt violence of that first full stop). It is an intensity, or rather a vibration and resonance of various intensities, that produces itself as the ground for itself, as the affect arises on the ground of the percept that is its landscape or space of production and movement. The poem’s violence is in harmony with the recalcitrance of its inescapable materiality, visible on the page as a monumental block of text. In the essay ‘Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality’, Daniel W. Smith argues that vibration is a ‘simple sensation’ that ‘is already composite, since it is defined by a difference in intensity that rises or falls, increases or decreases, an invisible pulsation that is more nervous than cerebral’.6 In painting, vibration is often produced through the use of colour,7 but here we can find it in, for instance, the word ‘scours’. This word has an onomatopoeic quality that causes a rise in intensity through a convergence of

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the intensity of the violence-affect that is produced by a sense of abrasion, the percept of the scoured ‘giant curtain wall’ (the violence of which is heightened by the word ‘giant’, a ‘simple sensation’ of size that increases the intensities with which it is in conjunction by a process of association) and the sonorouspercept (the pure sensation of sound) of the word itself (there may be other, more complex associations and poetic resonances at work around and through ‘scours’ but the word itself also composes this more simple vibration on its own account). Again, the imaginative and formal dimensions of the poem converge in the production of its broader landscape. The sensation of the word, in this context, is simple, but it vibrates with an increased intensity that is a composite of the intensities that attend the word itself and its context. It should be noted that, whereas the use of colour in painting may have no signifying elements whatsoever, a word like ‘scour’ inevitably does signify; however, although the signification of the word is an element (a vital one) in the vibration that it produces, the vibration itself remains a sensation, although it may have significance as an element of the block of sensations and as a percept that is an important element of the landscape of the poem. The fact that the vibration is a sensation and not a signification, although signification is an element in the rise in intensity, accounts for it being ‘more nervous than cerebral’. As for resonance, this can be illustrated by the phrase ‘avoid blow dragonflies’. Smith explains, In this case, two simple Figures or sensations, rather than simply being isolated and deformed, confront each other, like two wrestlers, in a handto-hand combat, and are thereby made to resonate. [Francis] Bacon, for instance, frequently puts two bodies in a single painting . . . in such a way that the bodies themselves are rendered indiscernible, and are made to resonate together in a single ‘matter of fact’, in order to make something appear that is irreducible to the two: this sensation, this Figure.8 In Wilkinson’s phrase ‘avoid blow dragonflies’, two ‘Figures or sensations’ might be ‘blow dragonflies’, although ‘avoid’ is an element of the resonance produced here. ‘Avoid’ produces the affect of violence in conjunction with ‘blow’, an affect that is perhaps itself a product of resonance that is a single matter of fact irreducible to the two elements. The pairing ‘blow dragonflies’, however, produces a similar affect through the conjunction with the violenceaffect already set up by ‘avoid blow’ (and other elements of the poem) and the pairing of the figures ‘blow’ and ‘-flies’, over-leaping ‘dragon’. The resonance between ‘blow’ and ‘-flies’, based on their possible pairing in other contexts provides a shock in the poem’s performance and therefore provides an important element of the encounter that the poem may produce. Without close analysis, this shock may be difficult to identify, obscured by ‘dragon’; the resonance between the figures ‘blow’ and ‘flies’, however, remains a single matter of fact, contributing through the suggestion of death and decay,

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to the constellation of percepts of violence with which the poem opens. Once again, the signification is clearly an important element of the block of sensations that is produced, but once again the signification involved is not the essential element: the single matter of fact remains a sensation and as such remains non-signifying, even as it relies upon signification for a vital element in its production. However, in this case, the signification is neutral; it contributes to the production of sensation but does not increase (or, for that matter, decrease) the intensities involved. These are some of the ways through which the poem does not produce a sense of place in Walker’s terms. While there are, of necessity, elements of recognition, through signification, involved in the production of the landscape or the space of the poem, and while, in fact, there are percepts of a natural or rural landscape (‘dragonflies’, ‘river’, ‘seals’, ‘breezes’, ‘hillsides’, ‘seagulls’, ‘bracken’ and ‘Canefrogs’, to identify a few) that are consonant with the poem’s title, these are conjoined with other elements of sensation, other constellations of percept and affect, that, producing a sensation and a landscape of violence, work to simultaneously deterritorialize any territorial recognition that is invoked. What is produced is not a place for a subject to dwell, but a space for individuation, becoming. In his essay ‘Six Notes on the Percept’, François Zourabichivili9 writes of the seer of painting or, for my purposes, a reader of a poem, passing into the landscape: . . . we do not see if we remain a subject opposite the object, maintaining its reserve, its personal feels and its memories, and living what it sees only in the manner of a reminder or a ghost: the seer becomes what he sees, he takes on the internal motion of what he sees, he becomes the very soul of the picture; the seer or the visionary has passed into the picture . . .10 In the conjunction of a reader and poem than is the actualized poem in performance, a reader not only passes into the landscape of the poem, but is the landscape of the poem insofar as the performance of the poem inscribes the landscape in the reader’s body. By passing into a poem, a reader is also passing into the world, if it is allowed that a poem is a part of the world with its own individuating actuality. The priority of sensation is vital; remaining focused on signified meaning means remaining opposite an object, attempting to assimilate it to the subjectivity of a reader through an intellection that, paradoxically, rebuffs the active thought of a poem’s sensations. Sensations, on the other hand, incorporate the conceptual elements of the poem, and so the conceptual intellection of a reader, without actually assimilating or erasing them. As a reader becomes with the landscape of ‘Sarn Helen’, she or he will necessarily become with both the violence-sensations and the rural territory that provides the violence-sensations with some kind of anchor, acting as a stabilizing influence. These two forces work together to produce the landscape as which and in which a reader becomes.11

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More specifically, this rural territory is incorporated into the poetic landscape of violence – as ‘blow flies’ works around the ‘dragon’ that produces ‘dragonflies’ as a percept that is part of the broader rural landscape of the poem and which provides some counter-point to the sensation of violence and decay. ‘Dragon’ is incorporated within ‘blowflies’ such that it provides a stabilizing, recognizable territory while blowflies, emerging from the rural landscape that it incorporates, takes on an extra deterritorializing violence due to its halfhidden position – the stabilizing rural territory thereby providing some of the possibility of the deterritorializing violence through its very existence alongside, and within, that violence. Of course, a reader will not become-violent through a process of an encounter with the poem. John Wilkinson is not likely to be sued as somehow responsible for muggings committed by readers of innovative poetry. Rather, a reader, as the body of the performed poem, is violent-becoming as the poem’s specific present-becoming. Becoming-violent implies a process in which an individual’s violence continually increases as she approaches some kind of absolute end-point. To violent-become, however, is a process composed of and comprising violence; it is not an end-point of a process but rather the mode of the process itself. This is the violence of, for example, the sea, a violence that is interstitial between order and chaos. Clearly, not all innovative poetry necessarily involves this kind of violence, but there is a tendency towards chaos and delirium, even if the poetry does not surrender to it, and even though it is produced with the utmost sobriety. The protection from chaos provided by territorialization is necessarily opened up to chaos again in the lines of flight that provide deterritorializing movements: Art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmos, a composed chaos – neither foreseen nor preconceived.12 The violence that composes the chaos approached and utilized by ‘Sarn Helen’ is a violence of smooth space, a space composed of trajectories rather than of points.13 Smooth space is pitted against the concept of striated space, although they do not simply oppose each other: . . . the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even the desert; in the second, the desert gains and grows; and the two can happen simultaneously. But the de facto mixes do not preclude a de jure, or abstract, distinction between them.14 The two spaces have different significances; if they occur simultaneously then the one who traverses them will be moving in two different directions, or in two different ways at once.

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In a description of smooth space, elucidating its differences with striated space, Deleuze and Guattari write a passage that is very like an accurate description of the operations of much innovative poetry: Directed or not, and especially in the latter case, smooth space is directional rather than dimensional or metric. Smooth space is filled by events or haecceities, far more than by formed and perceived things. It is a space of affects, more than one of properties. It is haptic rather than optical perception. Whereas in the striated forms organize a matter, in the smooth materials signal forces and serve as symptoms for them. It is an intensive rather than extensive space, one of distances, not of measures and properties. . . . Perception in it is based on symptoms and evaluations rather than measures and properties. That is why smooth space is occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces and sonorous and tactile qualities, as in the desert, steppe, or ice. The creaking of ice and the song of the sands. Striated space, on the contrary, is canopied by the sky as measure and by the measurable visual qualities deriving from it.15 This certainly resonates with the violent-becoming of ‘Sarn Helen’; readers trace a trajectory among the percepts, each of which is itself a haecceity that is conjoined with others and with affects to form the block of sensations that is the poem itself. At the same time, the tracing is also the poem itself; a reader’s body becomes the poem’s landscape, its predominantly smooth space. It is a non-human landscape (inscribed across and through a human body) capable of providing a ground of transformation from human being to a becomingwith-the-world that is in part human. The affects that a reader encounters in this process both rise out of the landscape as the becoming that a reader then is and, as compositional elements of the poem, are also the landscape themselves. Also of particular note in this passage is the reference to ‘haptic rather than visual perception’. A purely visual model is a model of a distant aesthetic experience and therefore a subject–object relationship. A haptic model of aesthetic encounter, on the other hand, implies (as a concept of touch) a more immediate or intimately connected quality. This notion does not exclude the visual but transforms it: “Haptic” is a better word than “tactile” since it does not establish an opposition between two sense organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfil this nonoptical function.16 They go on, It seems to us that the Smooth is both the object of a close vision par excellence and the element of a haptic space (which may be as much visual or auditory as tactile). The Striated, on the contrary, relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space . . .17

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The haptic is the state of a performed poem, a poem actualized across and through the body of a performing reader; Deleuze and Guattari’s aesthetic model in the above quotation is painting but the smooth space of poetry is haptic insofar as it, actualized, is always embodied. The concept of distant vision corresponds to conceptual thought itself if this thought is applied to poetry; through conceptual thought a reader may ‘see’ a poem but may not enter it and become a seer. In order for a reader to enter a poem, a poem has to enter and conjoin with a reader. On the simplest and most straightforward plane, the performed poem is always already haptic because, even in a silent reading, it is in the mouth. This was seen with Douglas Oliver’s discussion of Dryden – the performance of a poem is always a performance of its formal, musical dimension and this dimension is always first and foremost corporeal and sensational. Given the importance of the formal dimension for innovative poetry in particular (largely eschewing the illusion of the subordination of sensation to concept that is often the case with more conventional poetry), this places an emphasis on the space of an innovative poem as a haptic space. This is not an act of consumption – the mouth does not eat the poem – but rather the opposite, it is a conjunction and an opening out. To look at a brief example of this, I would like to take a quatrain from the fourth section of ‘Sarn Helen’: Noise & surplus it will erase, a pendant strung to starlight, floored with the table of valency & a preponderance. Go to the utmost ends of the earth, far be it from you will its thick-knit doldrums rock a glistening hold-all Here there are both auditory and visual percepts (‘noise’, ‘a pendant strung to starlight’, ‘a glistening hold-all’). The complex combination of alliteration and assonance that runs through the first line pulls the first two of these percepts firmly together. These sonorous percepts actually set up a resonance, in the Deleuzian sense discussed earlier, so that the various auditory and visual percepts become one matter of fact. This resonance plays across the quatrain, pulling in the /s/ sounds, the /l/ sounds and the /t/ sounds so that all four lines become a single matter of fact with a play of varying degrees of intensity, a particularly high intensity on ‘glistening’, which resonates through both sensation and signification with ‘starlight’. More importantly for my purposes, they set up this resonance in the mouth of a reader, necessarily conjoining with her as haptic. This is a smooth space (a single matter of fact composed of mobile variations of intensity) through which readers move – while it moves across and through readers – and becomes across all of their faculties, including the physical, even while those faculties do not work exactly in concert but rather resonate in a block of differing intensities. The haptic model is necessary for a theory of poetry as sensation because of the necessity of a sense of physical conjunction as opposed to the sense of distance that holds with the visual model.

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In a short essay on Prynne’s Her Weasels Wild Returning (1994), Rod Mengham also seems to approach a sense of the poetry as constituting a smooth space. He characterizes the language of Her Weasels Wild Returning as ‘heavily synthesised, more systematically correlated, simply more commensurable’18 in contrast to Prynne’s earlier poetry, in which ‘a collision of registers had been used to relativize individual cognition and the individual apprehension of data in respect of those macro- and micro-processes determining the various levels at which individual subjectivity gets formed’.19 To my thinking, Mengham’s sophisticated analysis of the shift in Prynne’s poetry marked by Her Weasels Wild Returning seems largely correct. The poetry produced by Prynne since 1994 has, by and large, been different from that which preceded it. Of course, Mengham’s analysis remains tied to interpretative assumptions that logically correlate to representationalism; for example, he writes that ‘Prynne’s texts have returned repeatedly to the conceptual alternatives that stem from the condition of settlement and nomadism in order to reflect on the origins of those social relations that arise with the creation of money economies and the establishment of money relations’.20 The key word here that reveals the principle of Mengham’s approach is ‘conceptual’: his is a reading of the concepts he perceives as produced by Prynne’s poetry and the cohesion that he notes in Her Weasel’s Wild Returning is, as sensation, perceived as an adjunct to the conceptuality that he analyses. In fact, the smoothness of Prynne’s later poetry is no greater, in the terms of the concept of smooth space outlined above, than much of Prynne’s earlier poetry – but it is of a different order. A poem such as ‘Es Lebe Der König’ is a smooth space in that it is a poem of movement, a dynamic landscape out of which affects of greater or lesser intensity arise and fall according to the fractured blend of discourses clashing and flowing together. As Mengham puts it, The earlier work provided an encounter with radically uneven velocities, where the movement of verse performed by the reading voice would part company with the speed of thought, or with the velocity of those macro- and micro-processes whose rate of movement is either infinitesimal or instantaneous.21 However it is intended by Mengham, the word ‘encounter’ here is entirely appropriate of course: an encounter is exactly what a reader enters into when reading a poem of this type, and that encounter is first and foremost an encounter with a poem as a block of sensations. This is what Mengham is describing as he uses terms such as ‘velocities’, ‘movement’ and ‘speed’. In terms of the poem’s landscape, he is also clearly describing the encounter with, or in, a smooth space, for all that it involves ‘shock and discontinuity’.22 Weasels is described, in contrast with the earlier poetry, as follows: In Weasels, all those discourses participating in the language of the text are subjected to a total reconfiguration that allows them to be systematically

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imbricated with each other in every aspect of the structure and according to every measure.23 Essentially, what Mengham is describing is a smoothing out of what was already, in the earlier poems, a smooth space, a smoothing out produced by an imbrication of the various discourses that in earlier poetries produced a sensation of movement or velocity through the ways in which they blended, clashed and flowed together. In Weasels, however, they are laid over each other, overlapping in such a way as to become, if not indistinguishable, then at least not immediately distinguished by the fact that they clash. They are no longer revealed in their difference by shock and discontinuity. This remains the case for much of Prynne’s later poetry; yet even though there is less obvious discontinuity, these poems do not become simply static. There may be an overall sense of a movement towards a kind of poetic entropy, or even heat-death, but that point has not been reached. Rather, the poetry produces a space of movement in which no points are reached, or rather, the reaching of points is not the object. Reading the first poem of Prynne’s Acrylic Tips (2002),24 for example, there are ‘krook pathways risen up / To wheel and turn about spandrels high over submission’,25 a dynamic, mobile landscape. It seems true that in the poetry after Weasels there is a lack of shock or discontinuity – the dynamism of these lines is not produced by a clash of discourses but by the intensities produced by the verbs that are simultaneously affects and, in that they are elements of a descriptive passage, percepts. The blend, now an imbrication, of different discourses is still a particularly productive element within the block of sensations that produce the poem. Here, however, instead of the dynamism of fracture, surprise or shock there is the dynamism of an exhilarating movement through a landscape (and the movement of that landscape through a reader) whose contours provide an inhuman speed and grace of development, of becoming, through lines of near-abstraction that seem, avoiding outright abstraction, to produce an entirely new universe. Take this passage from the second poem in Acrylic Tips: Ever fetch promoted, dejected by partner claimants out pat on a moving front, muster to confirm a perimeter ailment, their kids besotted like a felt roof on all sides. Win on green, give a toss in a snug rafter; heparin Regulation demeans and spoils the touchline, you fair ones on loan to ascending digger collapse ominous in a precint under rasp channelled by pickup spreads.26 The range of discourses traversed is remarkable, from the legalistic discursive conventions of social security (‘claimants’) to weather reports (‘moving front’), military lexis (‘muster’), colloquialism (‘kids’, ‘give a toss’), science and medicine

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(‘heparin’), sport (‘touchline’) and music engineering (‘pickup spreads’). These different discursive modes do not confront each other, as in earlier poetry, but rather slot together in such a way that they read like elements of a single discourse, a single matter of fact. The landscape of this poem may be thought of in terms of the third of the ‘three fundamental types of asymmetrical syntheses’27 of forces (the first two being the previously mentioned vibration and resonance) that Daniel W. Smith identifies in Deleuze’s aesthetic and in his analysis of Bacon’s painting in particular. Deleuze calls this third synthesis ‘forced movement’, and in the analysis of Bacon’s painting it is used with particular reference to his triptychs. Smith writes: How can the separated Figures of the triptychs be said to present a single ‘matter of fact’? It is because in them the separated Figures achieve such an extraordinary amplitude between them that the limits of sensation are broken: sensation is no longer dependent upon a Figure per se, but rather the intensive rhythm of force itself becomes the Figure .of the triptych.28 There is, through forced movement, a movement towards abstraction without the work of art actually being abstract. The Figure, which is not figurative, which is to say neither representative nor narrative, remains a figure but it is a figure composed of pure sensation, an ‘intensive rhythm of force’. Deleuze writes: With the triptych, finally, rhythm takes on an extraordinary amplitude in a forced movement which gives it an autonomy, and produces in us the impression of time: the limits of sensation are broken, exceeded in all directions; the Figures are lifted up, or thrown in the air, placed upon the aerial riggings from which they suddenly fall. But at the same time, in this immobile fall, the strangest phenomenon of recomposition or redistribution is produced, for it is the rhythm itself that becomes sensation, it is rhythm that becomes Figure, according to its own separated directions, the active, the passive, and the attendant.29 Given the focus on Bacon’s triptychs, Deleuze posits a threefold schema for forced movement: active, passive and attendant. However, no such schema will suffice for poetry, as there are not just three Figures brought into relation. The Figures in Prynne’s poetry may be identified with the different discourses that are brought together to form the single matter of fact of the poem and the smooth space that it is and that it produces – and there may be any number of these. Looking again at the lines from Acrylic Tips quoted previously, the first three words, ‘Ever fetch promoted’, form a rhythmic block without any readily apparent signification. Grammatically, the phrase appears to form the subject of the sentence. Other elements of the sentence, such as the word ‘muster’ and the phrase ‘their kids’ would imply that this subject, whatever it may be, is somehow

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plural or collective. This, however, seems as far as it is possible to go with an interpretative attempt; whatever it is communicating must clearly be a communication of sensation rather than sense. Yet sense is, of course, necessarily involved. Two of the words in the phrase are commonly verbs – ‘fetch’ and ‘promoted’; this gives a dynamic quality that cannot be reduced to the being of a subject. This ‘subject’ of the sentence is not being, it is doing, though what it is doing remains enigmatic as ‘fetch’ and ‘promoted’ are not verbs that would be juxtaposed like this in everyday discourse. Given their place in the sentence, however, which is grammatically conventional to the extent that it seems to have subject, verb and object plus subordinate clauses, and rhythmically quite regular, any potential for disjunction is smoothed out. Composed of three words that have no normal business either together or in the position that they are, the phrase nevertheless becomes a single matter of fact and that fact is a dynamic rhythmic movement. If ‘fetch’ is read as a noun – as an act of fetching, as a distance travelled across or to open water or as, archaically, a trick – this makes the sentence more obviously grammatical, but it changes little else of the sensations that compose it; the word remains essentially dynamic. The sense of movement across open water, of course, has some resonance with the ‘moving front’ of the second line. The impossibility of straightforward interpretation (recognition) immediately places readers in a strange space, smooth, beyond recognition and composed of dynamic sensations. Readers are thrust by this dynamism along the line and through the space of the rest of the poem (the space of a reader’s own body affected by poetic sensations). Each of the different discourses encountered along the way is connected smoothly to each and every other encounter by the forced movement of the language itself that imbricates these discourses into a single matter of fact. In Deleuze’s account of Bacon’s painting, vibration, resonance and forced movement are different syntheses of sensation that occur in different paintings: a painting that is composed of a single Figure is composed of vibration, that which is composed of two Figures is composed of resonance and the triptychs are composed of forced movement – and, forced movement being the most amplified of syntheses, Deleuze gives a ‘privileged place’ to the triptychs. In poetry, however, all three syntheses of sensation may occur within a single poem, indeed within a single line or even phrase. This is why, although I am writing about forced movement in relation to a question of a particular smoothness of Prynne’s later poetry, this should not be taken to imply any privilege over other poetries. It should not be assumed that Wilkinson’s poetry, for example, is composed only of vibration and resonance while Prynne’s is composed of forced movement; in fact the poetry of both is composed of all three and the vibration or resonance of specific words or phrases within a poem may form its Figures (to draw the analogy with painting) that are themselves disjunctive elements drawn together in a single matter of fact through forced movement.

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Forced movement does not necessarily rely on the kind of mix of conventional and non-conventional grammatical structures outlined above for the first sentence of the second poem in Acrylic Tips. If that were the case then much of Prynne’s later poetry would work in the same way as his earlier poetry, with those lines that do not involve conventional grammatical construction producing disjunction and a sense of fracture. The next sentence drawn from the same poem runs, Win on green, give a toss in a snug rafter; heparin Regulation demeans and spoils the touchline, you fair ones on loan to ascending digger collapse ominous in a precint under rasp channelled by pickup spreads.30 Grammatically, this is a rather more unconventional sentence than the preceding one. Grammaticality cannot, therefore, be an important factor in the forced movement that is smoothing out any tendency to disjunction in this instance. Opening with an injunction, the first clause has no apparent connection with the preceding sentence, and, of course, as an injunction, operates as an address. What is demanded of an addressee, however, is not clear, and neither is the source of address. There is no explanatory context for these phrases, which again considerably weakens any proposed representational function. What a reader encounters is, once again, a smooth space of percepts that gives rise to certain affects. However, the exceptional smoothness of this space weakens the force of the affects and gives prominence to the percepts so that what a reader appears to be confronted with is a scene that she or he enters into (with a little effort – readers are not invited or drawn in, but the space exists for an entry of a reader nonetheless even if it demands a certain commitment) and becomes, but which does not provide much of the affective force that would be produced through disjunctions that can force affects to rise up out of the perceptlandscape of the poem, like mountains pushed up from the earth by colliding tectonic plates. Such a production of affective force does not imply a more striated space, simply a different kind of smooth space. The striated space is, rather crudely, consonant with Place and is largely the product of a certain kind of settlement or marking out. The mountain is, in these terms, as smooth as the sea. This is not to say that there is no affect here; rather the affects that are produced are of a lower intensity and are occasionally indistinct in relation to the percepts. In this case, ‘snug’, ‘demeans’ and ‘spoils’ are clearly productive of affects; they are relatively distinct from the percepts that are in some sense their ground, and yet they also appear to be of a relatively low intensity. They produce no shocks, blocks or impediments to the flow of the poem, and therefore of a reader. It is as though their lower intensity transforms these affects

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such that they take on a solidity that renders them materially similar to the percepts with which they form a block. This is a space, then, through which a reader moves, and with which a reader becomes, that produces an intensified speed of movement through the lower intensity of the affects that are conjoined with the percepts in the production of the landscape. This speed of movement, and this smoothness of space provide for a deterritorialization that nears the status of absolute deterritorialization: The absolute expresses nothing transcendent or undifferentiated. It does not even express a quantity that would exceed all given (relative) quantities. It expresses only a type of movement qualitatively different from relative movement. A movement is absolute when, whatever its quantity and speed, it relates “a” body considered as multiple to a smooth space that it occupies in the manner of a vortex.31 There is an apparent contradiction here with my own assertion that the nearabsolute deterritorialization produced through Acrylic Tips is in part produced through its speed of movement. What the speed of the poem does, though, is to work as an element in the production of a quality of movement that is absolute. While speed is not a necessary element in the production of an absolute deterritorialization in every case, it is an element in this case. The speed of the poem works to prevent a reader from settling on a reterritorialization of sensation into concept, for example. The discursive materials of the poetry, drawn from any number of assemblages of enunciation, are imbricated in such a way that the movement from one to another occurs with a speed that almost disallows reterritorialization altogether. Reterritorialization does, of course, occur, but it only occurs for a fraction of an instant of recognition – recognition of the phrase ‘channelled by pickup spreads’ for example – before it is immediately whisked away, and the reader with it, removing it from any more than a fraction of reterritorialization in the assemblage from which it is drawn. So the phrase ‘channelled by pickup spreads’, drawing on sound engineering, might be reterritorialized on precisely that assemblage of enunciation – except that what is channelled by pickup spreads is not music but ‘a pre-/cint under rasp’. Of course, the ‘rasp’ may be a noise channelled by pickup spreads, but still there is the question of how the ‘precint’ is under such a noise. The noise in fact becomes a percept while ‘precint’ is entirely enigmatic beyond the percept that it is and its closeness to ‘precinct’. All of this is registered in the speed with which the text is read and without the reader pulling up at fractured signification, or even fractured sensation, because of the forced movement that is the poem’s imbrication. It is the lack of a fracture in sensation that disallows the potential shock of fractured signification. A reader is therefore caught up in something like a ‘vortex’ of sensation – although ‘vortex’ may not be the most precise word for the process as a vortex contains a still centre that is not present here.

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Signification cannot, though, as usual, be entirely discounted as the rasp is still channelled by pickup spreads, and that phrase signifies. Signification works with the deterritorializing effect of the blocks of sensations by its strange placing within the assemblage of the poem. As Rod Mengham says of Her Weasels Wild Returning, ‘the language is more bizarre than ever’;32 while there is none of the increased intensity that was produced in ‘Sarn Helen’ through the conjunction of signification and sensation, there is a further movement, away from the territory, that is a product of the strangeness of the imbrication of registers. The poetry both does and does not refer to the world; the different discourses that are imbricated in the poetry do not describe a recognizable world (which is one source of their power) and yet they are drawn from recognizable assemblages such that they do not become pure abstract sensation. The way in which they are drawn together in a single matter of fact means that they cannot be said to ‘represent’ some fractured modern or postmodern world; rather the poetry produces another world, another universe out of elements of the one inhabited every day by readers. The fact that a reader moves with this universe, becomes with this universe (which unfolds, or becomes, as the poetry unfolds from poem to poem, as each singular poem is drawn together in a single matter of fact), is a factor in opening a reader out to the cosmos of which this other universe becomes a part. At the same time, the fact that this universe is constructed out of elements of the everyday world of the reader means that it is not a separate universe, unconnected to the reader’s world, but is possible only because it is conjoined with the everyday world, and always has been. The poetry is the actualization of virtualities that already existed within the world and within language. Readers are therefore necessarily conjoined with the world and with the cosmos as a new actualization of an always already existing virtuality that implies the possibility of other worlds, other territories, than the one habitually inhabited on a day-to-day level. This indicates a certain non-conservative political force (as well as the non-conservative political provenance of their institutional status) to the operations of innovative poetries that will be spelled out more fully in the next chapter. However, the absolute deterritorialization produced in part through the production of a smooth space as in Prynne’s Acrylic Tips is not the only way in which poetry may produce such non-conservative political force. The production of a new territory, or even a fresh encroachment onto alien territory that forges a conjunction with an existing subaltern territory – a play of deterritorialization and reterritorialization that is relative rather than absolute – may involve a powerful non-conservative political force of its own. This could begin a description of Denise Riley’s innovative feminist lyric practice, or at least of elements of it, to which I will return in Chapter Six. First, though, I want to turn briefly to the work of Maggie O’Sullivan. O’Sullivan’s poetry produces a space that is resolutely non-human. Language is frequently broken apart and reformed according to auditory or visual requirements, sometimes evolving into significations that produce their own

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sensations, sometimes devolving from them. Robert Sheppard says of her work that a ‘reader has to recognize a moment that resembles language being born rather than being used to represent something’;33 this birth, however, is a monstrous birth beyond the human as we would immediately recognize it. This non-human, or perhaps rather extra-human, language, and the space it generates, is connected in particular with animals, and this is its monstrosity. While all innovative poetry, even all poetry, is in principle non-human, O’Sullivan’s poetry is often specifically hybridizing, a becoming-animal. As such it is a space that brings readers into conjunction with Otherness so directly that the deterritorializing force it produces, while not absolute, has a near-absolute intensity. It is a force, however that could not be produced in quite the same way through an absolute deterritorialization – it requires the presence of recognizable signification, which is to say it must be ‘hybrid’, to draw readers into precisely that conjunction with Otherness that is so powerful. ‘Another Weather System’, published as Book 1 of In The House of the Shaman,34 is said by Clair Wills, in her essay ‘Contemporary women’s poetry: experimentalism and the expressive voice’35, to follow ‘the “lure” of the hawk’s circling and kill, along with a parallel representation of human disease and death.’36 She goes on, The body as O’Sullivan presents it is blood, bones and tendons, but also fur, beak and fin.’37 This focus on animality accords with both the title of In The House of the Shaman, and with statements by O’Sullivan herself, such as the following (from an interview with Dell Olsen): I have always felt tremendous empathy with animals. As a child, I was appalled at the casual cruelties and unquestioning hatred and abuse of animals in the world at large. Exploitation and violation of other-than-human beings underpins our society and is embedded at every level in our h/arming hierarchies. I always felt I was no different from other animals. Having lived beside/shared life with animals, I feel this more passionately than ever now. The celebration of the transformative, merciful intelligences of animals is all in my work.38 It is my contention that this connection with animals leads O’Sullivan to produce a poetic landscape, and a poetry, that is specifically becoming-animal. In order to investigate this further, I will need to provide a quotation from the poem to work on, Skull & Bone & comb breathe & river, the crow

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is in time thinned, stirred stabbing souther impings – all the greater multiplying – hills unhealed, small bells so they glass in the clothing ailment pecking the lure seizing wood, barks, crown of these39 The capitalization in the first line here, on ‘Skull’ and ‘Bone’, gives those two words an emphasis that provides them with a particular intensity. This intensity provides the first pair of outcrops of affect in the space of this section of the poem and it is important to determine what that affect is. They are, of course, the first two words (not including the ampersands) and so it might be expected that they would be the first affects encountered, but the intensity provided by the capitalization is further enhanced by the lack of capitalization on the third word, ‘comb’. ‘Comb’ has a lighter affect and produces a dip in intensity partly due to the lack of capitalization; however it also produces a dip in intensity due to a certain sense of recognition. Although ‘comb’ in this sense belongs specifically to the bird, there is also something human about it; if a person wants to do a comical impersonation of a chicken, for example, they will often wear a rubber comb. ‘Comb’ therefore carries a weight of human-inflected ‘birdness’ about it that is precisely not becoming-animal. It remains a percept (rather than an affect), but it is a percept, a sensation, of low intensity because of its conceptual freight. Its function in the line is to signify ‘bird’ rather than to convey sensation of any intensity. ‘Skull’ and ‘Bone’, on the other hand, despite (or perhaps rather because of) the fact that they signify nothing specific in terms of species, plunge readers directly into a sense of animality, of physicality, that has force as affect because it cannot be assimilated. There is no possibility of imitation here; there is also an implicit resistance to the sentimentality of anthropomorphism – there is no suggestion that the animal has a face. This affective force of a non-human physicality brings a reader directly into an encounter with the animal (and for that matter with her own animality) that would otherwise be deflected by an assimilating recognition. At the same time, ‘Skull’ and ‘Bone’ might suggest an

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encounter with death were it not for the territorializing specificity of ‘comb’ and the following ‘breathe & / river’, percepts that are the ground for and productive of affects of flow and life (not respectively but simultaneously through their conjunction). ‘Skull’ and ‘Bone’ are thereby provided with a force of life that is distinctly animal in its pure physicality through a refusal of the possibility of anthropomorphism. Regarding becoming-animal, Deleuze and Guattari state For if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that human being does not “really” become an animal, any more than the animal “really” becomes something else. Becoming produces nothing other than itself. We fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. What is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposed fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. Becoming can and should be qualified as becoming even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become. . . . This is the point to clarify: that a becoming lacks a subject distinct from itself; but also that it has no term, since its term in turn exists only as taken up in another becoming of which it is the subject, and which coexists, forms a block, with the first.40 Becoming does not necessarily require a fixed or specific other term and a human does not ‘really’ become an animal, certainly does not imitate or play at being an animal in the process of becoming. ‘Another Weather System’ specifically eschews the possibility of imitation, or of a reader confusing the poem with an attempt to imitate; as yet in my analysis, it also refuses much in the way of species specificity, allowing only ‘bird’ to be signified by ‘comb’. Importantly, what it is doing is producing a process of becoming animal by a conjunction of animality with the human by way of language. ‘Becoming produces nothing other than itself’. The becoming-animal produced by the performed poem can only be composed in a particular kind of space. If it is the becoming that is real rather than the ‘supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes’, then a space that allows or promotes becoming must be, broadly, smooth. Striated spaces are precisely based upon fixed terms that have particular symbolic or signifying values that order the space and make of it somewhere to take rest and comfort (sheltered by the authority of the fixed terms). Places are spaces of recognition, relying on terms assimilable to human conceptual cognition in such a way that they provide a sense of comfort and safety that is inimical to change. That is why, to reiterate somewhat, places or striated spaces are always essentially conservative. There are necessarily territorializing terms at work in O’Sullivan’s poem, such as the aforementioned ‘comb’ and the word ‘lure’. These terms help to provide the ‘structure and argument’41 of the poem. However, the space of the poem remains primarily smooth and it is this smoothness of landscape that

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allows affects to produce the poem’s movement of becoming-animal. What the trajectory of the non-human becoming of a reader in the performance of a poem is may not always be easy to discern very clearly; in ‘Another Weather System’ it is, relatively speaking, quite easy to discern. It is a becoming-animal. ‘Another Weather System’ is a smooth space of ripples, outcrops and changes in velocity within which territorializing forces provide facilities for orientation, fractions of striation, before the reader is pulled, pushed or swept on through the poem. The changes in velocity are clear just on a quick scan of the page: the white spaces that break the text up or slow it down, the dashes, short lines, single-word lines, the almost crazy-looking but in fact entirely sober line indentations that score the poem and the longer lines, such as ‘all the greater multiplying –’ that provide a certain rush of speed, all produce these changes immediately. Again, there is no imitation of the animal, but rather a conjunction with the non-human and non-conceptual that is productive of a becominganimal written into the texture of the poem, producing a becoming that infects a reader and is a reader. Deleuze and Guattari write of becoming as an epidemic or contagion that is opposed to filiation or heredity.42 The language of O’Sullivan’s poem is infected with the animal and in its turn infects readers. This is an encounter with the poem as a reality that cannot be assimilated but may only be conjoined with or rejected; conjunction produces thought against the comforts of recognition, while rejection is a rejection of thought in favour of dogma. The poetry is transformative – even if only briefly – and a transformation of a reader is also a transformation of the world (on however microscopic a level, and however short lived), as a transformation of a reader only occurs in conjunction with the real, which the poem is, and with the world, of which the poem is a part. What is transformed is an individual as a haecceity (and part of the transformation involves a realization by a reader of him or herself as a haecceity and therefore as always already necessarily conjoined with an unassimilable world that forms the individuation, process of becoming, that they are) that is a conjunction of a reader and the world. It is in this way that innovative poetry, although often produced from a position of privilege, does not endorse such a privilege but offers, rather, a certain promise of happiness, broken or not, beyond hierarchical order. The transformative force of poetry will often operate through the subaltern (such as the animal) or the other, such that what is always produced is a minor literature, a minor poetry that is necessarily pitted against hierarchy. This is to say, of course, that this poetry is political. A full consideration of the conjunction of the poetic and the political as it is staged through innovative poems will be the focus of the next, and final, chapter.

Chapter Six

The significance of sensation: the politics of contemporary innovative poetry

In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno states that ‘what is social in art is its immanent movement against society, not its manifest opinions’.1 If I replace the word ‘social’ with the word ‘political’, the essential remains the same: what is political in art, and in this case in innovative poetry, is ‘its immanent movement against society’ and not the opinions apparently expressed in or through it. Adorno elaborates further, Social struggles and the relations of classes are imprinted in the structure of artworks; by contrast, the political positions deliberately adopted by artworks are epiphenomena … Political opinions count for little.2 Politics are inscribed in the form and structure of a poem; political opinion is a gesture across the poem that has little purchase in comparison to the political struggles inherent, according to Adorno, in the bedrock, the structure, the depths of the work. However, Adorno’s model renders the poem static, existing most authentically in structure and depth, nullifying the present-becoming of performative movement and actualization. Not only this, but a depth of meaning imprinted in the structure implies the necessity of interpretation, by a high priest figure, of meanings hidden beyond the surface. I have argued, however, that the performance is the poem: the poem is its own performative actualization, not some deep structure discernible and interpretable only by a priesthood of expertise. Having said this, political opinion is somewhat epiphenomenal; it may have a bearing on the sensations that compose a poem and are actualized in its performance, but the politics of innovative poetry go beyond it. On this question of political (or other) opinion, Deleuze and Guattari are in some agreement with Adorno: Art does not have opinions. Art undoes the triple organization of perceptions, affections, and opinions in order to substitute a monument composed of percepts, affects, and blocks of sensations that take the place of language. The writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into

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sensation that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing: this is the style, the “tone,” the language of sensations, or the foreign language within language that summons forth a people yet to come . . . The writer twists language, makes it vibrate, seizes hold of it, and rends it in order to wrest the percept from perceptions, the affect from affections, the sensation from opinion – in view, one hopes, of that still-missing people.3 This remarkable passage sets out the position quite precisely. Art does not have opinions; a poem is a block of sensations, its language trembles, cries, stammers, vibrates, is percepts, affects – but it does not have opinions. Therefore, insofar as an opinion is expressed, it must be only one element of the work (an opinion attributable to a character, perhaps, a persona that is a vehicle for the composition and ultimately the actualization of sensations, itself functioning towards the actualization of sensations) or, precisely, an epiphenomenon, outside the work, not art. However, this may be a position born of privilege, of use only by those (white, bourgeois, males for example) for whom the significance of their opinions can be taken for granted. Critical of American Language poetry, D. S. Marriott writes: Marginalised voices – black women and men writers for example – have traditionally had their claims to representation, their positions of performativity, silenced, ignored and oppressed.4 This is a straightforward point, but as Marriott indicates it is one that is may be easily forgotten by those whose initial territoriality is a privileged one. The same point might be applied, of course, with respect to women of any race, working class men or women, people of marginalized sexualities and so on. Even those, simply, of dissident opinions. It would be easy to dismiss innovative poetries on the basis of this statement, to return to Movement-oriented poetry with its everyday language democratic credentials; to accept that for the marginalized what is important is to be represented, to be included, to make it ‘inside’. This would be a move to a philosophically idealist social-democracy and the reduction of poetry to a simple medium for the representation of the marginalized and oppressed. It would also be an acceptance of the assimilation of the margins to the centre whereby the marginalized provide justification for the status quo through the latter’s tolerance of their representation which thereby ratifies its democratic credentials. It will not do to simply deny that the marginalized desire and even require ‘voice’ and ‘place’. Those without territory may need to territorialize before they can even begin to move towards the possibility of tracing volitional lines of flight and producing movements of positive deterritorialization. However, it cannot be necessary that this territorialization should simply lead to assimilation

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by central or State powers and forces and the eradication, therefore, of oppositional force. It should also be recalled that embracing ontological univocity, focusing on poetic sensation, and encountering what the poem does rather than simply reading what it means, hinder such a return to representation insofar as the latter is already impossible from this perspective, an illusion towards which conservative poetries pull but that can never finally be achieved. In order to investigate this problem further I wish to examine Marriott’s poem, ‘the “secret” of this form itself’.5 The poem begins with a beginning, the ambiguities of minimal punctuation, and a tendency to narrative and address: it begins at the border intimate as skin searching for a sentimental foreignness or fusion all these restless voices reflected in the antiplace where we enjoy the status of victims the disease and compensation tricks of fate?6 The use of lower case actualizes the intimacy that the second line names after the fact, an intimacy-affect that melds with a narrative opening that is suggestive of folk-tales, or possibly the orality of an ancient epic. This narrativity-affect and intimacy-affect coalesce in the orality-affect that is already partially actualized in the narrativity-affect itself. These are sensations of place, tradition and, therefore, of territoriality; however the word ‘border’ is a percept of non-place (or, as the poem itself has it, ‘antiplace’) and quickly introduces a movement of deterritorialization. Delicate lines of flight are also traced, in the first two lines, by the (almost characteristic of innovative poetries) uncertainty of reference (what is ‘intimate as skin’? The border, or ‘it’? What is ‘it’? The narrative, as might initially be presumed, or something else less defined or more problematic?) and even by the lower case that is also an element of the poem’s territorializing movements both feeding into the intimacy-affect and breaking with convention, even if on a very minor level. The intimacy as denoted in the second line is, of course, not simply the intimacy-affect of address; ‘intimate as skin’ connects grammatically with ‘it’, but also syntactically with border. Both ‘it’ and the border, then, may be ‘intimate as skin’, giving the sensation of intimacy a deterritorializing twist as the border and ‘it’ are written into or over the body, which is inscribed with the antiplace of the border area and with something yet unnamed. So, in the first two lines of this poem, the block of sensations immediately pulls in two directions simultaneously, to territorialize and deterritorialize. The territorialization of the narrativity-, orality- and intimacy-affects also traces an anachronistic line of flight to a past, a mythic past, a kind of reverse line that is the opposite of the deterritorializing lines. There is a reference

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here – a horizontal reference and not a vertical representation of an essence – to ‘homeland’ of course. Again, the concept of place presented in the previous chapter is useful for thinking this through. The homeland is tradition, safety and self in a particularly conservative sense (a subjectivization as belonging to this tradition and safety). This is brought together with the forces of deterritorialization through forced movement to form a single matter of fact that refers, again horizontally, to the experience of immigration. In the performance of these lines, that do not signify immigration at all, the reader is brought into conjunction with immigration as this single matter of wrenching fact. ‘It’ is clarified somewhat in the third line; now that the syntax of the first line has served the purpose of composing a narrativity-affect, ‘it’ can serve more precisely in an actually narrative role allowed by this clarification. ‘It’ is, grammatically, a subject, now becoming an active subject, ‘searching for a sentimental foreignness or fusion’, and narratively this searching is a beginning. This beginning also folds back over the first two lines, so that ‘it’ is ‘intimate as skin’, not the border (though the force of this latter possibility, having occurred, an event in the performance of the poem, cannot be erased). ‘It’ is a percept, although almost imperceptible, an active and negative force in the landscape of the poem; the negativity is composed in the phrase ‘sentimental foreignness or fusion’. The word ‘sentimental’ immediately has negative force, but coupled to ‘foreignness’ the force is intensified, this latter word being redolent of racism. In the poem’s formal, musical dimension, the alliteration between ‘foreignness’ and ‘fusion’ pulls the words together and makes them resonate together in a single matter of fact. This resonance makes what might seem nearopposites take on an aspect of the same; ‘sentimental foreignness’ and ‘fusion’ thereby share the mantle of racism, albeit a very explicitly liberal and wellmeaning racism. Both sentimental foreignness and fusion are ways in which a dominant indigenous population might attempt to reterritorialize an immigrant population whose presence has to some extent deterritorialized them; so that the attempt to reterritorialize the Others is simultaneously (and even primarily) an attempt to reterritorialize themselves. This well-meaning racism, ‘it’, a precursor perhaps of the more clearly malevolent full-bloodied variety, is a percept that haunts these first few lines, almost imperceptible and unnamed, but fully real and actualized in the movements of negative deterritorialization that the lines undertake. What these lines reveal so far is how poetic sensation, rather than stated opinion, may produce an encounter with the marginalized and their experience that is more intimate and forceful than hearing a ‘representative’ voice. These first three lines are, of course, relatively conventional; their experiments and movements of deterritorialization are subtle and delicate, definitively relative and not always positive; to some extent the lines might be seen to be staking out the initial territory from which it will be possible to take flight. To do so, however, with productive reference to the experience of black men and women, the movements of deterritorialization are absolutely necessary insofar

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as negative deterritorialization is, ‘intimate as skin’, an absolute element of that experience. What, therefore, the very ambiguous territorialization of these three lines does (as a composite block that pulls in different directions) is stake out that territory as a movement of becoming-immigrant such that the territory itself, necessarily so intimate with negative deterritorialization, already traces a line of flight that is its own becoming. Thus Marriott’s own poetry, with full cognizance of the needs or desires of marginalized people, in this case immigrants, for representation and for recognition of their speech and their voices, even at its most conventional does not represent but produces, in the performative actualization of its blocks of sensations, an encounter with that marginalization itself. Social struggle is not so much imprinted in the structure of the poem as simultaneously composed of and composing its sensations, actualized through its performative movement. It does not require interpretation: it only needs to be read. So far the poem is almost a testament to the persistence of narrative in poetry as ‘it’ takes on the active role of a narrative subject. Narrative (which is to say full-blown narrative itself rather than a narrativity-affect) in poetry is broadly territorializing, having a tendency to dampen the intensity of sensations, providing for a translation of sensation into concept. In an account of research into sensation and the relationship between the televisual image and language,7 Brian Massumi states: Linguistic expression can resonate with and amplify intensity at the price of making itself functionally redundant. When on the other hand it doubles a sequence of movements in order to add something to it in the way of meaningful progression . . . then it runs counter to and dampens the intensity. Intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback that momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future.8 In the first three lines of ‘the “secret” of this form itself’ it is all too easy to subsume the sensations that I have analysed above under the narrative form of those lines, reducing the sensations to elements of narrative and dampening their force. If this happens, then their significance is also reduced and the poem may be closed down and assimilated, consumed, by a reader. The poem may thereby be reduced to being (as the reader will regard it) representational, a carrier of information, standing in for the reality of the immigrant experience, rather than producing, with the reader, a real encounter that references that experience. However, the remaining five lines of the poem that are quoted above begin to break the narrative up. ‘All these restless voices’ might be separated from the previous line by a non-existent comma; such a comma would, while returning to an uncertainty of reference, retain a straightforward narrative movement.

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It is the lack of punctuation that breaks the narrative movement up somewhat. This break, a percept within the dimension of the poem’s formal landscape, isolates the previous three lines as narrative; in doing so, the performative conjunction of reader and poem unfolds differently (along a line of flight) such that there is a new perspective on the first three lines that revivifies them as a block of sensation and as an encounter. In other words, to use the more general terms of the quoted passage from Massumi, the break produces feedback and resonation that increase intensity. The movement into the next line, ‘reflected in the antiplace / where we enjoy the status of victims’, edges closer once again to conventional narrative and so is a territorializing movement, although there is a haunting-percept produced in the movement from ‘restless voices’ to ‘antiplace’ via ‘reflected’, a suggestion of limbo perhaps, that is relatively deterritorializing. As ever, the territorializing movement allows readers to get their bearings before, or even as, they move with the poem along a line of flight. In this case, as with the poetry considered in previous chapters (the poetry written by Oliver and Riley in particular), territorialization allows the poetry to be ‘HEARD’,9 and so is a part of a ‘striving to reinscribe marginalised histories and collectivities onto contemporary cultural signs’.10 Having said that, of course, the movements of deterritorialization, although relative and circumscribed by near-simultaneous territorializations, serve to prevent the poetry simply being assimilated to ‘contemporary cultural signs’ or to simple signification and continue to confront the reader with intense, sensational encounters. The territorializing movements of narrative are striations across the surface of the poem, organizing elements that help to make the poem ‘readable’ in a relatively conventional sense. It should not be necessary by now to detail the conservative nature of this move; on the other hand it ought to be just as clear how such a conservative move is not necessarily, in every instance, politically reactionary. However, such a move does remain open to political reaction, susceptible to assimilation by a reactionary status quo, finding its place within the latter’s territory as a signifier of tolerance and democracy. The movements into and away from narrative, striating and organizing the space of the poem and, often almost simultaneously, smoothing that space out, tracing lines of flight out of the territory and into the deterritorialized space of flight itself, never settle on opinions that might be easily assimilated in this way, however. For a further example: what emerges is an unmistakable symmetry, driving their buses their trains, wiping away all the blood and foulness of their arses, making tea with sugar seeing the chains and mutilations

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done by cultured men framed for posterity on the horizon of an idea pressing their way into the long sweet paralysis of so many years lost, wandering adrift in memory this space that is open to us could so easily be lost we have neither the books nor the city only the many reflections of polished floors and corridors a surfeit of forgotten traces without rank or honour11 There is voice here but it is not the voice of a stable subject telling a story, spinning out a narrative line, and it is not voicing opinions. Rather it is multiple, collective and, of course, sensational: the sensations of the first line cited (academic possibly, at least official, scientific or sociological) are authoritative; the line vibrates with authority. It is, however, a fragment, and that fact is an element of the poetic music of the poem, a percept within the dimension of the poem’s formal landscape, a break like a rift in the poem’s musical ground. The comma that, at the end of that line, seems to connect it (even while endstopping it) with the following line (by this stage in the poem a lack of punctuation, which might more often indicate an onward surge of enjambment, is expected rather to be more like falling into a hole, or, indeed, a rift) does so purely formally while in fact that line brings about a bathetic collapse of authority, a switch of voice with no necessary switch of anything like a persona or ‘subject’ but that underscores and brings into relief the collectivity and multiplicity of the ‘voice’, of the language. These lines denote experiences, signifying the working lives of black Britons. They are also impersonal, collective and non-narrative. They are first significations of experience, but they are primarily percepts and monuments of those experiences for the reader to encounter. ‘A monument,’ say Deleuze and Guattari, does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event: the constantly renewed suffering of men and women, their re-created protestations, their constantly renewed struggle.12 These lives, forgotten in their singularity and specificity become, as poetic percepts, monuments of everyday collective events. As monuments they, once again, do not represent those events, those collective lives, but refer to them while existing in their own right; ‘wiping away / all the blood and foulness of their arses’ is not a window on an event, it is an event. It is a persistent renewal

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of sensations, of suffering and of immanent protest. The lines ‘making tea with sugar seeing / the chains and mutilations / done by cultured men’ are a monument of protest and as such are the constant re-creation and renewal of a protest that is immanent not only to the poem but also to the work to which the poem refers. The middle section of those cited above again moves into narrativity, appearing to follow a narrative line. However, considered closely, it can be discerned as a production of an event with narrative specificity but which is, for all that, a pure vibrating event without narrative connections to deaden its intensity. It does not follow on a narrative line from the previous section; while there is a certain narrative-effect in this section, it is primarily a block of sensations (including that of the narrative-affect). These sensations, most clearly affects of suffocation or claustrophobia (through ‘pressing . . . / into’ and ‘long sweet paralysis’), confusion (‘lost, wandering’, ‘adrift’) and temporal or historical alienation (‘so many years lost’, ‘adrift in memory’) can hardly be described as positive, and yet they provide a certain comfort. The softness of the sensations that compose this section makes horizontal reference to a stupefaction of the faculties, a reference that gently territorializes as it actualizes that stupefaction such that its ease is immediately both cloying and welcoming. This is not an opinion that is being represented in the poem but something in itself actual that references the nostalgic reterritorializing moves produced by those who are exiled and not made welcome in their exile. Forcible deterritorialization by circumstance is a negative deterritorialization; however the reterritorialization that is essentially a hankering and a lonely nostalgia and that remains lost is also negative. What this poem performs is a series of positive moves through these negative forces. It actualizes both the reterritorializations and the negative deterritorialization but unfolds them along a positive line of flight that is composed of the poem’s stuttering between sections and the ways in which the language vibrates. I will repeat the third section of those quoted earlier: this space that is open to us could so easily be lost we have neither the books nor the city only the many reflections of polished floors and corridors a surfeit of forgotten traces without rank or honour This appears to be a statement of position, almost of opinion. It would seem to signify the dispossession of a people reduced to ‘forgotten traces without rank or honour’. However, the sensations of which it is composed – open space, lostness, polished floors and corridors that seem empty, after hours and just produced by the cleaner disappearing just out of sight, around the corner – these percepts necessarily take precedence over the most apparent signification. The anonymity of the bus and train drivers or nurses gives way here to an emptiness of space where such people might once have been, or been imagined.

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The poem moves between moments of lyrical subjectivity (‘as when wading through a warm stinking mess to meet my father, / lightscreens in the back of my cropped skull’13) and gestures of collectivity, producing lines of flight that are traced in both directions at once. The poem also slips in and out of narrativity, losing intensity when it slips in and allowing readers to assimilate what has been gained in the encounters so far actualized; in the process, during the deterritorializing movements, the language stutters and vibrates. It is during these latter movements that the poem is at its most collective, not necessarily when it makes explicit signifying gestures at collectivity. This collectivity is not representative of a people. The empty space, the anonymity, the vibrations running throughout the poem, from the first line, of percepts of lostness and wandering, all suggest a people who are missing. Again, this poem moves in two directions simultaneously in this regard. It attempts to present a people through the collective first person ‘we’, yet it is also haunted by the absence of those very people, their ‘restless voices’ echoing (‘reflected’) in ‘the antiplace’. The poem brings them into view even if they are not there. Art that utilizes the forces of the people is, according to Deleuze and Guattari and as previously indicated (in Chapters Four and Five), romantic art; or the elements of a poem or an artwork that do so are romantic elements. However, Marriott’s is not a romantic poem; it might be said to attempt the utilization of the forces of the people and to have its romantic gestures, but ultimately it is a modern poem: the people are missing and the poem has to invent them. This is the politics of the modern (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) poem and is also, according to Deleuze, its ‘health’: Health as literature, as writing, consists in inventing a people who are missing. It is the task of the fabulating function to invent a people. We do not write with memories, unless it is to make them the origin and collective destination of a people to come still ensconced in its betrayals and repudiations.14 The invention of a people takes place in the collectivity of the language, in its vibrations and stutters and its forced movements and, in general and most vitally, in its lines of flight and deterritorializations. These are the movements through which a poem both draws on the collective assemblages of enunciation that are its resources and initial territorialities and uses them to actualize new potentialities – lines of flight and deterritorializations that allow for the formation of new territories and new peoples and as such becomes itself a new collective assemblage of enunciation, for all that it remains absolutely singular, and is all the more singular at each performance. Any such people invented or called forth are a resolutely minor people, an ‘oppressed bastard race that ceaselessly stirs beneath dominations, resisting everything that crushes and imprisons, a race that is outlined in relief in

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literature as process’,15 as becoming. In becoming: this minor and resistant people will never, in fact, be present and will never, in fact, be anything other than missing and to come. The territories that are formed for such a people to come are only ever places of rest and nodes of intersection for lines of flight and further lines of flight. For if the people were ever to be formed, if the process were to end, if their stirrings were to cease, it would be because they were no longer a minor people and had passed over to the majoritarian. They would become Man, ‘a dominant form of expression that seeks to impose itself on all matter’.16 Innovative poetry is the production of a minor people; it is the collectivization of language in its absolute singularity. It ‘opens up a kind of foreign language within language’, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois, but a becomingother of language, a minorization of this major language, a delirium that carries it off, a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system.17 Adorno’s notion that a poem is an expression of a social antagonism is, then, taken a little further. Insofar as a poem may quite often, under the current social and political dispensation, originate from a position of (the poet’s) privilege, which is to say a majoritarian position (i.e. ‘Man’), the innovative poem carves out lines of flight and movements of deterritorialization that are the production of ‘a minorization of this major language’.18 Such a minorization cannot, in fact, be achieved by ‘speaking for’ or even ‘giving a voice to’ a minor people;19 however this might be strategically necessary, it always, as I have indicated, risks their assimilation to the majoritarian and therefore their effective neutralization as resistance to the dominant. ‘The ultimate aim of literature,’ says Deleuze, ‘is to set free, in the delirium, this creation of a health or this invention of a people, that is, a possibility of life. To write for this people who are missing . . . (“for” means less “in the place of” than “for the benefit of”).’20 Poetry, and most certainly an experimental, innovative poetry, does not express opinions and does not represent; it produces delirium, sets free, invents ‘a possibility of life’ that is for the benefit of a missing, minor people who are always coming, and is not in their place. There is, however, more – a further dimension to this question of a people to come, insofar as an actualization of an innovative poem may actualize, however briefly, a reader as a haecceity. I stated at the end of Chapter Five that the actualization of a reader as a haecceity through a poem as a performance (as a performative speech-act) involves a promise of happiness; that was a deliberate echo of Adorno: Aesthetic experience is that of something that spirit may find neither in the world nor in itself; it is possibility promised by its impossibility. Art is the ever broken promise of happiness.21

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If an actualization of a haecceity is innovative poetry’s promise, the actualization has to occur for the promise to be made. There is no other way for such a promise to have any meaning. Therefore, in making the promise, innovative poetry immediately and of necessity keeps that promise. Yet the promise remains broken. I agree with Adorno: there is no way that this promise can be kept under capitalism. This means that the promise is made, kept and broken simultaneously and immediately. I also agree with Deleuze and Guattari when they state the following: We must avoid an oversimplified conciliation, as though there were on the one hand formed subjects, of the thing or person type, and on the other hand spatiotemporal coordinates of the haecceity type. For you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that.22 However, I would also want to argue that in fact the haecceity is ‘what you are’ abstractly (it is abstractly true that ‘you are nothing but that’) and virtually: it is not currently possible to sustain an actual existence as a human haecceity if existence is taken here to mean ‘lived experience’. It is not possible to live as a haecceity in a capitalist world. It cannot be sustained, and therefore the promise of happiness that the brief actualization of the self as a haecceity through an encounter with poetry is, is always already broken even as it is kept. In terms of lived experience, it always slips quickly back into its status as a virtual selfhood, which is to say a potential selfhood, as the reader is reterritorialized as a subject, the dominant mode of actual selfhood. Deleuze and Guattari go on, You are a longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of duration) – a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity). Or at least you can have it, you can reach it.23 You are; you have; you can have, you can reach. All of this seems true, except insofar as it might be taken to imply that you can live it and sustain it. Such living must remain potential for the time being. However, the reason for this necessary virtuality of the haecceity is also implied within this quotation. The haecceity is a dynamic, mobile, unformed, nonsubjectified, collective (‘a swarm, a pack’) individuation. This form of selfhood, especially the coming together of collectivity and individuality within a singular becoming, disallows its own lived existence within capitalism, for good and simple historical materialist reasons. This is because, for all that capitalism itself retains enormous revolutionary potential that is still and continuously being actualized, it also remains true that the majority of deterritorializations that are produced

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within it, whether negative or positive, must be reterritorialized for capitalism itself to remain running smoothly: As we shall see, capitalism is the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows, substituting for intrinsic codes an axiomatic of abstract quantities in the form of money. Capitalism therefore liberates the flows of desire, but under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution, so that it is constantly opposing with all its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward this limit.24 The successful haecceity is continuous positive deterritorialization and indicates capitalism’s dissolution. On the other hand, the subject is absolutely axiomatic to capitalism itself. The production and reproduction of the subject is central to the operations of the bourgeois perspective. This importance, or axiomatic quality, of the subject indicates the continued and seemingly irrepressible ubiquity of the lyric form as the art of the modern (bourgeois) subject, often even within the most innovative poetry. This is never going to be simply undone, to be replaced by haecceities or any other currentlyvirtual selfhood, by poetry or any other art form. Subjects are what we actually are because we live in capitalist societies, even as we are also virtual haecceities. However, it needs to be recalled that the promise of happiness, the actualization of the haecceity as a lived experience, is actualized in encounters with contemporary innovative poetry – the promise is, as stated, made, kept and broken simultaneously. This folds back onto the missing people. The haecceity is absolutely an individual, a singular individuation and yet, through the fact that it is radically situated, it is also the collective of which it is a singular element. It is the active and living deconstruction of the traditional opposition between individual and the collective. As such it is a people, for all that they may be missing; and a revolutionary people at that, insofar as a people of a haecceity must be already post-revolutionary: a haecceity may only be actualized beyond the territorializations and reterritorializations that produce and reproduce the bourgeois subject that is axiomatic to capitalism itself. Every performance of an innovative poem is in itself in a sense revolutionary because it pushes, briefly, beyond the bounds of the capitalist world itself, even though ultimately there is then, necessarily, a falling-back and a reterritorialization on the subject. Much has been said up to now of capitalism, and its importance as the historically specific over-arching system within which we all live should never be underestimated. However, it is worth remembering and restating at this stage that the dominance from which lines of flight are traced, and which becomings are a moving-away from and implicitly an attack upon, is Man – and Man is male, white and heterosexual. This does not mean, of course, that the wholesale murder of all straight white men would be a revolutionary act

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(and in fact it would be both a banal and barbaric one), but rather that a successful revolution involves the ending of the domination of that form. This means, then, that the poem that actualizes the haecceity of the self has to end (however briefly) the domination of Man. Again this does not necessarily mean bringing an end to masculinity, ‘whiteness’, or to heterosexuality per se, but merely to their dominance as a form of expression. What this means, of course, will be entirely singular for singular poems; whiteness, heterosexual masculinity and the bourgeois subject have become so tightly bound together, at least in the West, that the deterritorialization of one is likely to simultaneously deterritorialize the others. However, it is also clear that non-white people, women and lesbians or gay men may well (though just as clearly this may not necessarily be the case) have a particular interest in pursuing lines of flight that first deterritorialize around race, gender or sexuality. It also remains true, of course, that a poet may intend to do none of these things at all, but for the poetry to do so anyway as it deterritorializes the language itself and makes it speak from under or to the side of the dominant forms in which it is caught. In fact, given that Man is the dominant form, all positive deterritorializations perform this (relatively) revolutionary act to some extent – and it should be borne in mind that this is not a purely formal question but involves a performative act, an encounter and a transformative event that occurs every time a poem is read – even while the promise that this event is, is already broken because it cannot be sustained while capitalism remains the system within which we live. Denise Riley’s innovative feminist lyrics perform in precisely this way, composing an encounter with ‘woman’ that deterritorializes the category of ‘woman’ itself. They do so through a language marked ‘female’ that requires recognition of itself as such in order to produce a sense of solidarity that is both affirmed and transcended, not representing women so much as encountering them as individuals who inevitably fit that category (of ‘woman’) but are not it. The following lines are from her poem ‘A Shortened Set’: All the connectives of right recall have grown askew. I know a child could have lived, that my body was cut. This cut my memory half-sealed but glued the edges together awry. The skin is distorted, the scar-tissue does damage, the accounts are wrong.25 The first two lines concern memory and a shift out of ‘true’ – already, it might be said, a negative deterritorialization. They suggest Hamlet’s ‘The time is out of joint’, of course, but the use of ‘connectives’ and ‘grown’ are suggestive of surgery, and so of something previously cut. The overall affect is one of an

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almost metaphysical mis-healing and as a result misconnection with a past. The inevitable further result of any such misconnection with the past of one’s own self would be a misconnection with regard to one’s sense of one’s own subjective self. However it is, so far, still very far from any possibility of being fruitfully reconnected and tracing a positive line of flight. This is, first of all here, still a subject, but one that is set adrift from itself: simple alienation. This ‘simple alienation’, however, performs a sense of misrecognition of the subject that one is, a sense of it not fitting, that is a necessary part of being a subject. Without in any way wishing to assimilate the concept of the subject as a capitalist axiom to a simplistic notion of ideology as false consciousness, if a haecceity is what we ‘are’ and the subject is the dominant expression of what we are, this would suggest that the subject, so different from a haecceity, is going to split in some places or hang loosely in others. There will be misrecognition, misconnection and alienation, a sense of ‘something else’, an excess that escapes subjectivizing interpellation. It is not, however, so much that the haecceity is the ‘real me’ while the subject is simply a false ideological subject, but rather that they coexist uneasily within the same space, the one virtual and potential but already real, the other actual and dominant – and also real. The term ‘expression’, then, in the phrase used above, ‘the dominant expression of what we are’ is perhaps misleading. It would be more accurate to say that the subject is the expression of what capitalism (and patriarchy etc) requires that we be and is therefore (since capitalism is the dominant social relationship) the dominant actualization of the self. Of course, insofar as the subject as the dominant actualization of the self is already modelled on an ideal Man (male, white, heterosexual), the fit with a haecceity that a woman is may well be particularly imprecise, and such imprecision is reiterated continuously across Riley’s poetry. This does not mean, once again, that Riley’s poetry ‘speaks for’ or represents the position of women on this account. Her poetry, as a block of sensations that encounters readers in temporary conjunction, speaks on its own account as language; it is, however, a poetry that is, I think it is fair to say, a becoming-woman: When Virginia Woolf was questioned about a specifically women’s writing, she was appalled at the idea of writing ‘as a woman’. Rather, writing should produce a becoming-woman as atoms of womanhood capable of crossing and impregnating an entire social field, and of contaminating men, of sweeping them up in that becoming.26 A poetry that produces a becoming-woman will affect readers, male or female, with its own becoming as an element of a haecceity that is actualized in the performative conjunction of reader and poem; there is thus actualized a feminist poetry that does not speak for women but affects the world, on each singular performance, with a becoming-woman that is the actualization of a (feminist) missing people to come.

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This absolutely does not mean that the poetry of becoming-woman does not, should not or cannot be produced out of specifically women’s concerns. Such concerns are clearly among those that need to be thrust into the poetic encounter for a general and necessary affection of poetry with becomingwoman. It is the absence of such concerns that marks the fact that the women are missing, as the American poet Alice Notley recognizes in her own poetry and in the essay ‘The Poetics of Disobedience’: I’ve spoken in other places of the problems, too, of subjects that hadn’t been broached much in poetry and of how it seemed one had to disobey the past and practices of literary males in order to talk about what was going on most literally around one, the pregnant body, and babies, for example. There were no babies in poetry then. How could that have been? What are we leaving out now?27 However, it is also important to understand that there is no simple slipping into a comfortable and close-fitting female subject either. Such a subject would still largely be a subject in the classically bourgeois sense spoken of here – an assimilation of ‘womanhood’ to the dominant Man with only a minor mutation of the latter for the sake of accommodation. There is, after all, already a major Woman that is the necessary binary corollary of Man. Of course, this subjectivity may be used for the vital majoritarian struggles of women for day-to-day recognition within a patriarchal capitalism, as Riley states very clearly, There is no gainsaying the forcefulness of the moment of recognition, the ‘but that’s me!’ of some described experience, which, if the political possibilities are there, will pull some women together into a shared feminism.28 However, Riley also states just as clearly the fact that such an identity, feminist or not, is still never a precise fit: For the moment, it seems to me that even the apparently simplest, most innocent ways in which one becomes temporarily a woman are not darting returns to a category in a natural and harmless state, but are something else: adoptions of, or precipitations into, a designation there in advance, a characterization of ‘woman’.29 Such an adoption or precipitation into a ‘characterization’ will be an inhabiting of a subject that the individual is but which their haecceity will be always in excess of, spilling out and rupturing it in ways that might even be considered shameful if the individual in question feels that such a subject is an ideal. It is now high time that Riley’s poem was approached once more.

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The second sentence of the poem, moving from line two to line four, does introduce specifically female concerns, or at least the inference of such. The surgical percepts from the first sentence are carried over and confirmed, the direct lyrical address asserting that the subject has undergone surgery, probably a caesarean (‘a child could have lived’) with a resultant stillbirth. However, there is already a peculiarity here, in that the surgery implied in the first sentence seems to have involved memory rather than the body as such. However, now it is explicitly the body that has been cut. The connection between these two first sentences is only implied, but it would seem likely that it is the trauma of the lost child and cut body that has produced the memorial misconnections. A reader is, as the body of the performed poem, inscribed with affects of trauma and loss that are specifically female; this by no means necessarily excludes male readers unless they expect that the poem should be something with which they can identify unproblematically and therefore assimilate. It will, however, initiate a movement of becoming-woman. The disconnection of the poetic subject is intensified across the dimension of the poem’s imaginative landscape through the assertion that the cut body was ‘half-sealed’ by memory; an apparently corporeal manifestation of an incorporeal force. Such a disconnection is a deterritorializing move whereby, once again, the language begins to speak through the disruption and disconnection of reference. While the body and the memory are still referenced, the connection of the two disables, or short circuits, reference in such a way that the language itself is actualized in its own intensity. This short circuit whereby the language in this poem stutters and thereby, of its own accord, also speaks, occurs within a lyrical narrative that is itself short circuited but which continues to move on through the performance of the poem, regardless. Such a shortcircuiting of reference and of narrative sharply increases the intensity of the poetic affect and so throws further out the line of flight being produced, increasing the deterritorializing force that is produced. The fact that the movement of the poem’s performance does this while still carrying over a certain narrative consistency (along with a certain consistency, while also being consistently deterritorialized, of the poetic subject) is highly significant in its own right and is itself an important deterritorializing affect. It might be said to mimic the process whereby a reader is deterritorialized and has her self as a virtual haecceity actualized even while her dominant classical subjectivity retains its dominance and continues on, almost regardless but more or less subtly altered. However, to say this would be to bring the poem back once again within the purview of Platonic representation. In fact, the poem does not mimic this process but produces it: while a poem by, for example, John Wilkinson might produce this process almost accidentally, Riley’s poem does so with an absolutely sober clarity. Wilkinson’s poetry, apparently produced from a relatively privileged social position, radically deterritorializes that position and moves quickly towards a

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movement of absolute deterritorialization that is revolutionary in that it actualizes the reader as a haecceity for the period of the performance; the reader is then reterritorialized by the historically inevitable forces of subjectivization that might be called, after Althusser, interpellation. Riley’s poetry, however, experiments with the lyric in ways that seem at first glance less radical than Wilkinson’s but which perform similar processes within its own movements. Reterritorializing forces befall Wilkinson’s poetry, so to speak, on the ending of the performance and from the outside. Riley’s poetry incorporates and experiments with those same forces within the movement of its own performance. Thus, aporetically perhaps, the reterritorializing forces within the poem, continually once more put to flight, themselves become elements of a process the overall movement of which is deterritorializing. More importantly, perhaps, this process allows for an experimentation with the lyric that produces this deterritorializing movement but which also integrates the kind of recognition that is necessary for producing and maintaining the solidarity required by a feminist (or class or anti-racist) politics that needs to engage with the majoritarian powers. Coming from their relatively privileged positions, the poetries of Wilkinson or Prynne have no need for such recognition; indeed, coming from privileged positions, such recognition might be detrimental to the deterritorialization of their own privilege and to the production of a non-subjective, non-personal, even non-human revolutionary solidarity. ‘Saw Fit’ by Andrea Brady30 performs somewhat similar experiments with deterritorialized engagement with majoritarian powers. Published in a special issue of the Barque Press magazine Quid that is comprised of poetic responses to the war in Iraq and to revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib prison, the poem is obviously, dissentingly, political. It is notable in its concern with Lynndie England, an American soldier prominent in photographs revealing the torture at Abu Ghraib and who became a media cause célèbre, scapegoated perhaps, taken to be in some way representative of those events. The word ‘concern’ is used advisedly here; the poem demonstrates an ‘interest’ in England, but it also demonstrates a concern for her in the more anxious sense of the word: She is mother of all “persons in my higher chain” England the moonface of the 72-point matrix of stress and duress. From wonderbread Fort Ashby her people raised her up, poor short-shackled to a trailer behind the saloon and sheep-farm, images of a collapsed pyramid of accountability and desire on the enamelled tiles in the college hallway, her proud railway daddy Detention is an enabler for interrogation Shut up Get some booth time screen door to catch the skeeters “very, very sorry,

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we are not home” they are tacked to wire netting. Terrie believes her daughter was at heart Thinking in the dirt Maybe England would get more from the MPs. The gloves came off for a new entry whose order had been cut above.31 This poem is certainly a monument, both for England and for the victims of the torture inflicted by her at the behest of the US military and government. To reiterate the definition of the work of art as a monument: it ‘does not commemorate or celebrate’, it ‘confides to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody the event: the constantly renewed suffering of men and women, their re-created protestations, their constantly renewed struggle’. Lynndie England can be included in this, an element in the State forces of oppression certainly, but at the same time one of the people who are missing, suffering and struggling. The segment quoted above is the second section of the poem. It introduces the figure of England with a quotation from England herself, ‘“persons in my higher chain”’, the preceding phrase, ‘She is mother of all’, presenting something of the sensational conflict that the figure of England, for this poem, is. This first phrase is conflicted because that indefinite ‘She’ connects with ‘mother’ in the production of one of the most territorializing of figures, a percept that in turn gives rise to an affect of ‘home’ – the territory of the greatest safety, comfort and warmth for most people, while, simultaneously, the phrase ‘the mother of all’ is a percept of desert warfare, being a phrase used by Saddam Hussein in relation to the first Gulf War in 1990. The phrase “persons in my higher chain”, as well as being a quotation whereby England declares the responsibility of those senior to herself in the military for the torture (and so speaks in opposition to the ‘few bad apples’ theory propagated by the US government itself), also, in its mangled syntax, presents the figure as badly educated and poorly served by the system of which she is both victim and agent. The running together of elements from England’s life as a young and poor white woman with references to torture (as in the lines ‘trailer behind the saloon and sheep-farm, / images of a collapsed pyramid / of accountability and desire on the enamelled tiles’) disrupts the narrative of England’s life that is strung through the poem as a whole. This increases the intensity of the sensations that compose the poem while at the same time allowing the narrative to exist. The contradiction that is Lynndie England as a suffering, young woman marked by poverty who ultimately commit acts of deliberate cruelty, willingly for all that they are at the behest of those in authority, is produced through the performance of the poem as a dynamic monument within which her suffering and that of her victims is brought into a contact and a resonance that compels readers’ recognition and even the production of a certain sense of solidarity with England.

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This is achieved by a technique that utilizes juxtaposition but which might be more fully understood with reference to Deleuze’s theory, expounded in Cinema 2, of the ‘irrational cut’. He states that, Interstices thus proliferate everywhere, in the visual image, in the sound image, between the sound image and the visual image. That is not to say that the discontinuous prevails over the continuous. On the contrary, the cuts or breaks in cinema have always formed the power of the continuous. But cinema and mathematics are the same here: sometimes the cut, so-called rational, forms part of one of the two sets which it separates (end of one or beginning of the other). This is the case with ‘classical cinema’. Sometimes, as in modern cinema, the cut has become the interstice, it is irrational and does not form part of either set, one of which has no more an end than the other has a beginning: false continuity is such an irrational cut. Thus, in Godard, the interaction of two images engenders or traces a frontier which belongs to neither one nor the other.32 Of course, interstices also proliferate everywhere in a poem: between sentences, between lines, between phrases, between words, within words – and, as a result of such interstitial proliferation (spacing), interstices also further proliferate between and within sensations. As with cinema, however, such interstitial proliferation does not engender discontinuity, but rather its opposite, as spaces and interstices join words, phrases and lines that are commensurable. They are entirely rational. As Deleuze puts it, rational cuts always determine commensurable relations between series of images, and thereby constitute the whole rhythmic system and harmony of classical cinema, at the same time as they integrate associated images in an always open totality.33 An irrational cut, however, both in cinema and in poetry, is a force, a sensation, in its own right and it simultaneously links and separates images, words or sensations that are incommensurable: The cut, or interstice, between two series of images no longer forms part of either of the two series: it is the equivalent of an irrational cut, which determines the non-commensurable relations between images. It is thus no longer a lacuna that the associated images would be assumed to cross; the images are certainly not abandoned to chance but there are only relinkages subject to the cut, instead of cuts subject to the linkage … There is thus no longer association through metaphor or metonymy, but relinkage on the literal image; there is no longer linkage of associated images, but only relinkage of independent images. Instead of one image after another, there

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is one image plus another, and each shot is deframed in relation to the framing of the following shot.34 The linkage that occurs by way of the irrational cut (perhaps ‘irrational space’ might in one sense be better in reference to poetry, but ‘cut’ has a useful sense of force and disruption) – not across it but as a result of it – is something like what Robert Sheppard calls ‘creative linkage’; ‘disjoining’, he says, ‘to be efficacious, must simultaneously link.’35 Sheppard sees such linkage as ‘an essential issue for any art which achieves formal defamiliarization and deautomatization through effects of fragmentation’,36 such essential linkage of that which is incommensurable producing what the poet Allen Fisher has called ‘pertinence’. The concept of pertinence is opposed to poetry that ‘merely affirms the values of existing society; it shows a flattering mirror to its audience but is ultimately an ideological mirage’.37 Pertinent poetry ‘creates fresh significations’,38 a notion with which it is necessary to take minor issue in order to affirm the creation of fresh and significant sensations, or blocks of sensations, but the broad trajectory of the lines being traced is clearly quite similar. Creative linkage across incommensurable sensations (‘in the college hallway, her proud railway daddy Detention / is an enabler for interrogation Shut up Get some booth time’, for example) is a result of the intensity of the irrational cut itself, an intensity that is in fact produced by the incommensurability of the sensations that it both links and separates. That intensity produces the resonance between the incommensurable sensations. This means, paradoxically, that the incommensurable contiguous sensations in a poem are caused to resonate together as a single matter of fact by the intensity of the cut that separates them, the intensity of which is produced by their very incommensurability. The resonance of the incommensurable sensations as a single matter of fact is itself, most often, an intense sensation, often a possibly unnameable affect that is a pure (but not necessarily absolute) deterritorialization; this deterritorialization is then itself increased in intensity by the very disruption that it both is and produces. In other words, as a force of deterritorialization, it further deterritorializes the process of reading of which it is a part, disrupting this process insofar as it is narrative. This disruption of narrative increases the force of the deterritorialization. ‘Saw Fit’ makes extensive use of narrative; as a monument to Lynndie England and ‘her’ victims (hers because she retains responsibility for her actions even while they were directed by others) it needs to do so: their stories, it might be said, ‘have to be told’. Those stories, though, have already been told, and quite extensively, through the world’s media. This poem is not simply repeating those stories, but it needs to make use of them. It does, not, however, make use of them in order to tell us, the readers, what to think about them; the poem, while very much a political poem, is not (for this would be the classical model of the political work of art) a simple polemic that aims to persuade or

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to order. What this poem does is to think and to produce thought about Lynndie England and what she has done and the circumstances out of which she did it. This thought takes the form of a monument to Lynndie England and her victims that makes them resonate as a single matter of fact; that resonance is the thought, actualized anew as it is performed in every reading of the poem. Narrative is an essential element of the poem; this means that it does not approach becoming-imperceptible or a process of absolute deterritorialization. In fact, similarly to Riley’s ‘A Shortened Set’, that is not its function insofar as it thinks the story of Lynndie England’s life and the events at Abu Ghraib as a single matter of fact. In order to do so requires a sense of solidarity with the whole of that single matter of fact on the part of the reader, which means achieving a paradoxical sense of solidarity with tortured and torturer simultaneously. What this means for the poem as a poem is that intensity of sensation and of deterritorialization (which must remain relative deterritorialization, which is vital to the poem’s operation) is sacrificed to the possibility of solidarity, as the latter requires, again as with Riley’s poem, narrative appeal to the subject. As well as England’s youth and hometown, the poem also makes reference to her experiences in Iraq itself (other than participation in torture): A hundred degrees in the shadows, rain of mortar hanging out with her buds across the yard theirs were transitory technical networks but persistent social networks the new targets underlings left to sweat the details the vast of night lit by a chemical light fluid spilled on the ground saying it was a knife ghost detainees “forced to crawl through it and then placed in a dark cell, this would freak them out because they would glow”39 In this passage, ‘the vast of night’, although semantically linked to ‘lit by a chemical light’, is marked off from it by an irrational cut, a longer-than-usual space, that is peculiar to poetry; in the process, it almost becomes an irrational cut in itself as it separates England’s life in Iraq from one of the forms of torture used by England and her ‘buds’. Yet the intensity of the (simply sublime) sensation that it is causes the two halves of the section to resonate together as a single matter of fact, something also allowed by the fact that the torture is not rendered as the result of any specific subject with whom England could be identified (which would make the passage work straightforwardly as narrative with a rational cut in the middle), even if the reader knows all too well that she was responsible. ‘A hundred degrees in the shadows, rain of mortar’ and ‘underlings left to sweat the details’ produce between them an affect of suffering and struggle (though significantly, of course, not the political struggle that would have been a refusal to take part in torture) that is England as a

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poetic monument in this section of the poem, while the affect is composed of enough narrative elements to allow a reader, as a subject rather than a haecceity, to feel a sense of solidarity with her. One important element of this poem that has not been mentioned so far is its feminism; the suffering and struggle of Lynndie England is not only as somebody from the working class but very much as a woman. For the most part, this percept of England’s suffering-as-a-woman is produced through the same essential techniques as those that allow her to resonate with her victims in other respects, except that they are specific to her gender. For example, For that vast of night that they may work the signs the gun, thumbs up, cigs, she plays cock tease to men modelling themselves on the Rock. In Mineral County they played from the baseline, over the bra, under the bra, down the pants, hard fingers gitmo enduring Squatting and hooded, lactic acid pouring through thighs cramps, side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up40 In this section of the poem, there is an irrational cut that is not a space or a single phrase that has been separated out, but rather seems to be within, first of all, the second and third lines, so that they operate like a double exposure of film. For example ‘thumbs up’ occurs twice but simultaneously as a percept of a sign of affirmation in the context of a noisy military operation or perhaps across the distance of a compound (following on, as it does, from ‘the signs the gun’) and as the globally famous image, partially reproduced on the cover of the publication in which the poem appears, of the same signal being given to the camera before a ‘pyramid’ of naked Iraqi prisoners. This kind of irrational cut that seems to be operating through two simultaneous and intersecting planes of the poem continues with the percept of England as the object of adolescent sexual fumbling, rendered as an assault, and the sexual nature of much of the torture (‘she plays cock tease’). England’s gender as something suffered is, of course, present here in the low-level violence that is written into the syntax of the sexual fumbling and England’s object-status with regard to it. This is extended across references to ‘baseline’ – the American male tendency to talk about sexual encounters in terms of baseball is the percept here, with an affect of female objectification as a sporting conquest that is inverted into a becoming-woman that has been set up across the poem through the solidarity with England that is an on-going affect of the narrative. As with ‘A Shortened Set’, this solidarity is continuously in a state of resonance with the affects of relative deterritorialization that the poem produces such that the intersubjective category ‘woman’ never quite fits: it is always overwritten and overflowed by the process of becoming that forms half of ‘becoming-woman’ and is equivalent to the actualization of haecceity that is also always in process.

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I wish to turn now to an innovative poem that makes a very different kind of attempt at political thought. From the same edition of Quid, Keston Sutherland’s ‘Song of the Wanking Iraqi’ initially seems both more radical and less complex than Brady’s ‘Saw Fit’. First appearances though, can be deceiving. I will quote the first eight lines of the poem: Bust those sluts anal thrashing to imagine in a room with no windows or doors with a metal pipe along the wall a ferro-concrete roof nobody inside and a vapour fed in through the pipe in short jets the temperature is right so the vapour won’t evaporate it can be permethrin hated by crayfish with each jet the room is more full very slowly41 There is, of course, no direct link or reference in the lines quoted here (other than the title) to Iraq or Abu Ghraib at all. It is, though, for all that, a political poem (and there are some direct references to Abu Ghraib later on) that is a process of thought concerning Abu Ghraib and the events there. The plosive violence of its opening affect is, of course, entirely consonant with the violence of the events at Abu Ghraib, the war itself and, on a somewhat less hideous and tragic plane, the use of the word ‘wanking’ in the title, which is likely to be offensive to those of a polite sensibility and is unusual in the titles of poems. It is shocking. There is almost, in fact, an irrational cut that opens this poem, or at least the main body of it, in that there is no clear reference back to the title (a title that is itself clear enough to be going on with) such that any link with Iraq or with Abu Ghraib, while absolutely prompted and ‘real’ is certainly a creative linkage and could not be confused with anything other than a horizontal reference. ‘Sluts’, crudely and abusively sexual, certainly sexist and arguably misogynistic, adds a further affect of shock to the shock and violence already composing this poem, resonating with and intensifying it. ‘Those’ has already syntactically and affectively identified ‘sluts’ as the objects of abuse; in doing so it pulls the reader over to the side of the abuser. This is not, however, as with the feminist elements of the poetries of Riley and Brady, an affect of solidarity or identification. It is purely an affect of syntax, an interpellation that is all the more insidious for its utter impersonality; it is in fact an affect that, as a function of its impersonality, is part of a process of haecceity actualization; however, on this occasion the haecceity that is actualized is composed, at least in part, of dark and reactionary social forces. In the dimension of the poem’s musical landscape, there is assonance between the sibilants and the plosive ‘t’s of ‘bust’ and ‘sluts’ that provides readers with a certain territorializing orientation, a stability, that supports readers through the deterritorializing sensations of shock and violence and the referential

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uncertainty (what sluts?) that are already being actualized through the performance of the first three words. This territorializing assonance also provides readers with some orientation before the shock of the next word, ’anal’, that by pornographic association pulls the poem further towards the crude and abusive sexuality introduced by ‘sluts’. This shock resonates both with the sensations of shock, violence and abusive sexuality already composed and with their overall affect of deterritorialization. ‘Anal’ immediately resonates, thanks to pornography (and most Western adult readers would probably be perfectly able to actualize such pornographic resonance, not necessarily because they use pornography but because of the explosion-to-plague-proportions of pornographic spam e-mails in recent years), with ‘sluts’ anyway, but the intensity of this resonance is increased by the irrational cut that joins and separates the two words. This is also very much the case with the following word, ‘thrashing’, again joined to and separated from ‘anal’ (and, by default, ‘sluts’) by an irrational cut which causes the line to resonate powerfully as a single matter of fact that is both a violence-affect and a sexuality-affect that are in the process of composition of a sexual-violence-affect. The second line moves away from sexual-violence, although it also necessarily carries it with it. The room that might be a cell, in conjunction with the sexual-violence-affect that composes (and is composed by) the majority of the first line, suggests torture or abuse. It is a percept, in fact, that is almost virtual at this stage, but which is just edged into actualization. The specified lack of windows or doors (suggestive of a cell) is also produces an affect of claustrophobia or at least of containment, which feeds into the following line, the details of which (‘metal pipe’ and ‘ferro-concrete’) produce percepts of general physical discomfort. The violence and the sexual abuse refer (in conjunction with, at least, the title and the poem’s original context insofar as the poem appears in a magazine the theme of which is Iraq and Abu Ghraib) to (but do not represent) Abu Ghraib for a reader with a certain cultural, political or historical knowledge. The poem is thinking itself into that, or something like that, situation. This is a poem as political thought – a thinking into the circumstances of the tortured and abused that constitutes thought about those circumstances, that situation and that event. It might be said to be thought that produces an analogous event; given that this thought is actualized in performative conjunction with a reader, a reader is of course also producing and inside, is becoming as a part of, that event, analogous to torture, that the performance of the poem is as present-becoming. The reader is actualized as a haecceity that is torture, abuse and discomfort. The emptiness indicated by the next line (‘nobody inside’) is possibly disorientating, depending on the reader’s knowledge of the context of the poem’s production. This possibility of disorientation is due to the expectation that there will be a figure inside what is assumed to be a cell, awaiting

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punishment – torture or some other form of violence. The ‘vapour’ that is ‘fed in’ to fill this emptiness might suggest fumigation (which might be why the cell is empty) but also, given the context of the apparent cell, the sexualviolence-affect and the torture-affect, suggests cyclon B and the Holocaust. However, permethrin is an insecticide with carcinogenic properties; this fact might suggest de-lousing (again returning readers to a vacated cell), but the vapour’s carcinogenic properties still produce an affect of a possible, horrible, human death – and again it should be borne in mind that the suggestion, which is to say the percept, of the Holocaust, once produced, cannot simply be erased; it lingers and has its affects even if it is questionable in terms of signification. At this stage of the poem it reads, apart from the lack of punctuation, rather like clipped, functional prose. This has an affect of distanciation, not so much allowing as compelling the reader to pull back somewhat from the violent affects of the poem’s opening lines and providing, therefore a rather slight affect of reterritorialization. The lack of punctuation, of course, provides an on-going (though again rather slight) deterritorialization. As a reader moves through the remarkably smooth space of this poem, continually deterritorialized, even when reterritorialized to a distinctly relative degree, she moves very quickly but is thrown around somewhat, buffeted by deterritorializing sensations. This might be thought of as a disorientation that mimics to some extent the trauma of the abused and tortured prisoners, but in fact there is no sense of trying to capture that trauma ‘accurately’. What it actually does is thrust readers into a sensational proximity to that trauma and yet also make them complicit with it. The means by which the proximity to trauma is produced are linguistic violence (English, of course) and cultural references that are the (very public and international) underbelly of Western culture: ‘anal’, for example, is a biological or medical term. As such it should be drawn from a scientific/medical collective assemblage of enunciation; however, the fact that ‘sluts’ immediately precedes it draws it instead, as already indicated, from the pornographic collective assemblage of enunciation. While ‘sluts anal’ has a deterritorializing affect because of the irrational cut that composes an element of the resonance that this juxtaposition produces, the reader, certainly the reader with enough exposure to pornography (even if only through spam) to do so, will automatically reterritorialize the words, however briefly, to produce ‘anal sluts’. This in itself has a deterritorializing affect; there is at least a degradation of women here, and ultimately thereby a degradation of (hetero-) sexuality itself, that is shocking. The rapid shock of the production of this percept through involuntary reterritorialization is in fact a deterritorializing affect (reterritorialization therefore having a role in the composition of a deterritorializing affect); the certain knowledge that this degradation of sexuality has played a role in the events at Abu Ghraib and that it is an element of Western culture produces a complicity-affect that composes the poem concurrently with the violent-sexual-abuse affect that brings the reader into proximity with the abuse suffered by the prisoners.

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The room as it is presented in the poem could also, to pull out a further percept from the block of sensations, be a description of an art installation. This would explain why it is empty and the concern that the temperature should be right for the avoidance of evaporation. The poem goes on, it will fill and the vapour will become a total block of liquid which the room sheathes and the room is categorically a void no-one is in it42 The vapour as a block of liquid sheathed by the room might suggest an art installation with, perhaps, the play between the room-as-full and the roomas-void working as a site of encounter. This percept of an intersection with other art forms is given greater force by lines a little further on in the poem: center added Renoir did a picture he called girl with a watering can we look at the world from her own altitude in the national gallery of art washington 39 1/2 x 28 3/4 in43 This again returns readers to Western culture, though perhaps to rather more ‘elevated’ components of that culture. In fact, it should be noted here that the poem states that ‘we look at the world / from her own altitude’; this somewhat enigmatic phrase might be read to suggest an elevated view of the world and world events from the West, one that would crucially involve an inability to see the baser motives of our own governments and leaders – or of Western culture in general. This is, of course, an interpretative remark that is concerned with what this enigmatic phrase means; however, that phrase is in fact a presentation, an actualization, of that thought, rendered here into conceptual terms, through sensation. Therefore, the thought is already sensational and the sensation (that it is) is (also) what it does – it thinks a certain Western hubris through Western art and culture, having already presented more violent and degraded elements of that culture such that the hubris is therefore already in a bathetic state. This does not mean that the poem necessarily actualizes the thought that Western art is in some sense a ‘lie’ or simply ideological, but rather it actualizes a thought around the complexity of Western culture, and the complicity of that complexity in the atrocities committed by some, far from isolated, elements of it. This folds back over the dual percepts of the room as cell and as art installation; these percepts resonate together as a single matter of fact rather like a duck-rabbit picture whereby the room is both of these things simultaneously, even if both cannot be actualized simultaneously. As such, they resonate together precisely as the inseparability of the entire complexity of Western culture and its responsibility for, and complicity in, torture at Abu Ghraib.

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As the poem continues, details from the actual events are included, along with further pornographic references and references to the military and to specific individuals. For example, of the room nobody inside innocent teen in first throating would it be better from a conceptual art perspective to turn it up or down ask General Karpinski the conditions inside are better than at home44 These lines include both pornographic references and a reference to General Karpinski, the female general in charge of Abu Ghraib. It is noteworthy that there is no narrative move to produce any kind of solidarity with Karpinski, as there is with Brady’s poem and the figure of Lynndie England. Coming from the privileged, majoritarian territory of Man but working for the actualization of politically radical thought, this poem is concerned to produce a maximum deterritorialization of that position, which is to say a minorisation of itself, and therefore does not move through subjectification. Rather, the poem operates to actualize a kind of negative haecceity that, for all its negativity, remains, as I shall argue, a broken (and yet actualized) promise of happiness. The poem comes to an end as follows: good show we could hardly have done it better ourselves the chemical light is snapped the phosphoric liquid is dropped to the lees into him but he prefers the broom handle it can go all night like capital itself in the grip of the cupidity of the 372nd Military Police Company.45 It will suffice to note here the references to ‘chemical light’ (referenced also, in just those words, in Brady’s poem) and ‘phosphoric liquid’ and the brutal pornography (‘he prefers the / broom handle it can go all night’). The final two lines make a connection between Abu Ghraib and capital itself (which can ‘go all night’, indicating its relentless force) and the American military unit at the heart of the torture at Abu Ghraib. These two elements are intimately connected, of course, by the word ‘cupidity’, which produces something of an irrational cut. It stands semantically on the side of capital, but syntactically on the side of the Military Police Company – it therefore stands with neither and produces the force of the irrational cut that makes them, as the irrational cut is wont to do, resonate together as a single matter of fact. Of course, they are, in a certain sense, a single matter of fact; in terms of the poetic composition of sensation, it is a characteristically brilliant final gesture.

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‘Song of the Wanking Iraqi’ produces a disruption and a deterritorialization of a reader’s subjectivity such that she is firmly situated within her culture (assuming that her culture is that of the West). A reader’s individuation, rendered impersonal and non-subjective, is that of a Western reader complicit with torture and guilty of blindness to it, of a lofty stupidity that thinks of itself in terms of major works of art but cannot, ordinarily, think itself in terms of torture, humiliation and atrocity. The elements of lyric that persist in this poem serve to aid the conjunction of reader and text to produce a performed poem that kicks out at subjectivity in the actualization of an individuating haecceity that is, in its situatedness, in its connections that (among other things) distinguish it from the apparent discretion of the subject, abusive (and abused), degraded (and degrading), murderous (and murdered) – and also art of the highest (and most minoritarian or illegitimate) kind. However, as a deterritorialized, smooth space, the poem does not identify with either abused or abuser but is impersonally related to both simultaneously (though it does not mimic or approximate to abuse, torture and murder but rather, through the movement of the blocks of sensations that compose it, brings readers into connection and into proximity with them). The actualization of a haecceity here is negative in the sense that its connections actualize complicity with terror and death; yet it remains positive to the extent that the actualization of a haecceity is always a positive event. There is disease here, a disease that is deep within the major culture out of which the poem is produced and out of which it traces its line of flight, which is an element in the composition of individuation and which individuation is an element in the composition of. Yet the poem conforms entirely to Deleuze’s prescription: The ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, this creation of a health or this invention of a people, that is, a possibility of life.46 The opening of a reader to his milieu (that is the actualization of his self as a haecceity) is, in the delirium of this poetic experimentation, this sober fury, life-giving health itself. Its invention of a people is not the invention of a tortured people but the invention, once again, of a people who are minorized within a majoritarian milieu: it does not speak for the tortured but thinks about them from a position of complicity with the torturers that it is in full and open revolt against. It is therefore the invention of a people in revolt against Man, and as such against what those people, at least in part, are themselves. The invention of such a people is brief and partial; the fully lived complicity with an individual’s milieu is unsustainable insofar as it is an actualization of the self as a haecceity. It is therefore, once again (and again despite its negative aspects), a broken (though already realized) promise of happiness; a reader will necessarily, to a greater or lesser extent, reterritorialize onto the subject that she is. I would not, however, wish to give the impression that actualization

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of a haecceity is a mere phantom to be dissipated and immediately lost; certainly not that it is therefore worthless. Deleuze and Guattari express the worth of it beautifully, precisely using revolution as a figure for the monumentality of art: Will all this be in vain because suffering is eternal and revolutions do not survive their victory? But the success of a revolution resides only in itself, precisely in the vibrations, clinches and openings it gave to men and women at the moment of its making and that composes in itself a monument that is always in the process of becoming, like those tumuli to which each new traveller adds a stone. The victory of a revolution is immanent and consists in the new bonds it installs between people, even if these bonds last no longer than the revolution’s fused material and quickly give way to division and betrayal.47 After reterritorialization and the reassertion of the subject, the promise remains and the ‘revolution’, the becoming of an actualized haecceity, has already occurred in order to produce that promise. Nothing can take that away. The process also leaves traces, subtly altered relations with the world and with a reader’s situation, new forms of connection and intersection with language itself and with the world to which it is connected, of which it is a part. A reader will fit the subject that it also is a little less than it did before – and so the promise is not, ever, entirely broken. As the promise has to be briefly kept for it to be made at all, so that fact leaves its residue in a reader’s life.

Conclusion

I suggested in the Introduction, through a comment by Keston Sutherland, that the work of J. H. Prynne, and by extension contemporary British innovative poetry more generally, is ‘illegitimate’. Given that Sutherland uses the word in a piece that is entitled ‘Comment and Homage’, it is unlikely that it was intended as a derogatory statement. However, I do not believe it should be taken simply as an expression of ‘homage’, either, or even as implying a simple negative opinion of the contemporary British poetic mainstream. For there is a very real sense in which innovative poetry is necessarily illegitimate. Innovative poetry is coupled to the disruptive, unsettling and ultimately revolutionary forces that are unleashed by capitalism itself, but which are continually checked and reterritorialized for the sake of stability. Innovative poetry is illegitimate as a result of this coupling – it is deterritorializing and disruptive and therefore cannot be part of the (stable and stabilizing) mainstream in a situation that is not revolutionary. Again, this should not necessarily imply any simplistic opinionated criticism of contemporary mainstream poetry insofar as this latter is unavoidably legitimate, coupled as it is to the conservative and reterritorializing forces produced by capitalist ideologies that help to keep capitalism stable. Questions of legitimacy or illegitimacy in contemporary poetry are not simply questions of conservative forces deliberately excluding or refusing to recognize innovative forces (although this does also occur), but rather are questions of the situating of poetry at a particular social and historical juncture. At the level of poems themselves, innovative poetry’s illegitimacy is a result of the recalcitrant material forces of which it is composed; a poem exists in its own right, leaving its sensational inscriptions in the body of a reader as it passes through her, leaving her in a briefly live connection with the world before she is reterritorialized by the conservative forces that envelope her at almost every living moment. Philip Larkin’s moralistic attack on modernism as ‘irresponsible’1 contained an element of truth: modernism and innovation disrupt habitual modes of thought, perception and experience; they are destabilizing. Such disruption occurs through the individual performance, but it inscribes the poem within the institution and within capitalist history as necessarily and objectively illegitimate. The present-becoming of a poem as a becoming-animal, as a becomingwoman, or as the realization of individuation as haecceity, is usually a positive

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and generative illegitimacy. It is productive of a kind of happiness that is something other than contentment, and might even be opposed to it, and is closer to joy, a joy in the materiality of life itself and the living of it, a joy that cannot exist for long under the current global dispensation. It is therefore monstrous. It is perceived as monstrous by those who disparage it, who refuse to engage with it or who fear its irresponsibility; but it is also actually monstrous in that it is composed of the irrational (it makes use of irrational cuts), it is composed of the incommensurable (it juxtaposes that which ought to be kept apart), and it is composed out of chaos. It is generated out of blocks of sensations that deterritorialize and that, therefore, are apt to terrorise the unwary reader with the generative disruption, or refusal, of meaning. It is, simply, difficult. Or not so simply: the question of difficulty has been approached in two different, although inseparably related, ways. The poetry is difficult because it has to be so if it is to perform its functions of positive deterritorialization, of producing encounters beyond habit and of generating sensational thought. If Riley’s innovative feminist lyrics are not to become only feminist lyrics that rally the already-committed, or at least sympathetic, to an uncomplicated commonality of female experience, if they are rather to challenge assumptions of that commonality without rejecting it and are to really think and become the individuality of a woman, both absolutely individual and absolutely an element of the collective, then they have to be difficult. If Riley’s poems and Wilkinson’s poems are to produce a minorization of language that disrupts the domination of everyday assumptions, if they are to be composed of counter-words that produce real intensive transformations of a reader, actual even if short lived, then they have to be difficult. These things could be said, with variations for the specificities of the work of individual poets, for all the work looked at across this thesis, and for many other poems that I have not been able to consider. Difficulty is both unavoidable and necessary for innovative poetry; if it were not difficult it would not be innovative. On the other hand, I have shown that difficulty can be understood (though not by any means eradicated; indeed, it should not be eradicated) by paying attention, first of all, to what happens when we read innovative poetry rather than to what we think ought to happen. This means taking the poems seriously in their own right and encountering them on their own terms. The rigorous, uncompromising smooth spaces of Prynne’s later poetry will remain difficult for readers to negotiate, but such difficulty can be understood more usefully by thinking about what the poem does in conjunction with a reader than by trying to untie all the poetry’s knots of reference and allusion in order to interpret it and make it mean something other than what it is. By the same token, Oliver’s poetry, striving for accessibility while retaining innovation’s aesthetic and deterritorializing force, is, in the service of the latter, composed in part of unruly stumbling blocks of language that refuse to allow the reader an easy passage without taking them into account and feeling their stubborn existence.

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But these stumbling blocks of language can only be understood, once again, on their own terms: they are not obstacles to understanding that which might be represented by the poem but are the poem itself, or are at least the source of the poem’s real power. So difficulty in poetry, at least in our period, is inevitable; and this is innovative poetry. Such difficulty can, however, be understood (without being eliminated, though it might be rendered more negotiable by such understanding) as long as it is encountered as a material and forceful existence composed of sensations. The sensations themselves do not (of course, for they are sensations and not signifiers, for all that they are frequently produced through signification) signify, but they are, frequently, significant. I have traced that significance across questions of the relationship between poetry and society, concepts of the self, the productions of place and space and more directly political poetry. My findings in these areas demonstrate the significance of poetic sensation and its capacity for the generation of fresh thought and, perhaps even more importantly, fresh experience. For what is always true, whatever the specifics of the areas that have come under investigation, is that the poetry is on every occasion substantively new, beyond packaging or even simply a change in perspective. Each poem is a unique object, one that is active and even, given that an actualized poem is always in conjunction with a living reader, alive: this latter is true of all poetry, but innovative poetry, as always-renewed experimentation, is therefore always-renewed experimentation with life and with potentialities for living, which all poetry certainly is not. This is why every innovative poem, whatever the political desires apparent in its composition, is in some sense revolutionary and will, when the experiments are successful, leave a residue of change in the reader. On the other hand, the lack of understanding of the difficulty of innovative poetry today inevitably means that it is not as widely read as it might be – for, however difficult a work, if the difficulty itself is understood it can be engaged with beyond feelings of stupidity, for example, or suspicions that one is being taken for a fool. The lack of understanding that prevents engagement with the poetry is a result, I believe, of poetry more generally being taught first of all to children on problematic, representationalist, premises. According to these premises, difficulty needs to be eradicated by understanding a represented message, idea or model behind or beneath the poem, rather than understanding the poem itself. In other words, poetry is a special form of discourse that needs to be decoded; this leads to a situation in which poetry that cannot simply be decoded is rejected as ‘too difficult’ or as ‘pretentious’ – a word that often means little more than ‘something I don’t understand’, but which can just as often mean ‘appears to have a hidden meaning but does not’, leading to suspicions of chicanery. Such suspicions are generally unwarranted, of course, not least because the poetry simply is not attempting to do that which it is accused of failing to achieve. However, if representationalism is problematic from the first, then poetry from earlier historical periods (or contemporary

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conservative poetry) may also be misunderstood insofar as it is read through questionable premises that are taken for granted. The insights to be gained, then, from the study of contemporary innovative poetry as sensation rather than representationalist meaning might, if taken sufficiently seriously, potentially have an impact on thinking about and teaching of poetry more generally. If the appearance of representation (in whatever form, whether mythological, symbolic or realist) were to be read as a particular aesthetic affect that is consonant in some way with the social-historical context in which it was composed then our understanding of it would be more profound. At the same time, contemporary innovative poetry, while still ‘difficult’ because substantively new by definition, would be more amenable to understanding on its own terms without our having to entirely relearn everything we know about poetry and poetics. Being more amenable to understanding on its own terms would not legitimise the poetry, however. To become legitimate would mean being assimilated, impossible anyway under current conditions, to the centre, which would mean losing the transformational force of its sensations and intensities. This would in turn entail the loss of the promise, always briefly realised in the actualization of haecceity, of happiness that actualized innovative poetry, as the living conjunction of the poetic text and the reader, at its most powerful, is. This is what is perhaps most important about this poetry in our time; this is what needs to be understood more completely, extended if possible, and ultimately given its full due as a significant part of contemporary culture.

Notes

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Sinclair, Iain, ed. (1996), Conductors of Chaos. London: Picador. Sutherland, Keston (June 2006), ‘Comment and Homage’ in Quid 17, For J. H. Prynne: In Celebration, p. 64. Prynne, J. H. (2005), Poems. Freemantle: Freemantle Arts Centre Press/Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, p. 410. Sheppard, Robert (2005), The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents 1950–2000. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. In particular, the chapters ‘The Movement Poets and The Movement Orthodoxy in the 1950s and 1960s’, pp. 20–35 and ‘The Persistence of the Movement Orthodoxy in the 1980s and 1990s’, pp. 125–42. Larkin, Philip (1970), All What Jazz. London: Faber and Faber, p. 23. Ibid. Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying, p. 22. Ibid. Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying, p. 28. Ibid. Morrison, Blake and Motion, Andrew, eds (1982), The Penguin Book of Contemporary English Poetry. London: Penguin. Morrison and Motion, The Penguin Book of Contemporary English Poetry, p. 11. Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying, p. 131. Crozier, Andrew and Longville, Tim, eds (1987), A Various Art. Manchester: Carcanet. Allnut, Gillian, D’Aguiar, Fred, Edwards, Ken and Mottram, Eric, eds (1988), The New British Poetry. London: Paladin. O’Sullivan, Maggie, ed. (1996), Out of Everywhere: linguistically innovative poetry by women in North America and the UK. London: Reality Street Editions. Caddel, Richard and Quartermain, Peter, eds (1999), Other: British and Irish Poetry since 1970. Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press. Mengham, Rod and Kinsella, John, eds (2004), Vanishing Points: New Modernist Poems. Cambridge: Salt Publishing. See, for example, the following: www.archiveofthenow.com; www.barquepress. com; http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/; [access date to be inserted when author replies.]http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.com/; http:// jacketmagazine.com/00/home.shtml; www.maggieosullivan.co.uk; http:// freespace.virgin.net/reality.street/; http://abandonedbuildings.blogspot.com/ and www.saltpublishing.com.

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Notes

A period, also, of great controversy, of which Morrison and Motion would hardly be unaware, within the Poetry Society, run briefly during the 1970s by radical poets of the British Poetry Revival. A full account of this important institutional episode is available in Barry, Peter (2006), Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court (Cambridge: Salt). See Mottram, Eric, ‘The British Poetry Revival 1960–1974’, Conference Booklet, Modern British Poetry Conference, 31 May, 1 and 2 June, 1974, The Polytechnic of Central London, Centre for Extra Mural Studies. Cheek, Cris, ‘giving tongue’ in Romana Huk, ed. (2003), Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, p. 247. However, it will need to be faced in the course of this book that some of the writers working with these poetries come from relatively privileged social positions. This does not invalidate cheek’s point but it does complicate it somewhat. cheek, ‘giving tongue’, p. 248. Lopez, Tony (2006), ‘Oppositional Englishness: National Identity in Basil Bunting’s “Briggflatts”’ in Meaning Performance. Cambridge: Salt. Lopez, Meaning Performance, p. 161. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix (2003), What is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill. London and New York: Verso. Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix (2002), A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi. London and New York: Continuum, p. 4. This is despite the fact that, from some perspectives, it may seem to entail a deconstruction of some aspects of the opposition between idealism and materialism – however, this does not seem the place to examine these issues in detail.

Chapter One 1

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Deleuze, Gilles (2001), Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 35. Ibid. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 36. Williams, James (2003), Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: A Critical Introduction and Guide. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, p. 64. Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, p. 36. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 36. Ibid. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 38. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 37. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 36. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, pp. 40–1. Williams, Gilles Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition, pp. 68.

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Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 41. Ibid. Olson, Charles, ‘Letter to Elaine Feinstein’ in Donald Allen and Warren Tallman, eds (1973), Poetics of the New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press Inc., p. 158. Deleuze, Gilles (2003), ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’, an appendix to The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale, and ed. Constantin V. Boundas. London and New York: Continuum. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 256. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 257. Ibid. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, p. 260. Prynne, Poems, p. 10. Ibid. Quoted in Marriott, D. S. (1997), ‘The Rites of Difficulty’ in fragmente 7, p. 126. Marriott, ‘The Rites of Difficulty’, p. 126. Pound, Ezra (1934), ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions Books, p. 32. Pound, ABC, p. 32. Dell, Floyd (1911), ‘Review of Provença’, first published in Chicago Evening Post, in Eric Homberger, ed. (1972), Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 70–2. Pound, Ezra (1963), ‘The Tradition’, in T. S. Eliot, ed. Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. London: Faber and Faber, pp. 91–3. Pound, ABC, p. 32 Adorno, Theodor W. (1999), Aesthetic Theory, ed. by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor. London: The Athlone Press, p. 1. Bürger, Peter (1999), Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. by Michael Shaw. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, p. 22. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1. I do not mean that the work of Carol Anne Duffy, for example, is conservative in quite the same way as that of Philip Larkin, but rather that Duffy’s work, and that of other younger and more recent Movement Orthodoxy writers, seeks representation for ethnic or sexual minorities, for example, within the terms of a very narrow way of thought that ultimately is not only not disruptive of but is actively supportive of the status quo. This does not mean that literary experimentation only appeared with the advent of poetic or artistic autonomy. See, for example, Rasula, Jed and McCafferty, Steve, eds (2001), Imagining Language: An Anthology. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, which contains a historically wide range of examples of literary experimentation, including work by Aristophanes from 350 B.C. However, pre-modernist work of this kind was relatively rare and often the work of isolated individuals (Sterne’s Tristram Shandy was unique in its time, for example). The developments that led to modernist experimentation were important because what they allowed was the possibility, even the inevitability of much more widespread work of this kind, to the extent that it became part of the fabric of the institutions of modern poetry and literature. Pound, Ezra (1973), ‘I gather the Limbs of Osiris’ in Selected Prose 1909–1965, ed. by William Cookson. New York: New Directions Books, p. 31.

188 40

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56 57 58 59

60

61 62 63

64 65

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69 70 71 72

Notes

Allington, Cyril (June 1923), ‘A Plea for Lucidity,’ English Review, p. 546. Quoted in Diepeveen, Leonard (2003), The Difficulties of Modernism. New York and London: Routledge, p. 97. Pound, Selected Prose, p. 34. Ibid. Pound, Selected Prose, p. 35. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 20–1. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 21. Ibid. Ibid. Marx, Karl, and Engels, Frederick, (1986), Manifesto of the Communist Party Moscow: Progress Publishers, p. 37. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 21. Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying, p. 136. Hulse, Michael, Kennedy, David and Morley, David, eds, (1993) The New Poetry. Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, p. 16. Ibid. Hulse, Kennedy and Morley, The New Poetry, 27. Ibid. J. D. Scott, in an article entitled ‘In the Movement’, published in The Spectator in October 1954, described the Movement as ‘sceptical, robust, ironic . . .’, while Robert Conquest, in his ‘Introduction’ to New Lines in 1956 wrote that Movement poetry is ‘empirical in its attitude to all that comes’. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 61. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 31. Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 53. ‘Encounter’ is a Deleuzian concept that I will leave to stand in its everyday meaning for the moment, but I will return to it later. Eliot, T. S. (1941), ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in John Hayward, ed., Points of View. London: Faber and Faber, p. 25. Pound, ABC, p. 29. Pound, Selected Prose, p. 374–5. Flint, F. S., ‘Imagisme’, Appendix A in Jones, Peter, ed. (1972), Imagist Poetry. London: Penguin, p. 129. Quoted by Jones in the ‘Introduction’ to Imagist Poetry, p. 16. Ford, Ford Madox, ‘Those Were the Days’, foreword to Aldington, Richard, ed. (1930), Imagist Anthology 1930. London: Chatto and Windus, p. xiii. Ford, ‘Those Were the Days’, p. xiii. Ibid. Quoted by Martin, Wallace (1970), ‘The Sources of the Imagist Aesthetic’, PMLA 85: 2, p. 200. Quoted in Jones, Imagist Poetry, p. 32. Prynne, Poems, p. 10. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 166. This is not, of course, to deny that ‘bourgeois’ is a specific and definable class position, but rather to make it clear that I am using the term to indicate an epoch defined by bourgeois dominance.

Notes 73

74 75 76

77

78 79

80 81

189

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix (2000), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane. London: The Athlone Press, pp. 244–5. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, p. 37. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 257. Even this, though, is something of a simplification: the conservatism of reterritorialization may arguably have some counter-oppressive force, for example in the establishment of ethnic minority communities of support that look to established traditions and codes of belief and behaviour. On the other hand these may well themselves become oppressive in their turn, especially if they become orientated towards an elite group of so-called ‘community leaders’ at the expense of the other members of the community. Massumi, Brian (1999), A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press. Massumi, User’s Guide, p. 118. Incidentally, despite the apparent paradox, if I had the space here I would have wanted to argue that Pound’s poetry is closer to the anarchist-schizophrenic pole than the fascist-paranoid. This argument will have to wait for a different occasion however. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. 260. The concept of ‘linguistically innovative poetry’, while useful enough in itself, has the problem of implying that the techniques used in one poem will be picked up as an innovation and further developed by another poem or in other linguistic contexts. While this may happen, it is not necessarily the case.

Chapter Two 1

2

3

4 5 6

7 8 9

Mendelssohn, Anna (2000), ‘underground river.’, in Implacable Art. Cambridge and Applecross: Folio Equipage, p. 81. It is perhaps most accurate to say that a reader becomes an addressee as the reading of the poem continues and the reader gets some sense of who or what the addressee might be. The otherness, however, remains. These are, of course, my own associations. Again, these readings cannot be definitive insofar as each reading is different and essentially experimental. Other readers will certainly have other associations. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 508. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 164 Oliver, Douglas (1999), Poetry and Narrative in Performance. New York: St Martin’s Press, p. vii, emphasis as in original. Oliver, Poetry and Narrative, p. vii, emphasis added. Ibid. This performed conjunction of reader and poetic text may also be, in effect, an aggregation of multiple readings insofar as an individual (and individuating) reading is informed by previous readings, the results of which might have been partially transmitted through critical writings, commentaries, or even simply informal conversations.

190 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

18 19 20 21

Notes

Oliver, Poetry and Narrative, p. 5. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 164. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 169 Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 164. Ibid. Oliver, Poetry and Narrative, p. 112. Ibid. If I am right here, this might suggest that stress is not entirely phonic but has a psychological component (activated visually in this case) that can work to increase or reduce the intensity of the sensation of stress, an intensity that is not encountered in phonics alone. Prynne, Poems, p. 223. Oliver, Poetry and Narrative, p. 17. Ibid. The lines are: An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress

22 23 24 25

26

27

28 29 30

31 32 33 34

35 36 37

Oliver, Poetry and Narrative, p. 17. Oliver, Poetry and Narrative, p. 18. Oliver, Poetry and Narrative, p. 19. Deleuze, Gilles (2005), Cinema I: The Movement-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London and New York: Continuum. Massumi, Brian (2002), Parables for the Virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press. The word ‘is’ is being placed in inverted commas here in order to draw attention to its inadequacy. Massumi writes of movement as a ‘nonpresent potential to vary’ (Massumi, Parables, p. 4), while Deleuze writes that ‘movement is present’ (Deleuze, Cinema I, p. 1); in fact, both are correct, despite the apparent contradiction, and as such ‘is’, as a marking of being and therefore of simple presence, is inadequate. Massumi, Parables, p. 6. Massumi, Parables, p. 6, emphasis as in original. It should be pointed out here that these remarks on the dimensions of the poem do not necessarily relate to visual, sound or installation avant-garde poetries that may, on a case-by-case basis, have more or fewer dimensions and simpler or more complex dimensional relationships. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 164. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 168. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 169. Always bearing in mind that performances of the poem will be slightly different for every reading, let alone for every reader. Massumi, Brian, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, in Massumi, Parables, pp. 23–45. Massumi, Parables, p. 24, italics as in original. Massumi, Parables, p. 26.

Notes 38 39 40 41 42

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Massumi, Parables, p. 27. Massumi, Parables, p. 28. Massumi, Parables, p. 27. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? p. 176. Deleuze, Gilles (2003), Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation, trans. by Daniel W. Smith. London and New York: Continuum, p. 34. Derrida, Jacques (1982), ‘Différance’ in Margins of Philosophy, trans. by Alan Bass. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, p. 13.

Chapter Three 1

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It should be borne in mind that, unless it is stated otherwise, ‘poem’ (certainly from this point on) should be taken to mean the actualized poem, which means the poem as the performative conjunction of reader and text. This immediately complicates the question of the way in which society is manifested in or through the poem beyond Adorno’s discussion that begins this chapter, although his formulation of the essential problem, cited here, remains precise. Adorno, Theodor W. (1991), ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’ in Rolf Tiedmann, ed., Notes to Literature Volume One, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholson. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 38–9. Adorno, Notes to Literature, p. 39. Riley, Denise (2000a), Selected Poems. London: Reality Street Editions, p. 109. Riley, Selected Poems, pp. 47–8. Sheppard, Robert (2002), ‘The Education of Desire’ in Far Language: poetics and linguistically innovative poetry 1978–1997. Exeter: Stride, pp. 28–31. Sheppard, Far Language, p. 28. Sheppard, Far Language, p. 29. Riley, Selected Poems, p. 48. Adorno, Notes to Literature, p. 43. Watts, Carol (2000), ‘Beyond Interpellation? Affect, Embodiment and the Poetics of Denise Riley’ in Alison Mark and Deryn Rees-Jones, eds., Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice. London: Macmillan Press, p. 164. Riley, Selected Poems, p. 48. Ibid. Ibid. Prynne, J. H. (1992), Stars, Tigers and the Shape of Words. London: Birkbeck College, p. 32. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 524, n. 7. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 78. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 77. The deconstruction of this opposition does not necessarily affect the fact of the oppositional position of poetry with respect to society as Adorno sees it, though it may affect its nature and operation. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 77. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 88. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 80.

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57

Notes

Watts, ‘Beyond Interpellation?’ p. 164. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 227. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 277, emphasis as original. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 76. Ibid. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 79. Masssumi, User’s Guide, p. 31. Ibid. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 82. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 80. Ibid. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 80–1. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 81. Riley, Selected Poems, p. 49. Ibid. Celan, Paul, (1999), ‘The Meridian’ in Collected Prose, trans. by Rosemarie Waldrop. Manchester: Carcanet, p. 40. Marriott, D. S. (1997), ‘The Rites of Difficulty’, fragmente 7, p. 129. Celan, Collected Prose, p. 40. Ibid. Ibid. Marriott, ‘Rites’, p. 130. Marriott, ‘Rites’, p. 129. Celan, Collected Prose, p. 46. Ironically perhaps, should those readers be open to it, the deterritorializing movements produced by the refusal of these expectations ought to be greater than they are for readers without such expectations. However, to be open to such deterritorializing movements would mean that these expectations must be of less force, which reduces the force of the deterritorializing movements. Celan, Collected Prose, p. 49. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 139. Ibid. Celan, Collected Prose, p. 48. It is worth noting that Derrida writes of an absolute responsibility to the other, while stating that ‘Every other (one) is every (bit) other’; this may have both ethical and political ramifications for a poetry that is concerned with an encounter with otherness. See Derrida, Jacques (1996), The Gift of Death, trans. by David Wills. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, p. 69. Celan, Collected Prose, 40. Ibid. Prynne, Poems, p. 169. Ibid. Matthew, Chapter 27, 51–3. Hamburger, Michael (1996), ‘Introduction’ to Celan, Paul, Selected Poems, ed. and trans. by Michael Hamburger. London: Penguin Books, p. 21. Rothenburg, Jerome and Joris, Pierre, eds (1998), Poems for the Millennium Volume Two: From Postwar to Millennium. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, p. 155.

Notes 58

59

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Adorno, Theodor (1967), Prisms, trans. by Samuel and Shierry Weber. London: Neville Spearman, p. 35. Adorno, Theodor, (1973), Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 366–7. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 263–4. Prynne, Poems, p. 169.

Chapter Four 1

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Althusser, Louis (1977), ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses’ in Lenin and Philosophy and other essays, trans. by Ben Brewster. London: NLB, pp. 162–3. Oliver, Douglas, ‘Poetry’s Subject’, in Real Voices on Reading (1997), ed. by Philip Davies. London: Macmillan Press, pp. 83–102. The quoted lines are as follows: ‘Of these the false Achitophel was first; A name to all succeeding ages curst: For close designs and crooked counsels fit; Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit; Restless, unfixed in principles and place; In power unpleased, impatient of disgrace: A fiery soul, which, working out its way, Fretted the pigmy body to decay, And o’er-informed the tenement of clay. A daring plot in extremity; Pleased with the danger, when the waves went high, He sought the storms; but, for a calm unfit, Would steer too nigh the sands to boast his wit.’ (Oliver, ‘Poetry’s Subject’, pp. 85–6)

4 5 6 7 8 9

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Oliver, ‘Poetry’s Subject’, p. 86. Oliver, ‘Poetry’s Subject’, p. 86. Ibid. Ibid. Feder, Lillian (1954), PMLA, 69:5, p. 1264. Oliver, Douglas (1996), ‘The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet’, in Selected Poems. Jersey City, NJ: Talisman House Publishers, pp. 109–10. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 312. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 315. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 325. Ibid. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 311. Ibid. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 508. Wilkinson, John (1996), ‘The Metastases of Poetry’, Parataxis 8/9, p. 54. Wilkinson, ‘Metastases’, p. 54.

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Notes

Wilkinson, John (2001), ‘Facing Port Talbot’ in Effigies Against the Light. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, pp. 113–26. Wilkinson, ‘Metastases’, p. 54. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Wilkinson, Effigies, p. 113. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 318. This account is necessarily a somewhat abstracted one insofar as I am positing a generalized possible reader; however, the account describes a process that I believe is likely (given the analyses presented in this text so far) for anyone who reads this poem openly and positively in the context of contemporary Western society. Riley (2000b), The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony, p. 66. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 261. Riley, Words of Selves, p. 58. Riley, Words of Selves, p. 65–6. Riley, Words of Selves, p. 67. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques (2002), Deleuze and Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave and Macmillan, pp. 223–4. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 338. Ibid. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 342. Riley, Words of Selves, p. 79. Wilkinson, Effigies, p. 116. Wilkinson, Effigies, p. 117. Bataille, Georges (1993), The Accursed Share Volumes II and III, trans. by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone books, p. 198. Bataille, Accursed Share, p. 197. Bataille, Accursed Share, p. 198, emphasis as original. Bataille, Accursed Share, p. 199, emphasis as original. Bataille, Accursed Share, p. 198. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 13. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1989), Phenomenology of Perception, trans. by Colin Smith. London: Routledge, p. 456. Quoted in Milne, Drew (2001), ‘Speculative Assertions: reading J. H. Prynne’s Poems’ in Parataxis 10, p. 77. Riley, Words of Selves, p. 80. Monk, Geraldine (2002), Insubstantial Thoughts on the Transubstantiation of the Text. Sheffield: West House Books & The Paper. Monk, Geraldine (2003), ‘Interregnum’, in Selected Poems. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, pp. 97–164. Monk, Insubstantial Thoughts, unpaginated. Monk, Selected Poems, p. 124. Ibid. Monk, Insubstantial Thoughts, unpaginated. Deleuze, Gilles (1998), ‘He Stuttered’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. London and New York: Verso, p. 108.

Notes 55 56

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Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 109. Monk, Insubstantial Thoughts, unpaginated.

Chapter Five 1

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5 6

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10 11

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Walker, Denis B. (2003), ‘The Displaced Self: The Experience of Atopia and the Recollection of Place’, Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature; 36, 1. Walker, ‘The Displaced Self,’ p. 25. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 338–43. Wilkinson, John (2001), ‘Sarn Helen’ in Effigies Against the Light. Cambridge: Salt Publishing, pp. 171–96. Wilkinson, Effigies, p. 173. Smith, Daniel W., ‘Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality’ in Paul Patton, ed. (1997), Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, p. 45. Smith, ‘Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation’, pp. 45–6. Smith, Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation’, p. 47. Zourabichivili, François, ‘Six Notes on the Percept’, in Paul Patton, ed. (1997), Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 188–216. Zourabichivili, Six Notes on the Percept’, p. 192. There may be an affect of a ‘doubling’ of ‘landscape’ here insofar as it is both the landscape of the poem itself, of the movements of its performed actualization, and the landscape that is contained within its imaginative content, the ‘rural territory’, for example, to which it refers. I am concerned primarily with the first of these, the landscape of the poem’s performed actualization, although this necessarily exists by way of its references to the latter; this concern is one of the reasons why I did not wish to further confuse the issue by addressing poetry that is even more explicitly concerned with place, such as Allen Fisher’s Place or Iain Sinclair’s Lud Heat: A Book of Dead Hamlets, May 1974 to April 1975. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 204. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 478. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 474–5. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 479. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 492. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 493. Mengham, Rod, ‘After Avant-gardism: Her Weasels Wild Returning’ in Romana Huk ed. (2003), Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, p. 385. Mengham, ‘After Avant-gardism’, p. 384. Mengham, ‘After Avant-gardism’, p. 385. Mengham, ‘After Avant-gardism’, p. 387. Ibid. Ibid. Prynne, J. H. (2002), Acrylic Tips. Cambridge: Barque Press. Prynne, Acrylic Tips, p. 7. Prynne, Acrylic Tips, p. 8.

196 27 28 29 30

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Notes

Smith, ‘Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation’, p. 45. Smith, ‘Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation’, p. 47, emphasis as original. Deleuze, Francis Bacon, p. 73. Prynne, Acrylic Tips, p. 8. I am reading this as one sentence although it is rendered somewhat ambiguous by the capitalisation of the initial ‘R’ of ‘Regulation’. I am taking this as the capitalisation of the beginning of the stanza rather than the sentence, but it does not have to be read this way. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 509. Mengham, ‘After Avant-gardism,’ p. 385. Sheppard, Poetry of Saying, p. 234. O’Sullivan, Maggie (1993), ‘Another Weather System’ in In The House of the Shaman. London and Cambridge: Reality Street, pp. 7–26. Wills, Claire (1994), ‘Contemporary women’s poetry: experimentalism and the expressive voice’, Critical Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 34–52. Wills, ‘Contemporary women’s poetry’, p. 36. Ibid. Maggie O’Sullivan/Dell Olsen, ‘Writing/Conversation: an interview by mail, November-December 2003’ in http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/ archive/online_archive/v2_2_2004/current/workbook/writing.htm This was last accessed today, Monday 15th February 2010. O’Sullivan, In the House of the Shaman, p. 12. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 238. Wills, ‘Contemporary women’s poetry’, p. 36. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 241.

Chapter Six 1 2 3 4

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Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 227. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 323. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 176. Marriott, D. S. (2003), ‘Signs Taken for Signifiers: Language Writing, Fetishism and Disavowal’ in Romana Huk, ed., Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, p. 339. In Marriott, D. S. (2001), Dogma. Cambridge: Barque Press, pp. 9–10. Marriott, Dogma, p. 9. ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, referred to in Chapter Two. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, pp. 25–6. Marriott, ‘Signs Taken for Signifiers’, p. 339. Ibid. Marriott, Dogma, p. 10. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosphy?, p. 176. Marriott, Dogma, p. 9. Deleuze, Gilles (1998), ‘Literature and Life’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. London and New York: Verso, p. 4. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 4. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 1. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 5.

Notes 18 19

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Ibid. It should probably be clearly stated at this point that to refer to a minor people or a minor collective is not to make reference to their arithmetical number but to the fact that they are not the dominant, which is to say Man. Therefore, women are minor in this sense, as are people of colour, the disabled, lesbians and gay men and, increasingly, working class people, organised or otherwise, who, having been broadly assimilated (in the West) to the smooth running of capitalism in the post-war social democratic consensus (and so, largely, to Man) are once again thrust out of Man’s place of recognition by both neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 4. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 136. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 262. Ibid. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 139–40. Riley, Selected Poems, p. 36. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 276. Notley, Alice (2004), ‘The Poetics of Disobedience’, in Anne Waldman and Lisa Birman, eds, Civil Disobedience: Poetics and Politics in Action. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, p. 91. Riley, Denise (1988), ‘Am I That Name?’ – Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History. London: Macmillan, p. 99. Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’, p. 97. Brady, Andrea (2004), ‘Saw Fit’, in Quid 13, unpaginated. Brady, ‘Saw Fit’, unpaginated. Deleuze, Gilles (2000), Cinema 2, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. London: The Athlone Press, p. 181, emphasis as original. Deleuze, Cinema 2, p. 213. Deleuze, Cinema 2, pp. 213–14, emphasis as original Sheppard, The Poetry of Saying, p. 194. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Brady, ‘Saw Fit’, unpaginated. Brady, ‘Saw Fit’, unpaginated. Sutherland, Keston (2004), ‘Song of the Wanking Iraqi’, in Quid 13, unpaginated. Sutherland, ‘Song of the Wanking Iraqi’, unpaginated. Sutherland, ‘Song of the Wanking Iraqi’, unpaginated. Sutherland, ‘Song of the Wanking Iraqi’, unpaginated. Sutherland, ‘Song of the Wanking Iraqi’, unpaginated. Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, p. 4. Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, p. 177.

Conclusion 1

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Larkin, Philip (1970), All What Jazz. London: Faber and Faber, p. 23.

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Index

‘Absalom and Achitophel’ (Dryden) 9, 103–6 absolute deterritorialization 146, 147 Abu Ghraib prison in poetry 168–9, 174, 175–8 Acrylic Tips (Prynne) 9, 142–7 text 142 Adorno, Theodor on Holocaust and poetry 97–8 on interrelationship between subject, society and language 76, 80–1 on language 81 on literary and artistic break with tradition 27–8 on modernism 5 on political opinion 152–3 on status of art 24 aesthetics 1–2, 7–8, 19, 52 affects 54, 139, 145–6 of child 79–80 of coherence 108–9 of comfort 77, 78 of complicity 176, 177, 179 concept 64 emotion and 68 expansive 72–3, 74 of female objectification 173 of guilt and responsibility 98–9 of horror and humour 127–8 of intimacy 154–5 of objectivity and scientificity 65–7, 71–2, 73, 74 of primeval force 82–3 relationship between image and language in production of 67–8 of restlessness 107, 112, 113 of rusticity 64–5 of scorn 103, 104 of sexual-violence 175, 176

somatic 131–2 of suffering and struggle 172–3 of terror 95, 97 of trauma and loss 167 of unease 100–1 of violence 135–6, 137, 174–5, 176 of withdrawal 77–8 ‘Affirmations-As for Imagism’ (Pound) 32 Althusser, Louis on ideological interpellation 102 Riley’s critique of 122 Alvarez, A. The New Poetry anthology 3 amateurism defence of 26 anarchy-schizophrenia 40–1 ‘Another Weather System’ (O’Sullivan) 148–51 text 148–9 anthologies of innovative poetry 1–2, 3–4 of Movement poetry 3 anthropomorphism 149–50 art autonomy 24, 31–2, 34 copies 16–17 experimentation 19–20 opinion and 152–3 sensation 37, 53–4 autonomy artistic 31–2, 34 concept 24 institutional 25, 78 poetic 24–5, 36 Bacon, Francis Deleuze’s account of paintings of 9, 70, 143, 144

206

Index

Bataille, Georges on sovereignty 123–4 becoming-animal 10, 148–51 becoming-immigrant 155–6 becoming-violent 137–8, 139 becoming-woman 10, 164–6, 173, 182 Bergson, Henri Deleuze’s reading of movement of 60, 62 Brady, Andrea 10 ‘Saw Fit’ 168–73 Buchner, Georg Danton’s Death 94 Bürger, Peter 24, 30 capitalism Adorno’s conception of newness and 27–8 haecceity and 162–4 innovative poetry and 38–42 revolutionary drive of 28, 39 subject and 163, 165 Celan, Paul on counter-word 91, 93–4 on encounter 93 on obscurity and strangeness of poetry 92, 93 Prynne’s ‘Es Lebe der König’ and 94, 96–7 cinema interstices 170 Conductors of Chaos (Picador anthology) 1 Conquest, Robert New Lines anthology 3 contemporary innovative poetry see innovative poetry copy 16–17 counter-words 8, 91–2, 93–5, 96, 99, 102–3, 119–20 Danton’s Death (Buchner) 94 decoding capitalist 39–40, 48, 163 Deleuze, Gilles on Bacon’s painting 9, 70, 143, 144 Difference and Repetition 12 on encounter 93

on forced movement 9, 143 Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation 9 on individuating differences 14 on irrational cut 170 on literature’s ultimate aim 179 reading of Bergson’s notion of movement 60, 62 on singularity 87 on stutter 130 on univocal being 13–14 Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari 5, 6 on affects 64 on artistic sensations 37, 53–4 on becoming-animal 150 on decoding 39 on deterritorialization 48 on enunciation 86 on haecceity 118, 162 on language 89 on monuments 158 on order-word 88 on percept 53 on political opinion 152–3 on refrain 110 on revolution 180 on rhythm 115 on smooth and striated spaces 139 on speech-act theory 89 A Thousand Plateaus 5, 8 What is Philosophy? 5, 37 Derrida, Jacques on relation between differance and time 71 deterritorialization 56–7, 58–9, 67, 72, 74, 78, 79, 91, 95–7, 99 absolute 146, 147 capitalism and 39–41, 48–9, 164 concept 39, 48 defamiliarization 49–50 forcible 159 majoritarian powers and 161, 166, 168, 179 deterritorialized subjectivity 9, 114, 119–20 Marriott’s poetry 155–6, 157, 159–61 Monk’s poetry 127–32 Oliver’s poetry 111–13 Riley’s poetry 164–5, 167

Index Sutherland’s poetry 179 Wilkinson’s poetry 114–15, 116, 167–8 difference new generation poets 29 univocity and 13–15 Difference and Repetition (Deleuze) 12 difficulty 22–3, 34–6, 92 critique of 23 poetic innovation and 6–7, 182–4 Dryden, John as subject in ‘Absalom and Achitophel’ 9, 103–6 Duffy, Carol Ann 29 Eliot, T. S. on historical sense 31 emotional significance poem’s music and 51, 55–6 encounters 2, 92–3, 141, 182 Engels, Friedrich on revolutionary drive of capitalism 28, 39 England, Lynndie in poetry 10, 168–9, 171–3, 178 enunciation 90 collective assemblage of 86–7, 88, 89, 120, 160 equality of beings 14–15 ‘Es Lebe der König’ (Prynne) 8, 94–101, 141 references to Celan 94, 96–7 text 95–6, 98 title as counter-word 94–5 eternal return Nietzsche’s 15, 18 experimentation artistic 19–20 poetic 7, 19–20, 25, 27, 168, 183 ‘Facing Port Talbot’ (Wilkinson) 9, 114–16, 122–3 text 114, 122 fascism-paranoia 40–1 female objectification 173 Fisher, Allen on pertinence 171 Flint, F. S. on imagism 32

207

Floyd, Dell critique of modernist difficulty 23 forced movement 9, 142–6, 155, 159 Ford, Ford Maddox on concrete objecthood of a poem 32–3 form content and 16, 19 novelty in 30 Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Deleuze) 9 Guattari, Felix see Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari haecceity 118–19, 125–6, 131–2, 139, 151, 179–80 concept 9, 118 selfhood and 10, 125, 161–4, 165–6 haptic perception 9, 139–40 Her Weasels Wild Returning (Prynne) 1–2, 141–2 historical sense 31 Holocaust 96–101 Hulme, T. E. 33 Hulse, Michael The New Poetry anthology 3, 29 idea Platonist 17–18 identity 15, 79–80, 166 ideological interpellation 102–5, 117, 122, 123, 168 desirability of 126–7 imagism 32–3 imagistic nodes 114–15 incorporeal transformations 89–90, 94, 102 individuality 9, 14, 114, 116, 118–20, 125–6, 151 innovative feminist poetry 10 Brady 168–73 female concerns and 165–7 Riley 164–7 innovative poetry 6, 11–12 anthologies 3–4 bourgeoisie tendencies of 38–42 ‘illegitimacy’ 1, 3, 4, 181–2

208

Index

innovative poetry (Cont’d) Movement Orthodoxy vs. 6 Movement poets attitude towards 2, 4 openness of 121–2, 124–5 strangeness and obscurity of 92–3 institutional autonomy 25, 78 Insubstantial Thoughts on the Transubstantiation of the Text (Monk) 127–32 ‘Interregnum’ (Monk) 127–8, 129, 130 In The House of the Shaman (O’Sullivan) 148 irrational cut 170–1, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 178 Karpinski, Janis, General in poetry 178 Kennedy, David The New Poetry anthology 3, 29 Labov, William 85 language collectivization of 158–9, 160–1, 163 Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of 89 distinction between speech and 85–6 doubleness of 81, 83, 85 interrelationship between society, individual and 76–86, 102 referential function of 82–3 relationship between televisual image and 156 relationship formed with the world via 125–6 as site of political contestation 90 as synchronic system 83–4, 85 Larkin, Philip critique of modernism 2, 29, 181 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques on style 121 legitimate poetry 1–3, 181–2, 184 literature aim of 179 social function of 23 lyric poetry 17, 19, 21, 43, 57, 163, 164, 168, 182 signification obscurity of 43–5, 46–7

social significance 76–86 transformation of language through 78–9 marginalised voices 153–7, 164 Marriott, D. S. 10 on counter-word 91–2 on encounter 93 on marginalised voices 153 Marx, Karl on revolutionary drive of capitalism 28, 39 Massumi, Brian on deterritorialization and reterritorialization 40–1 on movement 61, 62, 71 on order-word 88–9 on relationship between affect and emotion 68 on relationship between language and image 156 on relationship between language and image in production of affects 67–8 materiality recalcitrance of 10–11, 20–2, 81, 135, 181 Mendelssohn, Anna 8 ‘underground river’ (Mendelssohn) 43–8, 49, 50, 55–7, 58, 64–5, 77 Mengham, Rod on smoothness of Prynne’s later poetry 141–2 metastases 9 concept 113–14 ‘The Metastases of Poetry’ (Wilkinson) 114 minor literature 10, 151, 160–1 missing people 10, 160–1, 163, 165–6 modernism 6 commodity society and 30 detriment of social function 23–4 Larkin’s attack on 2, 29, 181 as negation of tradition 5, 27–8 modernist poetry autonomy of 23–5 break with representationalism 31–6 difficulty in reading 34–5

Index non-representational and experiential status 7, 12–13 praxis of 36 professionalization of 25–7 substantive newness of 30–1, 34 Monk, Geraldine 9 Insubstantial Thoughts on the Transubstantiation of the Text 127–32 ‘Unvocalised (private)’ 128–30 ‘Vocalised (public)’ 131–2 monuments 158–9, 169, 171–2 Morley, David The New Poetry anthology 3, 29 Morrison, Blake The Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry 3, 4 Motion, Andrew The Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry 3, 4 movement differance and 71 poetic stress and 60–3 Movement Orthodoxy 2–3, 25 attitude towards oppositional poetry 2, 4 innovative poetry vs. 6 ‘legitimacy’ 2–3, 4, 181 novelty in 28–9 reterritorializing tendencies of 40–1 music of poetry 51, 140 narratives sensation and 68–9, 155, 156–8, 159, 172 new generation poets 3 novelty 29–30 New Lines anthology (Conquest) 3 The New Poetry anthology (Alvarez) 3 The New Poetry anthology (Hulse, Kennedy and Morley) 3 newness in 29 Nietzsche, Friedrich on univocity 15 non-representational modernist poetry 7, 12–13, 33 Notley, Alice on missing female concerns 166

209

novelty Adorno on 27–8 as marketing ploy 29 modernist poetry 30–1 Movement poetry 28–9 as superficial 30 ‘The Numbers’ (Prynne) 20–3, 35–6, 37, 40, 41 text 20–1, 35 objective image 32 ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’ (Prynne) 57–9, 60, 65–7, 69–70, 71–5 text 57–8 Oliver, Douglas 183 on abstract metrical pattern 55 on Dryden’s poetry 9, 103 on pedagogical emphasis on signification 51 on poem’s music 51 on poetry as performance 50–2 ‘Poetry’s Subject’ 103 ‘The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet’ 9, 106–13 on stress 53 on stress location 59–60 Olson, Charles on form 16, 19 order-words 8, 88–91, 102 territorializing 119–20, 122–3 O’Sullivan, Maggie 10 ‘Another Weather System’ 148–51 In The House of the Shaman 148 non-human language 147–8 painting Deleuze’s account of Bacon’s 9, 70, 143, 144 smooth and striated spaces 139–40 vibration in 135–6 The Penguin Book of Contemporary Poetry (Morrison and Motion) 3, 4 percepts 64, 73, 78, 114–15, 139 concept 53 degradation of sexuality 176 of desert warfare 169 haunting 157

210

Index

percepts (Cont’d) imagistic 115, 116 of landscape 145–6 of lostness and wondering 159, 160 of movement 95–6, 98 of natural/rural landscape 137–8 openings through 122 phonic 109, 115 of physical discomfort 175 poetic stress and 53, 54 of restlessness 113 of room as a cell and art installation 177 of roundness 108–12, 113 sonorous 136, 140 of suffering-as-a-woman 173 surgical 164–5, 167 violent 135, 136–7 of well-meaning racism 155 performance of poetry 51–2, 119, 140, 152, 161 space and 137 temporality, movement and location of stress 59–63, 64 pertinent poetry 171 place 9, 150 concept 133 subject and 133–4, 137 Plato on simulacrum 17–18 poetic autonomy 24–5, 36 poetic experimentation 7, 19–20, 168, 183 professionalization of poetry and 25, 27 poetry correspondence theory of truth and 7, 12–13, 18–19 relationship between a poem and its original 17, 18 social function of 24–5 Poetry Society 3, 186n. 20 ‘Poetry’s Subject’ (Oliver) 103 political opinion an epiphenomenon 10, 152–3, 161 political poetry 10, 151 feminist 167, 168 marginalised voices and 153–4

responses to Iraq war and torture at Abu Ghraib prison 168–9, 174, 175 Pound, Ezra 23 ‘Affirmations-As for Imagism’ 32 defence of professionalism 25–7 on imagism 32 on modernism 23 professionalism 25–7 Prynne, J. H. 8 Acrylic Tips 9, 142–7 ‘Es Lebe der König’ 8, 94–101, 141 Her Weasels Wild Returning 1–2, 141–2 ‘Of Movement Towards a Natural Place’ 57–9, 60, 65–7, 69–70, 71–5 ‘The Numbers’ 20–3, 35–6, 37, 40, 41 smoothness of later poetry 141–2, 182 ‘The Stony Heart of Her’ 2 on synchronic system of language 83–4 reading individuating 20 non-linearity 72–5 recalcitrance to 20–2 representationalist 17, 43–5 refrain 110, 111 repetition 119–20, 129, 130 singularity and 117–18 territorializing 127–8 representationalism 183–4 modernist break with 31–6, 42 representationalist reading of poet’s feelings and thoughts 43–5 recognition and 17 resonance 9, 136–7, 144, 155, 174–5 concept 136 of incommensurable sensations 171 reterritorialization 49, 67, 146, 168 capitalism and 39–41 concept 39 immigrants and 155 rhythm 115–16 Riley, Denise 8, 10, 164, 182 critique on Althusser’s interpellation 122 ‘A Shortened Set’ (Riley) 164–7 on space-time individuation 118, 119

Index on style 117 ‘Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else’ 77–83, 90–1, 102 ‘Sarn Helen’ (Wilkinson) 9, 134–5, 136–8, 140 text 134–5, 140 ‘Saw Fit’ (Brady) 168–73 text 168–9 ‘the “secret” of this form itself’ (Marriott) 10, 154–61, 163 text 154, 157–8, 159 selfhood 9 haecceity and 10, 125, 161–4, 165–6 sensation 8–9, 45–7, 50, 51–2, 75 ‘blocks of sensations’ 50, 54 creative linkage and 171 marginalized voices and 155–6 narrative and 68–9, 156–8, 159, 172 praxis of poetry and 36–8 signification and 37–8, 46–7, 50, 56–7, 69–71, 183 social significance 8, 76–7, 82, 84, 102 space and 134–8 transformation of subject through 102–3 Sheppard, Robert on creative linkage 171 critique of O’Sullivan 147–8 on transformation of language through innovative poetry 78–9 ‘A Shortened Set’ (Riley) 164–7 text 164 signification 5, 18–19, 130 arbitrariness 83–5 differance and 71 of experience 158 lyric failure 44–5 pedagogical emphasis 51 referential 134 sensation and 37–8, 46–7, 50, 56–7, 67–71, 136, 137 vibration and 136 simulacrum 5, 7, 12, 20–2 distinction between copy and 16–17 divergence and 19 poetry and 18–19 as source of untruth 17–18

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work of art as 19 ‘The Simulacrum and Ancient Philosophy’ (Deleuze) 16 Sinclair, May on imagists belief of transubstantiation 33 singularity 91 concept 87 repetition and 117–18 subversion of habit and recognition 87–8 Smith, Daniel W. on Deleuze’s analysis of Bacon’s triptychs 143 on resonance 136 on vibration 135 smooth space 138–9, 140–2, 144, 145–7, 150–1, 157, 179 society in or through poetry 76–7, 101 ‘Song of the Wanking Iraqi’ (Sutherland) 174–9 text 174, 177, 178 ‘The Soul as Crumpled Bedsheet’ (Oliver) 9, 106–13 text 106–7 sovereignty 126 Bataille’s conception 123–4 beyond consumption 124–5 subjective 105–6, 112, 123 spaces 9–10 political issues and 147, 155–8 significance of sensation and 134–8 ‘The Stony Heart of Her’ (Prynne) 2 stress 53–5 definition 53 in Mendelssohn’s poetry 55–7 in Prynne’s poetry 57–9 temporality, movement and location of stress 59–63 striated space 138–9, 145, 150, 157 style production of subject and 117, 120–1 subjective image 32 subjectivity 9 as capitalist axiom 163, 165 deterritorialized 9, 111, 112–13, 114–15, 164–5, 167–8

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subjectivity (Cont’d) interpellation of 102–6 interrelationship between society, language and 76–83, 85–6, 102 place and 133–4 style and 117, 120–1 Sutherland, Keston 10 critique of Prynne 1, 181 ‘Song of the Wanking Iraqi’ 174–9 territorialization 9–10, 110–12, 115, 116, 121, 150–1 marginalised voices and 153–8 order-words 119–20 poetic style and 117 of repetitions 127–8 A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari) 5, 8 time differance and 71 poetic stress and 59–63 ‘underground river’ (Mendelssohn) 43–8, 49, 50, 55–7, 58, 64–5, 77 text 43 univocal being 13–15 univocal ontology 5, 7, 12

Index Nietzschean 15 ‘Unvocalised (private)’ (Monk) 128–30 text 128–9 vibration 9, 135–6, 144 concept 135 ‘Vocalised (public)’ (Monk) 131–2 text 131 Walker, Denis B. on space 9, 133 Watts, Carol 82, 86–7 What is Philosophy? (Deleuze and Guattari) 5, 37 ‘Wherever You Are, Be Somewhere Else’ (Riley) 77–83, 91, 102 text 77, 83, 90 title as order-word 90–1 Wilkinson, John critique of 167–8 ‘Facing Port Talbot’ 9, 114–16, 122–3 on imagistic nodes 114 on metastases 9, 113–14 ‘The Metastases of Poetry’ 114 ‘Sarn Helen’ 9, 134–5, 136–8, 140 Wills, Clair on O’Sullivan’s focus on animality 148