william watkin's blog (since 2003)

In reading and teaching Howe’s work I always commence from an appreciation of the semiotic and graphematic elements of her work and find this invariably opens up the text to further understanding. The Midnight is no exception. From the very start of the poem with a fake frontispiece blurred by a false tissue paper interleaf, a frontispiece whose reverse or tain is also visible, the text rendered in mirror image, it is apparent that the visual is of equal importance to the verbal here. A simple technique I often use when teaching Howe, indeed much postmodern poetry, is ask my students to first look at the poem without reading it. For example in “Thorow”, perhaps her best work and one of the masterpieces of contemporary literature, the simple exercise of looking leads one from the visual icon which opens the poem, through two types of prose, into recognisable poetry, ending with the remarkable three pages of palimpsest, anti-linear poetics. The midnight is similarly a book to look at. Th...

In trying to think how the horizontal, disseminating form of poetic lineation bisects or simply meets with the vertical, cohering force of the poem body, the uncanniness of poetic space presents and thus withholds itself as is fitting. Perhaps it is not that the poem is born of the tension between poetry and prose, line-breaking and lineal resumption, but rather that this tension emanates from a more fundamental, cognitive, philosophical and embodied crossing, that between the horizontal and the vertical line. The poem progresses, fitfully, across the impossible space it conjours at the end of its semiotically curtailed duration (ten syllables, abab rhyme, breath, graphic rhythm). At the end of each line it is confronted with an impassible territory, absolute alterior space, which however it must cross. First if it did not cross it there would be no poetry. Second if it does not cross it there is no space, the line just continues encroaching on and deferring the space, but never tr...

Postmodern Prosody and Line Measure Just a quick consideration of theseecstasies which I wrote over a longish period several years ago now. I have used the term line measure before to refer to the rhythmic nature of lineation. I should clarify here that this is not counting the syllables in the line, which is syllabic measure, nor does measure suggest a regularity. Having said this naturally line measure relies on what goes on in the line, so it could include syllables, but within the avant-garde tradition that I work in it is more likely that phrases, phonemes and gaps will form the basic unit of regard. In addition all rhythm is reliant on the repetition of some form of mark and the moment of its non-repetition, which could be a pause or a break in regularity. I won't get into why such a basic deep structure of rhythm works, mainly because I don't know and nor does anyone else it would seem. So what are the areas that need to be considered in line measure. I feel that the rhy...

Comments added to a discussion on The Line in Space at Lime Tree. I've been working on lineation for a while now, not taking it for granted as a fundamental of poetry but accepting its importance all the same. The most illuminating work in this field is Agamben's "The End of the Poem" which I have discussed in detail on my blog so I won't go on about it again here, even I have my limits of interest! What seems to be behind the differences of opinion in this discussion is an inability to understand the semiotic materiality of the line as a visual unit with the field of the poem, and of course its liminal status as a non-necessary, convenient way of rendering the temporality of the spoken poem in a more portable and lasting form. Sorry, it's not easy to say all that in a prettier way but basically the line has its own aesthetic presence but it also serves the voice. This transition from voice to page happened a long time ago now, and it seems time to pay our due...

How to read the right hand column I don’t want to think too systematically about this because it’s the challenge to the systematic that the role of the other column presents. Can you get emotional about absence; can the lack of what is written on our right hand side really move us as readers? I suppose my most recent work is a more general attempt to answer this question by looking at the deconstructive and affective results of writing into material presence issues to do with absence. Like you are at the edge of something, which you are, space is there if you want to carry on but you can’t go there. You can’t read space and yet reading cannot occur without it. Supplemental in the extreme, it is, of course, as I have already said, absolutely central to a sense of poetry. The gaps between letters are phenomenologically different to those between words. The first link letters into units of significance, the second parse them up into larger units of significance. But both are essential and...

Lines into Columns cont... Extract taken from my second book, On Mourning: Theories of Loss in Modern Literature (Edinburgh U.P., 2004) with siginficant modifications. My work on columns comes, as I have said, from considerations of language and loss: It is useful to try to think of every poem as consisting of two columns or of two sides. Some of the most important elegiac works of our age have tried to do precisely this. I have already mentioned the double columns of "Litany." This same technique is however used by Jacques Derrida in his prose-poem Glas, still one of the most challenging and confounding works on death we have, where he conducts two separate deconstructive readings of death and mourning, one of Hegel and the other of Gide while Blau duPlessis' "Draft 5: Gap" mixes single columns with double columns. However, because "Litany" is such a remarkable conception we ought to begin there where Ashbery conducts a debate on the spatial duality o...

Lines into Columns One of the problems of Agamben's dialectical approach is that, like all dialectical approaches, it is extremely limiting and reductive. Oppositions feel right and they give good structure, but the gradations of the semiotics of space in the poem are subtle and various, and a prose/poetry dichotomy simply does not do them justice. No, to better understand the semiotics of space in relation to the line the main source remains poets themselves, not their poetics, but the actual work. Although lineation and space are fundamentally important to poetic language, nothing has really been written on the subject that comes near to tackling the remarkable usage of semiotics in contemporary poetry. Recently, in my own work on the poetics of loss and mourning, I have been looking at the interface of the semiotic and semantic in that of all the semantic areas space could address, obviously the theme absence/loss is the easiest. In particular I have been looking at the right ha...

Agamben's Theory Cont... Having established the semiotic event of the poem as occurring at the end of each line where the semantic is challenged by the semiotics of space, Agamben then both expands and switches round his argument to think about the end of the poem as a whole. Here his rather limited project, considering the period in the 19thc where traditional prosody started to give way to free verse, is a bit of a problem but the point is still well made. Whatever happens at the end of a line should be augmented massively at the end of the poem: What is this falling into silence of the poem? What is beauty that falls? And what is left of the poem after its ruin? If poetry lives in the unsatisfied tension between the semiotic and the semantic series alone, what happens at the moment of the end, when the opposition of the two series is no longer possible? Is there here, finally, a point of coincidence in which the poem…joins itself to its metrical element to pass definitively into...

Giorgio Agamben's Basic Theory One of the central works on lineation is Giorgio Agamben's essay "The End of the Poem," which puts forward a theory of line tension that he locates as the basic definition of poetry. As I have already mentioned, one of the main issues in the rhythm of the line is the point of its truncation and it is this point, especially at the very end of the poem, which Agamben theorises: poetry lives only in the tension and difference…between sound and sense, between the semiotic sphere and the semantic sphere…Awareness of the importance of the opposition between metrical segmentation and semantic segmentation has led some scholars to state the thesis (which I share) according to which the possibility of enjambment constitutes the only criterion for distinguishing poetry from prose. For what is enjambment, if not the opposition of the metrical line to a syntactical limit, or a prosodic pause to a semantic pause? "Poetry" will then be the n...

Line Measure: Historical Precedents Up until the twentieth century, with some notable exceptions, the dominant unit of measure and rhythm in poetry was the syllable. This is not so say that other elements of the poem could not also take measure or produce rhythm, but that syllabic effects were foregrounded to such a degree that the visual field of the poem or the distribution of the lexicon, to give two examples of areas that can have definite rhythmical patterns, tended not to be seen or heard. Syllabic measure relegates the line to a container of syllables so that once the poet has determined, say, to go with four stressed syllables the line must exist merely to accommodate this, probably in a tetrameter of some sort and the patterning of the lines themselves exists merely as an accidental by-product of this. Similarly, stanzaic patterns, which can be visually arresting such as in Keats' odes or Byron's terza rima, dictate the number and distribution of the lines so that any ...

Poetic Adventures in Space 1: Right Margin Flush (RMF) Recently in a submission of my work to the magazine Magma I was asked about the layout of the poem’s I submitted. This gave me an opportunity to think about the features I had been using in what I hope to be my first collection of poetry “Lines in Space”. As the title suggests, the visual rhythm of lines on the page is an important part of my most recent work. What I discovered was that in the four poems I had sent in I was using three techniques that do crop up in other work of mine: 1) right margin flush 2) reverse triadic foot 3) internal line-break I thought it might be interesting to post examples of each here and maybe give my ideas as to why I use the techniques and the rhythmical effects they seem to have for me. Right Margin Flush For me, all lineated poetry is written in at least two columns. The left column is traditionally occupied by text, is flush to the left margin and ragged at its own right margin...

Line Measure Measure is any notable feature in a poem that is repeatable and whose repetitions and modifications have a rhythmical effect. Traditionally this has been restricted to the counting of stressed syllables within one line, which relegates the line to being the result of this choice. However, the line itself has measure, especially in free-verse, and contemporary poetry is rich in examples of line-measured poems. The measure of the line can still be dictated by the words or syllables within it, for example poets like Ashbery, Schuyler, Silliman and Raworth composing poems based either on one or two words, or on a strict number of words per line. However, increasingly the visual appearance of the line and its rhythmical impact, what we call the graphematic side of the poem, has been foregrounded. Thus a poet might adopt the triadic foot of William Carlos Williams where the line is fragmented into three sections which move across and down the page like three steps. Rachel Blau d...

  Lines insert false time (Ibid. 86)   Are we to take this seriously?  Is there a true time of writing and a false time?    Linguists and certain philosophers of language like Austin and Habermas would lead us to believe that there is a basic level of accepted communication, and agreed upon, non-distorted, good enough environment of intention and reception through which we talk to each other in basic, consensual ways.  One might take blogs as a kind of evidence for this.  If this is true then there is an agreed upon true time of language which is serial, developmental, syllogistic, perhaps progressive.  I say something you say something back and lo! we are human and talking the talk of that.    Yet Silliman is also aware, as a poet and political activist, that the ideal time of language is at least part constructed.  Language poetry would not exist without the Rorty-like assumption that all language is contingent and s...

The line only exists in relation to the before and after (Silliman, Tjanting 93) Again with these quotes. Noticed in my previous post I never got round to dealing with the above in any detail, in fact in not detail at all. Let's take them seriously and somewhat systematically, even though they are not systematic statements of an argument. Still, we are just finding our feet here, or our nounphase's to be more accurate. The line only exists in relation to the before and after. The number three is essential to language. The phrase, line or sentence, depending and which of these units you are dealing with at any one time, and you can be dealing with all three in the poem which makes it so rich, all depend on context for meaning to be broached. This is something we all learned from deSaussure even if his theory of the sign turns out to be a lovely fiction but not much more. The phrase does not mean in an autonomous fashion because its referential field is conti...

The line only exists in relation to the before and after (Silliman, Tjanting 93) Lines insert false time (Ibid. 86) This is another sentence. Space is the same in all directions (Ibid. 82) Margin types its own form. Each sentence is a test (Ibid. 82) Earlier sentences, our old friend. (Ibid. 82) The space was the last letter of the alphabet to be invented (Ibid. 90-1) Again with these quotes. Noticed in my previous post I never got round to dealing with the above in any detail, in fact in not detail at all. Let's take them seriously and somewhat systematically, even though they are not systematic statements of an argument. Still, we are just finding our feet here, or our nounphase's to be more accurate. The line only exists in relation to the before and after. -The number three is essential to language. The phrase, line or sentence, depending and which of these units you are dealing with at any one time, and you can be dealing with all three in the...

The line only exists in relation to the before and after (Silliman, Tjanting 93) Lines insert false time (Ibid. 86) This is another sentence. Space is the same in all directions (Ibid. 82) Margin types its own form. Each sentence is a test (Ibid. 82) Earlier sentences, our old friend. (Ibid. 82) The space was the last letter of the alphabet to be invented (Ibid. 90-1) This flurry of comments on the nature of the relationship between line and space comes from Ron Sillimans long prose poem Tjanting (1981, re-issued Salt 2002). This work consists of a number of paragraphs each with a strictly limited number of sentences based on the Fibonacci sequence where the next number in a sequence is derived from the sum of the previous two numbers. The poem is an example of what Silliman calls the new sentence, see his essay of the same name. The aims of the new sentence are a major challenge to the semiotics of lineation as I have been considering them over the last co...

from the sequence theseecstasies brown is this season’s black which means for the truly fashion conscious brown is already black thus they can say with impunity that black is this season’s black which is bytheby how poetry works or at least language but question is there any difference? I want you my lover’s back please—we go all the way up the poplar smothered lane to the shrub then all the way back don’t we not? the tautegorical hurt of ecstasy that is what I mean when I burn in my eyeballs seething “ver-ti-ge” through tawdry gaps in my teeth the brown hurt of a dissimulating spring whilst I embrace squalls take up droplets fell from the bushes tender green entreaties the same as dogs do I am the first to do so my hair a rose and I am dealing with it it’s queer aint it you say potato I bow down my jaundiced thoughts and smoke it. bare which the day it is synonymous to being borne by the winds of france to the singéd herbaceous to the singed herbaceo...