Island Twenty-Six Isle of Experimental Literatures

(Extract from: Muse of the Long Haul Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination)

Copyright, Dr Ian Irvine, 2013 all rights reserved. All short extracts from the texts discussed are acknowledged and used under fair usage related to review and theoretical critique contained in international copyright law. Cover image: James Joyce photographed with Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier at Shakespeare & Co. in Paris in 1920. Image is courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University. This image is in the public domain. Publisher: Mercurius Press, Australia, 2013. NB: This piece is published at Scribd as part of a series drawn from the soon to be print published non-fiction book on experiential poetics entitled: Muse of the Long Haul: Thirty-One Isles of the Creative Imagination.

Island Twenty-Six Isle of Experimental Literatures

we can identify certain techniques, concepts, and social stances as characteristic of the avant-garde of the late nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. The technical emphasis of this period is the foregrounding of the aesthetic medium, which for poetry predominantly means the self-reflexive use of language. [the] relativist challenge to empiricist notions of perception and representation. And its social stance has generally been anti-bourgeois, anti-establishment, anti-institutional, and anti-commercial, a stance often but not always associated with leftist politics.1

The arrival of the two volumes of Poems for the Millennium in late 2005 was an important moment for me. For weeks afterwards I sat around the house reading sections, digesting them slowly and generally feeling inspired. The two volumes are a mine of experimental modernist and postmodernist poetic forms. By the time Id absorbed maybe a quarter of the works anthologisedwhich included extracts from poetic manifestosI was feeling creatively liberated. The anthologies presented a tradition of experimental poets that I immediately identified with. The anthologies did not read like mainstream anthologiesthe technically perfect poems of the canon were few and far between. Instead I felt jarred into parallel imaginative worlds by encounters with poems that explored poetrys paradigm testing potentialities. Writing poetry once again became meaningful to mebecame an experiment in personal liberation. In among all the extracts from poets, however, was an extract by someone better known as a novelist, i.e. James Joyce. More importantly the commentary on the extract chosen (p.328330 of my 1992 Penguin edition of Ulysses) states that the extract selectedwhich presummarises Blooms encounter with a group of barmaids-sirens (beginning Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyrining Imperthnthn thnthn thnthn.) heralds Joyces transition to themes and techniques that became fundamental to postmodernist fiction. I must confess that previously that slab of text had made no sense at all to me. Indeed, I had read it as a kind of surrealist nonsense poem (the language, after all is vivid and inventive). Clearly I needed to return to Ulyssesa book Id been unable to finish (in the conventional cover to cover sense) many years earlier. Reading Ulysses Journey and quest metaphors are fundamental to Ulysses both in the text and in the way in which the text has been received culturally. In relation to the cultural journey of the texti.e. into the ocean of culture, as it werewe can say that the wonder tale that became twentieth century literature owes a great deal to the literary experiments found in Ulysses. When we look inside the text we note that this modernist/postmodernist hybrid of a book depicts another kind of journey throughout its 900 plus pagesspecifically the physical and mental journey of an advertising canvasser around Dublin on an ordinary day (specifically June the 16th 1904). However, behind this narrative journey is yet another. Almost every section of Ulysses alludes to aspects of Homers The Odyssey perhaps the earliest wonder tale in Western literaturethough Joyce radically alters the motifs associated with Homers story. In fact, Homer is conscripted to serve a distinctly Modernist agendai.e. his motifs are adapted to serve
1

George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets, p.1. Indiana University Press, 1989.

the needs of the secular, psychological journey undertaken by Bloom etc.. Joyce invites readers to consider the many dramas, marvels and mysteries to be uncovered in the conscious and unconscious minds of ordinary people. Though Joyces fascination with anti-heroes and everyman/woman characters affirms Virginias Woolfs maxim that fiction writers should consider the ordinary mind on an ordinary day (an approach also at the heart of the Objectivist poets), I suspect that what most people take to be ordinary minds are in fact shown to be extraordinary due to Joyces use of various modernist technical tricksthe most well-known being the stream of consciousness technique. As is well known, the technique highlights the everyday clash we all experience between interior thoughts and desires and exterior behaviours/actions (the domain of the polite, wellhealed public/civilised self). The use of stream of consciousness narrative struck early twentieth century readers as an explosive psychological revelation that extended realism into the most intimate areas of the self. In many ways the technique remains revolutionary today since even modern readers of the Molly Bloom section at the end of the book instantly recognise their own interior voices (and unconscious impulses and imaginings) in Mollys uncensored interior monologue. Readers suddenly realise that others around them possess an uncivilised interior lifean unsettling epiphany that also had all kinds of cultural repercussions unrelated to literature.2 To return to Joyces renovation of Homers The Odyssey, we can conclude that the journey, quest and wonder story motifs Joyce recycles from The Odyssey became fundamental to the Modernist literary revolution. Joyce taught us that everyman/woman (the ordinary antihero) is on a fabulous journey at any given moment in life. The anti-heroes of many later existentialist novels and plays surely owe much to this aspect of Ulysses. Many more or less traditional, themes are also explored in Ulysses. Its focus on the ways in which jealousy, androgyny, voyeurism, affairs within marriage, polyamorous desire, prostitution, etc. impact on the interior life of ordinary people makes it a very human book.3 These themes were also of interest to many other Modernist literary innovators. Similarly, his take on religion and politics confirms a Modernist perspective. He saw himself as an atheist, critical of any religious institution seeking to control the interior lives of individuals (he was especially critical of Christianitys approach to sexuality/desire). His political views are also interestingdespite being vehemently opposed to British interference in Ireland he did not hold to an essentialist conception of Irishness. Joyce was an internationalista citizen of the world before such a concept existed. We could explore more of the traditional and Modernist themes to be found in Ulysses (and other books by Joyce) but that is not the purpose of this section. By 2005 I was more and more drawn to Joyces radical language experimentsrecall the puzzling line: Bronze by gold heard the hoofirons, steelyrining Imperthnthn thnthn thnthn. The editors of Poems for the Millennium (Vol 1) mark this line as a transition point between Modernist and Post-modern literary concerns. They write that in these lines from Ulysses Joyce moves from the domain of the novel into an act of language ... the lines here given are the likely turning point.4 The commentary
2

For example, the sexual revolution of the sixties can be seen as an acknowledgement and externalisation of the inner narratives of repressed desire described earlier by the likes of Freud, Joyce and Virginia Woolf. 3 The Circe, Naussicaa and Penelope chapters of Ulysses are particularly relevant. Similarly, Joyces play Exiles and his short story The Dead (contained in The Dubliners ). 4 Rothenberg and Joris (editors), Poems for the Millennium, (Volume 1), p.359.

goes on to argue that Joyces technique is to draw words and sentences from the (almost) narrative that follows: to form with them a kind of litany of voices, leitmotifs. I immediately scrambled for my Penguin edition of the book and sure enough Bronze by gold is repeated at the start of a more or less realist narrative sequence concerning barmaids (page 331). On page 332 Imperthnthn thnthn thnthn is repeated. Further down the same page we find, hoofs ring from afar, and heard steel hoofs ringhoof ringsteel, (which is very close to heard the hoofirons, steelyrining). Line fragments from the 2-3 page overture discussed above (i.e. pp.328-330) are indeed repeated throughout the realist narrative that follows (which is 45 pages long) . What I had previously taken to be a nonsensical unconscious (free association) spill was actually created, at least in part, by a very rational, almost mathematical procedure. From such a perspective it made sense. The overture section is thus best seen as a summary narrative created by some kind of constraints based technique or procedure applied to the 45 page Realist narrative that follows it in the book. Id been acquainted with the way John Cage and Jackson MacLow had used such procedures for some time but had been unaware of the collagist and constraints based elements in Ulysses. The Poems for the Millennium editors were probably rightBronze by gold ... is a key transition moment indicating a shift from Modernist literature to Postmodernist literature. This is because the relationship of language to reality (i.e. the transparency or otherwise of the sign/signifier to reality i.e. the signified) and the value of sense and meaning in a writerreader exchange are being examined by Joyce in the overture. The overture pages create, in short, a language field constructed out of word fragments drawn from another narrative. The aura of the cannibalised realist narrative remains, however, and contributes to the open text (i.e. open to the readers interpretation) that is the overture. Joyce was obviously being very mischievous inserting the overture piece into a manuscript purporting to be a novel. Given he his readers enjoy no warning as to what is being perpetrated they are left struggling to make sense out of the section if they approach it in a conventional way. Some readers toss the book on the floor after attempting this section and declare: Ulysses is crap! nonsense! ... unreadable rubbish! They would prefer to read (consume) Ulysses as they would a conventional novel.5 But Joyce deliberately deconstructs such reading habitsseeking instead to provoke an examination of the relationship between language and reality by his readers. In this sense Ulysses is anti-literature, i.e. literature that questions conventional, self-evident notions of what literature is. These insights made it much easier to read Ulysses. I began to approach it as a series of prose experiments and reading Ulysses also became reading the critical commentaries written on the book. Indeed I began to see Ulysses as a kind of infinite text since each commentary (including some wonderful documentaries) revealed new ways of re-reading the book. On one level, of course, reading Ulysses simply made me conscious that every book, every text, is intricately connected to numerous other texts. Ulysses, however, brought this fact into
5

The first generation of critics read Ulysses as a very long experimental poem (thus the difficulty in reading it is perhaps explained by the necessity of reading its rich language as one would a poem i.e. slowly!). Later critics reclassified it as an experimental novel (basically surrealist in style). More recent critics read it as the first totally open text since it evades interpretation (due to its language i.e. subsumes interpretation into itself?) and lacks a definitive form/genre. This lack however, is also acknowledged as a cornucopia since the book, in truth, contains a multiplicity of forms and genres, i.e. it is part myth, part free association/surreal text, part poetry, part play, part absurdist farce, part novel, partly a collection of short fiction, part psychoanalytic case study, and so on.

consciousness. With these insights I even felt liberated to read parts of the novel out of sequenceafter all the commentary texts had given me excellent plot overviews that Id found difficult to track when actually reading the book as a novel! I found these ways of reading Ulysses more enjoyable, less anxiety provoking, than reading it sequentially as per most novels. Like the American novelist Thomas Pynchon that I first encountered as a nineteen year old (see earlier Island) Joyce spent quality time on the archipelago of ontological chaos. I like to think, however, that he travelled there because he was in search of somethingi.e. the blueprints for an anti-authoritarian literature: a literature in which the passive consumption of other peoples text-conveyed realities is to be systematically disrupted. The Poetics of Atomised L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
The locus of attention of many language poets is extended out beyond the horizon of the minds act of ordering to the ordering of that mind itself. The focus is now on the ideological framing of perception.6

Around 2005, whilst I was reading Poems for the Millennium and Ulysses, my partner, Sue KingSmith, began her Creative Arts PhD at Deakin University. About 18 months in her focus shifted from novel writing to political poetry, at which point the problem of the relationship between language and reality became central to her work. The theme was also explored in her first collection of poems, An Accumulation of Small Killings (published by the Melbourne Poets Union in 2008). Around the same time I got to know US poet, editor and translator Clayton Eshleman (see next Island for more on his work), and began exchanging emails with him on a range of topics, including the contemporary American poetry scene. From 2007 on, Sue and I started to develop an approach to poetry and creative writing (and creativity generally) that we provisionally labelled transpersonal relational poetics. We were trying to develop an expansive, humane (i.e. non-oppressive) and ecologically sound poetic relevant to people living in a complex, culturally and economically globalised world. This project required us to move on from the Modernist poetics wed been taught at La Trobe University (where wed studied poets like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, H.D., Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, even Beat poets like Ginsberg, but no postmodernist poets) to a contemporary poetics capable of challenging postmodern forms of oppression (a poetics of the Nuclear Age if you like). My email exchanges with Clayton made me realise just how ignorant I was of trends in contemporary American poetry. I also had to accept that I had much to learn about a range of post-1960s experimental poetries. I resolved to get up to speed as quickly as possible and on his recommendation read the various volumes of Poems for the Millennium. As a result of Sues PhD research her bookshelf had become cluttered with books by Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Bob Perelman, Lyn Heijinean etc.i.e. poets and writers loosely associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement of the 1980s and 1990s. I also remember devouring in quick succession: The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book (edited by Andrews and Bernstein); Situationist International Anthology (edited by Ken Knabb); and the Oulipo Compendium (edited by Matthews and Brotchie). Over the next two years the deluge of books, web articles, podcasts etc. concerned with contemporary poets and poetics continuede.g. The Politics of Poetic Form (edited by
6

George Hartley, Textual Politics and the Language Poets, p.18; Indiana University Press, 1989.

Bernstein); A Poetics (also by Bernstein); Technicians of the Sacred (edited by Jerome Rothenberg); the critical work of Marjorie Perloff, especially Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media; as well as work by John Cage, Jackson MacLow and Kenneth Goldsmith (who runs Ubuweb a vast online repository showcasing experimental poetries from all over the world). Philip Meads Networked Language: Culture and History in Australian Poetry joined up many of the local dots for me with regard to Australian experimental and activist poetries since Kenneth Slessor and the Ern Mallee Hoax.7 The works of Western Australian poet, John Kinsella, and Australian indigenous poet and activist, Lionel Fogarty, proved relevant to what we were attempting to do and Sue wrote about them extensively in her PhD. She was also interested in the work of US poet Adrienne Richwho died in 2012. The computer modified/processed poetry of John Tranterespecially his work Different Handsalso seemed intriguing. Indeed I was lucky enough to hear Tranter speak publicly about his poetics at the Poetry and the Trace conference in 2008. My own research into this rich poets culminated in a number of presentations at writing conferences where I delivered talks on topics as diverse as: how Australias Jindyworobak poets looked at landscape; John Kinsellas collection Peripheral Light (especially his Essays on Civil Disobedience) and Clayton Eshlemans ideas about the origins of poetry in Upper Paleolithic cave art (the focus being his remarkable book Juniper Fuse) . After being immersed in experimental poetry and poetics for about five years I realised something interesting: that it is possible to enjoy the prose writings of some of the more radical experimental poets (Im talking specifically about some of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets) whilst at the same time failing to connect with their actual poetry. I experienced this strange aesthetic inversion repeatedly during those five years, so much so that it became something of a puzzle to me. To add to the mystery, I found that though I often felt unmoved by text-based versions of experimental poems, I sometimes found recorded versions of the same pieces inspiring, entertaining and engaging. I nevertheless persevere with reading both the poetry and theory of a range of contemporary experimental poets since their work usually addresses major fault-lines in postmodern culture and society. For my partner, Sue, the transition from hermit-like research into the anti-oppressive poetries of the postmodern era to public presentations concerned with her research happened somewhat abruptly. One wintry afternoon in June, 2008, I sat nervously in the audience at the Poetry and the Trace conference (held in Melbourne) as Sue rose to deliver her paper entitled The Language Poets and Neo-liberalism (she was on a panel dealing with political poetry). Shed had a sleepless night, due to frantic last minute editing, and went on stage knowing that a number of the poets shed been researching were sitting in the front row of the audiencei.e. New Zealand poet Wynstan Curnow (long associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets) and Rachel Blau DuPlessis, a US poet known for her sequence of experimental Draft poems (as well as many books on 20th century poetics). The Greek-Australian anarchist poet Pi O was also in the audience as were other leading Australian poets. For Sue, the research shed done into Language poetry critiques of hyper-capitalism was new knowledgei.e. not fully committed to automatic memory. She was thus a little worried about the question and answer segment that would follow her presentation. In short: a true baptism of fire threatened and I found myself rubbing my chin nervously as she approached the microphone. Despite the stress she came through the talk with flying coloursthere were only a few
7

I accept that others might find the reading list discussed above too traumatic to work throughindeed Im careful not to expose my poetry students to too much of this material too early in their classes.

tricky, technical questions from the audience and she answered them astutely. From that day on it was clear she would gain her PhDand she did, graduating in 2010. Summary Though I sometimes feel overwhelmed by the poems and essays on poetics published by the poets discussed in this chapter, I nevertheless find their experimentation and commitment to a non-oppressive poetics profoundly inspiring. Under their influence I wrote several hundred poems between 2005 and 2010obviously something important was happening at an unconscious level. Many of these poems were eventually published. Ironically, I came across this tradition at precisely the moment my work began to appear in a number of national level poetry anthologiesi.e. Best Australian Poems 2005 (edited by less Murray), Agenda: Anthology of Contemporary Australian Poets, (2005) and Fire (UK) Special International Edition (2008). As such, just as it felt legitimate to own the vocational title poet, I found myself driven to deconstruct, via radical experimentation, conventional notions of the terms poet and poetry.

Author Bio (as at June 2013)

Dr. Ian Irvine (Hobson) is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence (UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), as well as in a number of Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda: Australian Edition, 2005. He is the author of three books and co-editor of three journals and currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing program at BRIT (Bendigo, Australia) as well as the same program at Victoria University, St. Albans, Melbourne. He has also taught history and social theory at La Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui.