| The Politics of
Reading Zack Finch
Word Group
Marjorie Welish
Coffee
House Press, $15 (paper)
8
Paul Valéry wrote that poetic language creates “the
need to be heard again,” whereas ordinary
language “tends
to bring about the complete negation of language itself”
as soon as the message is understood. The particular music of
a phrase may bring about this desire for repetition,
but Valéry
also noted that a phrase’s difficulty may endow
it with poetic
value, since “the person who does not understand
repeats
the words” until they surrender to sense.
Readers of Marjorie Welish’s
new book, Word Group, will
want to read and re-read her poems for both somatic and semantic
reasons. The curious text inquires into the most basic assumptions of
cognition and understanding. At stake is the procedure of
translation, a situation that invites—no, requires—criticism,
since the text so plainly refuses to reduce itself to a single
reading. Take these lines from “Detained by Rest”:
The
politics of reading
have caught those moving
stairs (as they were once
called),
for epic purposes. In what
sense
are they then translations? In the climbing
valley,
our gradual
ascent, our newly incremental elevation
ready-to-hand, escalators
are
“redirected toward unprohibited objects.”
(“Faster,” say the
montagists.)
Whereas the
shopping-mall escalator delivers consumers to “ready-to-hand”
commodities, Welish encourages readers to take an active role in
the general economy of her poems, experiencing where meaning is
risked, lost, and redoubled. She reminds us that the act of writing
is always an act of reading. Moreover, translation is necessarily
indeterminate—since meaning depends upon context, which is never
fully saturated. This notion of the indeterminacy of translation
recalls the argument presented by philosopher W.V. Quine in his book
Word and Object, the title of which Welish borrows for one of
poems:
The
clarity of the lack
seizing eye level
provides a companion
to epistemology in the description where it
folds back.
We live in a harrowing relativism
of hue
flaring into
value. Apprehended when
spreading
(ever
rain green bow
rain bow ever
card
ever
green ever ready ever view green
ever
green
card ever green re view life
jacket).
Readers new to
“language-centered”
poetry may first notice the apparent loss of meaning,
wagered by the spreading syntax that favors force and velocity
over semantic clarity. The preservation of music (“We live
in a harrowing relativism”) should ensure that all readers
hang around to witness its complement: “hue flaring into
value” in the three-line word group enclosed by
parentheses.
The recombination of simple terms yields all kinds of
references
and cross-references: evergreen trees, green cards, green bows,
bow tie and jacket, rainbows, even Eveready
batteries. The book’s
title, Word Group, seems to put a lid on all
these riots
of passage by suggesting that the book is (merely) a
finite bank
of words (one waiting to burst its seams once the
reader appears).
But the title also signals a shift in emphasis from
the word
as the significant unit of sense to the word group. A
word can be expected to correspond to one referent; a
word group
can convey multiple meanings through a dynamic
grouping of material
signs.
It is easy to see how Welish’s
poetry grows out of
an ongoing engagement with linguistics, semiotics, and translation
theory—conventionally the realm of the theorist standing outside
the poem. Welish embraces these intellectual demands within a lyric
setting, often as a means of interrogating the basic premises of
lyricality and Romantic ideology. For instance, Word
Group’s title
poem begins this way:
“I”
investigate
“I”
sing
itinerary
modern American usage
a
writer’s guide to copyright
a manual of
style
signifying art
“I” may
investigate
“I” might have sung
The
relationship between an “I” that sings for itself and an
“I”
whose itinerary is ideological (“modern American usage”) soon
becomes intertwined with the history of Sergei Eisenstein, the
Russian filmmaker who pioneered cinematic montage, then later
produced conventional films such as the nationalist masterpiece
“Alexander Nevsky.” The poem concludes by alluding to the famous
battle scene on ice:
shot numb for that
residuum
of ideology, as for that shot
delighted with
it, retentive
ignited. Freeze frames
radiant:
“Freeze!” he shouted abundantly
in
ideological
ice.
Ideology, be still.
Lo! Tableaux
vivants.
Look! Vivid arrest!
Welish keeps her
prosodic tools sharp, embedding rhymes like “numb” and
“residuum,” “delighted” and “ignited,”
“radiant” and
“vivants” into these compressed tercets. At the same time, she
writes against the custom of presenting in the lyric a reassuringly
stabilized and unitary voice. “What if the lyric were not a voice,
were not an utterance,” Welish asked in a 2003 interview, “but
written, hence construed through a presupposition of literature
rather than through a presupposition of orality?” This
interest in exploring the contingencies of textuality yields, in the
final section of Word Group, a series of poems called “Delight
Instruct” that addresses the framing devices surrounding a
scholarly book—the table of contents, the preface, the
translator’s note, the endnotes, etc. Welish is fascinated by the
“indexical universe” a text employs in its attempt to point to
itself, enclose itself, supplement itself, and legitimize itself.
This entire apparatus becomes the center of a carefully fragmented
scrutiny, as in the opening lines of “Rustling”:
The
preface predicts your text to perfection; the text is left to fend
for itself; and/or an index rats on the
text.
Preface this with a text predicated on
itself: it is perfect; the text enters and is alone; as for the
index, it antagonizes the text.
Instead of presenting a
voice that reflects on its own nature and what opposes it (as in the
Romantic lyric), Welish presents a text that reflects on the nature
of textuality and what borders it. This is postmodern poetry in a
very literal sense—revealing the poet in the midst of a dynamic
dialogue (sometimes an argument) with the legacy of the modern poetic
tradition. One of the
pleasures of Word Group is the variety
of forms that it offers. In the most kinetic of the book’s five
sections, “Begetting Textile,” Welish adopts a spatialized,
constructivist aesthetic. The 16 poems in this series occur largely
as thrown tercets, a mosaic of disjunctive parts (the “tiles”
that make the “text”), demonstrating the “tendency of ideas to
go over into movement”:
And as in the
mind
a
gyroscope
through
and beyond gossip
“Of
what is past, or passing, or to
come”
and
its
corollaries.
And
its copyright
as in the
estate of “Gates of
Hell”
cooling
off
original
copies.
As a gyroscope turns freely in
multiple directions at once, so Welish’s poem
moves by multiple
means. “Gyroscope” produces “gossip,” and
“corollaries” leads to
“copyright,” according
to what one might call sound logic. The allusions are
swift, the
collisions reminiscent of the “ply over
ply” technique
of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, but to more disjunctive
ends:
Because, then
if,
then, then even as
such
as in voice-over
“ ‘because,’ Schubert writes . .
.”
“
‘Nevertheless, your life / seems
to
me wide with potential
because
of your / . . .’ ”
“because” pageant:
to
give voice to a cause
choir
to ascertain causes beyond
rhetoric
chorus.
Welish demonstrates that
words do not simply organize sense. As individual units, they are
free to orchestrate other patterns, too—musical and visual
ones—independent of their communicative function. By extracting
conjunctions like “because” and “if” from their normal
grammatical contexts, Welish challenges syntactic expectation,
proffering language as an artificial system in which one word does
not naturally lead to the next. Welish seeks “causes beyond
rhetoric” in an attempt to liberate language from our habitual uses
of it. Such a project has a
formidable forebear: Gertrude
Stein, who now and then makes an explicit appearance in the book. In
“Seated Recklessly” she appears in relation to the figure of
Faust. Implicit in this comparison are two very different forms of
recklessness: Faust’s (destructive) compulsion for closure and
totality against Stein’s (generative) love of openness. To indicate
the limited possibilities of the Faustian position, Welish encloses
him within italics and parentheses, while the rest of the writing
occurs as a flux of juxtapositions, as if in the open
air:
(At a box he perhaps has opened, Faust
sits)
Seance—in what sense? With what
faculty?
Modernity raised on posts differentiates moods and
tenses,
a modicum of reduction differentiates use
from dust and
flakes cordial to picture books
for Russian children: children’s
things
sheltering alternative poetry:
hunter hunts
hunted.
In response to
any possible statement one can
always ask “In what sense?” and “With what faculty?” The
boundlessness of context guarantees that interpretation is never
foreclosed. At its core, Welish’s work illustrates how the truly
creative act is always critical, and how the writer’s act is akin
to the reader’s. Her poetry instructs us in how to become more
productive, vigilant collaborators with the text.
In his ABC of Reading,
Ezra Pound wrote, “Any general statement is like a cheque
drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there
to meet it.”
For Pound, this bank was the reality of facts and
objects in the
empirical world. But for Welish, there is no such
binary between
language and the world which guarantees the
former’s validity.
Validity is not even the issue, since there is never any right
or wrong translation. Rather, the text is a lavish economy of
signs that invites us to enter into its circulation. It is the
reader who must conspire with the well-wrought
openness of Marjorie
Welish’s poetry to ensure its status as—in
Pound’s
formulation—“news that stays news.”
<
Zack Finch is
a presidential fellow in the English department at
SUNY Buffalo.
Last year he was a poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center
in Provincetown, Massachusetts.
Originally published in the December
2004/January 2005 issue of Boston Review |
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