poetry proper 3rd issue
TRANSCRIPT
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POETRY PROPERIssue 3
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POETRY PROPER
Page
A Prologue 3-4
Poems by
Martin Mooney 5-7
Christopher Kitson 9-10
Elizabeth Campbell 12-14
Eoghan Walls 16-17
Dominic Connell 18-19
Richard Epstein 21-22
Nell Regan 23
Vidyan Ravinthiran 24
Featured Poet: Frances Leviston
Poems 26-28
Essay: Fabulous Appendages: Ange Mlinko's
Shoulder Season
30-43
Photographs
Paul Maddern, from An Hour in Tate Modern
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PrologueWritten by a Person of Quality
In vain we labour to reform the Stage,Poets have caught too the Disease o' th' Age,
That Pest, of not being quiet when they're well,That restless Fever, in the Brethren, Zeal;In publick Spirits call'd, Good o'th' Commonweal.Some for this Faction cry, others for that,The pious Mobile for they know not what:So tho by different ways the Fever seize,In all 'tis one and the same mad Disease.Our Author tool as all new Zealots do,Full of Conceit and Contradiction too,'Cause the first Project took, is now so vain,T' attempt to play the old Game o'er again:The Scene is only chang'd; for who wou'd layA Plot, so hopeful, just the same dull way?Poets, like Statesmen, with a little change,Pass off old Politicks for new and strange;Tho the few Men of Sense decry't aloud,The Cheat will pass with the unthinking Croud:
The Rabble 'tis we court, those powerful things,Whose Voices can impose even Laws on Kings.A Pox of Sense and Reason, or dull Rules,Give us an Audience that declares for Fools;Our Play will stand fair: we've Monsters too,Which far exceed your City Pope for Show.
Almighty Rabble, 'tis to you this DayOur humble Author dedicates the Play,From those who in our lofty Tire sit,Down to the dull Stage-Cullies of the Pit,Who have much Money, and but little Wit:Whose useful Purses, and whose empty SkullsTo private Int'rest make ye Publick Tools;To work on Projects which the wiser frame,And of fine Men of Business get the Name.You who have left caballing here of late,
Imploy'd in matters of a mightier weight;
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To you we make our humble Application,You'd spare some time from your dear new Vocation,Of drinking deep, then settling the Nation,To countenance us, whom Commonwealths of oldDid the most politick Diversion hold.
Plays were so useful thought to Government,That Laws were made for their Establishment;Howe'er in Schools differing Opinions jar,Yet all agree i' th' crouded Theatre,Which none forsook in any Change or War.That, like their Gods, unviolated stood,Equally needful to the publick Good.Throw then, Great Sirs, some vacant hours away,
And your Petitioners shall humbly pray, &c.
Aphra BehnfromThe Rover, or, The Banishd Cavaliers
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Bernard Manning in Hell
Bernard Manning has discovered hellsanother round of sentry-go at Spandau.Dressed in Bermudas and Hawaiian shirt,
he shares a NAAFI brew with Speer:
So, two yids escape from DachauWhen his wife died, he moved back with his Mam.Youjust simmered in your widowers flatlooking out for Roma paper-boys until
your stroke. Now theres someones leg
in bed beside you, sometimes a personlying to your left who keeps so stillyou think theyre hiding from authority.
Manning scans the brimstone for a newarrival: look, a coon. He tells the oneabout the Klansmen angling for gator.You are so careful not to offend you warn
the nurses if a joke will have bad language,but then you tell it anyway, and makethe grimace odd part-wink, part sneer thats all the smile youre left with.
Martin Mooney
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Aubade
The forty-four year old in the shower what has he got to sing about?His children. His lover. His work.
Doesnt he know he has already lived more than half his life?
Hes singing about that too.A regiment of deaths is assembling in his cells.
Not singing wont disperse them.Hes lucky he remembers half the words of the song.
Yes, he is.In fact, he is making most of them up as he goes along.
A bag of sticks. A heap of stones.His children are putting their fingers in their ears.
Their ears are lovely.
And the girl waking in the next room what does she see in him?He hasnt a clue de-doo de-doo.
Martin Mooney
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ONeill Road
You need your wits about you,coming off the roundabout
at Carnmoney cemeterya difficult lane-change and,
in winter, the dazzleof your own lights reflected
in the frosty headstonesof the sculptors yard
like an oncoming vehicleon the wrong side of the road.
Martin Mooney
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The AmbassadorsHans Holbein (1533)
Sense the tensions in the curtains;Observe the twitches, shifts and furtive
Murmurs fanning through the bristledErmine and the worming silk. FeelThe thickness of the fingers as theyHang or fidget, physical asIngots, blunt and weighed. Now blink:Notice eyelids flutter overGlobes rotating in their sockets,Each a fraction out of kilter;Look at how the nerves are shot.Switch, then, to the fulcrum of theEntire scene, to the painterInterfering in the fabric,Scuffling at the oil and oakwood,Harsh as on a night-time doorway.Examine, most of all, the inches,Radians and seconds over on theEquinoctal dials, how they almost seem to speak.
Christopher Kitson
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On the Flightpaths of Bats
I tell my friends to walk the coastal path at dusk:The bats swoop past your head. Its great!Why they do it? Well.... I confess, I just repeat
some tale: They catch the microscopic gnats aroundyour skin . Fanciful enough, Im sure,but, lack of evidence aside,Im attracted by this unseen-cloud idea,of us in empty, weighty human-space:
it could, as well, be why they dont touch you(as you cant them, by law). Theyre visible
just on the turn, like sheen in velvetor the chasing shale of sea-top breeze.The gulls and hoodie-crows belowtack and soar, navigating wind,but bats inhabit thinner places, drawtheir courses on poetic, shivering, charts.
Christopher Kitson
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Dalkey Island for Maria, David and Aingeal
Terns demonstrate the work of flightby stopping in the sky dropping
like flintheads to pierce the channel after prey:
turning the air-and-water beyond this cliffwith sudden decisions,sheering off, thinking better, the way reasons
glance in our minds like flicks of sunny fish,though mostly they miss worryingup again, riding another angle, until your reason
reasons suddenly: these powerful dives are powerednot by birds, but their agreementwith passive gravity.
Perhaps all your insights are this obvious modest freefalls out of doubtwhen the mind stops beating and the head bows
out of the abstraction of the air, to whack fishlike nodding into sleep, terns plummetingsilently into the surface of giant seas.
Elizabeth Campbell
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Givingfor Emily
Chips to the gulls: best part of the meal,becoming prince, distributing or withholding
munificence, largesse, consolingthe lame and the ugly, punishing
the upstart and the bully here am I! Centrifugalat the core of my giving:Adam's next move after namingthe creatures was feeding them.
And that crazy old lady, filthy
with pigeons in the square, whorl at the centreof her own magnanimity, is this princely humanfor, despite anomalies
of suckling, grooming and studies which showmost monkeys choose the leverdispensing fruit to their neighbour too, givingis what animals mostly don't do.
Still, children are mad for fauna, from each exemplarof the AaBbCc, throughto the naughty beast of the parable.And holding hands to feed the ducks, we teach the child to give.
Hours I spent, awayfrom the others, tearing armfuls of sweetspring grass for someone's horse that strained
at the fence, then got bored before I did, staring off, accepting
kisses with the food. I'd keep it up,herculean, all afternoon, provingsomething, as when we stayed late in the pool,shaking and blue, on principle (getting it wrong? it wasn't
pleasure, but was itfreedom?) and scorning sadadult moderation, we becamedancers, binge-drinkers there was a thought in this of giving.
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Stale loaves for the gulls, torn breadlooping up as grappling hook, caught at the rampart beak.Reeling them closer, you teach themto take it from your hand, eyes on the bread, mind on you.
Emily, at the park at two-and-a-half: too young yetto enjoy reflexive pleasures of the gift, sheknows more easily what happiness is: stares,says 'duck duck' but prefers stale as it is,
it is still good herself to eat the bread.
Elizabeth Campbell
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The Dance of Araratafter W C Williams
If my wife is snoring as softly as a musk-ox,the child purring in the cot, and a distant hum
declares the taxis and rain have nearly stopped
and my empties are strewn like a planetariumin the aquatic light of my screensaver, as I riseand feel the deck shift under the living room
but catch myself in an arabesque, and the lineof muscle in my forearm seems a thing of gloryand behold, my hard calves, buttocks and thighs
and sense the thousands in the darkness, more,a disco of silent limbs around me and each oneheaving their breaths, ecstatic, owning the floor
then who is to say I am less than Noah, captainwaiting for the tide to breach against the topof Ararat, one hand steady on the klaxon?
Eoghan Walls
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Revenge of the Crabmonstersafter Lawrence Raab; for Colm and Fiona
1.Crabmeat sizzles upon a pockmarked platter,
and your tits look cracking. I drain your glass,light cracking the molecules of the water,and chuck a discreet fiver to the waiter
just as you tumble heavily on your ass.
2.Like crabmeat sizzling under its pockmarked platter,spongy flesh ran through you. One of the cancers.
You took each drink they gave you, and did not askwhat light had cracked the molecules in the water.
3.You poke for new growth where the skin is tender.I hear your brain even when your face is downcastlike crabmeat sizzling under a pockmarked platter.
One day you'll get a bruise and there'll be laughterinstead of this slow probing of your crevasse.
4.Lightning cracks the molecules through the water.I scan the waves for the shadow of giant pincers,straining my ears as I get smashed on our terrace,for crabmeat sizzling under pockmarked platters,
or a light crackle of molecules beneath the water.
Eoghan Walls
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Timesharers
They bask in washed-up summer,hosting supper from their perches.Raising toasts. Draining every drop.
By day they loll, ignoring any rep.They say they bring enough of their own custom.There is a raft of thingsthey drift on in their small talk.In the small print. Given thingsbetween them, told in tongues,hidden among the Ts and Cs.They flock to beachfront balconiesimmersed in saga, watching suns give out,
and write their crabbed dispatchesfrom the concrete edge of ever-after.
Dominic Connell
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Petes Granddad
is a time machine gone wrong,reduced to furniture.He is an empty box,
an echo chamber, blank and muteuntil some bell is rung.And though a ghost in his own house,a stale long-standing jokeplayed on himself, sometimeshis seized machinery still chimes.He is sporadic, striking upa long-forgotten tunewhen it is least expected.
He has amassed small reckoningsto ward off shifting sands,reverts when moved to simple repetition,catechising childrens birthdays,planets names, Richard of York.He recollects that stalactites come down.His family is lost when he starts speaking
to some long gone friend.They look, despite themselves,at empty space, at his sun-spotted handsthat point and sweep two places at once.
Dominic Connell
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Winter Leaves
Look, have I mentioned how the winter leavesResemble bronze? That statue of a tree,It is a tree. The art of standing still,
Of keeping still till everyone forgetsThe name you had when swords were haute couture,When bronze was for an age, and dryads sleptWith bark for blankets, that you still possess.Have I not watered you when it was dryAnd promised that the birds would love you, too?Some day a god will build his nest from hairHe took as trophy. Some day he will kissConfusion into legs and roots, some day;
And men will cut themselves on winter leavesAnd swear eternal love, day after day.
Richard Epstein
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This House No Longer
This is a house without chalcedonyOr Andamooka opals, and it deemsIts seizure insecure. Hawks veer away
To overfly somebody else's house.It brooks no flower beds. It dries no bones.This house is what it is, is what it is.
You want to meet us? We share a single bath,Not privacy. Our calendar misquotesIn scarlet letters, Make your life sublimeUse Rapid Sands. We never leave the roomFor grave emergencies. Our motto is
A tramp stamp on the lady of the house,Her fine embroidered sacroiliac,Hunker Down, which seems not to overstate,
And understatement is a way of life.Why, there is a bone here after all: a moleHas left his skull, a warrior's helmet toy,For Spike to crunch and play with. This is a house
Without a porphyry tub or sisal stringsTo anchor it, and someday it will leave.
Richard Epstein
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On Sunday night at 8pm the batteries on Fort Camden and Carlisle opened fire on a suspiciousobject in the water believed to have been a German submarine. During the firing two of the shells
from the batteries ricocheted off the water passing to the mainland of Crosshaven. One shellburst but the other did not. No harm was done by the shells landing on the mainland andnothing has transpired as to the effect of the engagement with the supposed unwelcome visitor tothe harbour.
Southern Star, January 1915
Squealing and keening it entered the sea,seeking each breach of defence,echoing beyond its reach
how my soughing and spouting set it offis not known. Ploughing throughthe sound I thought I was bound for home
but when the sky darkened at fourI knew I had come too farout of my glutinous, smooth waters.
It wheeled past me and air itself
splintered; the sea it cracked from side to side.then bubbled and churned pig iron
so hearing smelted and fell in greathissing drops to the sea floor. Songstood still. Listening was lifted
on the swell and sucked back
into its vacuum. It set off a wavethat gathered oceans to itself and collapsed as sound.
Nell Regan
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Snow
What Im saying is, this isnt the right kind of snow.Sure the anchors call it treacherousbut Ive met it down dark alleys all my life.
No, snow should always be, as kids have it, a miracleof whiteness at the pane, flakes large enoughto plink at the glass like a moth or a fingernailand dry out slow enough to watch drying outon the clothing of the one you love. Forgetthe ice-box favoured in the emergency room,its snow like this a heart comes bedded in.And forget those now-useless runways;planes in mid-air grow sensitive,
the riveted metal of their wings goose pimplesas they go swooping through two kinds of white.The difference between snow and water isthe difference between dialectic and a kiss,between a birth certificate and spare change.This much you already know. What you dont knowis snow, is slanted crystals the halo rounda sodium lamp cant bear without shuddering.
The tale about the Eskimos hundred words for itmay be apocryphal, but the epicanthic foldis real, and may well, within our lifetimes,boss the globe while credit shifts and meltsand hardens and is lost, as the great man says,like water in water. Even his words are merelyso many thought-bubbles made visibleas we breathe in a snowy climate:white shapes of breath that want, like the smoke
from a cigarette, or the super-slow-mo ripplesof a cube of gelatine bounced off tile, to bethe drapes and folds of statuary. The bareruined choir, the coloured glass is stainedto a white radiance and goeswithout remainder into water, a new beginning;yet the snow we make play weapons of and buildinto forts well live in, when all grown up
wants to change, always, into a white beard.
Vidyan Ravinthiran
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Featured Poet: Frances Leviston3 Poems
Formations
Rosy conical fingers of rockerupt from the canyon floors they overshadow,if eruption can be slow,and indicate in perpetuity the bluebattlements of heaven and twelve o'clock.
Sagebrushes up in arms they dismiss
with a calm peaceful gesture,though not exactly pacifists, and army compoundsparachuted down within toppling distanceremain by their good grace,each uniform suffering a puff of pink dust.
Ambitious climbers, who clingto those planes by their sandpapered fingertips,or brace cracked verticalslike winter toads inching up cavity walls,plan on savouring the summit. They're wrong
dainty for picking sweetmeats off the horizon,it's as hard to pause on those pinnaclesas to stand on pivots.Vultures learn vertigo there. Like footless martletsthey fall in familiar down-drafted spirals
to land on a carrion beacon.
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Bearded Ladies
1.At the library there worked a woman whose trembly underchin bore a nimbusof long grey hairs like the guard-hairs on a rabbit. Much as I deplorestereotypes they often take root in fact. With such hypersensitivities she lived,
a creature of the moving air, intermediary of atmosphere and dust, finderof stuff believed to be lost; and every five oclock she completely disappeared.
2.The 15th century Nuremberg Chronicles contains an illustration of a hirsute woman.She sits naked on the ground, her legs outstretched, and her armsseem to conjure a tall plant from the earth. Her body is cloaked in curls of hairrepeating the curls of the leaves on the plant. A shocked ruff runs the length
of her spine, fanned flames, a dragons crest. Her left breast is visible, also on fire.
3.This flyer from the old American Museum shows Madame Clofullia, circa 1856,neatly trimmed in Napoleonic style, cinched at the waist, a graven locketswinging from a long silver chain about her navel, and she herself the portrait in it,a panel framed by wreaths of roses, cameo or coronation-plate, afloatbetween the columns and balustrades of Barnums most profitable fairytale castle.
4.Encountering a very tall woman in the womens toilets I cannot help but wonderif the big hands that softly soap themselves under lavender UV lightbelong in the day to someone else, and soon the words man and woman start to swimthrough each other the way two slippery hands in a basin swim and swapplaces under the immediacies of water, separated only by a hairsbreadth of shadow.
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Irisene
Shocking pink and plasticky-looking,something that could titivate an antechamber
or teach medics nerves,its leaves contuse around their perimeters.
When the sunset shines through it, it responds in kind,glowing until the horizon intervenesas if it doesn't belong on land.
Picture it undersea, thriving on saline,whining theremin-ethereal where the underwaves
wash through its rounded dividends, its tender branchesimpersonating anemone and coral,
parts forever colourfuland moist and scared: flinching clitoral architecture,the glans inside its hermit cowl.
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Featured Poet: Frances Leviston
Essay
Fabulous Appendages: Ange Mlinko's Shoulder Season
Language comes so naturally to us that it is easy to forget what a strange
and miraculous gift it is, wrote Steven Pinker at the start of Words and
Rules (1999), a book presenting language as not only a tool for
communication but also a medium for wordplay and poetry and an
heirloom of endless fascination. So far, so inoffensive; but at least one
word in that opening gambit, miraculous, signals the controversy in
which such arguments often find themselves embroiled. Pinker's mosticonic book, The Language Instinct (1994), connected language acquisition to
evolutionary science, arguing that the capacity to communicate in words is
as genetically definitional of homo sapiens as the spider's capacity to spin a
web, and earning a laudatory jacket quotation from Richard Dawkins. Its
success was a huge disappointment for those who believe Adam really did
name all the animals himself. So why that word, miraculous? Although
used here in a secular capacity, simply to marvel at the power of speech, it
cannot be divorced from its religious connotations; the same could be said,
indeed, of gift, which begs the question, From whom? Pinker's choice
of phrasing is perhaps mischievous, or petty, but it is far from pointless
when creationism can still be taught in schools. How children learn to
speak how they raise themselves, in language, from the babbling of
babyhood is an ideologically loaded question.
Shoulder Season (Coffee House Press, 2010), the third collection from theAmerican poet Ange Mlinko, writes itself confidently into these debates.
Mlinko's first book, Matines (1999), demonstrated a jaunty awareness of
language-as-medium that earned her many comparisons to the New York
School. Her second, Starred Wire (2006), tackled modes of cultural
production and curation. Fascinating as these earlier books were, their
excessive verbal dexterity and propulsive, investigative force sometimes
lacked focus. Shoulder Season solves this by bringing language into the
foreground as the explicit subject of the poems, and, at the same time,reckoning with the challenge of parenting young children, so that the
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linguistic concerns of an adult poet are fused with the concerns of a new
mother and the radical economies of language-exchange with young
children. Paying particular attention to the poems Squill, This One and
That One and This is the Latest, I would like to discuss the perspective
Shoulder Season offers on competing models of language acquisition asMlinko discharges her poet's responsibility not just to demonstrate but also
to enlarge the miraculous gift of language.
Whilst working on Shoulder Season, Mlinko began to write a regular column
on language for The Nation. One piece from April 2010 contrasts a
neuroscientific volume on the cognitive impact of literacy (Reading in the
Brain, by Stanislas Dehaene) with a book about hunting for rare words
(Reading the OED, by Amman Shea), showcasing Mlinko's characteristic
impatience with utilitarian approaches to language: There are people, in
sum, who read weird things for pleasure. There are people who read,
period, for pleasure. This sense of reading as excess, as perversity, or sheer
epicureanism is left unaccounted for in Reading in the Brain. Books that
merely use language, like a whip or a spoon, or which fail to take into
consideration those readers who are motivated by the weird, obsolete or
eccentric among us, are of limited interest to Mlinko. It is the surprises in
Dehaene's book that really capture her imagination, like the news that the
three bones of our middle ear are left over, in evolutionary terms, from
reptilian jaws. Shoulder Season often mentions ears zeugmatically in order
to remark on the ability / to attend: a quotation from Tree in the Ear
regarding children's music lessons, although Mlinko is concerned not only
with the ability to attend school but to remain attentive long after
graduation. As the column is keen to emphasise, language acquisition is a
lifelong process:
You probably remember your early schooling in the alphabet
song, letters and numbers, and handwriting practice. The process
went on much longer than that: your neurons went on building a
mental lexicon, compiling statistics about the prosodic and
spelling patterns in your language, and coordinating the different
networks that recognize meaning and sound so that they could
work in close association. The granularity of this knowledge can'tbe summed up easily: any language consists of untold numbers of
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arbitrary, infinitesimal differences. It calls on one part of the brain
to, say, distinguish pair and pear, another to pair pair and couple,
and another to suppress the arbitrary difference between pear and
PEAR, or "pear" as it is printed here and its cursive version. And
that's just ambiguity at the level of the word.
These columns were written for a general audience, so in this case Mlinko
draws no parallels with literary language; but those of us who are
interested in her poetry, too, can see further implications. If meaning and
sound work in close relationship for everyone, how does that affect our
attitude towards poetry, which then seems to have no special claim on such
a close association, but rather to be surfacing a system that already
perfectly exists? Where does that system originate? Is Mlinko, or any poet,
really invested in what Pinker calls the principle of the arbitrary sign,
which would disbar any genuine sense of the miraculous? And how
does she square those rather cold and clinical arbitrary, infinitesimal
differences with the pleasurable, prodigal excesses of her sheer
epicureanism?
Taking arbitrary, infinitesimal differences as a starting point, the ability
to make hairline distinctions between sounds provides an aesthetic and
rhetorical device throughout Shoulder Season. This is at its most
conspicuously self-conscious in Squill, a poem about the broken nights of
parenthood, which begins, Half-asleep, I heard a pin drop. The line
seems to hang itself on a familiar figure of speech, until we remember that
the figure is normally you could have heard a pin drop: in Mlinko's
poem, that hyperbolic eventuality has come to pass. The pin returns after a
few lines, and more pressure is applied to the image:
At the far end of the hall, behind a door,
I heard a pin drop. In another room
on the unpolyurethaned wooden floor
where gaps were growing between slats
I could distinguish the sound from
that of a screw. I knew it from a thumbtack.
What was that dreamthe brain candy cottoned to, the flight
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from a battalion, a mane slipping my grip
as my ear divined a button's bakelite
from a Lego...
The mother is half-consciously trying to decide whether to be alarmed bythe noise she hears or not. Different objects are invoked and told apart
from one another a pin, a screw, a thumbtack, a bakelite button, a Lego
brick and the methods by which the narrator tells them apart are equally
various: she heard, distinguish[ed], knew, divined. In this
manner, the poem yokes the supercharged sensory experience of the
anxious parent to the linguistic facility of the poet, sliding from sound to
sound, apprehension to apprehension, picking them apart with
hallucinatory precision. It is not coincidental that the poem rhymes: the
half-twists and consonant-shifts of the rhyme-words reproduce in us the
same absolute alertness to tiny distinctions between sounds that the
speaker is experiencing as she listens to the pin and then its successors
drop. This is something Mlinko may have learned, in part, from Muldoon;
certainly the use of a small noise to unleash a huge amount of imaginative
work finds several precedents with him, noticeably in Horse Latitudes
(2006), as Tithonus ties the day-old cheep of a smoke detector on the
blink to the two-thousand-year-old chirrup / of a grasshopper by way
of an improbable family history; or It Is What It Is, where the playthings
of a child like the Lego in Squill launch a parent's flight of fancy.
Shoulder Season is saturated with parental anxiety, and as a result the
poems display an almost hyperactive awareness that sees, hears and feels
intimations of danger at every turn. The cheap ubiquity of high-speed
travel, for instance, gives rise to poems like Penny Squasher, whichshows vulnerable children in the back seat of a car whooshed through the
nickelodeon lights // of the turnpike. The violence of the old-fashioned
penny squasher (or penny smasher) of the title, a machine which would
elongate pennies and emboss them with new designs as souvenirs, is
conjured up by the speaker in response to a rather innocent anamorphic
octagon of light thrown across the wall at a service station. The poem
ends, with relief, Boys asleep, unharmed, in car seat, in carrycot. In
Thalassotherapy, Mlinko combines nonsense refrains with what wouldappear to be a radical updating of Larkin's The Explosion, the result of
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which is entirely her own a strange and moving piece that navigates
nimbly between childlike delight in word-play (it begins Envying binges
/ of unbandaged waves) and the urgency of protecting the fragile brain-
matter that makes such enjoyment possible. The poem ends, The life
jackets made / of the same foam / as the bicycle helmet / que'est-ce quec'est cracked in two / in your hands. / What remains of the butter-and-
eggs.
This specific anxiety dovetails with the book's more general apprehension
of a world dangerously in thrall to the idea of danger. We read of a human
being designated the single point of failure / in a system that generates
160 million / thanks to his proprietary algorithms the algorithm being,
in a sense, the grammar of computing. In a society obsessed with
information security, even domestic chores become occasions for paranoia:
Someone's taking the recycling out with frozen hands / when the difficult
wind chooses then / to explode its data all over the streets of Peekskill.
Post-crunch, bonds and securities are relentlessly ironised, securing
nobody but the provider, as Someone uses your mortgage / to leverage /
something / far inside the starbursts of a server. A woman sits up
sleepless, cocked like a gun in her own bed, as Earth looms like a rock /
outside the window threatening fissure / from a petaled 9M133 Kornet.
But this feeling of powerlessness in the face of systems and forces so much
larger and more inevitable than the individual will also makes for
exhilarating poetry, as Mlinko and her reader surrender to the
unfathomable complexity, intelligence and redundancy of a language
evolving at high speed to keep pace with the world it has to describe. In
evolutionary terms, our sense-skills are always ahead of our language-
skills. Poetry Mlinko's poetry, at least simply tries harder to keep up.Does the feeling of gorgeous inevitability in Mlinko's work come from its
acquiescence to the sublimated patterns of English, or from an active
engagement with, and manipulation of, those patterns? This is false
dichotomy, we learn: her poems show that intelligent language never
simply speaks through us, but demands the application of intelligence in
return, in a mutually-invigorating loop.
This loop reflects Mlinko's more prosodic views on language, particularlyher attitude towards the theories of acquisition proposed by Pinker. In an
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interview with Jordan Davis for Molossus in 2010, she said, I am such a
hopeless Byzantine that I almost believe, contra Steven Pinker, that
language structures genetically shape the brain. You see the epicanthal
folds in my Americanized family, so why not in our language? Epicanthal
folds are the heavy eyelids obscuring the inner corner of the eye in peoplesof Asiatic descent, including those from the Urals. Mlinko's family came to
the United States from Hungary, and here she makes a comparison
between their persistently Uralic facial features and the imagined
persistence of Uralic predispositions in their speech. Although she presents
this position as contra Pinker, insofar as it suggests that the brain's
genetic make-up is modified by developments in language, rather than
simply producing the language instinct itself, she only almost believes
it, leaving us with a residual sense of sympathy for Pinker's work.
Nevertheless, it is a mark of her investment in this issue that she cannot
simply repeat Pinker's argument, but must add nuances of her own. It is at
a similarly qualified idea that Squill eventually arrives, first picturing the
squill of the title, the smallest simplest flower in the cold, growing inside
the mirroring labyrinths of the speaker's ears where it acts as a sensory
organ, and then suggesting that the squill may be both receiver and
transmitter: First flower of the year, Easterish / and yet it could be a bold
/ spy device, an earpiece. Is there something, she asks, embedded in my
ear, like that lost reptilian jaw, suggesting certain strategies to me? The
poem concludes with a passage that presents the idea of a genetic
predisposition to Uralic formulations in the same wishful, uncertain way
Mlinko uses in interview, with an added sense of exile:
And though you say it is right
than no one descended from Uraliclanguage speakers
has Uralic
language structures
pre-determining the cast of thought until
badly retrofitted in English,
I could not see this Siberian squill,
this earpiece, Easterish,
and not think of the cells of a languagein my sleep, growing out of the frost,
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assembled from history, a burned bridge,
as the first division, from which I was lost.
The idea of a foreign object embedded in the ear, and its connection both to
language and to divine or genetic dictation, inevitably calls to mind Rilke'sfamous hoher Baum in Ohr. As we may remember, Mlinko herself makes
this reference explicit with the title of Tree in the Ear, and the poem's
memory of a park Where I had strolled with my son /for the first three
years of his life, / but which he no longer remembered, / for that cherub
no longer existed. / O hoher Baum in Ohr! Mlinko's review of Edward
Snow's new collected translations of Rilke (2009) opens with a discussion of
Caedmon's hymn, written by Caedmon in the 7 th century after a dream in
which an angel commanded him to Sing the beginning of the animals!, as
divine dictation; Rilke tackles the same story in his Sonnets to Orpheus, and
Mlinko uses the two poets' approaches as staging-posts in poetry's journey
from inspiration to orphic radio, of which her own earpiece image is
an example.
As if to further examine how that first division, and the cherub her son
used to be, are lost, Squill is followed and faced in Shoulder Season by a
poem called This One and That One, which anatomises the language-
relationship between mother and child at three different stages of
development. The deictic title draws attention to how we indicate different
objects and their closeness to our own sphere of influence: this is close to
me; that is further away. The poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis has written,
Deixis in linguistics is a particular category of words: the shifters,
precisely those that change in reference given the position in time and
space of the speaker. They are words that can only be fully understood asparticular statement about particular contexts; they point into this
situation, Now (Jacket, 2008). Deictic words are intrinsic to language
acquisition as a stand-in for missing nouns: children soon learn to ask
What's that? as a way of requesting names for what they see, or to tell
people what this is as a way of confirming their knowledge. Deixis also
enacts the separation of the child from the mother, as the child must
account for the this of itself being different to the that of its mother's
body. Mlinko constructs her poem in three brief numbered sections. Here isthe first:
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She swears she saw, in this one's crib last night, that phosphorescence
that portends horns of a kind, fabulous appendages
when he proceeded to speak in ancestral gibberish.
The poem is playing with tropes of prodigality. One the one hand, the child
in the crib, or manger, overhung by a shining light that announces his birth
and/or has a kind of halo-presence, puts us in mind of Christ; on the other
hand, the horns make us think of the devil incarnate. The ancestral
gibberish recalls speaking in tongues, which comes either from possession
by the Holy Spirit or possession by a demon. Moses was often depicted
with horns in medieval and Renaissance art, a trend widely but not
exclusively attributed to the Vulgate's mistranslation of the Hebrew qeren
as horns instead of rays of light in the Exodus description of Moses
descending from Mount Sinai after his communion with God (see
Mellinkoff's The Horned Moses, 1970). Famously, the baby Moses was also
floated downstream in a rush-basket, a rudimentary crib, to be adopted by
the Egyptian royal family because his mother feared for his life. Mlinko
invokes both the horns and the rays of light (as phosphorescence) to
suggest the onset of the word: the onset of language.
Those fabulous appendages are words, and everything words bring. To
append means to attach something after the fact; it is a word associated
with words, with writing. Language's arrival lags behind the arrival of the
child. At the same time, appendages are physiological limbs, fingers,
and so on which returns us to a biological origin for speech, and to the
idea of speech resulting in biological changes to the body, in this case thehorns Moses acquires. The fabulous nature of these linguistic
appendages is another manifestation of the lingering sense of the
miraculousness of language that Pinker was unable to resist.
Prodigal gives rise to prodigy and prodigious, all but divorced from
their biblical root, now, and taken to mean someone who demonstrates, at
a young age, exceptional facilities or talents, or to describe the production
of exceptional amounts of work. In this sense, we can see prodigallinking back to those ideas of excellence and excess that Mlinko was so
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keen to foreground in The Nation. Her preceding column, in March 2010,
offered The Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary as an
occasion for thinking about the difference between superfluity and bounty.
What a prodigy gives us is bountiful; anyone else's virtuosity or over-
production is simply superfluous. This is a huge challenge for any poet,vulnerable as they are to accusations of frivolity or uselessness. Some try to
hide this with a semblance of utility; others, like Mlinko, make an open
secret of it, and a virtue of their own virtuosity. As she said in the Davis
interview, I love shows of brilliance and virtuosity. I dont share the
American prejudice for modesty in poems, but I do believe in a sense of
proportion and elegance, things which give meaning to the idea of
virtuosity, I guess.
Mlinko's word-play in This One and That One is one example of how to
give meaning to the idea of virtuosity. A crib is not just a child's cot, it is
also a literal translation, or a handy guide to something much more
complex than itself. The language of children, and the language mothers
use with their children, can be seen as a crib rather than a text; and
language is a crib for experience, a way of making it more easily
understood. If we look at the sound-patterning here, we can how see the
ib of crib is picked up by gibberish, and the p and end of
portends and the soft g of gibberish by appendages. We can hear
phosphorescence recur in ancestral. These patterns give the lines a
feeling of inevitability, of portentousness, as we hear a sound occur and
recur; but each recurrence is a reformulation, undermining the familiarity
even as it appears. Likewise the sophistication of the patterning is
undermined by words like gibberish, which alert us to the many
nonsensical aspects of poetry, and to language's origin in the gibbering ofsimian antecedents.
This prodigious, paranomasiac virtuosity is openly admitted to the
argument of the poem in the second section, where we learn how that
one, an older child, has discovered the joys of rhyming things that click:
he plays with words, and make nonsensical connections based on sound
and satisfaction alone, an obvious parallel to the satisfaction taken by a
poet. The nebulous she has now become his mother, and with thisseparation her anxiety has grown from a wondrous fear of the supernatural
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into a rational fear of her son's potential to damage himself or others, as the
uncontrollable rhyming makes her dream of switches on safetys
simultaneously flipped. Finally, in the third section, the mother's attention
turns to her own speech:
She swears she hears, in her own mamanaise, thoniers on a fishing-boat
haul in seine nets full of langoustines; cats enceinte in hyacinth;
tongues evolved to cleanse them of the telltale smell of meat,
the smell of meat on cubs, telltale bas-cuisine.
Mamanaise is the simplified language adults use with babies. Thonier
means tuna-fisherman. A seine net is a long, flat fishing net used to
enclose schools of fish, like a fence. The noun enceinte refers to the
enclosed inner wall of a fortification; the adjective means pregnant. Bas-
cuisine is cheap local food, or cheap, tough cuts of meat. Those tongues
evolved, then, are literally the rough tongues of cats, but we also use
tongue as a synonym for language, as in mother tongue, or a synonym
for babble, as in speaking in tongues. Mlinko is reasserting the idea of a
buried or nascent linguistic tradition, not Uralic this time, but French: for
English speakers, a smattering of French is a sign of linguistic prestige.
There is a deictic pun lurking behind all this: who's she, the cat's mother?,
we say, when telling children off for a disrespectful address (there is also, I
think, a joke about tuna mayonnaise). In this case, the speaker is positively
identifying herself with a cat's mother, cleaning her offspring of the
telltale smell of meat their primal, speechless animalism with her
own developed tongue. In the final line, this comparison slips gears into
social commentary, reminding us that language can be developed not onlyto communicate one's origins but to conceal them. The repeated telltale,
here meaning giveaway, but derived from telling a tale, alerts us to the
ways in which language allows us to tell tales about ourselves, including
biblical tales, which conceal how we too were once l-bas: as Mlinko puts it,
again using French to signal her own distance from infantile speech, O
because one is never l-bas for long, / holding an infant is like going to
Paris (Rocamadour).
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Mlinko's attention to the connective deictic ligaments of language also puts
us in mind of Muldoon, This One and That One riffing off Muldoonian
titles like the aforementioned It Is What It Is; and we notice, too, in those
seine nets full of langoustines a version of Muldoon's a fishing boat /
complete with languorous net from Paul Klee: They're Biting, a poemwhich also contains goitred, / spiny fish-caricatures, and reassures us,
At any moment all this should connect. Connection definitively occurs
in the subsequent poem from Meeting the British (1987), the well-known
Something Else, in which the sight of a lobster being lifted from a tank
activates a long chain of associations, from how Nerval / was given to
promenade / a lobster on a gossamer thread to Nerval's eventual suicide,
as the poem concludes:
he hanged himself from a lamp-post
with a length of chain, which made me think
of something else, then something else again.
The final poem of Mlinko's that I would like to consider here, This is the
Latest, extends this double-jointed use of the crustacean as a vehicle for
exploring the connections between words; and it is in this poem that the
loaded tensions between evolution and creation that bubble away under
the book are brought most clearly to the surface.
This is the Latest takes place on Christmas Eve. In the first section, the
speaker settles a sacrificial lobster in the bath tub, where it will remain
until it is time for it to be cooked. The poem is again divided into three
sections, each spaced into two columns on the page, and this vertical andhorizontal segmentation mimics the segmentation of the lobster's shell,
which is itself identified with other joints and plates in the poem:
Wrapping an oversized box (coffee maker)
can't find a swathe of paper
big enough Start to cobble bits together
with tape (ah chitinous)
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Chitin is the primary material from which the exoskeletons of arthropods
are formed. The attention paid to the structure of the exoskeleton
(segmented, chitinous, with a gooseflesh appearance) and its mirroring
in the structure of the poem reminds us again of the Uralic language
structures that Mlinko considers in Squill, the skeleton of a language, ifyou like, which is innate to speakers of Uralic descent, moving outwards
from within. The lobster appeals as an image because of this inverted
relationship; and it appeals because its structure is so clearly visible, so
publicly apparent. Its tail, its claws, its feelers, are all fabulous
appendages. In Mlinko's imagination, this kind of visible and segmented
structure is linked not only to language but to language acquisition, as the
depiction of kindergarten's disjointed tidbits (Pandas eat bamboo.
Koalas eat eucalyptus) against the backdrop of a bamboo screen's living,
jointed segments in For All the World makes clear. Increased
sophistication means the increased ability to conjoin disjointed facts: to
make the words link up. Muldoon himself, an incorrigible joiner-upper,
one often given to nomenclative readings, might well make something of
Mlinko's name containing the words link as in connection, as in joint,
as in the missing link and ange (Fr.) or angel, too. Indeed, Mlinko
might do the same: when asked to free-associate on language by Jordan
Davis, she replied, It has angle and gauge in it, which are instruments for
measuring; it has gag in it for fun; it has egg in it for possibility; angel
which means messenger and Ange, for talisman.
Wrapping a gift for Christmas brings us full circle back to Pinker's
miraculous gift of language: the coffee maker wrapped in paper, the
lobster wrapped in chitin, the gifts brought to Christ, and the gift of Christ
himself. To make this explicit, This is the Latest navigates from thebathroom to the kitchen, where the lobster's final destination, an
extravagant fish soup, is being prepared:
...the broth of something Provenal
sings from the pot a little tomatoey
a little stigma (not stamen) of Crocus Sativusunder the Star of Bethlehem
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Sensitised as we are to Mlinko's linking of language and cuisine, her
appetite for sheer epicureanism, and the foodie words and concepts that
populate not only poems that obviously treat language acquisition (the bas-
cuisine of This One and That One) but other poems whose delight inwords is matched by their delight in eating Gourmandizing, about a
fancy organic restaurant, or Gallimaufry, about cooking for friends we
understand that this bouillabaisse is a way of exploring speech, and in
particular a way of drawing together the competing attitudes towards
language on display throughout the book. What we might not be prepared
for, however, is the cosmic scale of the treatment: after two sections of cosy
domesticity, the poem suddenly zooms out into space:
If the universe is this is the latest
bouncing between inflation
and shrinkage as if on a trillion-year
pendulum why wouldn't
an infant's sobbing on the exhale
have a prosody as on the inhale
it has the chemistry of tears and seas
or our bouillabaisse, indeed,
a primal soup contain besides babbling
and nonspeech and raspberries
in the briny speech stream a scuttling underwriter?
On a literal level, that scuttling underwriter is the lobster, its carapace
clicking against the pan, its body giving body to the soup and providinga foundational flavour upon which subtler notes can be built.
Metaphorically, however, the scuttling underwriter, underwriting the
poem as it does on its own line, returns us once again to the tantalising idea
that there may be some kind of definite origin for the primal soup of
speech. The fact that the poem takes place on Christmas Eve raises the
possibility that this origin may be divine as much as ancestral, even as that
image of the lobster scuttling along the base of the pan puts us in mind
of aquatic origins, and of the primordial soup theory proposed by J. B. S.Haldane; and we think again of the isolated line underwriting Something
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Else. In This is the Latest, the arguments and counter-arguments of
creation and evolution, nature and nurture, exist not as hard antitheticals
but as ingredients held in suspension together: that briny speech
stream contains them all, the angel and the egg, the gag and the gauge.
I would like to conclude with the idea that, as the vertiginous complexity
of this poem's final sentence might suggest, navigating the speech stream
of Mlinko's work is itself an act of language acquisition. We are regaled
with the weird, obsolete or eccentric vocabularies and constructions she
so thoroughly enjoys, linguistic resources that are themselves imperilled;
we learn to wield the latest additions to the global English lexicon; and we
are invited to view language as evolution-in-progress, participating as
active readers in her virtuoso displays. If in our ordinary lives, as Dehaene
has suggested, we suppress some of the differences between words, does
poets ask us to de-suppress, to let ourselves be sensitised to every last
distinction, and overload our circuits with a granularity of information
they are not quite fit to handle? What does that do to those circuits? Does it
perhaps enlarge them? The resounding answer Shoulder Season provides is
Yes.
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