My fourth full length from Oneiros Books. Here it is at Lulu, & here it is at Amazon, 110 pages for $10.
Dessutom så finns boken till salu i Sverige här på Adlibris för 93 kr.
The book is composed of poems that respond to more or less short quotes from Gertrude Stein that are innocent of any relation to the content or preoccupations of the poems. See this demonstrated below: it is indicative of a refreshing semantic contingency that lets poems reside in syntactic distress & fuck meaning.
serene length
A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it
(Gertrude Stein)
night falls the longest dress conceivable
all the indistinguishable, all cats a grayness
a sudden change of place, all cats grayness
shifting subtle shape
crackles because entropy is disparate
bastards, a dress is electric blue
memory forever/ they have outworn
their murder
only the black & the red are eternity
and smell like unsubtle sugar/ sutures
and sexuality/ where the face was put
the front of some skull & a selective
scent/ elective is not infinite affinities
but there is nothing we call death
in us, ever/ there is this longing/
the longest possible dress
guns and butter
A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous
ordinarily
(Gertrude Stein)
if everything were red it would be better/
animals that see different colors
or just none/
guns & an extent of ordinary butter
with nothing neglected;
and nothing with no red in it
means the same as living
repression
A transfer, a large transfer, a little transfer, some transfer,
clouds and tracks do transfer, a transfer is not neglected.
(Gertrude Stein)
it is innocence & capacious
raucous suffering smelling not at all under heaven/
a somnolent zombie smoking beside a railway track
turning memories back into facts/
or repressed impossible sexuality therapy
Fridays before they ever invented cake:
for there was nothing dead as yet/
no such thing as a face
Thanks to Dave Mitchell & Oneiros for doing the books & to Michael Mc Aloran for the cover art.
Now an awesome review & a monstrous admission. Sometimes we draw a huge blank. I have no idea who wrote this review, & would be grateful to be able to thank the writer of this erudite piece.
“it is incomplete, one silence
and
the luscious almost nothing coming
tickling
the blood to acquiescence
and
the breathless presence
of
death, confusion, sex,
whatever
it is coming next
and
all our absences are adequate to us:
we
are boring corners
where
worlds come to touch”
David
McLean, “Rumbling Nothing.”
The
poem has a darkness which is also an accuracy. “We are boring
corners / where worlds come to touch” is a very accurate statement.
Notice how it has a certain precision of rhythm, with the emphasized
stress overlapping the hard “o” sounds at “boring corners”
and there is the very clear stressing at “come to touch,” “BAH
buh BAH.” The content is at first glance, negative dark, truthful,
minimal. It is not illusioned poetry. You can’t exactly say it is
disillusioned, because he still writes. Someone who was absolutely
disillusioned would not write poetry, would they? (or would they?).
The
poem is one of a little series indicating a reading of Gertrude
Stein. She always seemed very dry to me, I could never really “get”
her, except as a catalyst for many other artists. Lew Welch wrote a
thesis about Stein which I have never read, except for a bit of it
here: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/welch/from_stein.html.
I think of Stein as, maybe, an example of what Oscar Wilde
hypothesized as “the critic as poet.” Welch delves into that in
his analysis of Stein. She is definitely a catalyst for artists.
“We
are boring corners / where worlds come to touch” – so here, the
self has become emptied-out and hollowed-out. But, it is also the
place, where worlds come to touch.
It
might be helpful to back out of all this and think about the general
situation of the poet. That is, the general situation of someone,
when he writes. It is a poem: therefore, the person has backed out
of all instrumental use of words, all of those normal “prose”
uses where the words dissolve into their purpose, where the words do
not exist for us to look at them, but rather to look through them at
what they are about, at the referent.
The
poet, the person in that situation, has as it were, backed out of the
normal word-use situation where the words dissolve into their use,
and so now the acoustical and other properties of words as words,
start to matter. Here, you can see this in the clearly marked
rhythms, as well as the foregrounding of sound properties in places,
as with the panoply of “o” sounds in the last two lines.
Also,
by backing out of normal “prose” use, suddenly it places the
poet, as thinker, in a very weird place. All of the stereotypical
deep questions come up: why are we here? Is there a god? What is?
What does “is” mean? Etc. Again this is related to how we have
pulled back from words as a means to an end, we are no longer writing
the words as part of an instruction manual on how to use a lawnmower
or the like.
The
poet’s situation: the thoughtful, reflective function of the mind,
no longer dissolves into a particular task at hand.
McLean
is typically an abstract poet when it comes to sensory imagery.
However the poems while abstract still have strong emotional tone.
Somehow,
he has encountered the topic of nihilism, of nothingness, of
no-meaning, void, without leaving poetry. Other examples of this
happening: Larkin, Gluck.
Other
tonally similar: Ingmar Bergman.
Another
one, called “they were forever”:
“they seemed to be a tremulous
eternity,
these
walking corpses hollowed out
by
cruelty and memory,
as
if a sadistic sculptor had deigned to touch them
once
god was forgotten, as if morality depended on makers
and
the threat of heaven;
they
seemed to be evident eternity, these wicked
victims,
gray skeletons and fragile fetuses of hurt
become
sudden lonely ghosts, their hunger
our
torture, the tiniest evil disease
crawling
back at us from history
and
loveless, an insistent want to touch:
they
seemed to be tremendous eternity
and
nothing much; they had suffered though
so
we thought this enough,
memories
and roses and dust”
We
can see formal order here, and a nostalgia for formal order. By that
I mean, here you have the three-line stanzas; you have the clear
rhythmic marking of the lines, which is emphasized especially by the
linebreaks; you have the very fact of the linebreaks; you have
clearly foregrounded musical echoes and repetitions (e.g., the “y”
in “cruelty and memory,” the “o” in “lonely ghosts”);
also in this one you have the gradually building pressure of the
one-sentence structure, demanding a resolution and conclusion, as is
also demanded by the use of the by-itself last line. These devices
are all traditional, in the sense of, we have seen them in poetry for
a while. This poem like the others has this sense of a retinue of
traditional devices, and a desire to write a poem, being brought up
against a thoroughgoing nihilism, an undercutting doubt which itself
invokes a tradition (Larkin, Bergman, Nietzsche, numerous others).
However the nature of nihilism is that as Nietzsche noted it can be a
historically creeping phenomenon, and the effect with McLean’s
poems is like the nihilism has crept in even further, nothingness has
established itself even more, and yet there are still these poems.
The
poem lacks details but lack of detail is one of its themes. The
emotional force of the poem is clear without detail. The poem though
abstract is saying things quite specifically: words like “victims”
and “fragile” and “tremendous” are very closely literally
saying the pressurized emotional flow which the poem is. The poem is
looking for tones aside of sadness and horror. The poem reflects a
point of view which is looking at ultimate things. In detaching
itself from prose use of words it has confronted a groundlessness,
like a shocking insight where the presence of heaven or at least its
solace as a faith was supposed to be. At the end of this poem, it is
as if we crawl back through ghosts to the quasi-details of “roses”
and “dust” – it is as if the void which is so close to the
theme of Thanatos, hauls us away from things of this world. The
dematerialized quality of the poetry relates to what it is about.
Why
is it that such an acute experience of void has not snuffed out the
poems? For whatever reason, it has not silenced the stream of poems.
Again
notice how on the measuring-stick of concrete to abstract, the text
is very abstract. This abstraction feels like a stylistic minimalism
which is simply a case of the text staying true to the writer’s
natural predilections and preferences. He is at the far end on the
abstraction scale compared to where, say, Elizabeth Bishop, or
imagist poets, or classical haiku poets, would be. Yet this
minimalism, which constitutes a shadowy dissolution of objects and
sense-images, seems to be very organically tied to the long serious
stare at nothingness which is the overall tone of the poems.
His
poems violate the core principles of imagism, to wit, no ideas but in
things (the rule of thumb that a poem should catch the thing-detail
in vivid sensory light). Of course, what it goes to show is that
there is no particular principle or rule for poetry. The poems show
that use of the sense-detail-image is simply one possible technique
for the poem; just as in painting, abstraction is another.
It
makes sense, that things are so minimized, so much removed, from
these poems, given how much their theme is that removal.
In
the case of Rilke, we had a poet who, realizing the fuzziness and
mushiness of subjectivity and abstraction, threw himself into a
crash-course on importing the thing, the sense-detail, the object
into the poem. Thus we get his apprenticeship with the sculptor
Rodin, and his very deliberate “thing-poems” such as “The
Panther.”
With
McLean, what you have is the exploration of method for writing poems
which does not go back to the sense-detail, the image, the thing.
But which at the same time, gives short shrift to the subject, the
subjective (the self as nothing but a “boring corner”).
The
poems offer an alternative to imagism.
Another
one, “in their coffins” --
“in
their coffins they seem to be grinning
because
there is no time in them
and
every memory is gone missing
to
wherever it is the time goes
and
where worlds used to be
they
have gone to nighttime and non-being
and
become nothing and free:
in
their coffins they seem to be grinning
but
they are not agents today
they
have nothing to be;they
have lost the terrible blessing
that
is passion and need”
Again
notice the abstraction. The closest the poem gets to a sense-image
is the grinning skulls in the coffins, but clearly this image is not
being appropriated from direct observation in life. Rather, really
it is once or twice deferred from life-observation, and it is more a
literary conceit, an idea, a symbol (the grinning corpse) than a
thing observed in nature. He does not paint from nature; he paints
from his thoughts and emotions, which are dominated by the subject of
death. It has been said that death is the grand subject of
philosophy, and his poetry is close to philosophy.
The
poems are allusive to Housman. Both the hints of song or ballad
meter, and the hints of rhyme. The overall tone is definitely like
Housman in its being equal parts morally civilized and colossally
disillusioned. It is also like Thomas Hardy in having a certain
determinism. However the poems typically speak from an impersonal
and solitary zone as opposed to the miniature character studies and
short stories and drama scenes of Hardy.
Phrases
such as “terrible blessing” and “passion and need” can be
read as allusions back to traditional rhetorics. It is as if the
poems represent continuations of a tradition into a present moment
which is even more disillusioned, more nihilism-confronted and
nothingness-haunted, than before. Each poem always has this feel of
being the first realization of this fresh shock of this new full
realization, this fact of (for lack of a better word) death, which is
always more radical than any idea of it, more chilling and painful
than any prior conceptualization of it. There is a sense of trauma
overloading the circuits, really a subject which is “too much” to
be said; an overwhelming insight which chases away all subsidiary
insights. (So it is in form of a poem because the prose version of
this would be silence?) A phrase like “terrible blessing”
differentiates the text from regular speech and links it back to
prior exemplars, such as Yeats’ phrase “a terrible beauty is
born.” The poem helps us remember the past, even as it denies any
transcendental saving of the past.
(Nietzsche
also conveyed that very well, that sense of western nihilism as
something always more freshly, shockingly realized than before. In a
sense his tonal journey was a series of holding actions against an
insight which came more and more freshly until it jarred him from his
own sanity.)
On
the Dickinson-Whitman scale, McLean is over at the Dickinson end.
One
gets the sense of a specific historical moment when reading his
poems. It is the moment when a previously established and
believed-in belief system is undercut by a nihilism. Nihilism
achieves its scariness and darkness, when viewed in the context of a
happy belief in presence which it replaces. Nietzsche wrote of how
it is relative to the degradation and collapse of Christian religious
belief structures, that nihilism gains its force. If one could fully
forget the god-construct that the religion posits, then one might not
feel the darkness of nihilism, because one would no longer feel like
something has been removed. Nihilism for Nietzsche was like a vacuum
created by the removal of Christianity: if the removal was far
enough away that one did not feel the vacuum anymore, would one still
feel the nihilism anymore?
(Compare
western conceptions of void to the Zen Buddhist version. There are
passages in Buddhism which have a sense like what Nietzsche’s
“western nihilism” could be if they did not have the tremendous
collapse and vacuum of the lost xtian system to deal with at the
front end.)
One
more, “drums and puppies” --
“drums
and puppies fighting deadly serious
like
one irresolute genuflection
and
some dismal demiurge nowhere
all
the gods running around being homeless
Rizlas
and stupidity
because
world is vacant paper
and
no sky ever was angry
or
even a substantial subject -
in
the scholastic sense -
horrible
hypokeimenon
where
we swim listless like fish
this
smoky dusty nothingness
where
worlds live, drums
and
angry puppies -
nothing
to forgive”
“Rizlas”
is a name for cigarette rolling papers. “Hypokeimenon” means
“the underlying thing.” Here we see the dramatic power that
occurs when details make it into the poem. The peculiar details –
drums, puppies, rizlas, hypokeimenon – these are all the more
noticeable, given as the default setting of these poems is minimal at
the level of such things.
Where it says, “and no sky ever
was angry / or even a substantial subject” – You can see here how
the sensory barrenness or minimalism of the poems seems somehow to be
necessary, somehow of a piece with what the poems are about. The
skeptical inquiry as to the sky’s status as a “substantial
object” is close to the core of these poems. The question, when
the sky contains no god, is whether the sky can even contain itself
any longer. McLean is hauntingly aware of “this smoky dusty
nothingness.”
Precursors:
“SEYTON:
The
queen, my lord, is dead.
MACBETH:
She
should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for
such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps
in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of
recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The
way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking
shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the
stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an
idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.”
Shakespeare,
from Macbeth.
“As
for life, it is a battle and a sojourning in a strange land; but the
fame that comes after is oblivion.
*What
means all this?
*Death
hangs over thee: whilst yet thou livest, whilst thou mayest, be good.
*Deem
not life a thing of consequence. For look at the yawning void of the
future, and at that other limitless space, the past.”
Marcus
Aurelius, from Meditations.
