Spatial Engagement with Poetry

H. Yeung

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137478276
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

Drawing from a broad range of contemporary British poets, including Thomas Kinsella, Kathleen Jamie, and Alice Oswald, this study examines the inherently spatial and affective nature of our engagement with poetry. Adding to the expanding field of geocritical studies, Yeung specifically discusses ideas of space and constructions of voice in poetry.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

MAPPING 1: THE POEM AS SPACE

Reading Walter Ong’s The Presence of the Word, Louis Sass notes that “the written word could [ … ] be said to freeze thought, by organizing it and preserving it in a visual space; it thereby offers a new image of an independent mental universe.” He goes on to note that “the commitment of sound to space that is inherent in alphabetical writing had a noticeable effect on our sense of the world.”¹ The written, silently read, word promotes an engagement with literary language that is in many ways interior, or withdrawn. This visual, silent, appreciation of the poem leads to a conception of the poem as space; this is the first of three ways of engaging with poetry that I will investigate in the first part of this study. The poem as space is, alongside the poem of space, one of the dominant ways in which poetry criticism maps poetry and poetics. Often criticism that looks at the poem as space will reject out of hand the notion of reading the self-same poem as also operating of space, not to mention as a vocalized, performative, or affective poetic experience. After looking at the idea of the poem as space, I will go on to look at the importance of this critical poetic phenomenon in relation to the two other ways that space operates in the poem—of space and as vocalic space. Taken singularly, each attempt to map space in the poem is necessarily biased, leading to a reductive reading process, but taken together, we can more readily appreciate the spatial nature of the poem on its own terms, echoing Michel Foucault’s well-known exhortation, “l’époque actuelle serait peut-être l’époque de l’espace.”²

The dominant sensory modality here is visual rather than aural (or oral), tactical, or olfactory. The visual is the most easily quantifiable sense both in terms of object-relations and spatial awareness. Louis Sass writes:

Noise surrounds, and it can be difficult to locate the source of a particular sound; odour permeates, obscuring the very distinction between knower and known, and often evoking the most immediate visceral reactions, including revulsion, hunger, and lust. Vision, by contrast, is the prototypical distance-sense, embodying in every glance the separation of subject from object, and distance from emotional if instinctual response. Vision is also the most self-conscious sense, since it is most conducive to an awareness of one’s own position in relation to the perceptual field.³

In giving dominance to the visual, we naturally also create a scientific field that takes distance, object-relations, and singularity of point-of-view or experience as its bases for comparison and critique, and which, through the idea of positioning and/or the theory of the gaze, can become easily politicized. Oculocentricism in vision and in thought creates a trammeled world that is concerned “with ‘pieces’ of information; general, impersonal, fixed, certain, and disengaged.”⁴ For Sass and McGilchrist, the privileging of the visual leads to the schizoid tendencies he sees in High Modernist literature and art, wherein the preponderance of the visual, and related tendencies of aesthetic withdrawal and sensory deprivation, lead to a dislocated and dislocating poetics of artistic experience. Elements of Sass’s study echo the attempts of cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan, who, in his study of space and place and their importance to our experience of the world, tries to unseat the visuocentricism so often seen in modern and contemporary art and culture,⁵ and in the Noigandres poets’ attempts to re-inscribe sound to space. The “commitment of sound to space” and the subsequent “effect on our sense of the world” that we observe in and through the writing, reading, and analysis of literary works may be seen at its most heightened, not only in the work of avant-gardeist poets but also in the work of poststructuralist theorists and literary critics. In this criticism we more often than not encounter an experience of the poem that is textual rather than vocal. The rise of post-structuralism in the academy led Michel Foucault to claim the 1960s onwards as, perhaps, [peut-être] l’époque de l’espace. Under these auspices, we encounter the poem as space. Foucault’s peut-être is an important one. It intimates the indeterminacy and multiplicity of a possible spatial thought. Dangerously, this indeterminacy and multiplicity can lead to a method of thought that is “a hodgepodge of ideas, without [a] systematic theoretical framework.”⁶ Space, like any concept, has the potential to spiral out into unlimited realms of metaphor; “in the frequent spatiality of conceptual thought metaphoricity of place and depth is embedded (as in those very words residual, fundamental, embedded).”⁷ But, as Bertrand Westphal writes, “it is probably necessary to combine all these cross-disciplinary inputs [philosophy, sociology, anthropology, geography, postcolonial theory, gender studies, amongst others] in order to open up a truly literary approach to spaces.”⁸

Unlike many other forms of writing, the poem not only represents a certain space and time, but, due to formal principles, is also in itself a space. The spaces between and beside words may signify as much, if not more, than the words themselves. Indeed, Jacques Derrida employs the concept of spacing in an active way. For him, space and spacing generate literary force:

Spacing is a concept which [ … ] carries the meaning of a productive, positive, generative force. Like dissemination, like différance, it carries along with it a genetic motif: it is not only the interval, the space constituted between two things (which is the usual sense of spacing) but also spacing, the operation, or in any event, the movement, of setting aside.⁹

Space operates as noun and verb. It is a force that is active within the text; as an action of setting aside it also delimits the space of the poem, implying discrimination and value judgment, and it is intimately related to the ontological thrust of literature, so much so that Jean-Luc Nancy’s Typographies, which works out of the Derridean idea of spacing, coins the term “onto-typo-logy” for the sort of text that forces this sort of engagement.¹⁰ In privileging spacing in this way, Derrida, although he works against phonocentricism of any sort, moves toward a similar implication of possibility and contingency as Foucault’s peut-être, nevertheless also setting boundaries within which subject–object relations function. In poetry criticism, a major element that frequently comes under discussion is form. This could be the anti-formalist poetic acts of the avant-garde, or the deft formal manipulations of a more “traditional” poet in, for instance, the sonnet, the haiku, the villanelle. In either case, space, spacing, and through space, form, are intimately connected to our experience of the poem; form becomes “an active principle, an essential element in the literary event.”¹¹ As we look at the words and the manner in which they are arranged on the page, we see that the space(s) signify and are significant.

Susan Stewart links space in literature exclusively to the written word, which often acts as a visual paratext in a different manner to the experience of visual perception: “writing gives us a device for inscribing space. [ … ] Writing serves to caption the world, defining and commenting upon the configurations we choose to textualize.”¹² The poem as space exists as a soundless, voiceless thing. “Reading” space in the poetic work in this way leads us to question the “commitment of sound to space” of Sass’s silently read writing, and, indeed, the silent signification of Derrida’s textual spacings. Through the operations of space and spacing both within and outside of the text of the poem, the poem becomes an object for scrutiny rather than the subject of a process of voicing.

Various theories of the poem as space have been generated by and have influenced critical readings of poetries that are somehow nonstandard in their form, spacing, and appearance on the printed page. It is difficult to think of how, for instance, to read Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard (Poème) aloud and without affectation whilst also demonstrating the importance of the typography and spacing of the work to listeners unable to see what is going on on the page. On seeing the poem for the first time in a workshop in 1897, Paul Valéry commented on Un coup de dés as space, and as a making visible of the operations of thought:

It seemed to me that I was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space. Here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms. Expectancy, doubt, concentration, all were visible things. With my own eye I could see silences that had assumed bodily shapes. Inappreciable instants became truly visible [ … ] There in the same void as them, like some new form of matter arranged in systems of masses trailing lines, coexisted the Word!¹³

Un coup de dés, for Valéry, reaches back to the originary and radical nature of space, resonating with the creation of the universe itself. Through spaces and spacing, the instant (a roll of the dice), and instinct (to hope the contingency of the act plays out well) become textually embodied in the arrangements of the work. Our eyes do not read in any completely linear way—various elements, collections of words, catch our vision first, and we the assemble the other parts of the page around these. Each reading leads us to experience the poem and the page in a different way, indeed, the typographical dexterity lends itself to the hypertext—there are multiple online versions and translations of the poem some more interactive than others.¹⁴ Un coup de dés is a poem that can be seen indubitably to play out Foucault’s peut-être and Derrida’s spacings (figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Stéphane Mallarmé, from Un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard (Poème)

Interestingly, however, Mallarmé does not remove from his poem altogether the figure of voice, something that he emphasizes in his preface to Un coup de dés, where he writes of the visual, or formal, qualities of the poem thus:

The “blanks” [“blancs”] in effect, assume importance and are what is immediately most striking: versification always demanded them as a surrounding silence, so that a lyric poem, or one with a few feet, generally occupies about a third of the leaf on which it is centred; I don’t transgress against this order of things, I merely disperse its elements. The paper intervenes each time an image, of its own accord, ceases or withdraws, accepting the succession of others.¹⁵

The literary tradition into which Mallarmé places Un coup de dés is quite different from that which the renewed attention to the poem in the 1960s by the nouvelle critique in France, the new avant-gardes in poetics, and the more global dominance of structuralism in literary criticism, gives it credit. These latter criticisms, foundational works to many readings of the spaces of poetry,¹⁶ and of thought today, are so fascinated by the avant-garde spacings and typographical innovations of Mallarmé’s poem that they forget too much the vocalic aspects of poetry. Space, or spacing, become an easy conceptual tool to aid the critic in his or her navigation of the poetic work, but is not everything that comprises the nature of the poem. The solely silent spatial approach to Un coup de dés is a popular one not only amongst critics but also poets and artists who explore, through the poem, the space of reading, and the effects of reading such space. In looking at three such highly visual explorations, or visual “translations,” we can see the effects of prioritizing the poem as space by banishing the aural or even the linguistic from our appreciation of the poem. It is aesthetically dangerous to separate the constituent elements of the verbivocovisual: the poem as space cannot exist on its own. Three examples of spatial realizations of Mallarmé’s poem are Marcel Broodthaers’ Un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard (Image) (1945–1969), Mario Diacono’s JCT 1, a MeTrica n’ABOOlira (1968), and Michalis Pichler’s more recent Un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard (Sculpture). Each version produces a different creative reading of Mallarmé’s poem, and all elucidate in some way the manner in which Mallarmé’s original operates within space.

The three versions of Marcel Broodthaers’ Un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard (Images) reprint the spacings of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés, privileging the space of the page over the typographical or linguistic elements of Mallarmé’s poem. In one of the three forms of Broodthaers’ rendition, the artist, working with a book bound from semi-transparent paper, meticulously erases, through the use of black-marker, the space where the words have been, thus extracting the verbal experience from the visual experience offered by the spacings of Un coup. The flimsiness of the paper on which the book is printed gives a sense of immanence: the black spacings are so bold that they bleed through the pages and an almost palimpsestic effect with regard to the reading past and future is created. When exhibited originally, accompaniments to the displayed book included a series of anodized metal plates of various parts of the poem, and an audio-recording of Broodthaers’ reading the original poem. This installation of the poem within a navigable physical space alongside a manipulation of the sonic space, creates an effect of sensory dislocation. We are so used to associating poetry with the written word that Broodthaers’ deletion of this anticipated element makes it difficult to navigate his installation with Mallarmé in mind. By way of a prioritization of the visual, what was a poem becomes an artwork (or “(Images)”) instead.

It is interesting to note that in the original artist’s edition of Broodthaers’ book, the artist reproduces, after a foreword, the text (=words) of Mallarmé’s poem, but does not set them out as they were originally, or indicate any of the typographical experiments. Rather, after having produced a fully linear text of the poem, he only notates where line breaks occur by a forward slash. The forms of Un coup de dés are, in this response, reduced thrice over: once in the un-spacing of the words of the poem to produce a linear text, once in the erasure of the words in favor of a display of the spacings only, and finally in the audio recording of the poem, which extracts from it its textuality entirely.

Mario Diacono’s JCT 1: A MeTrica n’ABOOlira is an artists’ book printed in a limited edition of 199 copies. JCT 1 engages in a similar visual experiment, or translation, as Broodthaers’ Un coup de dés n’abolira le hasard (Images). In Diacono’s work, the spacings of words in Mallarmé’s poem are replaced...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• In-Text Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index