Apologies that a message to John K got copied here.
I've been reading the poem last night - essentially away from the
screen before I could "see" anything (ref John Cayley's discussion at
last week's SV colloquium). Here are a few interim notes/reactions
that might be worth posting. It shouldn't be too incestuous, despite
the dedication, as I hadn't seen the poem before.
Stanza 1: graphology on topography, where deciding to set out is an
onset, something is being done on a landscape or its graphic map.
Note suchs relations as "Route/out" "on/not" - it opens as an ode to
the "O".
Stanza 2-3 thought that word "inculcation" must be on to something -
delighted to find it derives from "calx = L heel, ie treading in, a
way of pressing absorbent surfaces. See also "fills the tread" later
in the poem.
Stanza 5 very much like this - "here" is already built over by the
excess signs of our being here, but topgraphically the signposts are
indicators of sheer density before anything else - and without gaps
in signs (which they are pressing on) can they function at all? And
they do seem to function in a "here" of real space.
Stanza 10 etc much dense allusion around here - perhaps Ric can make
out , but I take "nonnulli sensus" to be something like "sense is not
nothing" - rather like Gillian Rose's "death is not nothing" - but
don't know the allusion. Is is this which condones the "jaw's lexis"
where a jaw can get to grips with a not-nothing.
Stanza 24ff a lyric intrusion (also geological?) - the intruding
artists were here before us, though the critic likes to invent the
matrix. "a central register/to fringe against" - hugging the margin
as a form of privilege or the narcissism of oblique construction, or
is it that deconstruction has no mode of letting be which is not an
intervention even at its negative pole - its supplement can't provide
a place for itself. Can pastoral provide a space for itself?
Stanza 35: "graphology dressed as closure" - suppose the whole poem
is about addressing, or the dress of the graphic figure wooed into
convention, that moment of rigidity goes on to be a form a space-
making, the map.
Stanza 36 refs to shit essential convention for neopastoral (see
Haslam etc) - here it takes graphic shape if the "hard & black" turd
is also the thin tall "I" on the page, the contaminated shifter that
shifts with the self, not integral but not expellable wholly, but only
as detritus that inflects the exchangeable brittleness of the
conventional sign.
Stanza 41 is "draft" the end process rather than what is surpassed,
what is left for analysis to become? Is this the margin
essentialised, in which case analysis would be the victim, or does
"draft" refer to endless attempts to regulate world environment?
Very rough notes - for the draft terrain of the screen.
Peter
Peter Larkin
Philosophy & Literature Librarian
University of Warwick Library
Coventry CV4 7AL UK
Tel: 01203 528151 Fax: 01203 524211
Email: [log in to unmask]
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