Apologies for cross-posting

Re WORD SCORE UTTERANCE TEXT edited by Cobbing and Upton 156pp, 42 poets,
ISBN 0 86162 750 4 Scheduled for publication late October 98

Further to my recent posting, Robert Sheppard has agreed to his article
being posted here. Thanks to Robert.

Don't forget - L6.50 plus postage from New River Project 89a Petherton Road
London N5 8QT UK


A THING OR TWO UPON THE PAGE
The contributors to this volume have been invited because of their
fascinating, and fascinatingly diverse, approaches to an apparently similar
situation. They produce (at least) two types of text which can be described
as verbal and visual (to leave aside the vocal that surfaces also as an
aspect of these works). That these two types may be reproduced, from
authors' copy, on separate and contiguous pages, might be the only
relationship that can be claimed for them. Yet it is clear from the
statements of poetics that each writer has also produced, that the nature of
that relationship is very seldom one of contingency or peaceful
co-existence. Whereas some artists see themselves as engaged in two (or
three) separate activities, like Franz Mon, others usefully dispute the
distinction that the page divisions of this project have contentiously set
up; the appearance of the fashionable word "hybrid" in the statements of
Spencer Selby and Steve McCaffery testifies to this.
The question is one of medium. In contributor Johanna Drucker's The Visible
Word, Expcrimcntal Typography and Modern Art 1909-1923, she sees the
typographical experiments of Modernism (which she continues in her own work)
as a material practice with two orders of materiality. The first is the
"stuff of apparency" (Drucker: 45), the "sheer concrete thingness of
printer's type", as another contributor, Edwin Morgan, put it. (Cobbing and
Mayer: 21) Such an order may not exclude questions of historical and
cultural value; the same text on paper, brass or gold surely is validated
differently. Secondly, Drucker reminds us, following Saussure, the text is
bound also by the relational signifying system we call language. There is
no necessary connection between these material codes; whereas the linguistic
system is rule-bound (in terms of grammar, syntax, etc.) even when the rules
are broken, the realm of the visual is less encoded, although historical
conventions are not absent. A comparison of Tom Leonard's agitprop slogan
poster poem and Clemente Padin's "Destability Stabled" will reveal, in the
first, that the two systems are complementary, and in the second that the
visual expression undermines and complicates the verbal content.
Yet this doubleheaded materiality is ever present in language, in Leonard's
piece, and in all physical inscription of language. Writing is not on paper,
like a flat projection upon a screen, but is in the paper, as it were.
"Materiality of language," as McCaffery says, "is that aspect which remains
resistant to an absolute subsumption into the ideality of meaning .... To
see the letter not as phoneme but as ink, and to further insist on that
materiality, inevitably contests the status of language as a bearer of
uncontaminated meaning." (Perloff: 129) As some contributors say, such
"contamination" of Drucker's two systems is present in the physical
appearance on the page of the "verbal" texts. This is not simply a question
of design, layout, presentation, but of a visual syntax. There are no
non-meaningful elements of a poem, in this sense, and questions of the
spatial orientation of language on the page affect the reader's active
engagement, and can be used to deliberately affect that engagement in many
ways. This is relevant whether one is faced with Mallarmé, Olson, computer
or hypertext poetry; or, as a teacher, the unreadable purple loops of an
embellished exam script!.
The spatial field of the page has often suggested notation, whether it is in
the precise spacing of Jackson Mac Low's "Forties" or the openness of
Cobbing's visual sound-scapes. Both imply eye-movement as text-realisation,
present in both language and the visual, but again more coded in language
(left to right, top to bottom, for example) than in the image (though
conventions of perspective, centre and frame may dictate starting points).
But what happens when language is read in that visual field?
To turn to purely visual work, an escape from the linguistic system into the
more open semiosis of the visual field can, in differing degrees, effect a
critique, or even dismissal of, the constrictions of language. In certain
texts here, language as system is absent, or skeletally present as ink on a
page, or is replaced by recognisable image (and even figuration, especially
in collage pieces). The avoidance of the discursive in the figural is
analogous to the attitude of sculptor Anish Kapoor who speaks of his
suspicion of objects. A similar suspicion towards language as system is
demonstrated here, along with a fascination with page space (and, by
extension, book-space, in the work of book artists and others).
Some work collected here almost magically holds the two "systems" in a
separate and parallel state. Drucker's spatiality matches the semantic with
a rare poise and assurance. McCaffery on the other hand talks of presenting
a number of writing systems on one plane. It is in some of the more hybrid
texts that the system of language and the field of the visible collapse into
one another, beyond the typographical doubleness described and enacted by
Drucker. Each begins to take on aspects of the other. Letter forms or what
might be letter forms, lose their relation to the system (and this doesn't
only happen in the use of alien writing systems, as in Maggie O'Sullivan's
designs). Yet shape and image begin to take on the look of letter shapes,
symbols in an alien script, something that it forced upon the performer of
such texts, for that is what a reader has become (whether or not one rises
to one's feet with Bob Cobbing and begins to sound the texts as a score).
The irruption of thingness in language, as I've hinted above, is the
irruption of material historical occasion, of making, validation, and
performance of the text, that will unsettle linguistic system, and declare
its rooted but excessive presence.
But materiality has not only been used as part of a materialist poetics. A
hundred years ago (and where were the celebrations of this fact?) Mallarmé's
Un Coup de Dés dissolved syntax, opened up the page, varied type size and
style, and margins, partly as a critique of the case of early modern
newspaper design, yet its aim was an ideality of the Book. The paradox is
that, like the contemplation of yantra or icon, an intense perception of
material, significantly disrupted, affords access to a metaphysical realm,
even a spirituality, or (as one contributor argues) to a pre-verbal state of
primeval responsiveness. This paradoxical and, from the point of view of the
poetics I have so far outlined, an opposing view of verbal and visual
practices, can he found in some of the statements contained here. I don't
personally share this view of language and the visual, but it does point to
one of the commonalities of this work: the fact of the made thingness of the
work diminishes the ro1e of selfhood in artistic creation. It also serves as
a reminder of two things: firstly, poetics is a prescriptive, yet
speculative, and suggestive, discourse (unlike the formulations of theory
and criticism) and what it enables is almost as important as what it says;
secondly, that the models of language and the visual are themselves
historically and culturally unstable, and open to continual re-negotiation.
Such work as contained here, whether verbal, visual, hybrid, or whatever it
does or doesn't designate itself, has its place in those re-negotiations.
Its power, in the most general terms, lies in its ability to test and
contest the limits of language, the limits of the visual, and, ultimately,
the limits of the world. Its refusal of boundaries, or its shifting of
these, its exceeding of the boundaries, its excessive drawing into the fixed
areas of literary and art practice of techniques and materials usually
regarded as extraneous, is one of the great challenges that can be made in
this era. As computer technologies conflate the visual and the verbal, an
art which persists and resists at the meeting points of these systems
(whether or not it partakes of the still "new" technologies, and oddly very
little of what is contained here does) is particularly relevant and
exciting. You will discover, as you read the following pages, quite a few
things upon and into them, as the generalities of introduction give way to
specific practices and specific pleasures.
Robert Sheppard May 1998

Cobbing B. and Mayer, P. Concerning Concrete Poetry, Writers Forum, 1978
Drucker, J The Visible Word, The University of Chicago Press, 1994
Perloff, M. Radical Artifice, The University of Chicago Press, 1991
Copyright (c) Robert Sheppard 1998




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