abstractions of chinchilla

Today, boys and girls, we’re going to look at ‘Song of the Chinchilla’ by Lisa Jarnot*.

I liked the poem immediately – and I’ve given it to 9th Graders who wrote some pretty stunning 20-minute poems in imitation. However, it was interesting to see one of our ‘top’ 12th Grade English students struggle with it – revealing something about how we teach poetry, what we teach. Which is as much to say how we have been taught poetry and what we have been taught.

To clear the ground right from the start. It is – just about – possible to imagine La Lisa ‘en vacances’, wandering the streets in France (Paris, most likely), seeing a woman (a Parisienne, more than likely) in a fur coat. Knowing a little about Lisa, it is hard to imagine she’d be happy about fur coats and so the poem could be a ‘lament’ (a Moaner Lisa poem?) about the fur industry, about callous consumerism, about a particular day/woman/fur coat. And this was what our student came up with in the end. Furthermore, that the poem lacked rhyme or identifiable rhythm, and was really automatic prose chopped up to make it loook like poetry. And all this said with a general disdain for the text – as if we were trying to catch him out with a secret ‘bad’ poem.

Don’t get me wrong, this is a very good student which makes the reading all the more instructive. And I know that – aged eighteen – this student’s reactions would have been mine.

Here are the first lines:

You chinchilla in the marketplace in france
you international chinchilla, chinchilla of the
plains and mountains all in fur you fur of the
chinchilla of the pont neuf, selling wrist
watches, on the oldest bridge of evolution that
you are, you, chinchilla ...

i) Is it an animal?

As in many of Lisa’s poems, there seems to be a deliberate use of proper nouns (places, people, animals) which make the poems immediately ‘accessible’ and – in many cases – funny. Furthemore, “chinchilla” sounds funny (or at least interestingly exotic to the English ear) – something to do with the internal echo “chin/chill” the ‘ch’ consonant sounds and the short ‘i’ vowels. You might also find chinchillas funny little animals – or armadillos or lemurs or aadvarks for that matter, other creatures that live in Lisa’s poems.

However, at the very moment the poem seems to depend upon the animal, a reader’s competence in zoology, or a Ted Hughes-like descriptive realism, the chinchilla ‘vanishes’ into language.

I make it fifteen ‘namings’ of the chinchilla and each time it is less present as the little furry animal. It starts to decompose into its constituent syllables and sounds and even into its letters.

In a sense, ‘c-h-i-n-c-h-i-l-l-a’ becomes a set of possibilities, notes – if we want to transfer to music – with which Lisa can build her variations:

‘chinchilla’ can be split into further words:

‘chin’ + ‘chill’ + ‘chiller’ + ‘in’ + ‘ill’ + ‘a’

some of which she takes others she leaves unspoken but implied

‘chinchilla’ can also initiate a series of assonantal rhyme words:

“chinchilla in” followed by “in the market place” followed by “in france” followed by “you international chinchilla”. ‘In’ threaded through the first two lines and beyond.

ii) Harmolodics?

Again, music is the best analogy. No sooner are we pulling out the ‘in’ chords, there’s the ‘ch’ chord at work subtly ‘diminshed’ with ‘sh’ and ‘ss’ sounds:

“You chinchilla” then “marketplace” then “france” then “international”.

And, to an RP English ear, a long ‘a’ sound seems to be at work in:

“chinchilla” then “marketplace” then “france”

although I accept US English might bend the vowel in “france” rather differently.

And I love a kind of ‘reverse’ rhyme effect achieved across lines 3 and 4: “all in fur you fur” with “pont neuf”. Fur neuf, as Georges Perec would say.

The poem dazzles with its harmonic play of sound. And, I suggest, a necessary part of this pleasure is the constant awareness of reference even as it is being denied. “Chinchilla” is an animal. You buy cheese at “the marketplace”. There is a country called France – and it is no accident that Lisa drops the capital. Things, places, animals are ‘evoked’ and yet the life of the poem is not ‘out there’.

iii) Apostrophes?

No coincidence that Lisa should employ in many poems the rhetorical device of apostrophe. It is the gesture of language to an (absent) referent – lover, country, King, dead poet, etc. The word stretches out to touch the ‘real’ while being forever firmly in place on the page. Thus:

“You chinchilla .../you international chinchilla .../ ...”

The effect is comical (ever talked to a chincilla?), bathetic (a chinchilla doesn’t seem to merit such epic tones), oddly wistful (even melancholic as the poem reaches its close).

Again, the reader is seduced, here not so much by reference ‘out’ to a real world, as the voice of the poet. A ‘real’ is created by means of a device true to the speaking voice.

Yet, here again, just as the poem is in danger of falling into the predictable – a kind of Disney nature film effect: “who-is-this-little-fellow-then?” – reference explodes the realism.

What is a “dark arabian chinchilla”? What are “abstractions of chinchilla”? Can you really have an “aperitif chinchilla”?

Here the signified is set at angles to the persuasive tones of the speaking voice. The more the chinchilla is addressed, the more its qualities and attributes serve to lose it among seemingly infinite equivalences.

iv) Anaconda or anaphora?

Indeed, where does it stop? How long can Lisa sustain the surrealist encyclopedia entry for “Chinchilla, noun”? And here we need to talk about anaphora – that device for creating order through repetition. Irrespective of the items or subsequent phrases, the initial word/phrase sets a sequential logic in play.

Ginsberg uses it in ‘Howl’, Smart uses it in ‘Jubilate Agno’:

For in the education of children it is necessary to watch the words, -which they pronounce with difficulty, for such are against them in their consequences.

For A is awe, if pronounced full. Stand in awe and sin not.

For B pronounced in the animal is bey importing authority.

For C pronounced hard is ke importing to shut.

For D pronounced full is day.

For E is east particularly when formed little e with his eye.

For F in it's secondary meaning is fair.

For G in a secondary sense is good.

For H is heave.

For I is the organ of vision.

For K is keep.

For L is light, and ל [Hebrew character lamed] is the line of beauty.

For M is meet.

For N is nay.

For O is over.

For P is peace.

For Q is quarter.

For R is rain, or thus reign, or thus rein.

For S is save.

For T is take.

For V is veil.

For W is world.

For X [drawn as a backwards G and a G stuck together] beginneth not, but connects and continues.

For Y is young -- the Lord direct me in the better way of going on in the Fifth year of my jeopardy June the 17th N.S. 1760. God be gracious to Dr YOUNG.

For Z is zest. God give us all a relish of our duty.

For Action and Speaking are one according to God and the Ancients.

Smart’s poem is constructed upon anaphora and belief. Belief that every moment must be given over to praise of Creation. And that way madness lies. For what cannot be included? Yet, given our time-bound existence, what can be said and done when all is said and done? (Here Christopher Smart meets Samuel Beckett. Look at the long sequences of alternatives in Beckett’s ‘Watt’). A sentence is an expanse of time. If I say this, I am not saying that. I have already fallen behind. Syntax squeezes the breath out of me like a snake in its coils.

In Lisa’s poems anaphora becomes a way of opening up the crazy independent creative logic of language. It makes sense (the structural logic) while making nonsense (the semantic value). Why not a chinchilla tractor? Or a chincilla sock? Or a chinchilla whale? Or a chincilla China chin? The categories are heterogeneous (although urban and rural geographical locations recur), potentially infinite, yet are given credit due to the formal arrangement – syntactic and grammatical.

v) “You just go on your nerve”

Thus spake O’Hara & it’s a typically throw-away remark concealing an entire aesthetics. You go on your nerve in the sense of risking the poem. Don’t step back into the predictable. Why use the safety net of established form or iambic pentameter? You go on your nerve, also, in the sense of what your blood stream is telling you. Your rhythm, your pulse, your breath and its flow with your heart and the art within your arteries. Or, as Charles Olson put it:

“Now (3) the process (italicized) of the thing, how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be boiled down to one statement ... ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. It means exactly what it says, is a matter of, at all (italicized) points (even, I should say, of our managment of daily reality as of the daily work) get on with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed, the perceptions, theirs, the acts, the split second acts, the whole business, keep it moving as fast as you can, citizen. And if you set up as a poet, USE USE USE the process at all points, in any given poem always ... “ (‘Projective Verse’, 1950)

I’m fascinated by the line turns in the poem:

“france/you”, “the/plains”, “the/chinchilla”, “wrist/watch”, “that/you”, “towards/the”, “the/neutral”, “of/chinchilla”, “aperitif/chinchilla”, “mind,/dark”, “tractor/of”, “the/chinchilla”, “dawn,/facilitator”, “the/food”

Listed like this the turns lose a lot. Like a spring, the poem’s wire is turned to create energy. I sense Lisa is working by breath** while also knowing how to allow a phrase to complete (line one) for sense or cadence, or to deliberately disrupt (line two, the surprise to find “chinchilla of the (pause as the line turns) plains and mountains” or the sly “wrist/watches” where “wrist” is etymologically re-activated in its writhing turn). Then, within each line, the distribution of the clauses creates sub-rhythms too complex to do justice to here.

Thus the false opposition between ‘what is being talked about’ and ‘style’. ‘Song of the Chinchilla’ is not a poem ‘about’ chinchillas, or fur coats, or Paris, or a biographically definite day. It is not a poem ‘expressing’ the poet’s paraphrasable views on the fur trade or life in France. It “is” its energy: the complex interplay of word, sound, rhythm, reference, tone. And I wouldn’t go so far as to say it is ‘purely’ language – which would invite the defensive retort: ‘oh, it's just words, so I was right it’s just playing with sound’. The energy of the poem seems to be precisely in its tension between a very definite set of signifieds and the verbal material. And I’d even say, it is – ultimately – 'expressive'. While I can relate elements of the poem to Ginsberg, or Smart, or O’Hara (and other readers will find their own echoes) it is very much a Lisa Jarnot poem, it possesses her 'poetic DNA' traceable in the articulations of its linguistic anatomy.

It is also terrific.


(*from the collection ‘Ring of Fire’)

(**I don't want to suggest Lisa is purely intuitive - look at her teaching sites for evidence of the theoretical underpinnings of the poetry)

(***chinchilla image derived from Zoomschool.com)