Riddles of Form – Six

Easy Poem? Difficult Poem? (II)

A Drop of Golden Sun – Ray DiPalma’s ‘Fragment’



Fragment

sooner or later the sun cracks rebecca
sooner or later the sun hits
and not much is left of her
and cabbage the dog

misery is singing its pennies on the horizon
and rebecca of the sleek mechanics kisses
her knuckles

sick rebecca
of the tick and lop
inches through the dry foliage
cashes in her stockings

1001 sharks the sun
re-b re-b re-b
hawks and sharp stones

*

i.

There’s a picture I have in mind of a medieval monk sat at his writing desk with a page before him. He is copying the Gospel and decorating the letters. Through the stained glass window light falls upon the page he is working on. The message is clear: God’s light illuminates man’s work. Man devotes himself to bringing God’s Word to light – and life. The Word Incarnate. Logos.

However, in Ray DiPalma’s poem the terms have changed.

sooner or later the sun cracks rebecca

The sun “cracks rebecca” damaging, breaking apart, fragmenting the name. Is it even a name? DiPalma denies “rebecca” her capital, the mark of individuality and the properness of the proper noun. The “Rebecca” of the Old Testament, wife of Isaac, whose name means – by various accounts – to tie, to bind, a snare – is reduced to “rebecca” one word among others.

ii.

The title. The poem is ‘a’ fragment? Or the poem fragments? Noun or verb – we cannot decide. Certainly a glance at other poems that DiPalma is writing at the same period suggest that fragmentation is a major preoccupation. From ‘Exile’:

Above the tracks
a steep embank-
ment. Limestone.
Mud. Weeds. A
concrete wall
...

From ‘She’:

She multiplies and divides consolation in my hands.
She cuts down my vision with her eyes.
She consumes all so that we both might want.

...

In the first case, DiPalma breaks with the referential pull of language to describe a scene (itself of broken windows and a dangling staircase). Each section of the poem lures the reader with its prepositional logic – “Above the tracks”; “Below”; “To the left”; “To the right”. The short line and severe enjambment break sense units leading to radical shifts of reference:

Mud. Weeds. A

The indefinite article – literally ‘indefinite’ here – is juxtaposed with concrete nouns, plausibly ‘real’ in the landscape. It’s as though a letter has fallen out of the sky and lodged itself in the ground.

In the second example what seems to be a traditional ‘blazon’ poem celebrating through itemizing the attractions of the beloved is twisted into a surreal cataloguing of attributes kept together by the repetitive “she” at the start of each line and the coincidence of sounds being worked counter to the discordant imagery. Notice, though, how each line is “cracked” apart – DiPalma inserts an extra space between “She” and the rest of the sentence. Here it seems DiPalma’s focus is not so much on prepositional logic as the pull of the personal pronoun. “She” acts as a semantic ‘glue’ giving the incoherent coherence.

iii.

It might seem paradoxical to say it but one of the pleasures I derive from reading Ray DiPalma’s poems is that I do not know how to read them. How out of keeping this seems in a society of consumerism where immediate availability and satisfaction are unchallenged beliefs.

Let’s look at the first verse:

sooner or later the sun cracks rebecca
sooner or later the sun hits
and not much is left of her
and cabbage the dog

A reader looking for conventional ‘sense’ will already be baffled. We have what seems to be a horrible accident involving the sun striking a girl called Rebecca. Little is left of her as well as her pet dog who happens to be called Cabbage. Some kind of warped children’s book? Ray DiPalma meets Edward Gorey?

I think it is useful to take the children’s story a little further – not for the ‘sense’ so much as the connotative values of the style. Might DiPalma be wanting to evoke a return to first reading? When we first learned our ABCs? When letters of the alphabet came accompanied by pictures and words with sounds? (A is for Apple ... The dog goes ‘bow wow’ ... And notice how the penultimate line suggests a stumbling first reader spelling out the name). In this context the very choice of name seems more than coincidental:

r – e – b – e – c – c – a

how it incorporates the first three letters of the alphabet. How it suggests another ‘reb’ word – rebus – which, according to the SOED, is:

“an enigmatical representation of a name, word or phrase by figures, pictures, arrangement of letters etc. which suggest the syllables of which it is made up.”

Going further still, DiPalma also seems to be evoking the cadence and rhythm of a children’s song – try saying the first lines (slightly modified) to a melody such as ‘Oh, dear what can the matter be’:

soo-ner or la-ter the sun cracks re-be-cca
soo-ner or la-ter dee-dee-dee dee-dee-dee
soo-ner or la-ter and not much is left of her ...

It seems to possess that kind of child’s sing song voice only to flatten it with “and cabbage the dog”. It’s as if DiPalma is inviting a reading only to block it. A sense reinforced by the first and second lines – line two fails to complete the pattern established by the first.

iv.

“Patterns occupy my desires” writes DiPalma in another poem of this period – ‘Poem’. We have to be careful identifying DiPalma with the ‘voice’ of his poems but it is a revealing statement. That first verse again:

sooner or later the sun cracks rebecca
sooner or later the sun hits
and not much is left of her
and cabbage the dog

Working against the forward logic of the syntax is very evident repetition: lines one and two opening “sooner or later” and lines three and four “and”. It is this attention to form – rather than sequential reading – which seems particularly important when reading this poem. We have to go back to basics, relearn our ABCs so to speak, when reading DiPalma. The sounds, the shapes, the syllables of words are once again physical things we have to negotiate rather than – as with acquired habits of reading – things we take for granted.

v.

Words are letters. Rebecca – or, more accurately – r-e-b-e-c-c-a. Thinking differently, thinking now in terms of formal patterns, the poem starts to yield some interesting possibilities.

“rebecca” is similar in structure to “cabbage” – sharing a repeated consonant and six early letters of the alphabet. They’re not anagrams – but there is a distinct resemblance.

The eye starts to travel down the page and hits upon another ‘doubling’ structure: “1001”. Here the symmetry is perfect. It seems as though DiPalma is deliberately using this as a formal logic.

The eye travels back up the page and other ‘doublings’ declare themselves: “sOOner” – itself doubled; “sINGING”; “peNNies”; “kiSSes”.

vi.

Words are sounds. Another pleasure to be found in DiPalma’s poetry is the way the eye and the ear are being simultaneously brought into the act of reading. Transferring the ‘doubling’ logic, it is evident that it is at work at the level of sound.

In verse one: the repeated last syllable in “sooner” and “later” which echoes in “rebecca”.

In verse two: “rebecca” can be heard in “mechanics”.

Alert to such sound patternings, the ear listens more closely and experiences a dizzying sense of possibilities. To take only a few examples:

The shared short vowel in “not” and “dog” and “lop”. The “ic” sound running from “mechanics” to “sick” to “tick”. The “un” sound “1001” (one thou’sun’d and one) and “sun”.

In the line “misery is singing its pennies on the horizon”, “pennies on” echoes “horizon”.


Then what of the chains of sound DiPalma seems to be setting in motion? “Sooner” modulating to “sun” heard in passing through “pennies on” to “1001” to “sun” and then “stones”. The complex play of ‘k’/’c’ seen and heard in:

and rebeCCa of the sleeK meCHaniCs Kisses
her KNuCKles

siCK rebeCCa

and one more – the strange fragmentation effected in the last verse:

1001 sharks the sun
re-b re-b re-b
hawks and sharp stones

where “sharks” is split apart in to “hawKS” and “SHARp”.

It is a strange experience to become so focused upon what usually seem side effects of written communication. How DiPlama seems to be foregrounding the letters and syllables as potentially meaningful in themselves. Yet, to go back to our earliest experience of reading, this is how we started to ‘make sense’ of a line of text. And might one go even further and see fragmentation happening even at the level of the letter itself -

o e c

as we return to our earliest experiences of holding a pencil and shaping the letters of the alphabet?

Where does such reading end?

vii.

For while the eye and ear are dancing around the page finding such formal logics, the poem still proceeds by means of semantic logic – if one that is frequently broken or shifts across different schemes of meaning.

In verse two:

misery is singing its pennies on the horizon

A monetary theme is introduced* – seen later in “cashes in her stockings” – yet it’s hard not to read the line more ‘poetically’ as rain and a knowing allusion to ‘Pennies from Heaven’ and interesting for its theme of taking simple pleasures for granted (blue skies, the new moon, reading?) until they are removed and ‘paid’ for.

and rebecca of the sleek mechanics kisses
her knuckles

DiPalma’s Italian ancestry would lead him to understand the rich signifying possibilities of hand gestures but what – exactly – does it mean to kiss your knuckles? Success? (You can see Obama’s ‘knuckle kiss’ with his wife on You Tube). Or a slang expression for a punch?





In verse three, “rebecca” transforms herself into an insect:

sick rebecca
of the tick and lop
inches through the dry foliage
cashes in her stockings

She’s a “tick”, an inchworm, perhaps even a bookworm eating her way through dull pages. How interesting, too, that after the ABCs of verse one, here DiPalma might be alluding to the song ‘The Inch Worm’ with its chorus about learning your numbers – “rebecca” is an arithme-tick:

Two and two are four
Four and four are eight
Eight and eight are sixteen
Sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two

with two verses sung in counterpoint:

Inchworm, inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds,
You and your arithmetic,
You'll probably go far.

Inchworm, inchworm,
Measuring the marigolds
Seems to me you'd stop and see
How beautiful they are.

Language acquisition and numeracy – two stages in the process of the child’s education and social integration. The movement, too, from Innocence to Experience and how tempting it is to hear the famous lines by Blake “O Rose thou art sick” in DiPalma’s line eight: “sick rebecca”.

Tempting, too, to hear a deliberate fragmentation in “tick and lop” of “politick”.

And if so – so?

viii.

“I am/Going around with a code of upheavals” (DiPalma, ‘Paradigm’)

In a – perhaps - vain attempt to shape these readings into something that ‘makes sense’ I’ll use DiPalma’s own words: a code – or codes – of upheavals. Is this not the experience of reading a poem such as ‘Fragment’. It’s not so much nothing makes sense as too much is making too much sense. Our reading works from the individual letter shapes to consonant-vowel patterns, to competing discourses, to allusions to popular culture and literature, to anagrammatical inversions and perversions.

I’m deeply intrigued as to what makes someone write like this – or, rather, how someone comes to write like this. It appears so cerebral and yet in a statement made in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book DiPalma seemed resistant to theoretical thinking – “I prefer example to precept” - and his selection of a quotation from Wittgenstein seems especially revealing:

“329. When I think in language, there aren’t ‘meanings’ going through my head in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle of thought.”

The last verse is instructive, too:

1001 sharks the sun
re-b re-b re-b
hawks and sharp stones

The preoccupation with childhood rhymes returns in “sharp stones” – “sticks and stones/ will break my bones/ but names will never hurt me”. A little far fetched, perhaps, but justified in this poem so concerned with names and hurt “the sun cracks rebecca”.

Yet what else “cracks”? I think DiPalma is concerned with language itself and the ‘damaged’ meaning we deal with in the modern world. “1001” can be read as ‘one thousand and one’ but it is also the very basis of computer code: ones and zeroes. ‘Thinking’ in terms of artificial intelligence becomes simply a matter of 1 or 0; ‘on/off’ logics. Much as ‘o’ is not ‘c’ is not ‘e’, or as ‘rebecca’ is not ‘cabbage’ or ‘sharks’ are not ‘hawks’ or ‘sharp’ stones.

Then there is “re-b” which we read earlier as the first uncertain attempts to read the first syllable of “rebecca”. Might it also be an early music lesson with a less than talented pupil requiring the assistance of a helpful tutor?

“Oh let's see if I can make it easier ...

Doe - a deer, a female deer
Ray - a drop of golden sun
Me - a name i call myself
Far - a long long way to run
Sew - a needle pulling thread
La - a note to follow so
Tea - a drink with jam and bread
That will bring us back to do oh oh oh”

(Maria in The Sound of Music)

We all know how the song goes. How interesting that Ray Dipalma ushers his own name into this name-obsessed text (Ray: ‘re’, the ‘hopeful’ tone) which works rebus-like to associate sound with image – in this case “a drop of golden sun” (and we’re back to line five and ‘Pennies from Heaven’).**

Solfege – or, as DiPalma might prefer – solfeggio is the scale created by Guido of Arezzo. The notes are taken from The Hymn of St John:
Ut queant laxis resonāre fibris
Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.
(So that these your servants can, with all their voice, to sing your wonderful feats, clean the blemish of our spotted lips. O Saint John)



DiPalma places two systems of ordering – computer binary logic and the Western musical scale. Codes. And it is no longer a matter of asking which is right, which holds the key – rather it is the acknowledgment that this is where we are: in the cracks between competing systems of meaning. As DiPalma quotes in his text ‘Tying and Untying’ previously mentioned (its very title so apposite here):

“The poem as simultaneous structure, impersonal, autonomous, released from the charge of expression, of assertion; the poem as arbitrary construct, absurd, self-destroying, no longer aspiring to convince or even to hoax.”

A quotation which he – significantly – attributes to ‘Source Unknown’.

To return to my opening image of the monastic scriptorium this is what we have lost: a writing bathed in the light of faith. There is no longer the guarantee of The Word – yet we remain fascinated and under its spell. Here I detect a doubleness right at the heart of DiPalma’s work – a recognition of a ‘postmodern’ condition of competing codes of discourse and meaning with no ultimate authoritative Truth. While, at the same time, a desire to explore these meanings as if to find some consolation. “Cabbage” is so close to “cabbala” (Kaballah) (in fact it is one of those differentiations listed for computer spell checks etc.).

Here is not the place to develop ideas on Kaballah in full but to sketch out its relevance for a reading of DiPalma’s poetry:

i) God as matter and spirit, as Truth, yet is unknowable
ii) the ‘emanations’ (Sephirot) through which Truth can be approached
iii) the emanations which are vowel sounds
iv) a concept of reading by which everything – letters, words, numbers, even accents – contain ‘hidden’ senses.

The first word unknowable, let’s leave the last word with DiPalma’s mysterious ‘Source Unknown’:

“... the poem as agent of transformation, equal in value to the poet himself and therefore capable of changing him; the poem as means of escape from identity; leading to a world of contemplation, indifference, bliss.”

_______________________

* "cabbage" is slang - mostly in the US (?) for money
** also, of course, Daphne du Maurier's novel 'Rebecca' in which the narrator's witheld name is a key element of the plot (after she receives a note from Maxim, she says how her name was "spelt correctly, an unusual thing").