Spent the first part of the morning typing out from the notebook and then looking at the words on the page. However my mind isn’t really in it – so I’ll turn to another Riddle of Form post...



Riddles of Form Eight

Poetry & Minimalism

Mark Truscott

*

Here’s Walt Whitman:

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains
of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world ...

(from ‘Song of Myself’)

and here’s Mark Truscott:

bird

sky
or
sky

(‘Ornament’ – the poem in its entirety)

The contrast is immediately clear. Where Whitman expands, Truscott contracts. And yet ...

I’ve headed this section ‘Poetry & Minimalism’ but perhaps it’s not a very accurate title. The peculiarity of Truscott’s work is that for all it’s seeming reductiveness it – paradoxically – expands. Poems which seem at first sight one-shot deals start to take over your mind and expand with possibilities. Haiku logic? Beckettian negative aesthetics of paring the text to the bone? The old Mies van der Rohe cliche? Let’s see ...

i.

Mark Truscott’s poems – often no more than a handful of words on a page – pose some major questions about what is a poem, a line, of why there is so little. Furthermore, of what there is – why this? And then wider questions of the very act of reading: the eye ranging over the page, of the development of reading (how words start to suggest and connote), of the relation between silent reading with the eye and a spoken reading with the tongue and ear.

“Up to a certain time I was cutting into things. Then I realized that the thing I was cutting was the cut. Rather than cut into the material, I now use the material as the cut in space.” (Carl Andre)

Reading Truscott’s poems you sense a microscopic focus upon the potentialities of language: of a word, of its composite letters, of the space between and around the printed word, even of a ‘between-ness’ between sound and visual mark. (I’m reminded of Giacometti’s tiny sculptures – working ever smaller to expand space.)

A good question: where do these poems ‘take place’? Not purely on the page. Not purely in the ear. Which, of course, could be argued for poetry in general. And that, I think, is one of the great values of Truscott’s work. His hyper-attention to language revitalizes one’s reading in general. You finish a Truscott poem and start reading Shakespeare. Suddenly the adjacencies of two words leap out as a potential ‘Truscott’ poem. Sitting waiting for the pool to open a fragmentary phrase starts to open up:

letters ... let tears ... airs ...

I think these are also superb poems to transform what poetry is – or could be – for students. The vocabulary is minimal, there is rarely the need to look words up in the dictionary, hey! you don’t even have to turn the page – that’s the entire poem in six words! “I could do that!” – to which the only reply is: then try it ... .

As in Carl Andre’s statement above, I sense that Truscott’s poems are ‘interventions’ in poetry – in daily language for that matter. They are entities in themselves yet also cuts into the surrounding world of words.

I’ll offer a reading of a few poems from ‘said like reeds and things’ – which isn’t to be exhaustive: there are longer poems both on the page and run across pages. However, I think (& hope) the following will give a sense of what’s stimulating about Truscott’s writing.

ii.

EXTENSION


one

on

one

no

__

(I’ll place a small line below to show the end of the poem. In the actual text Truscott opts for a poem a page, the title in capitals, the poem printed high on the page ranged left – not, as one might have done, centred both vertically and horizontally. I assume this is meant to reinforce the tiny effect: it’s as if there could be more – but there’s not.)

There’s several things I like about this poem – taking it on its own, first, although it is immediately followed by ‘EXTENSION’ which demands to be read in tandem.

First, the typographic similarity of ‘one’, ‘on’, ‘no’ combined with the judicious lacing of each word on a separate line but retaining a line space between each line. Exquisite. Here already we hit something of a paradox: for the sparseness of the writing there’s something lush about Truscott’s volume. It’s beautifully designed by Darren Wershler-Henry. The graphics, the typeface, the very page quality are to be savoured. Snow figures in several of these poems and it’s that kind of deep fresh snowfall effect – where your footsteps sink satisfyingly into the powder.

Second, what for me – and I expect many readers – was the initial ‘one liner’ effect. Ha! He’s switched “on” around to get “no” – clever. Next poem ... I really think we shouldn’t be too sophisticated to fall for this effect in the poems. However ...

Third, if this was all, then Truscott’s work wouldn’t be of great interest. He’d be a kind of poetic jokesmith – a minimalist cummings. I think there’s a lot more going on. Let’s think about Truscott’s lexicon. In this instance “one”. He seems to deliberately choose a word which suggests entirety, indivisibility, a discrete entity. In addition, it hinges between two different ‘languages’ – existing as a mathematical integer and the linguistic marker for self or person. Any reading of the poem will have to maintain these different senses in mind. Do we read the poem mathematically or philosophically or erotically (!) or ...

Fourth, a deliberate setting in opposition of syntactic, semantic and typographic dimensions of the poem. Thus, our normal habits of thought lead us to expect ‘one’ plus ‘one’ equals ‘two’. Accretion. And, I think it is fair to say, upward development: I place one penny upon another. In Truscott’s poem, the eye moves downwards and finds the expected mathematical logic defeated: “no”.

Fifth, developing this further, “on” reads as a contraction of “one” to the eye – the ‘e’ has been removed. An effect reinforced by the equally amputated (but inverted) “no”. The title suggests extension – the poem itself operates a counter logic.

However ... (and this is where I really take my hat off to Mark Truscott) to read with the ear opens up another dimension of the poem. As delicately as a Robert Creeley, Truscott teases his vowel apart: the ‘o’ in “one” shapes to “on” returns to “one” then expands to “no”. It’s delicious! Truscott reminds us of how we lazily see an ‘o’ in “one” but don’t as such hear it. And, furthermore, pulls off a stunning paradox: the word of negation (semantically) is – compositionally in the poem – the word of expansion (aurally).

Wow!


iii.


EXTENDED

one

on

one

or

____

Here, of course, there’s the little joke that this poem – another four-worder – could be regarded as an ‘extension’ of an already tiny poem. Particularly when, on closer scrutiny, it seems identical but for the last word. As several people have said to me – “if he can get paid for writing so little more fool you for buying the book.”

Yet I think there is a provocative element to Truscott’s writing – which could extend to an entire aesthetic politics – but I’ll leave that to one side for now. Back to the poem ...

Here Truscott does develop upon the previous poem – “or” is less a reversal typographically than a reduction: Truscott thinks with a printer’s instinct spotting the loss between ‘n’ and ‘r’. To the ear, there is an extension of the ‘o’ vowel – the long ‘o’ replaced by the ‘or’ sound which is still perceptibly longer than ‘one’ and ‘on’. Semantically, there is a further development – an extension, indeed – as the closed logic of “one/ on/ one/ no” * opens to the wider possibility of “or”.

But I want to go back to the vey experience of reading such poems. Yes, the initial ‘puzzle’ and pleasure of recognizing the twist. Then, the development as the words start to expand in space and thought. Simply typing this reading of – what? - eight words has taken an hour and a half. The effect is vertiginous. What if one were to read everything as a Truscott poem? Poem ... page ... word ... time ... the room ... the sky ... expands. Dizzying!

iv.

Here are a few more poems to ponder and I might come back to them after lunch ...

NEGATIVE

Oh, it
snowed.

__


SOUNDING


odd eolith ogre aphesis

__


FALL

in grass

missed

eyeless

__

HAP


a one

an on


__

FUCK

image is seven.

__





*typing this I suddenly hear the entire works of Samuel Beckett – Truscott manages to outdo The Unnameable’s last staggering words?