Riddles of Form


“we keep around for the gist of the drift”


(Further thoughts on Ray DiPalma)


*

rumour’s rooster
halloos the distorted
strata of analogies

my A is a vegetable A
my Z is a vegetable A
profligate and tangential

is the balance
commercial and run by
the transmission of

the undeclared
or the strange low
coherences of the ear

when and where there
is no such thing
the thought walked

(from The Jukebox of Memnon, p23)

*

I’ d like to develop and refine certain ideas from my last post on Ray Dipalma. Today I’m taking ‘rumour’s rooster’ from The Jukebox of Memnon (1988). It’s a poem I’ve seen anthologized and thus acquires a kind of ‘representative’ status (rightly or wrongly) for DiPalma’s work as a whole. Certainly, the fourth verse contains a statement which seems significant in terms of DiPalma’s compositional method and a useful ‘way in’ for the reader:

the undeclared
or the strange low
coherences of the ear

However, there are 100 plus poems in the collection – none given a separate title. It is risky to ascribe one greater importance than any other. Presumably they are meant to be read in series. To further complicate matters, the real aficianado of DiPalma’s work would be able to see all sorts of connections stretching back to the earlier works and signs anticipatory of later developments. Sadly I don’t have the time or available resources!

The title itself is worth dwelling on: ‘jukebox’ is suggestive of ‘top hits’ (Dipalma suggesting these are catchy crowd pleasers?) but also repetition (the record drops onto the platter for the umpteenth time). As for Memnon things are typically ambiguous. There are several ‘Memnons’ to choose from, the principal ones being: an early Christian saint in Egypt, the Colossi of Memnon (two statues) in Egypt, or the Greeek historian. Modern day sound technology is set beside Egyptian mythic accounts (“rumour”?) of the fissured rock statue that gave forth a sigh (or groan?) when touched by the dawn. The main idea seems to be the bringing forth of sound from inert material: clearly the basis for a poetics and – once again – evidence of DiPalma’s fascination with occult and physical properties of language. That the very name ‘Memnon’ has an evident symmetry – a statuesque permanence if you like – is highly appropriate for what follows. I can’t help also misreading ‘Memnon’ for ‘mnemonic’ – a system to aid memory. So these poems on the jukebox might be ‘these you remember’?

On to the poem.

i.

Five verses, three lines each, the central three flanked by a verse set slightly further apart. Thus, formal symmetry is established from the start. The first line of the third verse even states “is the balance”, marking a fulcrum point in the poem.

The first verse:

rumour’s rooster
halloos the distorted
strata of analogies

is similarly concerned with symmetries. “Rumour’s” and “rooster” work in consonance and in terms of stress. The second verse carries on this symmetry both within and across two lines:

my A is a vegetable A
my Z is a vegetable A

Lest this should seem merely dry formalism, I’d draw attention to the way DiPalma’s patterning activates language. The placing of “rumour’s” next to “rooster” creates a ‘revving’ effect (something to do with the rolled ‘r’).* I’m more and more alert to DiPlama’s fascination with edges – “cuts a soft rough edge” (p 4, JoM) – reminiscent of Wallace Stevens – “There is nothing, no, no, never nothing/Like the clashed edges of two words that kill” (Le Monocle de Mon Oncle). In DiPalma’s poem the effect goes beyond simply texture (important as this is) and works also in terms of the referential ‘pull’ of the language. ‘Rumour’ and ‘rooster’ occupy distinct word groups – what logic could bring them togther? The effect is compounded by “halloos” which seems to come out of an entirely different period of language. Yet, the ear and eye serve to ‘make sense’ of the seemingly incoherent juxtapositons: the echo of the long ‘oo’, even the alphabetic doubling of ‘o-o’. Once again, we see DiPalma setting sound and referential dimensions of language in a state of tension.

ii.

The further I read into DiPalma’s work the more I sense him incoporating his own textual ‘exegesis’ into his poems. The effect is disconcerting and varies from explicit statements (but which are often buried by their context) or more oblique, impacted, figurative phrases:

“we keep around for the gist of the drift” (p1)

“I would not have you think” (p2)

“whistling at the moon with
a mouth full of crackers” (p5)

“a little less than music
a little more than mud” (p7)

A reader accustomed to read ‘through’ a poem’s language and to be taken away on an imaginative joyride feels a jolt. The bonnet is up and the mechanic is talking to us about the motor. It’s another aspect of DiPalma’s poetic ‘surface’ – a flattening of perspective.

An additional effect is to sense an uncanny anticipation of your own reading. DiPalma builds into his poems their own commentary and – in a strange way – sets the reader off balance. I’m not yet ready to develop this reading – but it is interesting how the poems seem designed with the reader in mind, second guessing the interpretive moves. Egyptian practices and motifs run through this volume and it’s almost as if DiPlama is like a master pyramid builder intent on luring the tomb-raider only to block him off or send him plunging down a shaft. The innermost chamber remains intact.

iii.

In verse two there’s an evident foregrounding of ‘a’ system of meaning. As in ‘Fragment’ we have a rebus-like mnemonic.

my A is a vegetable A
my Z is a vegetable A
profligate and tangential

I’m reminded of Sesame Street and the slow ritual intonation of ‘A is for Ap-ple’.*

However, what are we to make of

my A is a vegetable A
my Z is a vegetable A

?

It possesses a formal logic, it sounds authoritative. However, in terms of sense it jams our reading. How, logically, can both ‘A’ and ‘Z’ be the same?***

The answer is through language, the ‘other logics’ at work in the poem. DiPalma revels in the “profligate and tangential” possibilities of words. Furthermore, the term “vegetable” is carefully chosen. Taking the word back to its roots (pardon the pun) it means ‘animating’, ‘vivifying’. What else does such a poem do but encourage the reader to join in the play, respond to the energy within the language, taste on his tongue the ‘tang’ of tangential pleasures.

iv.

In verse four the language shifts into financial terminology:

is the balance
commercial and run by
the transmission of

I would suggest that the very phrases are lifted from a source such as The Wall Street Journal. Mean-minded talk of profit and loss is at odds with DiPalma’s poetic economy of excess and overproduction. Each term buzzes with semantic indeterminacy due to being prised from its original context (which only begs the questions what is original and who has possessive rights over language?). “Transmission” is especially interesting for its fusion of disease, money, and communication. Transferring to the next verse, the effect is similar to that of ‘tuning’ a frequency on a radio. Listen to the varying vowel sounds:

the undeclared
or the strange low
coherences of the ear

‘air’ modulates to ‘or’ to ‘ay’ to ‘o’ to ‘ear’. Literally, we hear – ‘hear’ and ‘ear’ speak within “coherences” and on into the first line of the last verse: “when and where there”, which re-establishes the “air” vowel sound.

Truly, “when and where there/ is no such thing/ the thought walked.” The first time I read these lines they seemed wilfully obscure. Reading them now they enact exactly what they say. Thought “walks” through the poem precisely because it is inseparable from the movement of the words. “When” and “where” and “there” are – as such – “no such thing” in being so dependent upon relative sets of circumstances (temporal, the time of the poem, the time of the reading of the poem, etc). The enjambment which orphans “is no such thing” underscores the provisionality of the verb ‘to be’.

v.

If thought walks in DiPalma’s poetry I get an increasing sense of his hostility towards establishing ‘meaning’, an ‘interpretation’, a ‘summary’ (somewhere there’s a line about there being no good summaries – I can’t find it!).

Why? Because this would be to deaden the play of language. I get the impression DiPalma wants his reader’s ear (and eye) to remain active. The art is therefore in not letting the poem solidify into paraphrasable sense. It’s a paradoxical art in that the poem – of necessity – is a fixed form: words disposed upon the page. Perhaps this accounts for DiPalma’s preoccupation with bringing sounds out of stones and what (I sense) is a wider interest in alchemy, the powers at work in inscribed letters, poetry as a magic art.

Follow the mysteries following
Desires following mysteries
This order now come to words

(p 44, Metropolitan Corridor)

Am I therefore arguing for some New York secret sect with DiPalma as head Druid? I don’t think so.

I hit upon this quotation from Nietzsche that DiPalma places in his long poem (aptly titled) ‘The Ancient Use of Stone’:

“I discovered and ventured divers answers; I distinguished between ages, peoples, degrees of rank among individuals; I departmentalized my problem; out of my answers there grew new questions, inquiries, conjectures, probabilities – until at length I had a country of my own, a soil of my own, an entire discrete, thriving, flourishing world, like a secret garden the existence of which no one suspected”. (‘On The Genealogy of Morals’)

It’s another one of the those moments when you feel that the poem is talking about itself – and the poet about himself and (why not?) anticipating the reader as well.

You know, I think that the best way to read DiPalma is to follow the “FOCUS THAT GENERATES” – why? because this is how he writes and true to the poems. Through that Nietzschean process of uncertainty and endless searching to find you have found something of your own.

Which leads me to pose an even more serious question: do we abandon critical discourse tired finally of its predictable (yet reassuring) habits, admitting that it will never really be adequtae to the energies at work in the poem? As Harold Bloom wrote – to bring him back into the picture –

“Poetry begins, always, when someone who is going to become a poet reads a poem. But I immediately add – when he begins to read a poem, for to see how fully he reads that poem we will have to see the poem that he himself will write as his reading. (‘Kabbalah and Criticism’ p56)

Therefore to write that poem or paint a picture is to read DiPalma (why, perhaps, Dipalma himself works in parallel with words and images), to dance is to read DiPalma, to compose and play music is to read DiPalma. Whatever: it is to create that “FOCUS THAT GENERATES” rather than to descend over and over again – an Indiana Jones - into the crypt and to dimly discern a few shadowy hieroglyphs.

there are
words for you
down here

on the Ground
so strewn
not as Bait

but as Fleas
to make the
itch you enjoy

scratching
come down
from your trees

(p6, Metropolitan Corridor)

Time to build your own pyramids?

_______

* I’m not an expert in Op Art, however, I sense a similar hypnotic shimmer working here as in – say – paintings by Bridget Riley. Similar:different brought into collision. This, in turns, leads to considerations of tesselation and DiPalma’s “versatile” (p 1) – verse-as-tile – art.

** and what else is language but the ‘Open Sesame’ of the treasure house of meaning?

*** complicated still further by the poem on page 101 beginning “A is legislative to Z”