Riddles of Form

“that that”

Simon Perrill’s tautologies

i.

I resume where I left off. The hiatus is due to the usual distractions entailed by school. I make good resolutions and then find the energy has dissipated: grading, planning, day-to-day issues take their toll.

Which is a reason in itself to find Simon Perrill’s volume ‘Hearing is Itself Suddenly a Kind of Singing’ impressive. It’s there. He seems to be able to juggle academic and family life and get the writing done (as well as some visual work I gather). I have nothing but admiration and respect.

I’m increasingly aware as to how Riddles of Form is a not so subtle act of appropriation ("hypocrite lecteur ...") . A way of mapping out the territory, taking bearings on writers, trying to see where to go. And, in a sense, I feel close to Simon Perrill without ever having met him. I opened ‘Hearing’ with a mixture of excitement and trepidation: wanting it to be good but not that good. Leave a little room! (If you follow me).

I’m going to look at the first poem in the collection – ‘i was cut out for this’ - which appears as part of ‘An Address Book’ knowing that this must be a relatively early text (1996?) and that later work might go in other directions.

My reason for choosing it is that on first reading I was left feeling decidedly lukewarm: the poem felt like a set of procedures and too evidently informed by Perrill’s reading. The poem moves fairly clearly from text and memory to linguistics and music to textual copying to text and textile to nautical metaphorics closing with linguistics and fashion. Or, to put it another way, Derrida, Barthes, Saussure, Freud, Lacan taking in J.H. Prynne and Tom Raworth on the way.

However, if the first question forming in my mind was: is this poetry anything but an illustration of theory? The second question that occurs me is: how can writing occur in the knowledge of such theory, embody it by taking it further, or somewhere else? Rather than the “score ... printed on the finest tracing paper”, it’s the challenge of a mapping as outlined by Deleuze: “plug the tracings back into the map, connect the roots or trees back up with a rhizome”.

You can find the entire poem at:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=5nSGy8XWFwYC&dq=simon+perrill&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=3sDGMhFAjO&sig=Armh71N7Mpb9PwxRb8AcH4p1S04&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=6&ct=result#PPA3,M1

ii.

The title of the poem is instructive: ‘i was cut out for this’. Note the lower case ‘i’, of course. The personal pronoun – the index finger of identity - is problematic right from the start. Perrill plays with identity and typography in subsequent poems too: “tough on the type”, “to cap it all” (‘A Manifest O’) as just one set of examples. He seems drawn to idioms, particularly those that see-saw meaning. Thus, the title: ‘cut out for’ in the sense of chosen or excluded? Then there’s the knowing nod at collage and the construction of the Self as a process of editing. And there’s an equally knowing postmodern flattening of linguistic reference: as if – literally – a letter ‘i’ was cut out to make the word ‘this’ in some simulation of a crime novel message. (Alternatively there’s that Iain Sinclair poem ‘The Moon Rises Like The Dot On An ‘i’’). Perrill is also preparing for his final flourish – the tmesis on ‘address’ in the final line.

iii.

Collage processes seem to inform the poem in other ways. I’m not sure that the very composition owes something to excised lines which are then reassembled. However, it’s more the way Perrill works syntax and grammar. Verses 3 and 4 work by parallelism: “laughing ...” and “exhibiting ...”. Verses 6 and 7 seem intially separate sense units and then the “is” refers back to “the score”. The eye travels across the edge between the phrases and glues them together. A similar effect is achieved moving from the title to verse 1 and on to verse 2. Sense is anticipatory and delayed.

Then there’s Perrill’s love of a phrase – in fact, I get the impression that this is the driving force of the early poems I’ve read (more than, say, sound or rhythm*). Line one is a good example of his jamming of two phrases together:

“as an unpublished article of faith”

The scholarly (“unpublished article”) and the religious (“Article of faith”) are grafted together and produce a catchy third sense which is at once throwaway and knowing. We’re meant to get the jivey almost ad-man wit while appreciating graduate student reading in ideology, linguistics and language philosophy.

It’s worth for a second citing a few lines from Out to Lunch (aka Ben Watson) taken pretty much at random from ‘Nine to Zero’:

tremor of the lower lip, the spittle-
bedecked parting of the flesh-ways:
throttled beavers brook an absence

Yes, Lunch’s line is more visceral and physical – those syllabic juices set running by the assonantal odours – but the third line is recognizably Perrill. Nature, genitalia and lyricism collide although – for me at least – the effect is less ‘knowing’ more at the mercy of the language drive.

Both Perrill and Lunch seem to be indebted to Joyce (then again, who isn’t?) and – I’d say – early Prynne. Verses 3, 4 and 5 of Perrill’s poem are pretty much a statement of poetics:

laughing like a good sound
wrapped around the ears

exhibiting an emblem
of a hardly held idea

you figure it out
of all available proportions

It’s knowing linguistic play, the signifier given its head at the expense of the signified. And it’s the “you figure it out” which sounds the Prynne note for me (the opening of ‘The Numbers’ comes to mind: “The whole thing it is, the difficult/ matter: to shrink the confines/ down”). There’s that surprising directness of address simultaneous to a literal and figurative uncertainty. Vocabularies compete and coexist.

I am also interested in the way Perrill works off phrases – what you could call an ‘allusive idiomatics’. Look at verse 3 again. The two lines seem to depend on a set of unstated but ‘heard’ phrases: ‘a box on the ears’, ‘a sound telling off’, ‘a scarf wrapped about your ears’ and the punning ‘wrapped’/’rapped’. And, as often happens in his poems, there’s the street-wise use of music styles and technology. Here, Rap and – given it’s the mid-90s – headphones and Discman.

iv.

I had assumed that this was most of what was going on and not much for the ear. However, Perrill’s poems are working in some interesting acoustic ways beyond the more ‘conceptual’ sonic play of puns (one example: notice how he assumes an equally knowing reader as he slides from the “cut out” of the title to editorial excision “unpublished” to “curates” with its shadow sound ‘curettes’ which is the activity of removing morbid matter with a scoop to the final cut of “a dress”).

In this particular poem he seems to be drawn to nasal sounds – ‘m’ and ‘n’s: “unpublished”, “mnemonic”, “museum” ... “relation”, “sunnier”. This pattern declares itself also in syllabic resemblances which also play for the eye:

mne / mon + ic

mu / se / um **

em / bl / em

pro / por / tions

As well as echoic movements: “call” to “all” which occurs twice; “hardly held”; the “skin” to “tracing” to “skein” development.

However, it’s this line which is of most interest:

like that that accumulates on milk

I’ll admit that it’s not a pretty line and - in some ways – you could even say ‘bad’? Yet the clumsiness seems justified. As I see it, the whole poem risks tautology – a saying the same thing: “knowing the score/ is printed on the finest tracing paper”. Just how thin a layer separates? How far can Perrill milk it before everything sours? 

Stale cheese or creme fraiche?

That. That "that". 

That’s the risk. And why I’ll read on in ‘Hearing’ with interest.




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* whereas Lisa Jarnot's poems - see recent post - work by wave-like cadences. Ear-led thought with a much more evident sense of lines as 'voiced'. Perrill's line movement, by contrast, seems much more intellectualized and page bound. 

** and the two placed together on the line:

mnemonic museum

form a little visual poem of cloistered arches and columns the eye walks through