In “Noil me frangere,” Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe write, “It is a mistake, then, to write in fragments on the fragment.” “But what else,” they hastily add, “is there to do? Write about something else entirely — or about nothing — and let oneself be fragmented.” (Am I writing in fragments here? I don’t think so — that is, I suspect a hypotactic logic operating from paragraph to paragraph, block of prose to block of prose. Does it add up to an argument? Perhaps — but I hope not.)

•

    Here’s a passage I’ve found myself returning to repeatedly of late. It’s by the Cambridge poet J.H. Prynne, and I can’t tell whether it’s the third section of “Evening Walk” or a separate poem (there’s no table of contents to his collection Wound Response):

As grazing the earth

                                        the sun raises

    its mouth to the night

                                        rick, ox-eye’d

    and burning, strewn over

                                        the phase path

    At the turning places

                                        of the sun the

    head glistens, dew falls

                                        from the apse line:

    O lye still, thou

                                        Little Musgrave, the

    grass is wet

                                        and streak’d with light

I think this is an alba, a dawn song to a lover: “Little Musgrave” (or Musgrove) is a character in a British Isles folk song, another version of which is “Matty Groves”; his failure to leave his lover’s arms results in his untimely death at the hands of her husband. I like that reference, and I like Prynne’s cheekiness in deploying his archaic punctuation (“streak’d”) even where it doesn’t belong — “ox-eye’d,” after all, needs no apostrophe. I like the technical terms — “the phase path,” “the apse line” — planted like mines in a poem whose diction is drawn straight from the eighteenth century. And I like how the parts of each sentence, though grammatical enough, don’t quite fit. How can one head “glisten” at (several) “turning-places of the sun”? What does it mean to speak of dew falling “from the apse line”? Prynne’s poem intrigues me as a concatenation of linguistic fragments, some of them radically different realms of discourse, strung like beads onto a single syntactic thread.
    (And mostly, of course, I love the way the poem sounds.)

•

    Is one still allowed to talk about tastes? (I’ve been reading Hume’s essays lately, so you’ll have to pardon me if I slip into an eighteenth-century periwig here. Anyway — ) My tastes are catholic, and eclectic. I can’t for the life of me dislike some poets whose work, I’m told, is diametrically opposed to everything I’m invested in. On the other hand, I’m absolutely unable to muster up enthusiasm for some poetry that, from its dust-jacket descriptions and from the testimony of friends, ought to be “just the sort of stuff you’d like.” I can’t even say I write the sort of poems I like best — I write, in short, the kind of poems I can. A poetics of necessity.

•

Overwriting and crossing out are mirror-image routes to the poetry of the fragment. The English artist Tom Phillips paints over pages of W. H. Mallock’s Victorian novel A Human Document to produce his A Humument. Phillips’s pages are shimmering with color, pictures, and designs. And on each page, a few words of Mallock’s text have been preserved, floating like speech balloons in a Bill Sienkewicz comic book. But the words are joined together by minute umbilici, so that the reader is led from one to the next as overtly as David Hume, with a most un-Scottish geniality, leads you from clause to clause, proposition to conclusion. Phillips claims that there’s a narrative here, its protagonist a chap named “Toge” (he can only appear, of course, when Mallock has used the word “together” or “altogether”). I don’t know — I’d rather attend to the interplay of word and design in A Humument. Blake rewrote Milton twice, once by illustrating him, and once by making him the protagonist of an illuminated poem in which the author of Paradise Lost appears (quite un-Puritanically) in the nude. Phillips has rewritten Mallock’s A Human Document by making its forgotten narrative into a succession of dazzling poem-illustrations, kin to Blake’s composite art.

    Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os rewrites the first four books of Paradise Lost by simply erasing most of their words. They remain naked on the page, still in their 1892 typeface (what coincidence caused both Phillips and Johnson to choose books published in that year?), sprinkled like the sparagmatic words of Mallarmé’s Un coup de dès. They are fragments in perhaps the purest sense, though Milton’s high diction and lofty rhetoric, perforce the only vocabulary Johnson has allowed himself, impose a certain cohesiveness of “poetic” tone upon them, as well as allowing Johnson an ample word-hoard for his favored themes of light and cosmology. But in their scattering, they do not submit to the same hypotactic unity imposed on the words that escape Phillips’s overpainting.

outspread,
                                                      on the vast
      Illumine,
      I
          Say first —

Our top-down habits of reading would render these lines “outspread, on the vast Illumine, I Say first —.” But our left-to-right habits (by no means inevitable ones — Leonardo, like all writers of Hebrew, wrote right-to-left, and some scripts are written boustrophedron, reversing direction at the end of each line) render them “Illumine, on the vast outspread, I Say first —.”Johnson has rewritten Paradise Lost into a transcendentalist celebration of mind, eye, cosmos, and artistic power, in the process losing the whole narrative machinery of Satan, God, and their respective cohorts. But he has also opened Milton’s text — or those fragments of Milton’s text he has retained — to a fertile syntactic and semantic undecidability, an opportunity for words to interact with their neighbors in ways completely foreign to the seventeenth-century poet.

•

    David Melnick’s Pcoet is yet more radical. Melnick’s raw material here is not words or phrases, but the smallest building-blocks of language. And not phonemes, sounds — that would imply a theory of language in which the spoken is prior or superior to the written word, in which the writing poet is merely transcriber of what she or he has already uttered, silently or aloud — but graphemes, letters, the fragments of the written word. Radi Os can be read aloud (and I am told Johnson has done so, magnificently). Pcoet is, in that sense, unreadable.

qquerl

asd tpelogn

seruasiet nsovv
zhsdiz, aomsa

csdpZ zsdui

The reading mind craves meaning. It wants to make sense out of a text. Melnick, fragmenting and recombining the basic particles of the sense-bearing strings we call words, continually frustrates that desire. I’m not so interested in the technicalities of Melnick’s compositional technique — sometimes he seems simply to be typing English words as fast and as badly as he can, other times he seems to be working over French or Greek templates — or the avant-garde precursors of Pcoet — Velimir Khlebnikov’s invented Zaum language comes immediately to mind — as I am in the end-result: letters; clusters of letters that are almost words; clusters of almost-words that are almost phrases — an apocalypse of fragmentation that offers both too little meaning to hold onto and too much meaning to take in at once.

•

(This isn’t the place to write literary history. I can hear someone saying, “What about X, what about Y, what about me?” I’m citing poems I know and have thought about, poems that have been important to my own poetics [such as it is]. Perhaps poems that haven’t been talked about enough? But not, certainly not, all of the texts that make important use of fragmentation, even in our own half-century.)

•

    I have bits and pieces of language continually floating in my ears, usually harnessed to tunes. (Did I mention that I listen to a lot of music?) Those bits and pieces — fragments — usually find their way into my notebooks, put down in great paratactic lists. Sometimes, often years later, they find their way into poems. The phrases I use often have great resonance for me. Whenever I read them, their original context is dragged into my mind — the tail of Proust’s madeleine wagging the great shaggy dog of Proust’s memory. Nothing magic about that. Does a reader share in that resonance? — of course not. But I hope, somehow, that traces of the resonance I feel in the phrases will cling to them in the poem, will somehow “haunt” the reader. Maybe that’s magic.

•

    The best poetics is applied poetics. Poe’s “Philosophy of Composition,” of course, is a travesty of the process, several thousand words of breathless and didactic prose demonstrating precisely how Poe wished he had written “The Raven.” Far more compelling is Zukofsky’s “‘Mantis,’ An Interpetation,” a free-verse poem explaining the origins, sources, and formal decisions involved in the composition of Zukofsky’s Depression-era sestina “‘Mantis.”‘ There’s some justice in writing one poem to explain another, but even in Zukofsky, you end up feeling he’s expatiating too much.

    Perhaps the best way to present a poetics of fragments would be to hold up a poem which that poetics has produced, then run down some of the bits and pieces that have gone into it. This poem is called “wee song,” and was written in the latter part of 1996:

        the LORD draws
    no one




                                                                    picks its way
                                    across the bottom




                                                    the LORD draws no
                                                                    one




                                *




    a tiny wee buke
        a broken gangrel




                                flashing eyes




                        stag
                              hound




                                *




            take it
            like
                a man




    turn again
    home




                                                        blackwater
                                                                side




                                *




                        “the only food
                            she had




                                        “never dance
                                         again”




                                bread
                                        & morphine”




                                            strathspey




                                *




                                                        sprinkled skirling
                                                                        words




    voicelings




                                                                        lips parting
                                                                        under water




                                *




farewell
fareweel




                                                                                take back
                                                                                your name,
                                                                                    your shiver




    John — your
        pillow




                                *




                Madonna of
                the Rocks
                    footwash


                            Baptist




    crystals on
        your sleeve




                                *




    auld black
        bitch of a
                    boat

                                                                                neither coal
                                                                                nor candle




                scrape lichens
                from the stone — or


                            “Charlie is my darlin’”

•

    Most of my poet friends listen to serious music: avant-garde jazz, twentieth-century “classical.” So do I, but truth be told, I like certain forms of pop music as much as the average sixteen-year-old likes the likes Nü Metal. I’m not rash enough to claim that most pop lyrics are poetry, as many did back in the heady Sixties (though there’s a chiasmus in this Wallflowers song that beats anything since Alexander Pope), but I can’t deny that as many of the stanzas buzzing in my head got there through my stereo system as from the pages of books. British Isles folk music, and its electrified avatars, are my true Penelope. When I read a poem in ballad meter, whether it’s “Because I could not stop for Death” or Johnson’s “I put my hat upon my head,” I’m liable to sing it to the melancholy tune of “Mary Hamilton.”

    The folk-rock songs whose fragments make it into “wee song” — Richard Thompson’s “Devonside,” Oyster Band’s “Fiddle or a Gun,” among others — are songs whose lyrics are both highly intelligent, literate, and — to the ear of my mind — highly affecting. These fragments are keys to points in the songs where melody, instrumentation, and singing come together in a way that almost inevitably puts a catch in my throat, whether I’ve had a drink or not. But beyond my personal predelictions, it seems to me that Thompson and Oyster Band’s John Jones have captured something quite integral to the power of the traditional ballad. The traditional ballad, that is, usually tells a story, narrates a series of events. It bears the same relation to the average pop lyric that a short story does to a Mallarméan prose poem. In the course of centuries-long transmission, however, the ballad becomes fragmented and reformed. Singers forget lines and stanzas, and substitute lines of their own invention, stanzas from other, similar songs. In compiling his monumental Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, Sir Walter Scott tried to iron over these discontinuities, to make the ballads into shapely, complete stories. But it’s those discontinuities, the absences, that make the ballads so compelling to me, and it’s those elements that Thompson and Jones have managed to capture in their own songwriting. We’re never told who the “she” and “he” of Thompson’s “Devonside” are, nor why the only nourishment she can offer him is “bread and morphine,” but the words themselves — inseparable in my mind from their melody, Thompson’s raw singing, and the astonishingly intuitive ensemble playing that accompanies them — compell my interest, my emotional investment.

•

    Over the past two years, picking up threads from old childhood interests, I’ve pursued the harebrained goal of mastering the entire corpus of Scottish literature. I’m presently running down the last three or four of Scott’s novels. They’re terrifically readable, once you get past the almost uniformly turgid beginnings, and Scott has yet to be surpassed, even by such contemporaries as James Kelman and Irvine Welsh, as a master of vernacular Scots dialogue. Words stick in one’s mind — “gangrel,” a wanderer or vagabond; the slight shift of pronunciation that makes “book” “buke”; “skirling,” “screaming,” often applied (approbriously) to the sound of the bagpipes. And phrases. In The Antiquary, Steenie Mucklebackit has no sooner been buried than old Mucklebackit, under the pressure of grinding poverty, goes back to mending the fishing vessel from which his only son has drowned — that “auld black bitch of a boat.” The indecisive Englishman Edward Waverley, in the novel that bears his name, first sees the extent of Scotland’s political and emotional divisions when he witnesses a crazed Jacobite woman set upon by a Whig crowd, all the while singing a song to the Bonnie Prince: “Charlie is my darlin’…” (The scholar in me knows that this is a bald anachronism: the poem in question was written by Robert Burns — born 1759 — and therefore is unlikely to have been sung during the 1745 uprising of which Scott writes. It rings in my head, however, not as another “Burns song,” but in its context in Waverley.)

    That the emotional crises of Scott’s novels rarely involve his major characters — pasteboard heroes and heroines all — does not make them any less moving; in fact, the minor characters of his great Scottish novels — lower-class, ill-educated, singing or speaking their minds in wonderfully redolent Scots — in the end have all the good lines: the lines, that is, that stick in the reader’s mind as luminous moments amid a great unsystematic, unsorted mindfull of linguistic fragments from all realms of experience.
    And the dog? Sir Walter’s great staghound, Maida, grew so impatient of portraitists that he would leave the room “whenever he saw an artist unfurl his paper and handle his brushes.”

•

    The other bits and pieces that make up the poem are also quotation, though I couldn’t tell you what I’m quoting much of the time. All language, after all, is quotation; poets knew that long before Derrida told the academy. The words, wherever they come from (and I’ve heard them before), move me. They have a talismanic significance in my own imaginary. Not a hermetic significance: they aren’t to be “explained” or decoded, and were I to go through a poem word by word, phrases by phrase, talking about what each fragment means to me, that exercise (tedious to be sure) would serve neither as a key to the poem nor as a descriptive poetics. I don’t expect to convey that talismanic significance in the “finished” poem. All I can offer is the poem itself, out of which a reader is welcome to make as much as she will.

    God knows this is an attenuated offering, appropriate perhaps for an attenuated poetics. But I spend far too much of my time, professionally and personally, trying to explain things I’m not sure I understand. (Perhaps, finally, a satisfactory definition of poetics: n., the act of explaining something one’s not sure one understands.) Let Louis Zukofsky have the last word:

Can love rouse a thing of the past
And not see it as present? (“A”-12)

Works Cited

Johnson, Ronald. Radi Os. Berkeley: Sand Dollar, 1977.

Melnick, David. Pcoet. San Francisco: G.A.W.K., 1975.

Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe. “Noli Me Frangere.” Trans. Brian Holmes. In Jean-Luc Nancy, The Birth to Presence. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993. 266-278.

Oyster Band. “Fiddle or a Gun” (Ian Telfer and John Jones). Deserters. Ryko Records, RCD 10237, 1992.

Phillips, Tom. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. First rev. ed. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1987.

Prynne, J. H. Wound Response. Cambridge: Street Editions, 1974.

Rilke, Rainer Maria. Selected Poetry. Ed. and trans. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Schlegel, Friedrich. Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1991.

Scott, Sir Walter. The Antiquary. London: Dent, 1975.

—. Journal. Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1891.

—. Waverley. Ed. Claire Lamont. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.

Thompson, Richard. “Devonside” (Richard Thompson). Hand of Kindness. Hannibal Records, HNCD 1313, 1983.

Thoreau, Henry David. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Walden, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod. Ed. Robert F. Sayre. New York: Library of America, 1985.

Zukofsky, Louis. “A”. 1978. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1993.