Melting Into Nature

Carrier of the Seed by Jeffrey Side

Review by Andrew Duncan

In radically autobiographical poetry, the self is the prison of the poem. The voice of the poet gives the text a deep comforting layer of personality, swaddled in layers of trust, familiarity, witness. But the problem of putting everything in the first person is that in our life we don't experience everything as a first person, we are also able to hear other people’s voices, intuit their experiences, and even lock into a whole cosmos of non-human processes and sounds. If all my poems mean the same thing, in fact mean Me, then they are much less diverse than the world. In order to reach the state of a camera, with its at least passive capacity to take on infinite diversity, the poem has to go through depersonalisation. This may be the point of a poem like this one:

we might
keep the altitude
in view by
the stream near
Vancouver yet the
exploratory research points
to functional monitored
contingencies and the
upgraded model now
offers responsive logistical
innovation while at
the same time
no place seems
lowest to these
my kindred

The soul of a poem is in its breath pattern, the division of sense coinciding with movements of someone’s sensibility. It may be alienating if someone depersonalises the flow of the text. This negates a whole repertoire of well-loved effects and also demands the reader to switch off their routine response and find a new way of reacting to the text. Carrier, presented as one long continuous strip, has a straightforward phonetic organisation: every line is three words long. This disconnects the line break from the flow of sense of the text. The telltales which show someone's emotional state, which make it possible to slip into the rhythm of a text and a situation, are effaced. The text thus breaks free from the limits of a soul and could for example be the voices of several different people, standing at different points of a situation. It ceases to be owned by a personality, which we could try to reconstruct in order to identify with it and share what it owns. Take this passage:

I hear a
voice shell-encased
turtledove similar to
Tripoli where she
met me her
singularity showing itself
in the way
she descended mirrored
accordingly to come
hither consistently but
it isn't an
illness there’s a
chemical element that
takes place at
a certain point
though nothing’s been
proven yet come
off it you
have a stable
mind so hang
on this is
one of the
voices calling through
you were forced
to closely release
faculty with these
who will be
familiar among the
admired melting into
nature resented constructions
against the glutted
apple

The "I hear a voice" probably belongs to the previous tirade, but for all that may belong to this one as well. The passage may end before the end of the quote I have extracted. This passage refers to chemicals and to voices coming through you so is probably about schizophrenia in some way. We might consider this as a theme of the work as a whole. Voices keep coming through a membrane which is very permeable. The central function in the ego which represses other voices has been stood down in Carrier.  The story may involve a real romantic encounter between the poet (or some character?) and a girl, maybe even in Tripoli in Libya. The turtle dove is a symbol of amorousness. Its enclosure in a shell (possibly also a symbol of Venus, depicted with a shell, a comb and a mirror which also crops up) is poetic and strange. ‘release faculty’ could refer to some halfway house where someone stays after a bout of illness, but could also be a definition of art as self-expression. I’m not sure how the singularity relates to mirrored, although it could simply be a mirrored staircase. That combination of virtual images and a shifting point of view offers difficulties to an insecure sense of reality. resented constructions could be a feeling of someone who feels oppressed by an over-complex social order, as if melting into nature were an option. I think instead of a chilled beer tap: the absence of heat makes water from the air condense on the metal, and so the absence of warmth in a poem makes the invisible appear. Transient and undefined things emerge into plain sight.

It is hard to read Carrier without thinking of Tom Raworth and Adrian Clarke. Tom Raworth moved, in the early seventies, into a depersonalised voice. After a great deal of argument, people actually reading the poems detected a personal sensibility re-integrating the finely differentiated data. In some of his great works, the integrating urge was applied to a variety of texts covering the range of voices you can hear from different niches of our society, and reminded me (at least) of a sculpture by Tony Cragg in which a vast range of found materials - old bottle tops, plastic toys, bicycle parts, a debris-line like the foreshore of the Thames at low tide - are integrated to form a Union Jack. The artist disappears behind the debris and the debris disappears beneath the artist’s transforming design. Both Cragg and Raworth are recognised as modern classics. Mechanising the line-break so as to get away from a voice in 2007 is not the same gesture that it was in 1970. I don’t think it can have the same revolutionary effect, but all the same it shouldn’t be hard to assimilate. 

The language which emerges from beneath a known voice and fixed social relations is deeply ambiguous and yet free to roll off in all directions.

safe
from his long
dog from Manatai
aura of civility
complete pattern of
when I was
deep underground or
widespread and she
couldn’t see the
point of closing
next to me
looking like a
crystal stretched in
water she was
a mistress to
all the world

It’s hard to tell where it’s going. While I can locate a breach in the wall through which this language has exited, I cannot give an account of what it did next. Absorption and naturalising of the linguistic material is going to have to follow after an unknown interval. I couldn't figure out what is the carrier of the seed or what the seed is. We all carry seeds of human beings, but the word can be applied to material from other species whose means of mobility is to hitch a ride on a larger organism. The relationship between two tiers suggests, for me, the relationship between form and meaning in a stretch of language. But then, it could mean being a bus for a flu virus to ride on.

("Carrier of the Seed" is available as an e-book for free download from Blazevox)

Comments

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