Rosheen Brennan
Five Poems
This poem is concerned with notions of guidance. Olson speaks of the poem as a structured form of numerous ‘points’, which are united by an inherent ‘energy’ that must aim to be externalised. In response to Olson’s notion of ‘energy’ I attempted to create a continual flow of ideas that though linking, furthered and challenged what had been proposed before. The words are arranged around a central ‘serried spine stem’ and map the page above and below in a series of stages or steps. In reference to the reader Olson remarks ‘he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself.’[1] I wished to highlight the boundary between language and the nonsensical. Form is implemented to contain and structure thoughts, and hence allow the mind access to what without form would be the arbitrary and senseless.
I wanted to form a series of questioning relations, which draw the reader in and captures them within its structure, while asking them simultaneously to perceive the methods of their entrapment. Within this comparative freedom there is still form and limitation that requires the tracking and assessment of parameters. This results in the creation of overlaps and intermingling, but not a complete breakdown into confusion.
The form of a dividing line from which one section of the poem is reflected and into which words, that although initially straightforwardly semantic, begin to merge into black space is based on Retallack’s discussion of the present as ‘a mirror image; the horizon is the mirror of futurity only as envisioned out of history.’[2] Retallack goes on to describe this present as ‘ the conceptually contingent location of your besieged senses.’ I wanted to question the role of language in the abatement of this ‘besieged’ state. Also the role the subjective ‘I’ plays in positioning itself as a nexus for the interpretation of external phenomena, and how this relates to Derrida’s notion that ‘we are living…under a ‘regime’ of normal hallucination’.[3]
The central form of this poem is the ellipses, a word derived from the Greek to ‘leave out’ and the grammatical form of which Royle speaking of Derrida, proposes ‘always signif[ies] a logic of the supplement.’[4] The supplement as a haunting absent presence, is furthered by the overlapping form, relating to Retallack’s conception of ‘Venn overlaps of the familiar, the mysterious, the unintelligible.’ Through the almost spiralling relation of circular segment’s I also wished to consider Retallack’s notion that a challenge to ‘mass culture[s’]’ spatialisation of time into ‘freeze frames’ is through an ‘active’ momentum. The notion of spatialisation aligns to Bergson’s discussion of ‘[a] qualitative multiplicity’ in which there is ‘a unity that is multiple and a multiplicity that is one’.[5] This is reflected in the unified sections of the crossing ellipses.
The form is a series of words arranged in squares that tessellate to form a larger pattern. The extension of the pattern is based upon the addition of words that are conceptually related to those that are within a particular square, following the notion of the selection of similarity through the overlaps of a Venn diagram. This poem is also related to Josef Alber’s ‘Poem’s and Drawings’, in which verse is accompanied by line drawings of seemingly simplistic forms, as Nicholas Fox Weber suggests in the book’s introduction ‘it put mysterious drawings, utterly lean and simple but with multiple meanings, against verse with the same qualities.’[6] It is this combination of seeming simplicity undercut by ‘multiple meanings’ that I wished to capture in this poem.
[1] Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, in Paul Hoover (ed), Postmodern American Poetry (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. 1994), p. 614 subsequent references are to this edition (back to text)
[2] Joan Retallack, The Poethical Wager (University of California Press, 2003), p. 14. (back to text)
[3] Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 55. Subsequent References are to this edition. (back to text)
[4] Nicholas Royle, Jacques Derrida, p. 48. (back to text)
[5] John Mullarkey, Bergson and Philosophy (Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 20. (back to text)
[6] Josef Albers, Poems and Drawings (London: Tate Publishing, 2006), p. 2 (back to text)
Rosheen Brennan has just completed her undergraduate degree at Royal Holloway University, where she hopes to stay and pursue an MA in Poetic Practice. She is interested in exploring writing concerned with the present and its unintelligibilities, especially in relation to modernist poetics and philosophy. She recently gave a reading for Openned in London.