So a while back I posted this poem because I think it's really fantastic:
So restoration is not spelled au
I spelled it so thinking of the czech word restaurace
and go with a lady to the Room
like a unicorn in the mirror
all naked in the mirrors
so that I could see the blood trickling.
Joseph Hutchinson attacked it for being "phony"/senseless/cliche "avant-garde" and suggested I defend it. Now I am totally opposed to the foundations of pretty much all of his criticism. I am opposed to defending a poem that I love; I am opposed to the idea that there must be some kind of organic unity of the poem that can be revealed through close (but apparently, as you'll see, not very close afterall!) reading; I am opposed to the idea that sharp turns in poems are bad, or that ephemerality is bad; and I am opposed to the use of "avant-garde tics" as a criticism (this is the most common form of dismissal without having to engage with something - call it both conventional and avant-garde, people have been doing that from the start, in fact it was the start in many ways).
However, against my better judgment, I will now attempt the stunt of showing how this poem makes a lot of sense and perhaps to show however sketchily what appeals to me about it.
Mr Hutchinson himself does a good job of getting the ball rolling. For one, he suggests something about the ephemerality of the poem (it feels like it was written on a napkin). I not only like this quality about poems, but it's at the heart of Blatny's later authorship, as the poems were written during his time in an insane asylum, and much of what he wrote appears to have been tossed out by administrators. "Bixley Remedial School" was salvaged by one of his nurses.
Another important thing to start talking about this poem and the Bixley book is the multilingual nature of the project. Blatny was a Czechoslovakian poet who moved to England in the late 1940s. The book consists largely of poems written in both Czech and English (and sometimes German).
As Brian Henry noted in the comment field to my previous post, the book does a really interesting job of "translating" these multilingual poems: in the translation, the Czech lines are translated into English, while the English lines are put in a lighter font, as to show the difference. This multilingual element is interesting to me, how it hides some text and renders the English lines strangely dubious. The lighter font does something very interesting: it suggests there is an element of translation about the "original text."
Blatny's multilingual aesthetic actually goes back to poems written before he moved to England. For example, there's a great "early" poem called "Treti" ("Third") that plays with a bit of translated Langston Hughes: "Waiting for my mammy -/She is Death" ("mammy" remains in English in the Czech text).
Those of you who have read this blog before know that I am very drawn to Deleuze and Guattari's notion of "minor literature," the literature that inside of a major language makes a strange language.
This is opposed to the "major" literature, literature that seeks retain the illusion that there is a major language, an official language, a true language. In Bakhtin's terms, it's monoglossic literature: literature that tries to cover up the melee of different languages. This framework of reading literature becomes: how does it follow standards, how does it sound "hard", rigorous and official. Language as an organism (in which all the parts work toward a unified effect - "no noise in art") is a "major" aesthetic.
It makes perfect sense to me that Ron Silliman does not read works in translation and that he is adamantly opposed to "non-native" translators who create texts that sound foreign to his "American tree"/"ear." Ron is on the side of the major.
Blatny is on the side of the minor: his foreign languages not only work in tension within the poems, they seem to pull and tug at the English much like how D+G say Kafka uses Yiddish to "deterritorialize" the German language.
One of my favorite examples is from "Janua Sapientiae": "The Monx speak Monx/I speak czech and english..." The "Monx" being of course a kind of blend of czech and english. And the spot that marks that interaction is - as in old treasure maps - the "x". (However, in most places it's far less specific.)
This is of course also the topic of "Misspelled": not just of misspelling a word, but of being misspelled by politics, being dislocated/relocated.
Another thing that irritated Joseph was the abrupt/disrupt change in the middle of the poem. We go from a discussion of misspelling to suddenly going to a "lady" in a "Room." These two don't go together, according to Joseph!
This disruption intrigues me. It's more than an abrupt change, the verb tense and everything seems to change inside of one sentence. It has the feeling of a *cut* - as in montage and collage. And like in those practices, I have the sense that the first sentence could be continuing to some other destination, while the second half seems to have lost its original destination. There is dislocation on a very formal level.
It is not however without any sense. As Eisenstein, the Master of Montage, would tell Joseph, montage makes connections between different stuff - sometimes as obvious as in Eisenstein's October in which the image of one hauty officer in connected to an image of a toy nightingale.
"I thus argue that the hysteric body was not simply a figure depicted in the modernist poem or film, but more provocatively, coincided with the fragmented and dissociated bodies created *as* montage." (Susan McCabe, Cinematic Modernisms)
What we have following the cut is a confusing scene, a confused narrator who perhaps looks in the mirror and sees himself as a unicorn (not quite mechanical nightingale, but related to the Eisenstein montage). Unicorn perhaps because the "lady" is a prostitute and he is erect (has a horn), but also perhaps because he looks ridiculous like a unicorn, a figure of childish innocence in a place of not-innocence.
The blood might be from the loss of innocence, from the strange violence of displacement, or - my favorite reading - from the montage "cut" in the poem. Going with McCabe's idea, it's the dissociated body of montage.
Another important thing: there's an element of montage about the entire "school" that is supposed to be the space of this poem. Frequently it appears to be a school, but also a military training camp, whore house and hospital. The room could be a hospital room with a nurse.
I love how the "misspelled" goes from being the "school" meaning of the term (something which a teacher corrects) to the physical damage/pleasure of the hospital/whorehouse. And in the process it comes to mean something much more profound, and physical than I might originally have seen in it, it comes to mean how all these things bear on the dislocated, dissociated, montaged body of the foreigner.
I love the unicorn. When was the last time you read a poem with a unicorn?
I read the unicorn in part as something akin to "camp." That is the appropriation of mass-produced kitsch to create a kind of art that is not so easily invested in heroic authenticity (Major Art, Macho Pollock etc), but a kind of inauthentic or minor authenticity. I think the unicorn functions in a similar way: but here not an emblem of the inauthenticity/perversion of the homosexual, but of the foreigner, another figure who is repeatedly conceived as a fake/perversion.
(No less by the kind of framework put forth by Ron Silliman: translations are not great! They are fake! Non-natives don't speak correctly! Or his insipid commentator Curtis Faville: Foreigners are ruining our English Tongue! Or all those heaps of people who used to attack me as a young immigrant for being gay: there's something weird about this guy! He must be gay! His body and language are inauthentic!)
OK, I hope these brief notes give you some idea why I think the Blatny book is one of the best books around. Certainly one of my favorite books publish over the last 20 years.