Slain in the Spirit of Catherine Daly

I've been spending the past few days in some books by Catherine Daly, and when I found DaDaDa, I would have to say I sneezed the French word "Eblouissante!" I choose the feminine "dazzling" for a reason as the work reads like a great love poem to female poets, singers, filmmakers, visionaries and women creators and thinkers of many disciplines, eras and philosophies/spiritualities. These spirits and voices appear and disappear posthumously throughout this book as volatile entities still engaged in the world, real presences above a medium's rocking table.

Not that I want to start off by sticking this book into some sort of dovecote or playing librarian...it's a thick book and it has the sort of sweep that celebrated serial poems of the highest order (you know, like canon fodder) possess, but it's thoroughly above any sort of aspirations like that. This is lip service without the lip service. I have to love a poet who equalizes the sonic Akashic field by putting lyrics by P.J. Harvey or Lene Lovich or Siouxsie Sue in the middle of beautiful lyric poetry without trying to become that most annoying of hipsters, the "pop art poet." But the work satisfies the killer-joint requirement of both timeliness AND timelessness.

Stylistically, the text is subject to no end of countless innovations, tortures, ecstatic mutations, and the author is as capable of writing perfect small lyric poems seemingly inspired by Sanskrit poetry as she is writing poems which seem to eroticize technological components in machines and then using these machines to generate lyric love poetry as Duchamp did in that celebrated "glasswork." This is the sort of book you encounter once, and will not be likely to forget. Think Theresa Cha. Think Joan Retallack. Think Susan Howe. I want to share a poem with you that I found to be exquisitely wrought, and that seemded to be a poetics or apologia planted smack dab in the middle of this amazing book. I hope I don't fuck up the HTML too bad...I couldn't cut and paste it...

     Strips

I am not making the earth seem better than it is
to trade it. No exchange.,
    no overflowing, no boat to the other side, no swollen river, no vessel.

This [life] carries love's flower, Marguerite, the daisy, that's me.
No one mediates. We desire none. We are, we are the medium.
    Filled with everything, empty. It isn't flowing. I am not borne.

             the daily that's me.
No one mediates. We desire none. We are, we are the medium.

       the other side, no swollen river, no vessel.
    no overflowing, no boat to the other side, no swollen river.
This [life] carries love's flower. Marguerite, daisy, me.

           I am not borne.
         It isn't flowing. I am not borne.
Filled with everything, empty. It isn't flowing. I am not borne.



Catherine writes in DaDaDa that the Marguerite which appears in some of the poems bearing her name is Marguerite D'Oingt...I looked her up online and found the following information on her.


"NOW IMAGINE HIS GREAT BEAUTY."
========================================================================
"Marguerite d'Oingt was a member of a powerful family from the area around Lyon. She entered a women's Carthusian community at Poleteins, and by 1288 she was its prioress (Carthusian houses did not have abbesses or abbots). The Carthusian Order, founded 200 years earlier at the Chartreuse in the Alps (hence the name given to each foundation: "charterhouse"), combined the hermit's life with that of the monk. The few women's charterhouses followed the same austere life as did the men's.

By 1288 Marguerite had begun to write a Latin set of meditations, Pagina Meditationum. Later she wrote in Franco-Provencal, which suggests a readership that included the laity, or at least an audience less skilled in Latin than Marguerite. By 1294, she had completed her most popular work, the vernacular Speculum (Mirror); a Carthusian prior took this work to the General Chapter at the Chartreuse, where it was approved for copying and distribution. References in her letters suggest that she wrote several works that have not survived; her last extant work was written sometime after 1303, the vernacular spiritual biography Li via de seiti Beatriz, virgina d'Ornaciu, about Beatrice of Ornacieux, a nun at another charterhouse, whom the Carthusians believed to be a saint.

In most of her extant writing, Marguerite's goal is to teach her readers how to meditate; to do this she most frequently uses images of reading and writing, of manuscripts and their illumination, and she presents these images in a simple and direct style."

So very appropriate.

DaDaDa will make many think of Stein for many reasons. One is the way the weave of life (and sound!) seem(s) to dissolve borders and create poems which flow into poems and achieve a larger weltanschaaung and gestalt...rather than making poems like products with clearly delineated borders, like sound bites or individual selves, both of which DaDaDa seems to disprove in its relentless onwardness.

There is a longish poem in here, "Mistress Plot," in which little summaries of novels (often unadept, written by students perhaps?) are used as fragments to compose a long poem which either foregrounds how misogynistic the majority of novels written tends to be, or else foregrounds how often said novels are read misognystically. It's actually a very funny, nay HILARIOUS, poem, and is every bit as much a great and subtle feminist poem as say, oh, Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market. Here are a few fragments from the work: "A real Lady moved to town, but married a doctor and became ordinary." (Shades of Flaubert if not an exact match!) AND "He forced her to serve him./She set the house on fire./She shot him./A bayonet ran through her.//He proposed to her again. She rejected him and went to Ohio." AND
"His sister was a sick woman./His sister was a prostitute and bootlegger./He found the mother of his lost son's child./His sister disappeared. She liked laughter and fun."

I couldn't begin to give you a list or compendium of the sort of ideas present in this volume, because it would take at least a year of living with this book. And the book would change during that time. Daly writes the sort of oeuvre, like Stein's, that morphs constantly, that lies there deceptively finished, but then as soon as you turn your back, the book is secretly sampling the world and changing all its configurations, its colorations and tenor. It's that sort of anima and animal.

Find this book, people.

If you don't it will probably find you anyway. It has legs and runs very, very swiftly.