Derailing the Sublime: Odes by Alan Davies (Faux Press, 2008)

              
       


1. Language is disgusted. Language is disgust. Language is discussed, concussed, concussive, dispersed, disbursed, discounted. Exploited, exploitive, exploded.

Love is not.

2. Language is an argosy of conquistador fantasies.

But love must be made.

It is arduous, self-inflicted, possibly doomed to the onanistic.

3.

"being momentless upon a sea

as graspless as the you as me

and then there's me for you the slay

the one that's endless as the glray"


Endless enallage, emballage, imbroglios of typos, snarls of meaning, slurs of feeling...

Aquarelle runs of speech in the fluid, the "flud."

Language is a train wreck.

But Davies wants it in slow-motion.


4.

"There may be in the cup
A spider steeped, and one may drink, depart,
And yet partake no venom, for his knowledge
Is not infected: but if one present
Th' abhorred ingredient to his eye, make known
How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides,
With violent hefts. I have drunk,
and seen the spider."

The Winter's Tale, 2. 1

These poems see the spider.

They feel it in their craws.

It crawls in their craws.


5. The surface is a mirror's craquelure.

Mental crazing:

endlessness becomes "andlesless."

Language's ratchet slips back to faux Middle English, Old English...to other languages it has divorced...divorce is a major theme in the collection....

"harnedlelessness of he one tatt that be

;of oridinanccen of thehe the

ange ange angles be



oh quite quiet t

quakes me

be h

be that tha that o

th

the one that bakes me of a

and a

of"


That is the opening invocation.

How far we are from "Be thou the leaven", although I believe I caught a sidelong smiling allusion to it.


6. Not all of the poems work equally well. (When do they ever?)

His run-on sentences have a sort of boustrophedon feel of eitherway-ness towards them sometimes, and when that happens they tend to blog or bog down in their talkativeness.

There is a strategy of deployment which convinces one the poet is going for the isotropic. He wants the poem to have that infinity of like horizons.

It can feel like war often. Conventions are contravened, and torture does occur. He tends to abacinate the eyes of language.

And then the poems make amazing confessions, language pours forth in sudden mesmerizing eddies "under the screws," and one is grateful as an Elizabethan monarch for the utility of cruelty.


7.

The poems don't really remind me of anyone. Okay, Charles Bernstein a little, because the rhetorical saturation is similar, and they seem to share that penchant for mocking passe forms of lyricism, a sort of diachronic ventriloquist's act.

But there are distinctive mutations in each poet.

Neologism is a virtually obsessive element in Odes.

Reappropriation of currency.

If only in imaginary bailout scenarios.

But the entities the poet is choosing to bail out are often very interesting.


8.

"We only know that the theater was invented

For tyrants and that we're in it and to have

Us in it, and that all kinds of slag fluds muck up

The e hardship into calcitrant evecastors as a

Side way of doing what can't be done undone

Or even be thought about again, not ever again

(No gain) so that the drag fwogs slup angle

Ions and the daily paperless harbinger swags

Fluck pastors down the dequestering swept

Streets (or are they steps) that we fall from"


(You're not gonna babytalk your way out of this one, Congressman!)

His language is, to use a technical term, fucked up.


9.

You want to hurt some of the poems.

You want to knock their heads against the walls

to make them TALK NORMAL,


they start to seem like that head

in the ancient world that supposedly

discoursed on philosoph(y)(ies), a metal head


you couldn't hurt if you wanted to,

it won't shut up, and you realize

he's doing the voices again,

he's become one of THEM,

the talking (t)h(r)eads...


"Around us (in search of us) and the slug doggerel

Flungking slangward (glangward) into the west

Th e best we've got (left), really masterful

In its curtailment of itself of what it was is of what

Is it of what it might be of what it might become of

What it will be (will it be that) of what it will become

If becoming becomes it (it won't/it don't) as against

The em fluggerer frag slung drag olden klip slankerers

(Th em ones/ and don't you fucking forget it)."


HE'S SERIOUSLY FUCKING WITH THE BAYESIAN FILTER

YOU PUT IN PLACE FOR A REASON.....



10.

A poem like "As If It Were Not Always Otherwise or So" is composed of a run-on sentence that carries on for three pages where sound is artificed beautifully but where the poet's rhetorical form of lyricism suffers from surfeit of conceit.

Beckett did this in Fizzles (that book which tends to appeal to poets), but the motive in that earlier book tended to be a desire to highlight the way tales told nothing really, how thought erects false markers continually, invents narrative as a mythical figure which comes into existence seemingly only to recite its own obsequies.

Davies shares with Beckett this tendency to create a sort of homogeneity or the isotropic model I mentioned above, as a means of lancing the lyric, deflating it of its turgidity. One senses the poet's disdain for sanguine poetry.



11.


This collection feels very British Isles to me.

I don't know if that's whom he was reading at the time of composition (although I suspect many 19th century authors and some much earlier but from that region).

I sense parodies of Tennyson and Milton, Chaucer and Shelley in many of these lines.

"spaces that graft the seadrift

from the land into the sky, the fast

death wish that death wishes for

against all that hasn't and all that has

been said over the sad abysmal

augustine sleepover islands, where

casks of memory lose themselves

in the snot of history, as if hospitality

could evoke penitence or turn back

what is already back, what is already

turned, and what can't be had, not

in a million tears, my dear..."


---from "For Going Away is to Stay."


I think there's a postcolonialist literary slam in there, especially with "the augustine sleepover islands(.)"


12.

The strongest and most moving poem in the collection is clearly the untitled poem beginning "Steaming into plangent harbor..."

This is a twenty page poem, a meditation on love and union, ripened with age, sustained and masterful.

It is a poem ostensibly about marriage, but to say that cheapens it, because the poem is smarter than the letter of the (corupt) law.

Like The Winter's Tale, it is bleak and hopeful.

The enemies of love and love's hallucinations are legion.

(This poem is arrayed on the page in the constellated bursts of words which compose a field poem, and I apologize I cannot do that form justice here.)

"slim floxes
among the phlox
waiting to outfox us
with the foxed edges of their gain

until we
we too (two
come against the slinking shores
that batter up against the

this is for you
you with a name (with a name I cannot repeat
(even here
on this eve of all that might in retrospect have happened
for (this is for you

     and for your name (here"

Reptition like the the tolling of a bell occurs in this poem.

And repetition with variation, as love is miscreant, desecretes and recreates by turns.

"and the young people are the old people
in this age and day
(and don't you forget it
not in (not in this day and age"

There is a doom harbinger that is repeated numerous times...

"(I remember Reuben and Miriam
   (like it was yesterday
     it was yesterday
and a multitude of same before that
     (I remember Reuben
  and Miriam like it was yesterday
    and neither dead
and neither dead nor gone
   (I remember
   (I remember
    Reuben
    and Miriam
    like it was
      like
      like it was
       (yesterday"

Nobody knows how to reverence love. It's the impossible task.

How not to end up cheesy or gooey.

Davies submits to the cheesy and gooey, amidst the mortal and the terrifying.

He slips in love lyrics from pop songs, Dylan and others.

He doesn't apologize, but keeps on.

The poem ends up being very stately and lovely. It reminds me of one of my favorite Montale poems, his elegy for his wife.

     "I have you


Th ere's a car of a sort/ up above the sky/ and it flies / and there is no
earth / not any more / as we fly / higher and higher / over the sweet
sweetening changes / changless/ and / more of a changeling / than
anything

As pastures / sleek/ under the warming rain / as sheep and particles
of other pastured things / lie down to sleep / in the sleepy rain/ again
/because morning will come / and with it / with morning / the
morning sun

      I'm the one that is you"

"As sheep and particles / of other pastured things..."

What a great way to speak of love.

That reminds me of Alice Notley. That's such a lovely Notley sort of line!

13.

For such a small collection, this book houses much memorable poetry.

Davies is capable of laying down his bow and arrows of 21st century rhetoric sometimes and indulging in atavistic lyricism.

This is from an untitled ode that follows the long poem alluded to above...

"the one that's lost
is always lost
forever lost

   and then again
the invincible defeat

to sling a phrase..."

And then he retools, and cools lyricism's heels...

"there are momentless moments
full of spit and spit and spittle
and if only you were in it, too

but there's exasperatinglessness"

Sometimes, he's able to get at the language's secret wishes, it seems, to rival the gifts of a Susan Howe, say, at cursing history as he unfurls its transcripts and codices...

Witness:

"fatherless
slackers
myopic trings
    that slake

importune
impotent thringlets of slot thens
     where wrens
are all that's cost
slot then
       wept swept
    up into
the blood upon our hands

swatting at flies
    that fly at swatting
   and that's that
     swat's swat
      over the
bend of the rally of the
    oh it's lost"


14.

The penultimate poem ("slackened and then bitten by what was token...") is a strange train poem that reads like Taggart meets Chaucer.

It's a very Muybridgean sort of poem.

It reads like a series of superimposed graph images of the phenomenology of the poem's apparition and movement.

It's a weird, effective poem.

15.

This book of Odes is dedicated to Christina Strong, and the last ode invokes her by name.

It's a beautiful void of language to dedicate to a lover.

"where there is bottomlessness as a curious possibility
taken as the token that that is, but no, from there on to the
when of the moment, there is only the clasp of the lost moment

and that were the one for you, oh Christina, from the tasking
to the where with all of the that there, for there were nothing other
but the time, and the time it took, and that were all, but not all."


Selah.