Tina Darragh's Striking Resemblance

This is a Burning Deck title from 1989 I had always wanted to own, but only very recently picked up.

I'm glad I did.

I know Darragh's work mostly from anthologies and a handful of magazine pieces.

The title seems particular apt, since one can't help but think of "striking" in the context of print or reproduction and the poems are often about the divide between reality and how reality is represented in language. Various editions of reality are struck all the time, but the copies seem to vary considerably.

Darragh seems to be drawn to illusions and fudging. Fudging is apparently a universal tendency, as Darragh locates classic examples in the sciences, the arts, linguistics and elsewhere. Here are some examples I loved...

The step by step process of looking
to rainbows
as a PLACE
for "Pi in the Skye"
started awhile ago
when reading Eye and Brain--
the author tells the story
of Sir Isaac Newton
pretending to see
orange and indigo
in the first color spectrum he made
so he could list seven colors
   --a lucky number--
and this made me feel very fond of science
given that I myself stretch things a lot
to make them fit


And there's this...


but by breaking the lines
I realize
I'm not the one
who causes words
to lie apart
--they come that way--
for example
the other day
we'd had a typical Washington snow
topped off by rain
giving what remained
enough crust
for finger writing
& when I went out to our car
I found what was left
of a message on the hood--
part of a letter followed by an "o"
backed up by more partials + a "t" and a "s"
& my first thought was
"someone has written
'go to hell, fatso'
on my car"
but in looking again
the phrase fell out as
"hold fast to dreams"
the kind of trade-off
I'd rather bet on
given this feeling
that all the practice
in turning things around
has let the words go
& in that scatter
I know that I'm no
different


There is a great deal of concentrated thinking on the etymology of words and the derivation of phrases, and this gives the work a feel of great (but funny) objectivity. As you can see from the passages quoted above, the poet is like an extremely friendly scientist who wants to find out if there's any real foundation in language, or whether it's all fudging and parallax.

Of course, it's the latter and the poet knows that. But she's going to prove it to you. In a gentle way.

Her celebrated poem "Raymond Chandler's Sentence" is in here too.

Who interested in language can't be struck dumb for a few minutes after they read this:

"Earl Stanley Gardner was one of the mystery writers Raymond Chandler imitated when first he wrote fiction. Chandler would select a Gardner story, rewrite it, compare it with the original and rework it once more. Chandler attributes this practice to his classical training at Dulwich where he would translate Cicero into English then back to Latin again. "I had to learn American just like a foreign language," is the way he himself put it."

I'm giving you more grammatically standardized examples of her inquiries and critiques.

But there's another side to the book.

There is another side to this collection which I can't reproduce here, and that's a deployment of language in odd configurations on the page to explore various linguistic problems or dilemmas.

Darragh's work is probably the poet whose oeuvre is most like that of Joan Retallack in AmPo. Certainly the D.C. thing (both were D.C. poets in the past...the present?) would make one question whether an actual friendship lay at the base of these similar preoccupations and similar methodology.

The "poem as gedankenexperiment" stance towards poetry is pretty rare in American poetry.

All of the language poets practiced and practice linguistic analysis--it was pretty much the modus operandi of anyone so subscribed--but some used this analysis to critique various forms of power or institutions; some were interested in deformations of the lyric or the rhetorical (Charles Bernstein); some were interested in reinventing a workable or sustainable lyricism based more on signifying absence than presence (Fanny and Susan Howe, Rae Armantrout); some were interested in the acoustics and/or visual qualities of language, and altering these. And so on, and so on.

Sure, the language poets were known for this mindset of classic Wittgensteinian linguistic analysis, but very few of them actually set up poems as gedankenexperiments. But poets the language poets openly admired did this; I'm thinking here of poets like John Cage or Jackson Mac Low. Probably Robert Grenier as well would fit under this rubric. It's interesting to me that Darragh quotes British poet Allen Fisher right out of the gate in this book, because he would be another example of this on another continent.

He's a good poet to search out if you don't own any of his books.

Striking Resemblance includes some poems which focus on various optical illusions and attempt to create linguistic counterparts on the page. This is very bold, very imaginative.

One of the most original things I have ever seen in American poetry is Darragh's attempts to create poems which are actually linguistic versions of the Ames Distorted Room "...in which A. Ames (painter/psychologist) uses two straight lines & a sloping line to creat a room with a 'false' corner. Other lines are used in the design to give one an image of a normal room. If a viewer stations herself at a fixed point just outside, two strangers of equal height standing at the far end look different in size. But if the viewer knows the person standing in the 'false' corner, she wonders what's wrong with the Room."

This Ames Room poem is a brilliant reification of the idea that power is centered in linguistic constructs and the illusions they foster for control. The illusions they foster for control by creating a select viewing point.

You've probably seen this Ames Room on t.v. on one of the Ripley's Believe it or Not shows, or in one of the Ripley's museums if you've visited one. If you haven't visited one, you should do so! They're great fun and they are all different.

This optical effect is simulated by Darragh in poems (one per page) which are actually Ames Rooms.

Try these sometimes. Hold the book horizontally before your eyes, level, and peer into the text from the indicated "Viewing Point" at the bottom of the page. (If you do try it, have someone take a photograph of you doing it and post it online, okay?)

It really fucks with your head, this form of "reading."

It's probably appropriate this series of poems is dedicated to Retallack, the other master of the linguistic gedankenexperiment.

There's much more in this book, many formalistic innovations, but I just wanted to give a brief mention of the book here as one definitely worth owning, and as one likely to free up your conceptions of formal constraints lying over the poem like a shroud or funeral pall.