Mary Dalton
(Signal Editions, 2013)
Reviewed by Patrick Warner
The Dalton Interview2
[snip] "The cento, according to the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, is a poetic creation made of passages taken from some major poet of the past, such as Homer or Virgil, and woven together as a form of tribute. In the 4th century A.D., Ausonius, himself a maker of centos, laid out some rules. He stated that the passages could be from the same poet or many. Among poets whose works have been paid tribute to through centos are: Euripides, Ovid, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Goethe. In recent centuries there have been humorous centos. R. S. Gwynn wrote a rather lugubrious one about his own aging, entitled “Approaching a Significant Birthday, He Peruses The Norton Anthology of Poetry.” Online, I discovered something called CentoBingo and some rather underwhelming constructions called “Cento Mash-Ups.” I found out that the Empress Eudocia, the wife of Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II and an influential Christian in the 5th century A.D., had constructed a 2500-line cento out of Homeric passages in order to tell Biblical stories. The cento began to have a whiff of the circus about it for me. [snip]
In making these collages, then, I felt connected to the activity my mother and aunts had engaged in in their childhood and young womanhood, when goods and money were scarce and chilly floors needed warm mats. But there were, of course, other motives, other satisfactions. It seemed to me that the cento, as I came to know the form, was one way to respond to what often appeared to be drearily earnest and misguided pronouncements about appropriation and originality. There, says the cento, what do you think of me? There is not a single original line in me, yet can you deny that I am something new? [snip]
I think of the lines I’ve excised from poems as material, as strips of words. Each line, the hooking of these words into this particular sequence on a line, is the creation of its individual author; the sum of the lines in each cento, the way in which these syntactical fragments have been hooked together, is my creation. These pieces are at once mine and not mine." [snip]
Minims3
What was it again?
Death by avalanche, birth by failed conception?
See-saws. There have been a few of them.
Irksome and moody, the early traffic whizzes by.
And you’re face to face with history,
the draining board, its dull mineral shine.
The pitched grey, gull-swept sea,
the badly behaved crowd—
each blade, for once, truly metallic.
Nothing that doesn’t have to moves.
The weatherman tells me that the winter comes on
because it wants to. Never that. Because it must.
Against each wall, a lame hope waiting,
without the certificate,
and doubly bold.
The Carey Review4
[snip] “Newfoundland poet Mary Dalton makes radical use of an age-old form in Hooking [snip]. The cento is a kind of patchwork poem made up of lines from other poets; it’s meant to pay tribute to the source material, and was popular in Ancient Greece. Dalton imposes an added condition on herself: each cento’s line has the same position in the original poems, so “Gauze,” for instance, is composed of the fourth line from work by writers as varied as Sylvia Plath and Leonard Cohen. (All the sources are listed in a section at the back of the book).
Dalton’s stitch work is very fine: it makes for some strange juxtapositions, but they are often as evocative as they are enigmatic. In effect, the collection as a whole is a celebration of creation, and subtly links writing to other products of human making, such as cloth, braids, lace, filaments and thread, all of which are mentioned in the poems. At their best, the strung-together lines and phrases have a new, arresting beauty.[snip]”
Jason Guriel on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry5
[snip] “Language poetry, which took shape in the 1970s, is poetry that calls attention to itself as language. In fact, it’s sometimes spelled “L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry,” an act of masochism before the era of copying and pasting. Still, if you had to type them out, the equal signs, like speed bumps, would have slowed you down and maybe even gotten you thinking about the materiality of words, letters. Note that those equal signs aren’t plus signs: Language poets aim to thwart our yen for language to add up to some larger point, to provide closure, takeaway. (These dubious satisfactions, they point out, can already be had in the offerings of what Charles Bernstein calls “Official Verse Culture.”) [snip] And the fragments are intended to be “nonabsorbable”—Bernstein’s coinage for disruptive writing that “prevents an initial / ‘illusionistic’ reading.” [snip] Language poets also lineate their fragments. [snip] Who is the speaker? What point is he or she trying to make?[snip]
But what’s so bad about kicking back with a poem that conjures the illusion of a speaker serving up a clear message in a linear way? (What’s so bad about a good read?) And why do these curious folk, the Language poets, want to take the reader by the lapels and jostle her so? I have a hunch the French are to blame. In 1968, Roland Barthes declared the author dead. I think he got the Language poets to thinking. Like those characters on The Twilight Zone who emerge from a coma only to find themselves in a comatose world (a suburb, say), the Language poets seem to believe they are awake to the fact that the rest of the populace is asleep. They want the reader to wake up already and see that words aren’t windows to the author’s soul. Poems are socially constructed. They are the expressions of a society, its ideologies. You don’t curl up with Robert Lowell; you curl up with humanism.
Maybe by writing in a fragmentary way, then, Language poets are trying to break the illusion that poems are people talking. They are trying to land one on the chin of humanism and, while they’re at it, the kisser of capitalism. After all, if the reader can’t figure out what the author is saying, then she can’t affirm the author’s existence as an individual property owner (the property being the poem’s meaning). Once roused, the reader can take back the language from the clutches of the patriarchy or Corporate America or what have you. [snip] Instead of feeling like a frustrated consumer, the reader can endeavor to make her own meaning out of the fragments. In fact, she can explain to her sleepier peers why Language poems need to be so fragmentary; she can become a graduate student.
Surely, though, there are readers who share the Language poets’ philosophical assumptions but don’t want to read writing shot through with disruptions. And surely there are those who aren’t much startled by the disruptions, having encountered them before. They might not be able to distinguish a Language poem from, say, the automatic writing of the Surrealists. But they know a poem that jerks a thumb at itself when they see one. [snip]
Here are some more questions. How does a Language poet know when her poem is finished, or at least ready for the typesetter? (It strikes me that a non-linear and non-representational poetry of fragments that resist closure could go on forever.) Does a Language poem end where it does because its author got winded and, well, a poem has to end somewhere? What does her revision process look like? [snip] Why couldn’t the lines be shuffled into a different order and still enable the reader to come up with the same point about the wobbliness of words? And if the lines can be shuffled into a different order, why should the reader read the poems at all?” [snip]
Minims (shuffle)6
The pitched grey, gull-swept sea,
the draining board, its dull mineral shine.
The weatherman tells me that the winter comes on.
Death by avalanche, birth by failed conception,
because it wants to. Never that. Because it must.
Against each wall, a lame hope waiting.
Nothing that doesn’t have to moves
without the certificate.
See-saws. There have been a few of them.
Irksome and moody, the early traffic whizzes by.
And doubly bold
the badly behaved crowd—
each blade, for once, truly metallic.
And you’re face to face with history.
What was it again?
Carmine Starnino: Steampunk Zone7
“In our mashup-mad era, we yearn for unpigeonholeability. We don’t want to be different. We want to be weird. We want to be total category-killers. As a result, it’s hard to find a poet – free-versifier and formalist alike – who doesn’t believe at heart that he or she is far too heterodox to be trapped in existing definitions of traditional and experimental. Contemporary poetry now comprises a vast invented form: the godknowswhat.[snip] As a result, more is going on in Canadian poetry than ever before – more sonnets, sestinas, flarf cycles, centos, erasure poems, plunderverse, uncreative writing, concrete.[snip] But, just as often, Canadian poets don’t play the odds as much as stack the deck. As more of them keep one eye on the lyric tradition and one eye on whatever comes next, they increasingly try to force a breakthrough by splitting the difference. The result can be too perfect, as if it were the winner of a contest to compose the ideal hybrid poem. [snip] Indeed, the dominance of the steampunk aesthetic, the easy availability of its procedures, has led to a growing uncertainty about how to discuss such linguistic lab work, or even whether anything meaningful can be said at all. The entrepreneurial spree of poets patenting new forms, and the feeling of optimism and copiousness that accompanies it, overwhelms taste. When every poet happens to be writing exactly the kind of poem he or she set out to write, and every poem embodies exactly its theoretical intent, it becomes harder to say which poems are good, and why; how one kind of recombining and estranging differs from another; what books are truly counter, original, spare, strange. [snip]
There’s a lovely image in William Gibson’s novel Count Zero (1986) of a sentient computer deep in an abandoned space station, creating beautiful Cornell boxes out of junk. The boxes make it into the hands of admiring art dealers on Earth who are unaware of their provenance. In the same way, Canadian poets generate, as if on automatic, wonderful contrivances from disparate materials. These are poets who care about their poetry and work hard at it. Like watchmakers, they build machines out of the minutest parts; unlike watches, these machines are full of beguiling generosity for errant incidents. But too often we are faced with an artificial intelligence, simulated for believability, not an actual style. Style is what happens when originality becomes indistinguishable from the poem itself. It’s a way of mingling the unfamiliar ‘new’ and the still-compelling ‘old’ so that we can no longer separate them. Style is therefore the result of a voice so grounded in its subject, the effect is not a self-regarding newness but a newness absorbed into the poem, a newness riening into something effortlessly manifold and available. Such poems may not be the sort fusionists like, but they are the sort real poets write.”
1 [Snip] refers to the cut-up method Dalton employed to make the poems in Hooking. In the context of this review, [snip] indicates where lines have been excised from the texts used to make the review.↩
2 “Like the Star-Nosed Mole: John Barton in Conversation with Mary Dalton on Her Cento Variations:” The Fiddlehead/Malahat Review. Sunday, October 21, 2012. (online)↩
3 "Minims," p.26 (Hooking)↩
4 Carey, Barbara. “Poetry Book Reviews.” Toronto Star August 2, 2013. (online)↩
5 Guriel, Jason. “Words Fail Him: The Poetry of Charles Bernstein.” Parnassus: Poetry in Review. Accessed on September 2013. (online)↩
6 Minims (shuffle) is the author’s attempt to answer Guriel’s question “Why couldn’t the lines be shuffled into a different order and still enable the reader to come up with the same point about the wobbliness of words?” It’s the author’s opinion that the shuffled version of the poem is no better or worse than Dalton’s original. The author applied the same test to Ted Hughes’ "The Jaguar." See "The Jaguar (shuffle)" below, followed by the original.
The Jaguar (shuffle)
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun,
lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
is a fossil. The eye satisfied to be blind in fire.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
as a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion
like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Cage after cage seems empty, or
stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.
But who runs like the rest past these arrives
on a short fierce fuse—not in boredom—
at a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes
more than to the visionary his cell.
His stride is wildernesses of freedom.
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
he spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him.
The Jaguar
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion
Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.
But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes
On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him
More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.↩
7 Starnino, Carmine. “Steampunk Zone.” Lemon Hound, Apr 17, 2013(online)↩
