Gallery 4: Anne
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16: Winter, 2010

Maria Camboni

A Dialogue Between Marina
Camboni and Anne Blonstein
From "Of Experimental
Poetry: A Dialogue between a Scholar and a
Poet"

The following contains selected, edited
extracts from an ongoing, critical exchange between Marina
Camboni, Professor for American Literature at the University
of Macerata, Italy, and Anne Blonstein, part of a long-term
project Marina is undertaking with several contemporary poets.
As she explains:

This
dialogue is part of a continuing dialogue with some
contemporary poets in the experimental tradition who use more
than one natural language and explore the potential for poetry
of different artistic and scientific codes. Though my
involvement with such experimental writers in the
Anglo-American tradition as ee cummings, Gertrude Stein and
H.D. dates back to my undergraduate days, my interest in more
contemporary poets like Kathleen Fraser, Anne Blonstein and
Rachel Blau DuPlessis is rooted in my fascination with their
hybrid languages and their exploration of the creative and
innovative possibilities of language and textuality, as much
as in my response to the cosmopolitan, multiple worlds they
build and their gendered, ethical and critical perspectives on
past and present issues. The idea for this project came to me
some ten years ago when talking to Kathleen Fraser about the
necessity for creating a critical language for noninitiates
and is rooted in the personal and critical dialogue we have
had for over 20 years. My readings, as well as my questions to
the poets, tend to highlight pathways leading to a better
grasp of the individual poet's works that also help the critic
to find clues and delineate ways of reading an experimental
text. My idea is that there is a lot of work that critics
should be doing for ourselves and to guide other readers—very
often our students—into a text. One of the first things we
certainly need to tell them is that in order to 'enter' the
single poem or sequence of them, they, like the surfers of the
net, should start to 'navigate' the text, explore its
potentialities, or play with it in ways that enhance their
co-participation in the creation of its messages or senses. In
order to do so, however, they have to move away from the docks
in which their critical thinking is harboured. But do we
critics have the maps to help them move out of shallow
waters?"

*     *     *     *     *

Poetry, science and
space

Marina: the blue pearl
was the first book of yours that I read. I was taken by at
least five things I saw in it. 1. Your manifest connection to
Gertrude Stein and H.D. 2. The precision and clearcut outlines
of your verses and poems. 3. Your ability to join the concrete
and the abstract. 4. Your use of words and your creation of
astonishing compounds. 5. Your use of punctuation and space on
the
page.

Your
connection with Stein made me feel that your style was
familiar, somehow. But your poetry was totally different from
the massive piling of words in Stein's poetry. The
distillation of your lines on the page made me think of the
precision of a scientist, of the hardness of a crystal. It
reminded me of H.D.'s lines rather than Stein's. Even your
"blue pearl" evoked the pearl of great beauty in H.D.'s
Trilogy. Yet, your book was completely original, new
and worth exploring.

My
first question about this book (but it extends also to your
other books) has to do with your experience as a scientist and
its influence on your writing. Can you say something about
this in relation to the features of your writing that I've
mentioned?

Anne: I was a
biologist, and more specifically a plant biologist, who
specialized in genetics. I also worked for many years as an
editor, and indeed writer, of medical texts. So I'm clearly
quite familiar with the (western) biological discourse and
worldview.

Layout
and spacing—which in the blue pearl is not simply
highly deliberate, it is calculated—are very important in my
writing and you've had me pondering in what way my scientific
background might have played a role here. I'll
speculate.

The
acquisition of a scientific Weltanschauung (during my
university days 30 years ago, in the biological sciences still
highly Cartesian) is not least an education in methodology—the
posing of hypotheses and then the conception, design and
realization of experiments to test those hypotheses, followed
by the presentation and interpretation of
results.

The
results section of a scientific paper may be very short on
words: the primary means of conveying experimental results is
in the form of photographs, drawings, diagrams and
graphically: tables and graphs. Having drawn the axes of a
graph, all the space on the page, even in the absence of a
mark, is potentially endowed with specific meaning. Potential
that is realized or materialized, if you like, as soon as one,
two, three etc. marks are placed on the page, marks that can
be joined (or not) in lines, curves, sets and so on. The power
of the
frame!

And
how many hours have I spent looking down a microscope at
tissue sections, chromosome preparations, trying to
characterize and interpret a complex visual 2D field, to
extrapolate it spatially and
temporally?

So
I do think that both detailed observation combined with the
conversion of a blank page into a signifying surface have
contributed to a sensitivity to the spatial relationships and
interactions of signs/words on a page, to a concern with
issues of figure and ground, and, more recently, to an
interest in questions of perception—what is and is not (no
longer? yet?) seen/noticed on the written page (screen).

*     *     *     *     *

The evolutions of life and
language

Marina: Thinking
about how to interpret the function of notarikon in your
writing, I found at least two answers. I will try to
articulate them. My first assumption is that use of notarikon
is suited to your enquiring scientific mind. Answering my
question about the presence of your scientific training in
your poetry, you wrote that you were interested in "the role
played by chance in life processes, and the endless generation
of diversity and change". These words I find reshaped and
framed in the poem (in the butterflies and the
burnings) "dietrich bonhoeffer: theology in fragments"
where "data nor chance suppress singular characters" (p. 40).
In the same collection you write ("angela: a folly of
origins", p. 12):

why i began to write
is

i

always desiring and
despairing

of a tenacious lucidity.

These
lines sound like your answer to one of my questions. Your
poetry, they say, traces a quest process. It is a double drive
in the poet that you are: a desire to express yourself and an
anxiety to find the words capable of conveying the uniqueness
harbouring within you, in your experience and in your visions.
All this, however, is not separated from a desire of form, of
composition for which you find that the scientific mode of
exploration of reality can be extended to the sounding of the
generative power of language and its smallest units: letters
and sounds. H.D. wrote in Trilogy that words hid
other words, that words were little boxes made to hatch
butterflies, by which she meant that the words of a language
have both a creative and a saving power. I would like to focus
on the creative aspect. Pursuing chance you must also have
pursued a project of finding out what sense chance could
yield, what new openings on reality and transformations of the
same were possible, i.e. the potential of language not only to
convey known meanings, and thus refer to a pre-ordained world,
but also to open up new visions, direct us toward unexplored
possibilities that were there all the time, and from these
start to create new directions for the world. In this sense I
recognize a scientific attitude in your experimentation with
words, which must be methodologically akin to that of the
geneticist in you.

Anne: I have (at
least!) two responses here. Of course, I am far from alone as
a writer generating e.g. new vocabularies, and I would
identify another context for my verbal experimentation that
I'm sure is at least as important as my experiences as a
geneticist.

Based
in Basel, I am both embedded in a German-language culture and
live just five minutes from the border with France. I read
French and German as well as English and translate from German
into English. So I'm constantly exposed to the qualities, the
possibilities of these languages as they are used in everyday
discourse and literature. I see and hear how, and not
unimportantly why, German and French users change their
languages. It is all too easy to make sweeping
generalizations, but the word compounding that German can take
is just the most obvious site for new word-ideas, while the
homophony of French opens into regions of stunning ambiguity.
English can absorb (is this hybridization?) some of these
features, but it also has other and particular properties and
flexibilities to
explore.

Setting
aside the issues of (new) syntax and grammar, you've already
noticed that my work with English is often at the very small
scale, the level of the letter. I suppose it is curious that
both my PhD and post-doc projects were focused on the
generation of mutants, i.e. in creating new phenotypes through
very small genetic changes. However, when I began to put
pressure on words to yield novelty, it was not part of a
conscious effort to apply to language what can happen in the
genome. Though obviously the parallels were clear.
Nevertheless, it was really only some time later that I
started seeing that the processes of my transformations all
have parallels in genetic material: point mutations,
inversions, deletions, insertions, transpositions,
replications—all genetic terms to describe alterations in DNA
that could apply to what I
do.

I'd
also like to note that most of the time, neologisms are not
the outcome of any deliberate, systematic "mutagenesis"
procedure: pencil in hand, intense concentration on the poem
being written—and the words (on a good morning!) appear as I
write. Occasionally, when I'm "stuck", I do systematically
make changes to words to see what comes out. I'll write down
or think a word and then e.g. take one letter and replace it
with every other letter in the alphabet to see what emerges.
Or (mis)translate words back and forth between languages. But,
analogous as these procedures might be to evolutionary
processes (or genetic engineering), their outcomes are usually
less rewarding than the more subconscious creations.

*     *     *     *     *

The song of
syntax

Marina: She, the
character in the poems of a syndrome of dreams [the
first part of an unpublished manuscript, the read of two
mouths], is the writer, who writes "over", "under",
"into" (I.16) "an attenuated space". That space is a mirroring
surface over which the writer's eye perceives or, better,
recognizes a "bodyscape". In the second section of a
syndrome of dreams, "inspire us by our desires",
desire moves the lines ["another bodily irrevelation" (II.1),
"a resonating bodyscape" (II.4)]. It is the loving, desiring
body in the poems that actualizes a modern version of the
Shulamite, whom we can detect, though hidden. Who is the "he"
in these poems? Is it a man that has awakened long-dormant
senses? Is it, as in the Song of Solomon, the god/king she
turns to that floods the speaking self with a life-giving
attention, that transforms her body into a landscaped garden?
Or more simply stimulates life in the loving woman? "Love
knows", we read, repeatedly. What does love know? "desire
dancing with deficiency / cells divide to provide / another
version" (II.17). It seems to me that these lines that I quote
tell the story of a tension, between the desire of fullness,
of completeness that moves the owner of the landscaped body
and the love that knows, and the body's moving autonomously in
a different direction. Its "irrevelation", one that points to
reduction, fragmentation, revealing a different
direction.

There
is a particular use of the "you" in the poems of "breaking
towards". It is as if the pronoun were a proper name, and a
character in these lines that are clearly evocative of the
"Song of Songs":

"     you
samples unexpected
wines
you savours
vaginal expressions" (1.2)

The
you is not the addressee but an actor in the loving drama. But
as a reader I remain uncertain: is you another self, a double
so to say, or does he refer to the "he", also present in the
poems?

Anne: Among the
several features that make the Song of Songs (henceforth Song)
such a rich, and intriguing, biblical book are two that are
relevant to your question. The Song is polyvocal. Although the
woman's voice, her desire, are the primary and compelling
forces in the Song, the male lover and the daughters of
Jerusalem, the chorus, are also speaking characters in this
erotic drama. Connected to this is the fact that in the
Hebrew, it is not always possible to assign with absolute
certainty speechparts to characters. This ambiguity is
retained in some translations, suppressed in
others.

In
composing a contemporary 'song' that is evidently patterned on
the Song, I not only wanted to acknowledge the effect of these
two features—polyvocality and ambiguity—while not imitating
them directly, I was also concerned to avoid, or at least
mitigate, one of the risks, I suppose I would term it, of love
poetry, that is the tendency for the voice/words of the lover
(who may be the author, or the I, stated or implicit) to
engulf the beloved, to deprive him/her of initiative and
autonomy within and outside the relationship. (I suppose
ideally I think such poetry should be written with four
hands.) To a large extent, though, this may be a problem of
grammar.

So,
I made two decisions. First to have the lovers "represented"
by four pronouns using all the possible persons. My second
choice, which you discuss, was grammatically transgressive.
The attempt combining the second person singular pronoun (you)
with verbs in the third person ("samples" "savours"
etc)—albeit, and importantly, not always—was to explore
whether it is possible in that way to convey the intimacy
between the (implicit) I and the you while simultaneously
acknowledging through the verb form you's existence also as an
other.

*     *     *     *     *

the butterflies and
the burnings

Marina:
There is a second aspect of notarikon that I connect to
mysticism, as well as to experimental poetry, and to part of
modernist writing. For is not the search for revelation a way
of reaching epiphany, of unveiling the ultimate sense of
things? A way of getting to what cannot be known and seen by
our human senses, nor understood by reason only? The poems you
devoted to mystics and saints and collected in the book you
published in 2009 but wrote between 1995 and 1999 throw their
light over all your poetry. Each poem is very different from
all the others. It is as different as each saint or martyr or
mystic on which it focuses and whose words or life it—in its
particular way—condenses. Even the language in the poems
varies, in tune with the time and space inhabited by the
protagonist. It has been the solitude and silence of Pereta
that has given me the possibility to devote my concentrated
attention to your poems. This medieval village in Maremma—some
believe its tower to be the one where Dante placed Pia de'
Tolomei—is my retreat, away from the chaos of crowded Rome.
Here I am spending these Christmas holidays, as in a faraway
oasis. Here I can be with myself as almost nowhere else. And
it is here that, as in a sort of revelation, I found a line
that made other lines echo in my mind, a line that I find as
beautiful and evocative as Whitman's "When lilacs last in the
dooryard bloomed" and T.S. Eliot's opening lines of The
Waste
Land.

Your
line reads:

"daffodils
lift their sterile trumpets into the breeze."

It is
followed by a line that both contextualizes the daffodils and
expands the time and places of their presence, uniting the
death-fields of Normandy and wartime to the present time of
the poetic voice's "backyard":

"be
it in normandy. or regent's park. or my backyard."

I find in both lines a synthesis
of what you write in the first lines of the poem:

"they
left us an anxious generation and stunned.

in
the struggle to erect a fragile place. we have in other words
the

letters.
we have in other words a litany to leach.

later
ne plus natura. We have in other words death's repetition."
(p. 50)

The
litany "we have in other words", repeated three times,
connects language, repetition and death. The whole poem—the
eighth in the Bonhoeffer sequence—can be read as a testimony
of a time that can be ours, where a heritage of death affects
the present. Here you surrealistically equate "the dead as
unidentified flying subjects" and "unidentified fleeing
others". Here, again, you create a neologism that sums up in
contemporary language, the cynical stance of those for whom
Bonhoeffer (Christ?) was nothing but an "agitpastor who
refuses to abandon his
god".

To
conclude, your daffodils stand for the faithlessness, the
sterility of a present that nothing has learnt from the past,
and is capable only of "death's
repetition".

They
remind me also of the daffodils so hated by Lucy, the
protagonist of Jamaica Kincaid's novel of the same title. She
cannot look at daffodils without being reminded of British
colonialism and her compulsory learning of Wordsworth's poem
"Daffodils", in a school where she had to learn about a flower
as far away from the Caribbean flora as British history was
from the history of its colonies. In your association of the
unidentified dead with "the unidentified fleeing others", I
find a condensation of colonial hegemony, displacement, and
death.

To
move now to the mystic side of some modernist writers, two
poems in this collection led me directly to Gertrude
Stein—whose mysticism is less studied though it is certainly
there—and particularly to her plays. In the last line of the
dramatic poem "leocadia and raquel: toledo", the character
"me" that enters the scene at the end of the poem, concludes
it with the words: "(writing) a life", which reminds me of
more than one steinian
title.

Reference
to Stein is explicit in a preceding poem "gertrude and a
gertrude and a gertrude is great / or / the colour of the sky
is yellow", where the five Gertrudes in the play interact in a
way that evokes Stein's "Four Saints in Three Acts" and other
plays in the same line.

Anne: Well, let me
begin by thanking you for what you write about the
butterflies and the burnings. I know you would like me to
say something about influences—Stein, Celan, Klee etc.—but
before I do, can I bring up something else: two terms that
have cropped up now and again in your commentaries and
readings which I would perhaps like to problematize a little.
I'll try to be
brief!

The
words I have in mind are "mystic(al)" and, to a lesser extent,
"spiritual". I would like to know how you read, feel,
experience or identify these qualities in my poetry, or indeed
other modern or contemporary art, such as Stein's, where you
claim there is an understudied mystic
content?

My
concerns here are twofold. First do you think this "religious"
vocabulary is appropriate to (contemporary) poetry, or is
there perhaps a need to develop other critical approaches and
terms to address these features or characteristics of a piece
of writing? But also, retaining the terminology for the
moment, how does the mystical content manifest itself? Is it
immanent in the text, sort of placed there by the writer,
waiting to be activated by the reading? Is it a perhaps
unconscious or unintentional residue of the writer's
experience and practice that leaves its traces in the text? To
what extent might its presence be independent of the writer's
intentions?

In
other words, when a text is read or interpreted as "mystical"
whose mystical experience are we talking
about?

It
may be worth going back to the genesis of the butterflies
and the burnings, what prompted me to write it. After I
had completed the 24-poem "island of salt" in early 1995, I
was struck by its (unintended) mythological tone and
immediately felt a need to engage with women in history,
though I wanted to write pieces that are to be read as
contemporary poetry not historical accounts. At the same time
I had been reading Elaine Scarry and was pondering the issue
of the breakdown of language in the body in pain. For a
historically grounded project, I knew I needed texts, and
found myself one day in the reading room at the university
library in Basel leafing through reference books about saints:
I had in mind, of course, martyrs, and was maybe also dimly
aware of the self-inflicted corporeal pain of certain holy
women and men, though my knowledge at the time about the RC
church was negligible. What I actually set in motion that
afternoon was a five-year, text-based project that exceeded in
every imaginable dimension what I was vaguely contemplating as
I responded individually to each of the women whose life (and
works) I
selected.

Similarly,
an engagement with biblical texts need not necessarily imply
spiritual concerns. So I am happy here that you have
highlighted the ethical intent of the writing. I recognize and
acknowledge the bible as a foundational text of western
culture, ethics, and law that continues to impact on the ways
we think and behave. I'm very uncomfortable abandoning the
so-called holy texts to those who profess a religion, however
they practise it. The bible is part of my heritage, my
(however troubled and troubling) tradition, to which I wish to
respond from a particular historical, social and geographical
location—another lesson learnt perhaps from some of our less
than orthodox foreaunts, to say nothing of many transgressive
readers and writers—H.D., Angela Carter, Claude Cahun are the
first that come to my mind—of the 20th century.

Marina: I agree
with you, perhaps the words "mystic(cal)" and "spiritual" are
too heavily connotated. They do not satisfy me. For a long
time I refused to use the word "spiritual". Still there is a
dimension in your writing that I believe has to do with a
search for the absolute, or the presence beyond the visible.
For the visible and the knowable is very often what we have
been taught to see and to know. I know this experience of the
absolute but also of the void in which we find ourselves
immersed, which I identify with the desire to be completely
oneself and still to recognize that one is part of a larger
cosmos, that human beings belong to one another and that there
is so much that eludes us. It is this dimension of extension
beyond oneself without annihilation of the self that I call
mystical. It is the feeling that time is both particular,
historical, and absolutely free from history, as is space. I
feel we belong to more than one space and more than one time.
Linguistic exploration of possibilities, like those opened by
notarikon, is a way to get somewhere that—whether we know it
or not—was there but was not a real space or a real time or a
real meaning or possibility of language or sense until we
unveiled, revealed it or got there—which means until we gave
it a name or a place in
time.

Gallery 4: Anne
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16: Winter, 2010