Colin Lee Marshall on Ian Heames
Review of Ian Heames, Arrays (Face Press, 2015)
Colin Lee Marshall
In the preface to his Four Lectures, Stephen Rodefer famously wrote: “Today we have
painted cities, painted conveyances, painted apartments, painted roads, painted
people, even painted food. Is it not time for painted poetry as well?” This
question has found a highly receptive addressee in Ian Heames, a poet who has
published a set of extensive annotations
to Rodefer’s poem, and one whose own poetry might itself be thought to evoke or
suggest the art of painting. Heames’ ‘painted poetry’ is often prefigured by
the production values of his self-released Face Press chapbooks, the artwork to
which typically seems to aspire towards a similarly extrinsic condition to that
of the poetry. Stated more specifically, even though Heames’ book designs don’t
actually incorporate traditional paintings, they are nonetheless highly
ekphrastic nods to the form (vide the
floral intaglio of Out of Villon, the
abstract digital pointillism of Arrays,
or the Rothko-ized photography of Banners
Over Terminal Highway). As regards the poetry itself, Heames’ style of
‘painting’ has already passed through several iterations, from the euphonious
impasto of his earlier work, to the variegated motif-stippling of his ongoing Sonnets series. The 2015 chapbook Arrays – which collects the releases Array One (Critical Documents, 2012), To (Iodine, 2013), and A.I In Daylight (Materials, 2014) – is
an especially interesting juncture of Heames’ painterly development, and one
that is worthy of a close reading on its own terms.
Each of Arrays’
three sections comprises twenty-seven poems, all of which are titled with
double decimal numbers (‘1.1.1’, ‘1.1.2’, 1.1.3’, etc.). If this structural
skeleton seems to promise the kind of propositional boldness and (alleged)
clarity that we might associate with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, it also immediately reneges on that
promise, flourishing out a world that confounds the usual methods of haptic and
optic purchase. Rodefer, who asseverates in Four
Lectures that “The modern world began with the first contiguity disorder”,
deserves quoting here at more length:
A poetry painted with every jarring color and juxtaposition,
every simultaneous order and disorder, every deliberate working, every movement
toward one thing deformed into another. Painted with every erosion and scraping
away, every blurring, every showing through, every wiping out and every
replacement, with every dismemberment of the figure and assault on creation,
every menace and response, every transformation of the color and reforming of
the parts, necessary to express the world.
For Rodefer, as for Heames, poetic painting
aims not at a neat, skillful prosopopeia, but rather at a series of effacements
and refasionings, with the aim of allowing all pentimenti to peer out from behind the redacted text. Indeed,
“jarring color and juxtaposition” perhaps doesn’t go far enough in Heames’
case; for in Arrays, what we more
often see is impossible colour and
juxtaposition: “the night turns one quarter green / incarnadine”. One could
perhaps write an entire essay on this string of text alone. Striking us at
first as a mere tremor, a local wavelet of protean colour, “green / incarnadine”
can turn, if we allow it to, into a whelm of poetry so oppressive that it
threatens to arrest the hermeneutic urge. Knowing that we cannot arrive at the
wavelength “green / incarnadine” through the dictionary, the Pantone Matching
system, or any other readily available reference work, we may prefer to
dispense with any attempt to arrive at it at
all—to which end we might be thankful for the line break, see it as a
welcome bulwark against so oppressive an incongruity. However, this requires
that we overlook its lacerative suggestion, its subtle nod to the sanguinary
associations that have attended the word “incarnadine” ever since its
appearance in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Such suggestiveness is also, by extension, a reminder that Shakespeare (or his
readers) had already taken a scalpel to the entailed flesh of the word’s
etymology long before its appearance in Arrays,
irrevocably staining the word just as Macbeth would stain the “multitudinous
seas”. We are thus confronted with a mysterious new wound atop an old one—mysterious
because it precedes the cutaneous integration that it severs. Given that there
has never been any ‘greenincarnadine’ to speak of, Heames’ amputation acts as a
displaced emotional stimulus, triggering in the reader an urge to mourn
something that has never been cathected. The discomforting vagueness of this
violence is further complicated by the fact that, before its severance, “green
/ incarnadine” had already been chromatically quartered (more blood, perhaps), and was thus already an etiolated
version of its Platonic form. Any attempt here to “storm the exactest shade”,
to restore a pure ‘greenincarnadine’, would thus occur outside the frame of
textual signification.
One could certainly write at far greater
length about the swirling Ishihara plate of colours in Arrays; however, there are also other striking impossibilities in
the text that are equally worthy of our attention. Nowhere, perhaps, are such
impossibilities more apparent than in the monsters of Arrays. Heames’ teratology is extreme, transcending more familiar
zoomorphic configurations, and extending even to the moment of utterance
itself, so that not only do the referents become monstrous, but the signifying
apparatus does, too (e.g. “Swans into theatregoer in floods”; “that visibly pet
moth”; “Cherry-pick workplace murex vernix Euler tour / then evolved into
prey”). Most notable, perhaps, is the progressive interlocking of several
wildly different taxonomies. In one prominent example, the lepidopterous and
the cetaceous drift into an improbable congress, out of which emerges a “moth
dolphin” (elsewhere a “beached moth”). But this impossible miscegenation is not
nearly impossible enough, given that the site of its unfolding is purely
biological. What Arrays seems ultimately
to strive for is a monstrosity that implies more than merely organic
impossibility, a monstrosity that sublates chemistry, warfare, art, and myriad
systems of knowledge or inscription. Thus, we also encounter a “metalloid
cartouche butterfly” and a “military dolphin”. Heames elaborates on the latter
thus: “A military dolphin is a dolphin / Trained for military uses / / One in
three warplanes / Learn cuneiform”. Given the proximity of “dolphin” to
“warplanes”, I’m inclined to read beyond the text here, and to posit “moths
that desire fins” as being almost
fungible with an extra-textual ‘dolphins that desire wings’. If such
fast-and-loose reading seems dubious, I hope that the point extractable from it
– namely, that a desire for wings doesn’t necessarily, or even likely imply biological alation (far
less romantic or poetic elation) – is
nonetheless relevant to the broader concerns of Arrays. What we see in the
“metalloid cartouche butterfly”, as in the [cetacean?] “warplanes that learn
cuneiform”, is a startling triad of nature, techne,
and inscription—that is to say, a gesture towards mastery and deployment (with all of the various connotations
that those two words might be thought to evoke).
This bores right into the etymology of the
title. In its oldest attestations, ‘array’ is a martial word (the OED defines the verb thus: “To set or
place in order of readiness, to marshall. esp.
To draw up prepared for battle”; and the noun thus: “Arrangement in line or
ranks, esp. martial order”). Over
time, the word has bled into various other disciplines – mathematics,
statistics, computing, law, etc. – on top of being co-opted for the inevitable
figurative usages. This ‘bleeding’ is essential to Arrays, is part of the book’s linguistic and philosophical
‘sfumato’ (a term Heames actually uses once in the collection: “in sfumato
limelight”). If the general use of
sfumato might sometimes achieve the expected shades (“Borders with no guard
left”) it is also often a technique of willful obnubilation, of a kind that might
invite charges of vagueness or misdirection (“please cloud / my judgement”).
What Heames often chooses to deploy
is perhaps precisely the kind of material that he might be expected by some to
elide. Consider the use of trees, for example. If Brecht’s claim that “talking
about trees is almost a crime / because it avoids speaking about so many
brutalities” might still be thought relevant for contemporary poetry, it is one
to which Heames is demonstrably unable to subscribe: “trees like the trees of another world”;
“some tree lined Valhalla of the crestfallen”; “trees locks / seas curls”;
“moth tree to moth”. That which, for Brecht, is almost impossible for committed
poetry, is, for Heames, clearly not impossible enough. Whether this makes the deployment of trees in his work
more, or less worthy of censure is
uncertain. But either way, far from being merely the pretty staffage of a
painted poetry, these trees are – like most phenomena in Arrays – worked into important discursive and hypertextual knots. The
first quote (enriched by the ambiguity of the word “like”) compresses poetry,
ecology, psychology, gender, cosmology, politics, sociology, and social media
into its few words. This perhaps seems a bold claim at face value. But at the
very least, we must recognize that it is difficult to discern any ‘simple’ tree
in Arrays. The word ‘tree’ is too
historically charged, too laden with associations (poetic staple/bauble;
life-giver; phallus; etc.) that are not – or are not necessarily – compatible with each other. As a further rebuttal to
this simplicity, the trees of Arrays
also act like synapses that effect pro- and analeptic communication with other,
intratextual phenomena. Thus, “some
tree lined Valhalla of the crestfallen”
refers us forward (if we are willing to shoehorn in a contraband etymology) to
“trees locks / seas curls”, which in
turn refers us forward to “locks greener [parenthetically, a hypertextual link
to all of the various ‘greens’ of Arrays]
and more weeping”, which in turn refers us back to “use iris to melt locks”,
which – on top of becoming reciprocally (and recursively) referential with “locks greener” – seems to radiate
out towards all of the impossible colours of Arrays. The horrendously pleached syntax generated by the
parentheses in the above sentence should go some way to conveying the dense, proliferative
effects of Heames’ text. One could just as easily abstract the words “world”,
“lined”, “seas”, or “moth” from the above quotes, and go off on other tangents.
Thus we are confronted not only with a kind
of hyper-economy or- compression (a desire, in other words, to deploy
individual words with a largesse that maximally confounds the notion of simple
conveyance), but also with proliferating in-text matrices that both deepen and
complicate this economy. Consider, for example, the line: “Autumn Psyche
Nightingale Indolence Autumn”. Divorced from the context of literary history,
these words would be, at best, merely rich;
but realizing that the words need not – in any definitional or categorical
sense – concatenate naturally with each other, we might have pause thereby to
be startled by the very specific associative power that they exact. If we
‘know’ what Heames has done – namely, that he has compressed Keats’ classic
odes by the simple juxtaposition of their titular keywords – we also know that
such knowledge is not intrinsic to the words themselves (a fact that holds true
even as they are deployed alongside each other). It’s an impressive card trick;
and yet, however arresting it might be in the moment, Heames’ uploading of a
secret, exformational cache of entire poems (via a simple list of nouns, no
less) is ultimately unsatisfying. What appears at first to be a type of
hyper-compression soon becomes a verbal cincture that must be unloosened. It is
not enough that these nouns refer only
to Keats odes. The storm that passes through Arrays (and by storm, I refer both to an actual, narrative storm, and to an unremitting
and oragious attack on language) ensures that almost any given word in the book isn’t quite what it is. Writes Heames:
“the shakeup could proceed / as early as this autumn”. This sentence, which, like
so many in Arrays, reads like found language, becomes more than what
it appears, is ionized by the context of its placement, so that “this autumn”
is also that “Autumn”—i.e. Keats’
Autumn, shaken up or out by the
storm.
But lest these cross-textual mappings belie
the more afferent or self-contained effects of the poetry, it is perhaps worth
pausing for a close reading of a single poem. The poem ‘1.1.3’ from ‘A.I. In
Daylight’ is reproduced in its entirety below.
crab panther Dis regent emanation clown
flame troubadour tsar manta
sort of floats
in on the receding undertow
cadre made halcyon phoenix of my ovation
as though a mesh were
without its border sign
it is listed as vulnerable and looks pleasing
doubt is a sad playlist
said the pretend leader
when it came to rest
the sky now is peach as the tree is willow
it would be easier to hold games
Notwithstanding the pageant of monsters
already encountered in Arrays, the
rapid-fire stacking of “crab panther Dis regent emanation clown / flame
troubadour tsar manta” seems almost too
excessive, larded beyond leitmotif to the point of poetic infarction. The
initial urge is to treat this monster as reflexive hyper-parody, and thus to
dismiss its constituent words as a kind of protruding surplusage—i.e. as
noticeable, but unimportant beyond the moment of lurid self-flagellation. But
there is something going on in this weird mess of words that allows the monster
to reclaim its troubled corpus beyond the parody, to feel itself as the site of
its own conflict. This conflict is felt not only in the fraught conjunction of
the body’s social, biological, and physical constituents, but also in the
stratification that these can imply, in their historical or futural status as
signifiers of power or pathos, and in the flickering grammar by which they vie
to be read substantively. The crab panther is thus simultaneously a hideous
monster and a conspicuously monstrous body politic.
The monster is also a harbinger of the
fraught syntagms that will follow. In the second (micro-) stanza, we encounter
“sort of floats”, a phrase almost calligramic in the buoyancy of its placement
above the third stanza. That which “sort of floats / in on the receding
undertow” also doesn’t do so, denies
the water as facilitative body, hardens into a complicit noun that is “in on”
the whole thing, or which simply hovers above,
safely static (however tantalizing), before giving way to, or becoming subsumed
in another monster: “cadre made
halcyon phoenix of my ovation”. Rather than immediately dovetailing with “[…]
receding undertow”, this line reads as a kind of Frankensteinian suture, a
grammatical oddment that requires a certain level of readerly pressure –
etymological, phonological, and morphological – before the various operations
of the juxtaposition become less opaque. Most obviously, perhaps, “halcyon” at
least lends the aquatic buoyancy the context of myth—although the avian surfeit
of “phoenix” cancels (nixes) this
elemental mooring with its associative fire. Both “halcycon” and “phoenix” are
also suggestively chromatic, the former orthographically evoking ‘cyan’, the
latter derived etymologically from “purple-red, crimson”. By the time we reach
“ovation” – a brilliantly germane choice of word – the line has become almost
untenable in its multiparous generosity, flailing around to keep hold of its
offspring. “Ovation” is almost ‘aviation’, evoking by this similarity halcyon/phoenician
flight and generation, tinged all the while (via “cadre”) with the suggestion
of soldiers and warplanes. Soldiers – or
their sublimation as athletes – are of course themselves entailed by the word
“ovation”. Thus, the halcyon that would build its nest atop calm waters is
threatened, trapped inside a syntagm that seems designed to thwart the simple
nesting instinct, and to promote instead a kind of oviparous surfeit.
In truth, though, “syntagm” doesn’t seem
quite accurate; for the matrix out of which meaning is (however dubiously)
‘held’, feels less linear, more densely patinaed than whatever might be
possible purely at the level of the sentence. The word “cadre”, for example,
can be linked (via its etymological roots as “four-sided thing, square”) to
“mesh”. Both “cadre” and “mesh” entail, in various ways, “border” and “list”,
and all four words variously imply capture or containment. But this lunge to
containment is always compromised by border spillage. The word “list”, in
particular, yields copious etymological spoils. That which is “listed as
vulnerable” is the building that ‘leans’, ‘inclines’, or (in light of the
already established oceanic setting) ‘careens’. It is ‘bordered’, or ‘taken
pleasure in’. But it is also ‘listened to’. Such definitional richness affects
the lines in strange ways. The phrase “looks pleasing” begins to seem almost
uncannily tautologous in the context of listly ‘pleasure’, while “sad
playlist”, given a super-aural definition, reveals itself as the false cognate
we probably never knew existed.
It is doubtful whether any of this ‘comes
to rest’ in hermeneutic fixity or inertia. The penultimate stanza parlays the
dubiety, so that the “doubt” proffered by a “pretend leader” is amplified by the de-humanizing pronoun “it”. We
have one more stanza to try to draw out further associations, and might perhaps
start by positing “peach” and “willow” as problem colours generically similar
to “halcyon” and “phoenix”. But when it comes to arriving at a definitive
answer, “it would be easier to hold games” (Olympic, video, or language). That
is to say, it would and it wouldn’t be easier, depending on which
kind of prehensility we are taking about at any given moment of reading—if
indeed we can hold anything for long enough to know exactly what it is we are talking about.
And yet, for all of this, there are rare
occasions elsewhere in the book when Heames chisels out a seemingly crystalline
apophthegm. “Love is an abuse of love” echoes a similar line in Rodefer’s Four Lectures—“Ordinary human love can
RUIN a being for the experience of real love”. Regardless of any homage that
may or may not be at play in Heames’ line, its sentiment is as succinct a
crystallization of a particularly prevalent tenor of avant-garde poetic ‘love’
as any I have encountered in contemporary British poetry. Vigilant yet fragile,
it cannot quite sustain itself (or can do so only vexedly under the weight of
its paradox). Another string of text makes similarly tantalizing apophthegmatic
demands: “love, as in politics / before the city / gets made there”. The
grammar here appears tensile and
generative, but is in fact isotropically weak. There can be no restitution – for love, for politics, or for the
city – however vividly the nouns might emerge from the lines, or however
ardently they might suggest that they are imbricated, temporally moored,
made/decided/perfected/instantiated. The words thus run a kind of gamut of
semantic clarity and nonsense, comprising at first a trenchant apophthegm,
which then fractures under scrutiny into rich equivocation, and finally
resolves into a carefully crafted series of conjunctive repeals.
This is a poetry, then, not only of what
gets included (trees, for example), but also of what gets excluded or denied. Specifically, it is a poetry that seems to
wonder at the viability of certain strands of ‘left’ thought in contemporary
avant-garde poetics. The final couplet of the collection reads: “Left poetry to
lift weights / Air between wings again”. Here, Heames’ fondness for puns
(prevalent throughout Arrays) can be
seen at its most strikingly polysemic. “Left poetry to lift weights” works
simultaneously as a defection, a commitment, an admonishment, a promise, and an
arrogation, while “Air between wings again” is both a re-subliming into a now
long-embargoed poetic flight, and an attempt to purify the stagnant – or
perhaps even the noxious – odour that
has built up under the complacency of certain contemporary pretensions.
Brilliant work, we might think, and hardly open to castigation simply because
it works an array of volte-faces into
its more dutiful moments. And yet, at a time when a great number of the poets
in Heames’ broader milieu often invoke direct targets and rhetorics – and do so
in ways that suggest figurative mobilization, deployment, and attack – Heames
stands out in his preference for a more iridescent, or better yet, a more spectral semantic palette. Granted,
there are tissues of what might be called a more direct poetic idiolect in Arrays
(“teens woke from a heavily policed summer”; “caught up in the rhetoric of the
Games”; etc.), but the book never comes close to positioning Heames alongside
the more brazen of his contemporaries. Indeed, his question “Why should I even
mention / These politicians” might almost seem incendiary, an unwelcome fit of
malcontent. But certainly, it provides an invigorating challenge to the notion
that any committed poetics must treat certain material as essential, just as it
treats other material as verboten. If not a directly political text, Arrays is nonetheless a fascinating and
challenging wunderkammer, a collection of monsters from the imagined
intersections of politics, technology, war, video games, the internet, social
media, dreams, and nature, and one that arouses in us a suspicion that simply
reading these words (or simply reading these words [or simply reading these words]) will risk
eliding too much. We are thus kindled with a desire to read also what has been
painted over or scratched out. An apparent piece of found language (which we
might do well to imagine as having been both deployed verbatim and painted over) brings us quickly to
the point: “Some names have been changed”. Indeed they have.
Colin Lee Marshall
