People Skulk
J. Gordon Faylor
2019
Smiling Mind Documents
84 pp
$12.00 [lulu.com]
Reviewed by Clara B. Jones in PANK,
October 2019
“No theoretical generalization is
foolproof.” Marjorie Perloff
The broader San Francisco poetry scene
has a long artistic history and has been called the “countercultural
center of modern poetry,” associated with poets such as Lawrence
Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg. J. Gordon Faylor: an
editor at San Francisco MOMA & Editor of GaussPDF, publisher of
digital and innovative books, is author, among other works, of the
highly-regarded, Registration Caspar [2016],
a stunningly original novel/”long-form” poem, as well as, The
Puppet Wedding, a 2017 pamphlet—both volumes composed
experimentally using innovative grammar, semantics, form, and
content, as well as, indeterminate semantics and non-sequiturs.
A few words from The Puppet Wedding are employed in People
Skulk [e.g., “puppet,” “half-pint”], a between-text
repetition facilitating the perception of unity across the author's
oeuvre. Other devices employed to enhance wholeness in the new
collection are the lack of a Table of Contents and serial pagination.
Similarly, the phrase, “people skulk” is repeated in the title
poem, and idiosyncratic punctuation is employed throughout the book
to highlight structure, as well as, “referential” and
“non-referential” elements.
Titles of volumes and poems may conceal
rather than expose or stress meanings of compositions, particularly,
if there appears to be no connection between them. The title of
Faylor's new collection is connected to its title poem's first lines,
“People skulk, / they really do; / match affinities, rain descent /
arrogance volitive, dated / worthy blisters on Leonora's / shells
otherwise abandoned.” [36]. Experimental poems lend themselves to
critical, including, textual, analysis [“close reading”], and the
reader might ask, for example, is “Leonora,” Leonora Carrington,
the British-Mexican Surrealist painter—possibly, referring to the
author's aesthetics or the lens through which he intends his
collection to be viewed? Alternatively, “Leonora” may be an
intimate reference or a symbolic name indicating, perhaps, that the
text is to be read as a heteronormative one. This quote exhibits a
common device of experimental poetry—the deployment of
non-sequiturs and erasure to “splice,” conceal, obscure,
or delete material that may or may not enhance meaning or facilitate
interpretation.
For example, “skulk,” and other
words, may have more than one, or archaic, meanings or may function
as different parts of speech, and the reader must decide how the poet
is using language that may be deployed in many different ways—e.g.,
intentional-unintentional, conscious-unconscious. “Skulk,” as a
verb, may mean to hide or to malinger [Br.]—often with a sinister
or cowardly motive; alternatively, used as a noun, “skulk” means,
a group of foxes. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept, “language
games,” word usage is meaningful only insofar as the reader can
determine what “rules” the writer has employed. The “game”
for the reader is not to reconstruct what the author intended, but to
use “close reading” to uncover “rules” or “associations”
[n.b. “associative poetry”] derivable from the text. The title
poem continues:
“I'm going to skulk myself
fudge fish chats with the NSA
these last days wagering
wipe-washing with my carrot
not behaving toward vocalizing
the glowed leftover, my standing here
unfollowed so to speak,
hoveling for present people
standing around here, dead guilty.”
—and, later in the title poem,
“You get to dress tape
understand animal
smarts not worthy
fuck and walk
undone go ahead hate me and my
pickled people love for putting up
with, at most, our kites' reports.”
Cowardly or sinister motives are not
addressed explicitly; however, the poem's speaker refers to himself
as skulking “with the NSA,” “not behaving,” “unfollowed,”
“dead guilty,” and the like. Similarly, though foxes are not
mentioned in the poem, the speaker mentions “fish” and “animal”—
referentiality contrasted to and contradicting the non-referentiality
of the composition when it is read as a whole and in parts.
Furthermore, the components, “you...fuck and walk” and, “go
ahead hate me,” direct the reader's attention to an apparent
relationship between the speaker-subject and recipient-object, while
other words and phrases may function parenthetically or as
“fillers,” or they, also, may stand alone—referentially, or
not. The subject's “gaze” is, clearly, directed at the female,
“you;” however, it seems throughout that the object's gaze is not
directed towards the subject or “voice,” who, we shall see, is
Gordon, himself. Elements that stand alone, with or without apparent
relationship to other parts of a poem, may be considered Functionally
Independent components of a poem or, even, “fillers” or “stops,”
devices common in experimental poetry [see “Collage” and
“Erasure” below].
Joan
Retallack made the following observation, “What I’ve found in my
decades of teaching...is that the conviction that there is an entity
called 'poem' with a discrete essence one should be able to discern
and evaluate according to universal aesthetic principles continues to
be widespread.” This point of view suggests, I think, that
non-traditional, non-mainstream poetry—innovative, avant
garde,
experimental poetry—is not rule-governed. Retallack, and many
others, however, would probably agree that different sub-genres of
poetry may encompass different procedures and aesthetics. The brief
discussion of Faylor's title poem, for example, demonstrates writing
that is formally non-linear,
without surfical clarity or 1 : 1 mapping of parts of speech and
meaning. Such characteristics violate and disrupt the rules of
classical art—what the 19th century German art
historian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, called, “true
style”—incorporating, “noble simplicity,” patriotism, order,
lack of emotion, symmetry, balance, emotional restraint, harmony, no
distortion, and/or scientific precision, among other traits. Faylor's
compositions, instead, are fractured with respect to form and
content, grammar and semantics. Like Winckelmann's Greek Revival
aesthetics, then, experimental poetry exhibits its own recognizable
style that can be described no less clearly than “true style.”
Consistent with this idea, Marjorie Perloff, speaking of collage,
stated, “It does not follow that collage is essentially a
“degraded” or “alienated” version of earlier (and presumably
superior) genres.”
What additional information can we extract from People Skulk?
Faylor makes clear that the “voice” of the collection is the
author, himself—“Inside demand—inside demand, Gordon.” [14];
“stop apologizing, Gordon / people do it because they're depressed
/ or unintentionally dreary,” [48]. As Rosalind Krauss has noted,
speaking of Claude Cahun's photography, the artist is “subject and
object of representation,” a type of “mirroring” and “doubling”
reinforced by the device that Faylor is, at once, speaking to himself
and to an “Other”: “You're a radiant individual and make me
glad, / but if we're done we're done, I promise. / I'll still send
your / aerations a kiss and always tear up after.” [8]
In addition to
identifiably “experimental” devices, Faylor's new collection
includes some traditional features—occasional soft rhyming, even, a
few 14-line, sonnet forms [32], or near-sonnets, suggestive of the
classical “love poem,” and the couplet on p 61 is
Shakespeare-like: “Answer me with both lolling now that I'm bare /
let me bleed my share.”—a couplet expressing loss and, possibly,
regret. Apparently, as suggested above, People
Skulk
is, inherently, about lost love [“...secure until you finally see
me off? / I'll love you until I die, regardless.”, 5; “I'll still
send your / aerations a kiss and always tear up after.”, 8; “If
and when you coddle her goneness”, [15]; “...in retrospect,
bitterly.”, 27], and there are numerous references to sadness,
regret, reflection, and loneliness. Also, conventional, if not,
traditional, the volume includes quite
a few words uncommon in US speech but more common in the British
vernacular [“archegonia,” “aletheia,” “propaedeutic,”
“psionic,” Latin phrases, etc.], a device that might be
interpreted as pretentious or elitist, though archaic or uncommon
words combined with inclusion of splicing, erasure, or non-sequiturs
in a poem can be employed as a formulaic way of creating an
innovative or experimental composition. Although,
“death,” “necrophilia,” “dead,” “lifeless,”
“malignancy,” “polyps,” and angry tones are elements of many
of the poems in People Skulk, this is not a “dark”
collection, in great part due to Faylor's frequent word play, as well
as, the indeterminacy [“undecidability,” “non-referentiality”]
and fractured arrangement of the compositions. On the other hand, see
4-5, “They wanted the same minced baby / lowered into its cradle,
sobbing.” The subject has his low moments—like all of us.
The device, “collage” [splicing],
and its relation to experimental literature, whereby poets layer
ideas or images, assembling various forms of speech to create a new
whole, has been famously studied by the poetry critic, Marjorie
Perloff*. Collage subordinates and disrupts the voice and identity
of the subject, though each composition is likely to have dominant
elements serving as moments of clarity or emphasis or, sometimes,
normalcy. In the two-sonnet poem, “I Forget,” for example,
“Gordon” states, “'You could've responded with so much more' I
tell myself....” [44]. Motifs such as the foregoing denote what
dominates situations [see the poem, “Proof of Staff” (may become,
“Proof of Stuff”?) on p 3], and strong units of speech may
dominate through emphasis, making a point, or grabbing attention
—similar to repetition. On the other hand, speaking of Dadaism and
“anti-art,” Dietmar Elger has pointed out that the reader may not
make “coherent sense” out of the works. Admittedly, fragmentary
language [“text fragments”] often suppresses logic, and People
Skulk includes several fragmentary, even, one-line, pieces [e.g.,
40, 49, 58]. I am arguing, however, that collage poetry is not
necessarily random, “stream of consciousness,” or “free
association” though some content may be concealed in subconscious
[dreams] or unconscious processes. Commenting on Kenneth Goldsmith's
idea that Conceptual Poetry is “unreadable,” Marjorie Perloff
contended that each word constitutes a “choice” by the poet and
is, thus, intentional. Thinking of a Bob Seger song, the poet must
decide, “what to leave in, what to leave out.”
Collage poetry requires erasure and
non-disclosure—of words, phrases, parts of speech. The Italian
Futurist writer, F.T. Marinetti, for example, exclaimed that adverbs,
adjectives, punctuation, conjugated verbs, and syntax, in general,
should be abolished. Erasure might be employed to conceal or repress
painful, embarrassing, socially unacceptable, prohibited, triggering,
private, or otherwise unpleasant or proscribed material. Erasure,
then, might hide [sic—“skulk”] meaning, though it would
be a mistake to attempt to recover whatever thoughts or motivations
Faylor [“Gordon”] may have had when composing his collection.
Erasure might, also, function as a type of Wittgensteinian “language
play” [“I take on the malignancy of the room / swept on by
sterile water, / polyps of my itinerary.” [55], a complex line that
might have been written by the German poet, Gottfried Benn. Examples
of “word play” may be found in the rich poem, “Archegonia” on
pp 26-27. Language and word play may entail the reader switching or
adding words, such as in the lines, “I want to make you comfortable
/ I defied that one cracked night / and spun out apologizing.”
[56]. What if we change the phrase, “one cracked night” to “one
crazy night?” “Crazy” appears in several poems and, if inserted
here, may facilitate associations and decipherability, substituting
for “cracked.” Similarly, The reader might, also, elect to insert
“of control” between “out” and “apologizing,” creating a
more harmonious and normal phrase, “and spun out of control
apologizing.” Both of these modifications may enhance the reader's
experience of, interpretation of, and/or accessibility to parts of
the poem or of the whole composition. On the other hand, collage may,
also, be effected for purely artistic purposes by the poet, and,
according to Perloff, “...is, by definition, a visual or spatial
concept.”, implying that collage poems are types of spliced visual
art, in addition to spliced verbal compositions.
Because of the juxtaposition,
intertextuality, and unconventional usages [e.g. using verbs as nouns
or adjectives] of a variety of linguistic elements, collage and
erasure may contribute to the experience of contradiction, ambiguity,
ambivalence, tensions, oppositions, and conflicts, such as, those
between male-female, imagination-reality, archaic-modern,
native-foreign. Experimental poetry, then, is, in part, recognizable
because of indeterminate meaning, yielding a “transrational”
experience, according to the critic, Gerald Janecek. He goes on to
suggest that, like many Russian Futurist compositions, poets strove
to write independent of Nature—like Abstract Expressionists after
them; elements were, often, interchangeable, as they seem to be in
many of the poems in People Skulk, and there seems to be no
necessary logical or functional basis for the poems' ordering in the
text. Nonetheless, as pointed out by Perloff, some logical elements
and relations may still be present, such as, negation, contradiction,
similarity, equivalence, identity, and their negatives; as well,
arrangement, association; assortment, repetition [e.g., 28, 36] are
often used as “rhetorical devices” for clarity, memory, emphasis,
or other functions, as in the following excerpt from the poem,
“Safer's Pet Rescue” [28],
“Gory repetition childish
your small dog isn't. No you don't bit
by bite sled dog
the world war's garage
my students' crystals depicting ruby
red
I want kids to band together
in uncooperative moments
cads ripping back-up plastic article
“Stressed”
for the small dogs' fiber, their backup
system finally tested
yet no longer my own, which
I gave up depressed-guy style.”
What comes next [“indeterminacy”]?
Logical conventions are not followed throughout [“transrational”].
“World war's garage” does not occur in Nature—at least, not on
surface. Words, phrases might be interchanged without loss of effect
[e.g., “crystals” and “article”]. However, some logical and
relational associations remain present, particularly, at the level of
phraseology, if not complete sentences [e.g., “small dog,” “ruby
red,” “backup system”], and repetition [“small dog”] is
employed for emphasis, to enhance memory, to attract attention, or
other effects.
Several
critics have pointed out that Indeterminacy
in
literature is a device in which components of a text require the
reader to make their own decisions about the text's meaning. Often,
the final lines of a poem leave the reader “hanging,” as in
examples above. The text's meaning, then, remains open to
interpretation [“indeterminate”]. Some readers have decided that
these features render the poems of John Cage, Gertrude Stein, John
Ashbery, for example, “incomprehensible;” however, I have
attempted to show that close reading and critical analyses may result
in intra- and inter-textual comprehension of some components of
experimental poetry such as that found in Faylor's new collection. In
People
Skulk,
“Gordon” is never whole or self-actualized. Throughout the book,
he is embedded in a “system” of contradictions, ambiguities, and
oppositions: subjective-objective, plant-animal, personal-impersonal,
part-whole, attachment-detachment, self-conscious-other-directed,
instinctual-cerebral. Like the formalities of the text, “Gordon,”
himself, remains indeterminate, fractured—“self” determined,
primarily, by what the Other [“you”, the subject's object]
reflects back [Jacques Lacan's, “mirroring”]. Non-specificity
can be distracting and can seem like no more than distortion or
obscurity or illusion or tricks or games that the poet is imposing
upon the reader; however, if we understand that “entering” and
embracing an experimental collection, such as Faylor's, People
Skulk, relies upon methodology no less than traditional poetry,
as outlined in this review, the reader's efforts will be rewarded
many times over.
*Chapter 2 in
Perloff M (1986) The Futurist Moment. The University of
Chicago Press.
