Elisabeth Joyce
Diffractions and Soundings in the Poetry of Christian Bök and Kenneth Goldsmith
Poetry, in the face of it, is matterless. It is buckets of text spread out on paper (or a screen). At the moment of reading or speaking it, the text is activated, but in an immaterial form if we are going to be literal about it: those sounds of words that evaporate the instant our ear drums cease vibrating. However, as I will argue in this paper, and as squadrons of philosophers contend, materialism is not just the fact of a tangible object and certainly not simply that object’s commodity value in a Capitalist world. It is, rather, what transpires in engaging with the text, whether through simply accessing it or through emotional or intellectual responses to it. In their “diffractions” and “soundings” of poetry, Christian Bök and Kenneth Goldsmith enact the materialization of poetry in several of their works from the 1990s. I am going to talk here in particular about Bök’s 1994 Crystallography with some related attention to Goldsmith’s 1993 73 Poems.
Jannis Kallinikos, Bonnie Nardi and Paul Leonardi argue that while poetry transmits via “material means (phoneme and marks),” what comes out of it, such as meaning or ideas, is “fugitive,” “transient, borderless, and evasive” (6). They suggest that the materiality of the form of work, what they call its “solidity,” “helps fix and stabilize the transience and evasiveness of ideas; it is through this solidity that the fugitive character of meaning is captured or molded, expressed, or extracted and conveyed, making them the cognitive currency of human communities” (quotation wildly modified 6). It is true that we access poetry through lisible text and that we come to it through that medium. However, rather than approaching what it provides us (meaning, ideas, provocations) as if it were a criminal or alien, I would like to suggest that it is in fact the poetry experience that is material. For materiality, as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost argue, goes beyond simply “matter.” It is “an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (6). It is, in essence, that activation of the marks on the page that produces the material of the poem in the form of a pulsating force field.
Materiality is, therefore, a coming into being. As Coole and Frost suggest, “matter becomes” rather than “matter is” (10). “It is in these choreographies of becoming,” they argue,
that we find cosmic forces assembling and disintegrating to forge more or less enduring patterns that may provisionally
exhibit internally coherent, efficacious organization: objects forming and emerging within relational fields, bodies
composing their natural environment in ways that are corporeally meaningful for them, and subjectivities being constituted
as open series of capacities or potencies that emerge hazardously and ambiguously within a multitude of organic and social
processes.” (10)
Essential in this process of becoming is change. A poem is never read the same way twice, so while it might be read repeatedly, each reading creates new materiality. Again, from Coole and Frost in an unspoken but I believe underlying homage to Tim Ingold’s material Anthropology, “Such systems [of becomings] are marked by considerable instability and volatility since their repetition is never perfect; there is a continuous redefining and reassembling of key elements that result in systems’ capacities to evolve into new and unexpected forms” (14). Change also occurs in the interactions between the reader and the poem and the enactment of the poem and the audience, for this material becoming involves “contingent, immanent self-transformation” (Coole and Frost 14).
Bök’s Crystallography supports these notions of becomings, through the metaphor of the study of crystals and their formation: “a crystal assembles itself,” he says in the poem; “puzzle puts itself together”; and “a word is a bit of crystal in formation.” No snowflake is like any other; crystals form themselves under the right conditions (and in the poem he describes the sugar water and string project for crystal formation that most of us probably completed as children); and, especially, the idea that a word is like “crystal in formation,” in the process of forming itself, but also in what Coole and Frost referred to in an earlier quotation as an “enduring pattern,” a word as a crystal with a clear internal structure, however elusive. Coole and Frost’s description of the “continuous redefining and reassembling of key elements that results in systems’ capacities to evolve into new and unexpected forms” is apparent in this poem as well, in such phrases as “aesthetic discontent in nature means / forever resculpting the same pagodas / exploding gently into mushroom clouds.” The effort to “get it right” pushes the artist to remake, to reconfigure, the same material, but material that can never be the same even twice.
Essential to this notion of becoming material is the performative feature of it. And for this point I turn to the work of Karen Barad who believes that “A performative understanding … shifts the focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices” (807). Rather than simply vocalizing the words of a poem, the act of making them aural through performance questions the words’ ability to represent and the power of language to represent at all (Barad 802). Barad says that “matter refers to the materiality / materialization of phenomena” (822) and that “matter comes to matter through the iterative intra-activity of the world in its becoming” (823). “The primary ontological units,” she argues, “are not ‘things’ but phenomena—dynamic topological reconfigurings / entanglements / relationalities / (re)articulations. And the primary semantic units are not ‘words’ but material-discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted” (818). This theory suggests that it isn’t the poem itself that means and / or is material, but the act of bringing the poem into life. We aren’t talking about things here but rather “material configurations of the world” such as “discursive practices,” and those practices are “causally related” to “material phenomena” where the relationship is more important than the thing itself (Barad 818).
I would go further than Barad, however, for I believe that performance exists within a poem itself, what she would call “intra-activity.” Bök’s Crystallography insists that “you follow the distant murmur of voices in riffling pages,” that “you step across chasms in between the words / ‘of one ledge and another’ while taking care / not to lose footing,” that “a landslide drags you down a funneled / pit through the waist of an hourglass / into this oubliette for all utterances,” and that “words [are] eroded, not erased, from memory, for the cavern never ceases to record / its story in the code of crystals.” Meaning resides in this poem in phenomena, largely involving the physical body: the sounds of voices not loud or enunciated well enough to hear what people are saying, in the movement and sound of pages of books, in a schuss of articulations lost and forgotten but not erased, rather captured “in the code of crystals,” memory repository as clearly structured.
Sounding vs. Sound
What happens when we cannot articulate something, when a poem presses against our ability to verbalize it? One of the things that I am arguing here is that it is at these moments when we are faced with, not just these concrete poems, where the poem becomes image, though these are the examples I bring to this talk, but also those instances in a poem where logic or cause and effect are no longer of concern, where the experience of the poem is reduced (or possibly expanded) to just that essence, what Michel Haar calls the “opacity of verbal matter” where the “sounds of spoken language … escape signification and withdraw from the clarity of sense and from the transparency of the world” (Nowell-Smith 85), that we have what Heidegger refers to as the sounding. In Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetry David Nowell-Smith argues that “Heidegger sees sense and world to be constructed by a series of meaningful practices and gestures that are irreducible to signification, and which inhere in the nonsignifying aspects of language” (85); these are soundings. In becoming impossible to mean in the sense of words containing specific transparent signification, meaning is opened up. Nowell-Smith says that, according to Heidegger, “language is a ‘sounding’ that would elide the opposition of sensuous token to a nonsensuous reference, and with it physical opacity to semantic clarity” (86). It is an approach where the intermingling of sound perception with meaning forces us away from comprehension yet towards meaning of a truer sort. Where we normally think that each sound that we make has a particular meaning and that these sounds/meanings coalesce into the larger meaning of a work, Heidegger is suggesting that sounds have been removed from signification and that it is out of that loss/absence/silence a surfeit of meaning of a different type arises. “Instead of sounds being ‘added to meaning,’” Nowell-Smith explains, “rather the ‘meaning sounds’” (86).
There is something a little zen about this approach to poetry, but it might make sense when trying to think about how to handle poetry like Bök’s or Goldsmith’s. For what really works here is not simply letting the poetry take over, but engaging with it and seeing what happens. “’Sounding,’” Nowell-Smith suggests,
is at first a self-showing as a being, an appearing, that lets appear. It is the site of openness, in which we set ourselves into
relation with the world around us. This involves distinguishing between the sounding of language that ‘means’ and ‘lets
appear’ and the sonority of the word … where the former is abstracted … into a ‘present-at-hand’ sensuous token whose
function is to transmit the meaning of a referential sign. (86)
In our engagements with a poem, we are not simply reading its words, translating those images into triggers for our mouths, and rendering their sounds in a complicated communication system in which we participate on a regular basis; we are, in fact, conducting soundings of the poem. For surely Heidegger selected the term “sounding” very carefully (though my German is not good enough to know if this approach works as well as in English). Not only does this word refer to fathoming the depths (as in water), to trying to “get to the bottom” of a situation, it also means, according to the OED, to try to find out quietly, to seek to ascertain (especially by cautious, indirect questioning), to take a probe, to having a loud sound, to a percussive physical examination (auscultation), and also just to understand. The word sound itself can mean to signify or to mean, to import, to imply, or to call to battle but also to receiving no harm (as in safe and sound), and to be sincere, true, trusty, loyal, morally good, honest, and straightforward. The paradox set up by the sounding is therefore that when we try to articulate the poem, in an act that on its face would appear to be the linking of words to create a unified meaning, but are unable to, we are actually embarking on a discursive disjunction, moving away from clear and logical sense and increasingly towards the “bottom” of things, to the truth of existence.
It is at these moments when we cannot speak out the poem that Heidegger’s notion of “broken silence” takes over. Nowell-Smith says that “poetry becomes a privileged site for hearing the way that ‘broken silence’ shapes speech because it attends to the limits of its own sonority, and thereby probes the moments at which this ‘broken silence’ shapes the poem’s speech” (90). And truly, where we are going with this, and where I seem to take things increasingly, is towards a type of transcendence. In saying that, according to Heidegger, “language’s originary articulation as a ‘soundless calling gathering’: its binding power, and its capacity, in ‘calling,’ to engage with absence, are such that they exceed our experience of the phenomenality of language” (92), Nowell-Smith is arguing that we are taken beyond simple perception, that these “gathering soundings” (86-87) don’t refer to the “tone and sound” of the poem, but to what lies beyond those in inarticulatable meanings. “all the delicate words simply dissolve,” Bök writes, “when immersed in the desire for meaning.” As he writes in “Katharsis,” “speak words in such a way that breaks the ice, the voice ascending / sharply to the perfect pitch, at which the pane of silvered / glass explodes, its shrapnel lacerating any space of silence / in between us, in between us.” [1]
Poetry, in the face of it, is matterless. It is buckets of text spread out on paper (or a screen). At the moment of reading or speaking it, the text is activated, but in an immaterial form if we are going to be literal about it: those sounds of words that evaporate the instant our ear drums cease vibrating. However, as I will argue in this paper, and as squadrons of philosophers contend, materialism is not just the fact of a tangible object and certainly not simply that object’s commodity value in a Capitalist world. It is, rather, what transpires in engaging with the text, whether through simply accessing it or through emotional or intellectual responses to it. In their “diffractions” and “soundings” of poetry, Christian Bök and Kenneth Goldsmith enact the materialization of poetry in several of their works from the 1990s. I am going to talk here in particular about Bök’s 1994 Crystallography with some related attention to Goldsmith’s 1993 73 Poems.
Jannis Kallinikos, Bonnie Nardi and Paul Leonardi argue that while poetry transmits via “material means (phoneme and marks),” what comes out of it, such as meaning or ideas, is “fugitive,” “transient, borderless, and evasive” (6). They suggest that the materiality of the form of work, what they call its “solidity,” “helps fix and stabilize the transience and evasiveness of ideas; it is through this solidity that the fugitive character of meaning is captured or molded, expressed, or extracted and conveyed, making them the cognitive currency of human communities” (quotation wildly modified 6). It is true that we access poetry through lisible text and that we come to it through that medium. However, rather than approaching what it provides us (meaning, ideas, provocations) as if it were a criminal or alien, I would like to suggest that it is in fact the poetry experience that is material. For materiality, as Diana Coole and Samantha Frost argue, goes beyond simply “matter.” It is “an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable” (6). It is, in essence, that activation of the marks on the page that produces the material of the poem in the form of a pulsating force field.
Materiality is, therefore, a coming into being. As Coole and Frost suggest, “matter becomes” rather than “matter is” (10). “It is in these choreographies of becoming,” they argue,
that we find cosmic forces assembling and disintegrating to forge more or less enduring patterns that may provisionally
exhibit internally coherent, efficacious organization: objects forming and emerging within relational fields, bodies
composing their natural environment in ways that are corporeally meaningful for them, and subjectivities being constituted
as open series of capacities or potencies that emerge hazardously and ambiguously within a multitude of organic and social
processes.” (10)
Essential in this process of becoming is change. A poem is never read the same way twice, so while it might be read repeatedly, each reading creates new materiality. Again, from Coole and Frost in an unspoken but I believe underlying homage to Tim Ingold’s material Anthropology, “Such systems [of becomings] are marked by considerable instability and volatility since their repetition is never perfect; there is a continuous redefining and reassembling of key elements that result in systems’ capacities to evolve into new and unexpected forms” (14). Change also occurs in the interactions between the reader and the poem and the enactment of the poem and the audience, for this material becoming involves “contingent, immanent self-transformation” (Coole and Frost 14).
Bök’s Crystallography supports these notions of becomings, through the metaphor of the study of crystals and their formation: “a crystal assembles itself,” he says in the poem; “puzzle puts itself together”; and “a word is a bit of crystal in formation.” No snowflake is like any other; crystals form themselves under the right conditions (and in the poem he describes the sugar water and string project for crystal formation that most of us probably completed as children); and, especially, the idea that a word is like “crystal in formation,” in the process of forming itself, but also in what Coole and Frost referred to in an earlier quotation as an “enduring pattern,” a word as a crystal with a clear internal structure, however elusive. Coole and Frost’s description of the “continuous redefining and reassembling of key elements that results in systems’ capacities to evolve into new and unexpected forms” is apparent in this poem as well, in such phrases as “aesthetic discontent in nature means / forever resculpting the same pagodas / exploding gently into mushroom clouds.” The effort to “get it right” pushes the artist to remake, to reconfigure, the same material, but material that can never be the same even twice.
Essential to this notion of becoming material is the performative feature of it. And for this point I turn to the work of Karen Barad who believes that “A performative understanding … shifts the focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices” (807). Rather than simply vocalizing the words of a poem, the act of making them aural through performance questions the words’ ability to represent and the power of language to represent at all (Barad 802). Barad says that “matter refers to the materiality / materialization of phenomena” (822) and that “matter comes to matter through the iterative intra-activity of the world in its becoming” (823). “The primary ontological units,” she argues, “are not ‘things’ but phenomena—dynamic topological reconfigurings / entanglements / relationalities / (re)articulations. And the primary semantic units are not ‘words’ but material-discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted” (818). This theory suggests that it isn’t the poem itself that means and / or is material, but the act of bringing the poem into life. We aren’t talking about things here but rather “material configurations of the world” such as “discursive practices,” and those practices are “causally related” to “material phenomena” where the relationship is more important than the thing itself (Barad 818).
I would go further than Barad, however, for I believe that performance exists within a poem itself, what she would call “intra-activity.” Bök’s Crystallography insists that “you follow the distant murmur of voices in riffling pages,” that “you step across chasms in between the words / ‘of one ledge and another’ while taking care / not to lose footing,” that “a landslide drags you down a funneled / pit through the waist of an hourglass / into this oubliette for all utterances,” and that “words [are] eroded, not erased, from memory, for the cavern never ceases to record / its story in the code of crystals.” Meaning resides in this poem in phenomena, largely involving the physical body: the sounds of voices not loud or enunciated well enough to hear what people are saying, in the movement and sound of pages of books, in a schuss of articulations lost and forgotten but not erased, rather captured “in the code of crystals,” memory repository as clearly structured.
Sounding vs. Sound
What happens when we cannot articulate something, when a poem presses against our ability to verbalize it? One of the things that I am arguing here is that it is at these moments when we are faced with, not just these concrete poems, where the poem becomes image, though these are the examples I bring to this talk, but also those instances in a poem where logic or cause and effect are no longer of concern, where the experience of the poem is reduced (or possibly expanded) to just that essence, what Michel Haar calls the “opacity of verbal matter” where the “sounds of spoken language … escape signification and withdraw from the clarity of sense and from the transparency of the world” (Nowell-Smith 85), that we have what Heidegger refers to as the sounding. In Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetry David Nowell-Smith argues that “Heidegger sees sense and world to be constructed by a series of meaningful practices and gestures that are irreducible to signification, and which inhere in the nonsignifying aspects of language” (85); these are soundings. In becoming impossible to mean in the sense of words containing specific transparent signification, meaning is opened up. Nowell-Smith says that, according to Heidegger, “language is a ‘sounding’ that would elide the opposition of sensuous token to a nonsensuous reference, and with it physical opacity to semantic clarity” (86). It is an approach where the intermingling of sound perception with meaning forces us away from comprehension yet towards meaning of a truer sort. Where we normally think that each sound that we make has a particular meaning and that these sounds/meanings coalesce into the larger meaning of a work, Heidegger is suggesting that sounds have been removed from signification and that it is out of that loss/absence/silence a surfeit of meaning of a different type arises. “Instead of sounds being ‘added to meaning,’” Nowell-Smith explains, “rather the ‘meaning sounds’” (86).
There is something a little zen about this approach to poetry, but it might make sense when trying to think about how to handle poetry like Bök’s or Goldsmith’s. For what really works here is not simply letting the poetry take over, but engaging with it and seeing what happens. “’Sounding,’” Nowell-Smith suggests,
is at first a self-showing as a being, an appearing, that lets appear. It is the site of openness, in which we set ourselves into
relation with the world around us. This involves distinguishing between the sounding of language that ‘means’ and ‘lets
appear’ and the sonority of the word … where the former is abstracted … into a ‘present-at-hand’ sensuous token whose
function is to transmit the meaning of a referential sign. (86)
In our engagements with a poem, we are not simply reading its words, translating those images into triggers for our mouths, and rendering their sounds in a complicated communication system in which we participate on a regular basis; we are, in fact, conducting soundings of the poem. For surely Heidegger selected the term “sounding” very carefully (though my German is not good enough to know if this approach works as well as in English). Not only does this word refer to fathoming the depths (as in water), to trying to “get to the bottom” of a situation, it also means, according to the OED, to try to find out quietly, to seek to ascertain (especially by cautious, indirect questioning), to take a probe, to having a loud sound, to a percussive physical examination (auscultation), and also just to understand. The word sound itself can mean to signify or to mean, to import, to imply, or to call to battle but also to receiving no harm (as in safe and sound), and to be sincere, true, trusty, loyal, morally good, honest, and straightforward. The paradox set up by the sounding is therefore that when we try to articulate the poem, in an act that on its face would appear to be the linking of words to create a unified meaning, but are unable to, we are actually embarking on a discursive disjunction, moving away from clear and logical sense and increasingly towards the “bottom” of things, to the truth of existence.
It is at these moments when we cannot speak out the poem that Heidegger’s notion of “broken silence” takes over. Nowell-Smith says that “poetry becomes a privileged site for hearing the way that ‘broken silence’ shapes speech because it attends to the limits of its own sonority, and thereby probes the moments at which this ‘broken silence’ shapes the poem’s speech” (90). And truly, where we are going with this, and where I seem to take things increasingly, is towards a type of transcendence. In saying that, according to Heidegger, “language’s originary articulation as a ‘soundless calling gathering’: its binding power, and its capacity, in ‘calling,’ to engage with absence, are such that they exceed our experience of the phenomenality of language” (92), Nowell-Smith is arguing that we are taken beyond simple perception, that these “gathering soundings” (86-87) don’t refer to the “tone and sound” of the poem, but to what lies beyond those in inarticulatable meanings. “all the delicate words simply dissolve,” Bök writes, “when immersed in the desire for meaning.” As he writes in “Katharsis,” “speak words in such a way that breaks the ice, the voice ascending / sharply to the perfect pitch, at which the pane of silvered / glass explodes, its shrapnel lacerating any space of silence / in between us, in between us.” [1]
Figure 1. From Crystallography
The diagram in Figure 1 from a page in Bök’s Crystallography, and the images in Figures 3 and 4 from Goldsmith’s 73 Poems, illustrate this principle. When confronted with a diagram of this type in the context of a poem, a work normally meant to be readable, all normal poetry assumptions must cease on multiple levels at once. For much of the language, what little there is, is scientific rather than poetic. Most of the “language” is, rather, in symbolic form, not readily linguistically accessible. The figure is, assumingly, appropriated from a scientific treatise on the impact of humidity and temperature on the formation quality and type of ice crystals. Bök has modified the figure to related temperature changes to the “Degree of Aesthetic Detachment” and humidity changes to the “Degree of Semantic Saturation.” The figure’s caption, “A diagram indicating the meteorological conditions necessary for the crystallization of poetic forms,” reinforces the ironic yet metaphoric relationship between crystal formation and the composition of and access to poetry. In short, the figure’s labels connect poetry to the figure, but the result is not articulable; it is a sounding.
The page from Bök’s Crystallography entitled “Crystal Lattice” is another instance of Sounding in this poem. Using the words “crystal” and “lattice,” the poet creates a mapping of a crystal on the page. Because the image of the crystal is formed through letters, in particular, because those letters represent very specific words, the urge to read the page is strong in those inculcated in reading matters (all of us!). However, because the crystal formation disrupts the linguistic nature of the words, it blocks ready articulation of the page.
Goldsmith’s 73 Poems also resist articulation. Figures 2 and 3 are representative images from this poem. Their overlapping letter/number combinations are recognizable as something to read, but the overlappings and the tension between letter and number shape deflect the effort to represent them aurally. Interestingly, the Joan La Barbara musical compositions are able to transcend this “sounding” feature of the poems through their multiple tracks and “voice-as-instrument” approach. That is, the overlaying tracks can represent the overlapping textual elements, while the voices can merely sound the letters or numbers without concern for recognizable linguistic elements. Yet, in spite of this ability to render the image of the poem in musical formation, actually articulation of the poem remains elusive, an evasion that is probably actually reinforced by the abstractions of the musical “voicings,” soundings even in the context of discernable sound.
The page from Bök’s Crystallography entitled “Crystal Lattice” is another instance of Sounding in this poem. Using the words “crystal” and “lattice,” the poet creates a mapping of a crystal on the page. Because the image of the crystal is formed through letters, in particular, because those letters represent very specific words, the urge to read the page is strong in those inculcated in reading matters (all of us!). However, because the crystal formation disrupts the linguistic nature of the words, it blocks ready articulation of the page.
Goldsmith’s 73 Poems also resist articulation. Figures 2 and 3 are representative images from this poem. Their overlapping letter/number combinations are recognizable as something to read, but the overlappings and the tension between letter and number shape deflect the effort to represent them aurally. Interestingly, the Joan La Barbara musical compositions are able to transcend this “sounding” feature of the poems through their multiple tracks and “voice-as-instrument” approach. That is, the overlaying tracks can represent the overlapping textual elements, while the voices can merely sound the letters or numbers without concern for recognizable linguistic elements. Yet, in spite of this ability to render the image of the poem in musical formation, actually articulation of the poem remains elusive, an evasion that is probably actually reinforced by the abstractions of the musical “voicings,” soundings even in the context of discernable sound.
Figure 2. From Crystallgraphy
Figure 3 From 73 Poems
Figure 4. From 73 Poems
Diffraction vs. Light
Comparable to the aural, or rather, inaudible or inarticulatable qualities of soundings, is the visual or nonvisual (invisible) quality of Diffraction. This term comes from Donna Haraway, who, according to Barad argued that “Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear” (803). It is not simply that repetition occurs in experience, nor that repetition never occurs in exact duplication but always with perpetual if sometimes minute differences, but rather, the importance of the poem transpires via the impact of these variations of repeated elements. Like the sounds taken out of and beyond literal meaning to the gathered meanings of soundings, diffraction pulls beyond the literal repetitions and into the perpetual shifts of fractals and the mise en abyme of endlessly multiplied reflections, what Bök refers to in this poem as “obsessive restatement (re(in)statement).”
Fractals are, simply put, the endless variations of repetitions. They are, for example, the variations of gusts of wind or turbulence in a jet. They are, as well, the endless ins and outs of a coastline or the perimeter of a cloud. To find the circumference of a cloud, for instance, it is possible to just draw a circle around it, but that won’t be very accurate. A more accurate measurement would be to use a series of straight lines. Accuracy of this measurement increases as the length of the lines approaches zero. Fractals are present in Crystallography, both in the form of direct reference and in the form of fractal-like images created out of letters, such as this one made out of S’s (figure 5)
Comparable to the aural, or rather, inaudible or inarticulatable qualities of soundings, is the visual or nonvisual (invisible) quality of Diffraction. This term comes from Donna Haraway, who, according to Barad argued that “Diffraction is a mapping of interference, not of replication, reflection, or reproduction. A diffraction pattern does not map where differences appear, but rather maps where the effects of differences appear” (803). It is not simply that repetition occurs in experience, nor that repetition never occurs in exact duplication but always with perpetual if sometimes minute differences, but rather, the importance of the poem transpires via the impact of these variations of repeated elements. Like the sounds taken out of and beyond literal meaning to the gathered meanings of soundings, diffraction pulls beyond the literal repetitions and into the perpetual shifts of fractals and the mise en abyme of endlessly multiplied reflections, what Bök refers to in this poem as “obsessive restatement (re(in)statement).”
Fractals are, simply put, the endless variations of repetitions. They are, for example, the variations of gusts of wind or turbulence in a jet. They are, as well, the endless ins and outs of a coastline or the perimeter of a cloud. To find the circumference of a cloud, for instance, it is possible to just draw a circle around it, but that won’t be very accurate. A more accurate measurement would be to use a series of straight lines. Accuracy of this measurement increases as the length of the lines approaches zero. Fractals are present in Crystallography, both in the form of direct reference and in the form of fractal-like images created out of letters, such as this one made out of S’s (figure 5)
Figure 5, From Crystallography
“A fractal,” the poem says and repeats, “is the ideal of redundancy”; “an acoustic fractal would be its own echo chamber”; “infinite interrepetition”; and “A fractal is a broken map of fragmentation.” These “interferences,” as Haraway calls them, disrupt approaches to the poem concerning direct “translation” of its meaning and, rather, turn the focus toward infinite series of representations on ever-smaller scales.
The mise en abyme functions in a similar manner but through a multitude of reflections where mirrors set at angles to each other reflect the same scene but in decreasing size, seemingly forever. “Each mirror,” Bök’s poem says, “contains within itself / an infinitely receding, series of self-replicas”; and later, “When two identical mirrors face each other / they reflect the reflection of each other in an infinite cycle of recursive exchange.” The poem moves beyond the simple endless cascade of diminishing images to visual perception itself, where the words become frost on glass, silvered glass, mirror over mirror, and even a “house of mirrors” where visual perception, here equated to our comprehension of language, is distorted, mis-reflected, and proliferated into those tangled “chains of signifiers” so prevalent at the time of this poem’s composition.
Equally important in the poem are those fractured images from tessellations and mosaics, kaleidoscopes and stained glass, but these are not simply fractured images, they are words. As they are broken apart and pieced together, replicated but inaccurately, they evolve into visions. “Words kaleidoscope together,” according to the poem, “magnifying, double exposure, stained glass windows, frost, polarizer.” The “double exposure” and “polarizer” turn the poem into a type of camera obscura: “this antechamber of words in which you awaken contains / a petrified forest, its image inverted, then reflected / through itself.” The inversion and reflection of the image, like the upside down image of the pin-hole camera, talks about perception and distortion; it is only through diffraction that we are able to see through things.
However, the point of diffraction, and linked to an earlier note on Heidegger, is the sense of opacity that drives the access to the poem. While in this poem in particular, the transparent elements are all frosted or tinted or silvered so as to thwart clear seeing, as with sounding, it is where we cannot see, where the text becomes opaque, that we gain access to the work. In situating himself against Jean Baudrillard, Craig Dworkin argues that while Baudrillard focuses on “transience and dematerialization, on transparency and disappearance, [it is essential to] look as well at the opaque material remainder, and the inescapable residuum of recalcitrant physical matter left behind when certain inscriptions do not occur as expected. In the absence of inscription, the substrate can be seen not as a transparent signifier but as an object in its own right, replete with its own material properties, histories and signifying potential” (9). Figure 6 shows one state of the transparent overlay in Crystallography. Flipping the transparent page to the left creates another set of images. Given the nature html, it is now possible to demonstrate this page flip, but regardless of the beauty of this feature, we are left in this transparency shifting from right to left and back with the opacity of the text, the “Y’s” composing the image dissolving into shapes far from the linguistic elements at their core.
The mise en abyme functions in a similar manner but through a multitude of reflections where mirrors set at angles to each other reflect the same scene but in decreasing size, seemingly forever. “Each mirror,” Bök’s poem says, “contains within itself / an infinitely receding, series of self-replicas”; and later, “When two identical mirrors face each other / they reflect the reflection of each other in an infinite cycle of recursive exchange.” The poem moves beyond the simple endless cascade of diminishing images to visual perception itself, where the words become frost on glass, silvered glass, mirror over mirror, and even a “house of mirrors” where visual perception, here equated to our comprehension of language, is distorted, mis-reflected, and proliferated into those tangled “chains of signifiers” so prevalent at the time of this poem’s composition.
Equally important in the poem are those fractured images from tessellations and mosaics, kaleidoscopes and stained glass, but these are not simply fractured images, they are words. As they are broken apart and pieced together, replicated but inaccurately, they evolve into visions. “Words kaleidoscope together,” according to the poem, “magnifying, double exposure, stained glass windows, frost, polarizer.” The “double exposure” and “polarizer” turn the poem into a type of camera obscura: “this antechamber of words in which you awaken contains / a petrified forest, its image inverted, then reflected / through itself.” The inversion and reflection of the image, like the upside down image of the pin-hole camera, talks about perception and distortion; it is only through diffraction that we are able to see through things.
However, the point of diffraction, and linked to an earlier note on Heidegger, is the sense of opacity that drives the access to the poem. While in this poem in particular, the transparent elements are all frosted or tinted or silvered so as to thwart clear seeing, as with sounding, it is where we cannot see, where the text becomes opaque, that we gain access to the work. In situating himself against Jean Baudrillard, Craig Dworkin argues that while Baudrillard focuses on “transience and dematerialization, on transparency and disappearance, [it is essential to] look as well at the opaque material remainder, and the inescapable residuum of recalcitrant physical matter left behind when certain inscriptions do not occur as expected. In the absence of inscription, the substrate can be seen not as a transparent signifier but as an object in its own right, replete with its own material properties, histories and signifying potential” (9). Figure 6 shows one state of the transparent overlay in Crystallography. Flipping the transparent page to the left creates another set of images. Given the nature html, it is now possible to demonstrate this page flip, but regardless of the beauty of this feature, we are left in this transparency shifting from right to left and back with the opacity of the text, the “Y’s” composing the image dissolving into shapes far from the linguistic elements at their core.
Figure 6. From Crystallography
This remainder is opaque in its resistance to meaning and to articulation. Like sounding, or perhaps as sounding itself, it is beyond and beneath the surface text and sounds. These moments are, as it were, those spaces between what is said, what can be articulated and comprehended. Bök relies on a metaphor of glass to discuss this aim in poetry: “Glass,” he writes, “represents / a poetic element / exiled to a border line / between states of matter”; and “just as acid / etches glass-- / just as words / dissolve away / their meaning / so transparent.” “Meaning [is],” he writes, “a form of glassiness, the misprision of transparency”; it “Vaporizes … as breath.” Words here lose their meaning; in comparing meaning to glass and then in suggesting that glass is close to a rejection of transparency, Bök turns towards the opacity of meaning, that we think we are attaining it, but we are in fact moving further and further from it.
Words might “accrete meaning” as he writes when comparing words and meaning to the formation of sugar crystals on a string in highly concentrated sugar water, but we still “fumble” for them, and when we do so, it is “amidst cinders,” Dworkin’s “inescapable residuum of recalcitrant physical matter.” These opacities appear in Bök’s book in places where words overlap, such as “occlusions” and “perfections” in Figure 7 and where transparent pages can be turned to overlay other pages and create newly opaque residuums. It might appear that this endeavor is ridiculous, that to persist might only leave our mouths full of these ashes, but I argue here that in our efforts to attain to these soundings, we stand to gain great benefits, that immanence of materiality that aspires to transform into the transcendence we might wish for. As Bök writes in this poem, there are “[sweet spaces / between words / between atoms / in among them / strong bonds].” It is all worth the effort if we even have only a glimpse of these “sweet spaces.”
Words might “accrete meaning” as he writes when comparing words and meaning to the formation of sugar crystals on a string in highly concentrated sugar water, but we still “fumble” for them, and when we do so, it is “amidst cinders,” Dworkin’s “inescapable residuum of recalcitrant physical matter.” These opacities appear in Bök’s book in places where words overlap, such as “occlusions” and “perfections” in Figure 7 and where transparent pages can be turned to overlay other pages and create newly opaque residuums. It might appear that this endeavor is ridiculous, that to persist might only leave our mouths full of these ashes, but I argue here that in our efforts to attain to these soundings, we stand to gain great benefits, that immanence of materiality that aspires to transform into the transcendence we might wish for. As Bök writes in this poem, there are “[sweet spaces / between words / between atoms / in among them / strong bonds].” It is all worth the effort if we even have only a glimpse of these “sweet spaces.”
Figure 7. From Crystallography
[1] The texts of Crystallography and 73 Poems are not paginated, so neither image captions nor quotations provide page numbers.
Works Cited:
Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28.3 (2003): 801-831.
Bök, Christian. Crystallography: Book I of Information Theory. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1994.
Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010.
Dworkin, Craig. No Medium. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2013.
Goldsmith, Kenneth and Joan La Barbara. 73 Poems. Sag Harbor, NY: Permanent Press, 1994.
Leonardi, Paul, Bonnie Nardi, and Jannis Kallinikos. Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World.
New York: Oxford UP, 2013.
Nowell-Smith, David. Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetry. New York: Fordham UP, 2013
Permissions to reproduce quotations, images and songs have been granted by Christian Bök, Kenneth Goldsmith, Joan La Barbara and Coach House Books
Works Cited:
Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter.” Signs 28.3 (2003): 801-831.
Bök, Christian. Crystallography: Book I of Information Theory. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1994.
Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2010.
Dworkin, Craig. No Medium. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2013.
Goldsmith, Kenneth and Joan La Barbara. 73 Poems. Sag Harbor, NY: Permanent Press, 1994.
Leonardi, Paul, Bonnie Nardi, and Jannis Kallinikos. Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World.
New York: Oxford UP, 2013.
Nowell-Smith, David. Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetry. New York: Fordham UP, 2013
Permissions to reproduce quotations, images and songs have been granted by Christian Bök, Kenneth Goldsmith, Joan La Barbara and Coach House Books