At first glance, SLANTING looks like an exercise in vanity publishing,
although without the usual aping of publishing conventions and self
promotion that adorn poetry books produced in the same way. But a more
careful reading shows that however pointless SLANTING may be, its author
is at least serious in his intentions. Just what they are is hard to
gauge - just because there are none of the conventional indicators as
to what category we should put this book into. This is all to the good
and it is a pity more books of 'real' poetry aren't produced with the
same austerity and self effacement. But then, many successful poetry
books are more mirrors of their buyer's self image than anything else:
the artistic merit or otherwise of their contents being completely irrelevant
compared to their 'message' and what this brings to their purchaser's
self regard. Chris Fortescue is not guilty of this. SLANTING is not
selling us an image of ourselves or of its author.
The book consists of single words or, at most, simple sentences, set
out on separate pages, with this isolation often emphasised by the facing
page being blank. When Aram Saroyan did this sort of thing, the minimal
presentation emphasised how the tiny fragments stood in for, or encapsulated,
a bigger narrative of a cute and zany life. For instance,
or
oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh
suggest bear
oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh oh
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or, one of my favourites
The Language poets practise another form of this minimalism, These
examples are from Clark Coolidge, the Ezra Pound of Language Poetry.
prune acrylic whose
dives
marls pays loops watts
lock mix deem
white apart
sass
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or
ounce code orange
a
the
ohm
trilobites trilobites
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While
these aren't bad, as words, this sort of poetry is usually justified
by a dumb linguistic essentialism that locates the capitalist structuring
of reality in grammar and syntax. And while Stalin was wrong in saying
that language wasn't part of the superstructure, this sort of poetry
is about as successful at fracturing bourgeois consciousness as the
Sparticists are at raising the revolutionary awareness of the proletariat.
Which is not to say some language poets aren't very good. And not all
of them write like this. The trouble with this sort of poetry is that
unless the poet has an eye for attractive language, it is really boring.
Fortescue's
words and phrases are neither mini mini-series nor linguistically experimental.
They are more like meditative texts or Zen koan. But the tone of his
work often suggests a cross between Delphic pronouncements and crossword
clues. For instance,
where
the
land
runs
out
to
form
a
cape
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This suggests either, "That's where we'll build a temple to Poseidon",
or "geographical feature (8 letters)". Other ones are grimly
Hegelian:
refute
what
falls
or
has
fallen
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or the almost Chestertonian:
lying
in
bed
without
undressing
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and the strictly geometrical:
plane
figure
having
a
thousand
sides
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So what? In the early Seventies, the American art critic
Peter Plagens complained that Conceptual Art was always
telling you to do things. These 'poems' (and the urge to
italicise the word reinforces the point I want to make)
work the same way. They are telling us, or inviting us,
to use our imaginations. I mean the thing I enjoyed most
about this book was making up the characterisation of the
example quoted. And that is the point of it. In the visual
arts, the audience is used to doing this, and is often required
to do it to an exhausting degree. But with written art,
even people aware of the visual arts are still slaves to
narrative and message, which are like drugs providing an
enjoyable but passive experience in which everything is
laid out for the consumer who judges them the way we do
motel rooms or meals in restaurants. And questions like
'What does it mean?' which at best betoken naivety in visual
arts contexts are perfectly OK when writing is the subject
of some well-disposed consumer's attention.
In fact, if SLANTING had been produced as a book of poems,
decked out as such and launched in a literary context, it
could not count on any more intelligent a reception. Despite
50 years of Raymond Rousell, Harry Mathews, OULIPO and Language
Poetry, the literary world still likes its books to do the
work for them and, you know, be about something. Even John
Ashbury's present fame largely depends on people seeing
his work as an endless internal monologue, presenting a
typical postmodern consciousness that mirrors a typical
fragmented, discontinuous postmodern reality, etc, etc.
It's easier that way. And Plagens all those years ago was
right - Conceptual Art wants us to do the work.
No wonder painting didn't die.
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