journal of british and irish innovative poetry (cork launch booklet)

in association with SoundEye

With an introduction by Jimmy Cumminsand papers by Alex Davis and Sam Ladkin

Selected Papers, University College Cork 2010

Journal of British and Irish


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With an introduction by Jimmy Cumminsand papers by Alex Davis and Sam Ladkin



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University College Cork SupplementO’Rahilly Building, 16 March 2010

ForewordThis e-brochure is intended to celebrate the Irish launch of the Journal of British and Irish Poetry at University College Cork on the eve of St Patrick’s Day, 16 March 2010. Thanks are due especially to Jimmy Cummins – poet, editor and research student at UCC – for suggesting the event in the first place, and his role in the organization. Thanks are also due to Alex Davis and Sam Ladkin for offering the papers that we are pleased to present here to a wider audience alongside Cummins’ introduction.

Cummins here identifies Cork as Ireland’s most important centre for the study of innovative poetries, a history linked with the remarkable Sound-Eye festival, which celebrates its fifteenth anniversary in 2011. We, as edi-tors, hope that the enclosed papers will provide entry-points and sites of engagement for further negotiations with the Irish tradition of innovative writing and we warmly welcome proposals and submissions for future work in this area.

Robert Sheppard and Scott ThurstonNovember 2010

(l-r) Anthony Levings, Scott Thurston, Robert Sheppard, Jimmy Cummins, Sam Ladkin and Alex Davis



Introduction

JImmy cummInsUniversity College Cork, Ireland

Welcome and thank you all for coming. It is a great pleasure for me to introduce this event here this evening. Before we begin, I just want to say thank you to James Knowles and Lee Jenkins for all their help in organizing this event. I also want to thank Alex Davis and Sam Ladkin for agreeing to deliver papers here today and a very special thanks to Anne Fitzgerald for all her help in booking rooms and answering all of my ridiculous questions about practical matters. Most importantly though I want to thank the two editors Robert Sheppard and Scott Thurston, and the publisher Anthony Levings, not only for producing this long over due critical journal of in-novative poetry but also for being here today and for having the foresight to recognize the need for an Irish launch and the important role Irish poetry has and continues to play in relation to poetry in general.

It is particularly fitting that this journal’s Irish launch takes place here in Cork and is co-hosted by UCC and by SoundEye. UCC has a number of staff and postgrad researchers who are actively engaged with the study of modernist, postmodernist and innovative or experimental poetics, which makes it Ireland’s most important university in relation to innovative poet-ics and if it continues to grow in this field could begin to rival some of the more established centres for innovative study in the UK. Cork is also home to SoundEye, one of the longest running festivals of innovative poetics in the world, which was founded by Trevor Joyce in 1997 after he returned from the ‘Assembling Alternative’ conference in New Hampshire.

Following on from New Writer’s Press, which reinvigorated an interest in Irish modernists of the 1930s, such as Denis Devlin and Brain Coffey who were, ‘without question the most interesting of the youngest genera-tion of Irish poets’ (Beckett, 2001: 75), SoundEye aimed to ‘Provide a forum for poets … overlooked by other poetry events in Ireland’ (Joyce, 2009: 83). SoundEye sought to provide Irish poets, who were often published and rec-ognized internationally, a chance to read in their home country and create a space for conversation and debate regarding poetics. In ‘The Point of Inno-vation in Poetry’ Joyce (1998/2001: 48) states: ‘surely one of those lessons must be that we need to work together, to draw to the attention … that not

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all Irish poetry lives in the shadow of Heaney and Boland’. SoundEye has also helped to create a community of Irish writers which in turn would make connections with groups of poets from the UK, America and Europe. SoundEye has tried not to limit itself in terms of ‘schools’ of poetry or poetic categories such as ‘mainstream’ or ‘experimental’ and has attempted to create a ‘point of juncture’ between traditions.

The festival originally sustained itself through the kindness and dedica-tion of the poets who came to read, with most of them paying for their own flights and sleeping on spare beds and couches. The festival continued to grow over the years and in 2005, when Cork was European capital of cul-ture, the festival, for a number of reasons, had a sort of coming of age. The first change was to be financial: for the first time SoundEye received sub-stantial funding and was able to host a week long festival with around fifty poets, including international writers such as Charles Bernstein, Bill Grif-fiths, Susan Howe, Tom Leonard and Nathaniel Mackey alongside a host of Irish writers such as Trevor Joyce, Michael Smith (the other co-founded of New Writers Press), Randolph Healy, Maurice Scully and Catherine Walsh. The other major change to occur in 2005 was SoundEye’s collaboration with a number of other art organizations such as The Cork Caucus co-cu-rated by Fergal Gaynor, in which an embassy of poets from SoundEye went and discussed their experimental practices and in response SoundEye was sent the International Necronautical Society. SoundEye also shared a venue in 2005 with The Vinyl Project run by Coracle Press’s Simon Cutts and Erica Van Horn. The Vinyl Project was a massive selection of experimental and avant-garde poetry and art books, all of which were for sale.

Since 2005, SoundEye has been in receipt of regular, albeit small and ever decreasing, funding but despite this it still exists and is grateful for the kindness and dedication of the poets, with many attending regularly as either readers or audience members. The most notable of these are the likes of Mairead Byrne, Peter Manson, Maggie O’Sullivan, Tom Raworth, Stephen Rodefer and Keith Tuma. With more poets funding their own trips and others forgoing reading fees either just to be able to attend the festival or to allow SoundEye to spend the money elsewhere.

In the years following 2005, SoundEye, thanks to the involvement of Fergal Gaynor, expanded into areas that incorporated music and perform-ance. Since 2007, Gaynor has curated a cabaret, which has proved to be an exciting and lively entry point into poetry for many people living in the city and is also a refreshing change of events for many of the poets reading at the festival. In 2009, we were full to capacity after just 30 minutes.

In 2007, I was asked to curate an event known as ‘poets by DEFAULT @ SoundEye’, which brings in poets that are new, young or simply not on Joyce’s radar. Poets that have read as part of this section have included Sara Crangle, Susana Gardner, Giles Goodland and Keston Sutherland. In

cummins | Introduction

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2008, Fergal Gaynor curated an exhibition of text based visual art in the Black Maria gallery on Washington Street. Also in 2008, Mairead Byrne hosted the first ever Cous/Cous @ SoundEye, which is a ‘not so’ open mic and gives an opportunity for local poets and less established poets to read alongside the best in international poetics. It also provides an opportunity for established poets to perform something a little bit different, something they might not feel comfortable doing as part of a ‘reading’.

Since 2009, SoundEye exists as part of a weeklong umbrella festi-val called The Avant. This collabo-ration saw an increase of audience members at many of the events, not only at SoundEye but also at events hosted by other partici-pants of The Avant, such as The National Sculpture Factory, The Guest House, the Eye and Mind series, Soundcast, Sonic Vigil and a host of small galleries through-out the city. Due to SoundEye and an increase of interest in all avant-garde art forms, Cork and Ireland is an integral location for all those interested in innovative practices.

All too often the tag ‘British and Irish’ is used in a somewhat patronizing way or else Ireland is tagged on almost as an after thought with no real interest in dealing with the separate issues that surround Irish poetry. I am very glad to say that this Journal does not do either of these and the very first essay in the first issue of the journal is one tracing the influence Irish history and culture has on the work of Maggie O’Sullivan, whose parents emigrated from West Cork. Also, the fact that the editors and publisher have made the effort to be here today shows the important connection between SoundEye, UCC, the Journal and the world of British and Irish innovative poetry. A connection I hope will continue to grow in the coming years.

After ThoughtSince the launch of this journal there has been another SoundEye and plans are already underway for next year’s festival, which will be its fifteenth year. SoundEye 2010 was a great success with outstanding performances by Jean

Jimmy Cummins,University College Cork


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Day and Sara Crangle to name but a few. SoundEye’s continued collabora-tion with other organizations has meant that the community of artists and audiences here in Cork is forever growing. In conjunction with the National Sculpture Factory there was a viewing and discussion with internationally acclaimed poet and film director Abigail Child. The Cabaret was once again a great success which was, in no small way due to the energies of Vicky Langan, who not only helped put the whole event together but was also part of the Cork shape note singers, whose performance people are still raving about. For more details of SoundEye 2010 go to:

Chris Goode’s Blog http://beescope.blogspot.com/2010/07/where-you-put-your-eyes.html

Openned Zine http://opennedpoetry.squarespace.com/epubs/2010/9/4/openned-zine-3.html

Hope to see you all in Cork in 2011.

Works Cited

Beckett, Samuel (2001) Disjecta. London: John Calder.Joyce, Trevor (2009) ‘Introduction’, Poetry Salzburg Review 15: 82–84.Joyce, Trevor (1998) ‘The Point of Innovation in Poetry’, For the Birds ed. Harry

Gilonis, 18–26. (Reprinted in The Gig 2 [2001]: 45–50.)



Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetrycork Launch, 16 march 2010

ALex DAvIsUniversity College Cork, Ireland

The Irish launch of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry provides an opportunity to rethink the relationship between Irish poetry and the currents of Anglophone and other modernisms; a forum in which to ques-tion readings of Irish poetry that, on occasion, verge on the hermetically-sealed – the kind of literary history of Irish poetry of the past century of which a representative exemplum is an anthology published a decade or so ago, Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry, co-edited by Noel Duffy and Theo Dorgan.

In this intriguingly constructed volume, ten poet-editors offer us a selec-tion of one hundred poems, a decad per decade. Eavan Boland’s headnote to her choice of poems from the period 1900–1909 draws our attention to Padraic Colum’s Wild Earth (1907) and the poetry of J.M. Synge in her analysis of Irish poetry’s turn from the introspective, lyrical mode of the Celtic Twilight to more robust, folkloric forms (though she omits to men-tion George Russell’s crucial 1904 anthology, New Songs). Marring her characteristically evocative commentary on this decade is the claim that this shift is unrelated to literary movements beyond Ireland. Her conten-tion that ‘Modernism, stirring in New York and London, has not yet come to the edges of the Irish poem’ not only neglects the centrality of the Irish Literary Revival of the fin de siécle to early European modernism, but also fails to relate Yeats’s and others’ poetry of the early 1900s to the ‘stirrings’ of the English-language avant-garde.1 One of the two poems by Yeats that Boland selects, ‘No Second Troy’ (from The Green Helmet and Other Poems [1910]), was judged by Ezra Pound in 1914 as sounding a ‘new note’ in Yeats’s work: a ‘gaunter’ clarity not unrelated to Imagism, and to which younger writers should attend. 3

We might also recall that Pound elsewhere praised, along related lines, Colum’s ‘A Drover,’ from Wild Earth, and his translation of ‘Ní bhFuighe Mise Bás Duit’ (‘I Shall Not Die For You’).3 Pound’s connections between Irish poetry of this period and the modern movement should act as a re-


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minder of the extent to which certain Irish poets were cognisant of, and drew upon, various avant-garde currents as part of their nationalist agen-das.4 In this context, the example of the poet-patriot Thomas MacDonagh is instructive. In his most famous lyric, ‘The Yellow Bittern’, a version of an Irish original, MacDonagh sought to introduce into English-language Irish poetry some of the sound patterns of Gaelic verse. In his posthu-mously-published Literature in Ireland (1916), MacDonagh argued that such exercises in the ‘Irish Mode’ were a necessary retort to the ‘Celtic Note’ of the 1890s: a form of cultural nationalism MacDonagh saw as mildly analogous to the disjunctive, and jingoistic, dissonance of Marinetti and the Italian Futurists.5 In this respect, MacDonagh’s transla-tions can be profitably considered along-side those of Pound – an admirer of MacDonagh’s thesis in Literature in Ire-land – whose revolutionary ‘translations’ from Chinese poetry, Cathay, had ap-peared in 1915. Likewise, Joseph Camp-bell, interned as a Republican during the Irish Civil War, had earlier been Secre-tary of the Irish National Literary Soci-ety in London; and his collections Irishry (1913) and Earth of Cualann (1917) owe more than a little to ‘the experimentalists of the Imagist school’, as Austin Clarke saw fit to point out when introducing his edition of Campbell’s Poems in 1963.6

Clarke’s comment came at a time when he was rethinking his own position vis-á-vis modernism, specifically with regard to Pound, whom he had attacked in the 1920s for his ‘spiritual homeless-ness’.7 In a 1929 review, Clarke wrote that Pound has ‘refused to settle down at any poetic address, avoided responsibilities, knocked wittily at many doors without waiting for an answer’.8 By the 1950s, Clarke was read-ing the Cantos in earnest, his growing admiration apparent from his poem ‘Ezra Pound’ in Old-Fashioned Pilgrimage and Other Poems (1967): ‘praise the language he compounded/The centuries are in that pound’.9 Clarke’s initial wariness with regard to Pound stemmed from his assumption that modernist experimentation constituted a form of aesthetic expropriation, a linguistic ‘homelessness’ he also identified in the ‘synthetic language’ of Finnegans Wake.10 Yet, Clarke’s own work within the ‘Irish Mode’ during the 1920s – as in such a deceptively simple a lyric as ‘The Planter’s Daugh-ter’ in Pilgrimage and Other Poems (1929) – bears comparison with Hugh MacDiarmid’s contemporaneous experiments in ‘synthetic Scots’ during

Alex Davis,University College Cork

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this decade; and, in this respect, Clarke’s dismissive attitude towards the self-consciously modernist poetry of Thomas MacGreevy obscures their parallel endeavours at, to paraphrase Pound, breaking the pentameter – ei-ther through a poetry inflected by Gaelic poetic devices or, in MacGreevy’s case, one drawing on the example of Eliot’s The Waste Land.

MacGreevy, along with his younger friend Samuel Beckett, and Beckett’s contemporaries Brian Coffey and Denis Devlin, rejected not only Celticism, but also much of the poetry which in various ways had sought to create an ‘Irish Mode’ distinct from that of Revival’s Celticism. Beckett’s Echo’s Bones and Other Precipitates (1936) is aggressively modernist in its disori-entating dislocations. Well-apprised of Joyce’s linguistic bravado in ‘Work in Progress’, and temperamentally inclined towards the sense of cultural malaise permeating The Waste Land, Beckett’s early poems edgily atomize concerns developed at greater length in his prose and drama. With his turn to French, the overdetermined nature of the early verse modulates into an evocation of ‘strangely gentle apocalypse’, as Hugh Kenner felicitously de-scribes the quality of a poem such as ‘je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse/my way is in the sand flowing’.11 Beckett’s increasingly minimalist poetic con-trasts with Devlin’s linguistic jouissance. The latter’s collection Intercessions (1937) is unique in Irish poetry, being saturated with the example of French surrealism, specifically the love poetry of Paul Éluard. Devlin’s career as a diplomat in the civil service would take him to the USA during the Second World War, and into a creative relationship with the New Critical poetics of Allan Tate and Robert Penn Warren, the results of which are evident in a number of highly-wrought and allusive poems included in Lough Derg and Other Poems (1946). But surrealist images continue to spot the densely symbolic patterning of these works, just as the libido’s urges inform and direct the Mariology of Devlin’s religious outlook in his late masterpiece, The Heavenly Foreigner (1950).

Still, an indigenous modernist aesthetics is, if not absent, a fitful pres-ence in the literary landscape of Ireland in the interwar years. With the notable exception of the novelist Flann O’Brien, Irish writers drawn to experimental modes of writing gravitated in the early 1930s to London and continental Europe, specifically Paris. In Terence Brown’s view, ‘[an] almost Stalinist antagonism to modernism’ is evident in much of the me-dia during the years leading up to the so-called Emergency; antipathy to-wards ‘surrealism, free verse, symbolism and the modern cinema … com-bined with prudery (the 1930s saw opposition to paintings of nudes be-ing exhibited in the National Gallery in Dublin) and a deep reverence for the Irish past’.12 What can be overlooked in such a dispirited portrayal of the period is the liberating influence of modernist poetics on certain women poets, specifically, Mary Devenport O’Neill and Sheila Wingfield, and to a lesser extent Rhoda Coghill (just as a number of Irish women painters were inspired by abstraction in the visual arts, most notably


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Mainie Jellett). O’Neill’s and Wingfield’s adoption of what are basically Imagistic procedures in some of their poems comes long after Imagism, as a coherent movement, had expired. Such belatedness is indicative of the extent to which O’Neill and, to a greater extent, Wingfield, wrote in rela-tive isolation, though O’Neill’s Thursday salon was frequented by such lit-erary luminaries as Yeats and Russell. Despite this connection, O’Neill’s poetry is anti-revivalist in its refusal to idealize rural Ireland, its Imagistic clarity, as Anne Fogarty suggests, governed by a mimetic attentiveness to the world that bears some comparison with Laura (Riding) Jackson’s em-phasis on poetic purity.13 Wingfield’s poetry also possesses a quality of objectivism, though her most achieved work is the discursive long poem Beat Drum, Beat Heart (1946): a sustained meditation in four parts on de-sire and warfare, the capacious historicism of which recalls, in parts, Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal (1939). As a scrupulous examination of the emotional vicissitudes of military conflict, however, the poem also bears comparison with Lynette Roberts’s second-world war ‘heroic poem’, Gods with Stainless Ears (1951).

The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry promises to contrib-ute to our rethinking of modernism, both Irish and British. A monolithic conception of ‘international modernism’ – the caricatured target of the cruder forms of postmodernist critique – has thankfully seceded to an understanding of the period as intricately variegated; that modernism, in short, has given way to ‘modernisms’. Few would now maintain that mod-ernism is definable simply through the employment of certain structural, formal and stylistic devices, such as stream of consciousness, fragmenta-tion, collage, etc. And neither would we isolate a specific series of themes and preoccupations as specifically modernist. In these respects, the delim-iting of modernism at the hands of the so-called ‘new modernist stud-ies’ has, from one perspective, brought the enormously varied contours of modernist literature into view, even as they recede into the literary historical distance. From another, however, it has produced a miasma. As Carla Kaplan observed as early as 1995, ‘[w]hat many are calling the “new modernist studies” would seem, then, to be at a conceptual impasse, caught between expansion and erasure. How can we reconstruct modernism while simultaneously calling into question its categorical status?’.14 Chris Bald-ick’s remapping of English modernism – in his recent volume in the Oxford English Literary History – within the context of a broader ‘modern move-ment’ suggests one way to negotiate this impasse in a specific national con-text, but, while useful, it is by no means conceptually unproblematic. The stability of the category of ‘modernism’ is preserved from erasure by Bal-dick through its being reserved for those few ‘central avant-garde’ works that have been unquestioningly recognized as such.15 However, as our knowledge of modernism is derived empirically from the relevant cultural

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evidence – it could hardly be known a priori or by reason alone – Kaplan’s own suggestion as to how research in this area should proceed strikes me as more fruitful than Baldick’s. Kaplan urges us to undertake ‘thick descrip-tion[,] upon which any new understanding of the field necessarily will de-pend’.16 The Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry will doubtless be an important contribution to such re-description.

notes

Eavan Boland, ‘1900-1909’, Headnote1 , Watching the River Flow: A Century in Irish Poetry, ed. Noel Duffy and Theo Dorgan (Dublin: Poetry Ireland, 1999), 10.Ezra Pound, ‘The Later Yeats’, rev. of 2 Responsibilities, by W. B. Yeats, Poetry 4.2 (1914), 66.See Ezra Pound, 3 Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1954), 14. On this issue, see Helen Carr’s illuminating discussion of Joseph Campbell and 4 Desmond FitzGerald in her The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), passim. See Thomas MacDonagh, 5 Literature in Ireland: Studies Irish and Anglo-Irish (1916; Relay: Tyrone, 1996), 4.Austin Clarke, ‘Introduction’, 6 Poems of Joseph Campbell, by Joseph Campbell, ed. Clarke (Dublin: Allen Figgis, 1963), 2.Austin Clarke, 7 Reviews and Essays of Austin Clarke, ed. Gregory A. Schirmer (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1995), 181.Ibid.8 Austin Clarke, 9 Collected Poems, ed. R. Dardis Clarke (Manchester: Carcanet; Dublin: The Bridge Press, 2008), 360.Clarke, 10 Reviews and Essays, 90.Hugh Kenner, 11 A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1996),

45.Terence Brown, 12 Ireland: A Cultural and Social History 1922-1985 (London: Fon-

tana, 1985), 147.See Anne Fogarty, ‘Outside the mainstream: Irish women poets of the 1930s’, 13

Angel Exhaust, 17, 87-92. Carla Kaplan, rev. of 14 Rereading Modernism: New Directions in Feminist Criticism,

ed. Lisa Raldo, Modernism/Modernity 2.2 (1995), 116.Chris Baldick, 15 The Oxford English Literary History, vol. 10, 1910-1940: The Mod-

ern Movement (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2004), 399.Kaplan, 116.16



Pavlov’s surferResistance to Googleatrophy, Google ADD, Google Amnesia, Googlebrain …

sAm LADkInUniversity College Cork, Ireland

When I began to think about a ‘state of poetry’ presentation I turned to T. J. Clark, who, in several recent texts, has tried to formulate the right questions to ask the culture of our time.1 His attempt is modelled on his better than average understanding of the founding myths (the ‘structures of belief ’) of modernity, the myths that modernism placed under formal pressure, where ‘form was ultimately a crucible, an act of aggression, an abyss into which all the comfortable “givens” of the culture were sucked and then spat out’.2 He writes:

The question to put to the art of the present, then, is what does that art appear to see as the beliefs in the culture of our own moment that are similarly structural, similarly the core of our present ideology; and how does art envisage putting those beliefs to the test?

If modernism’s rise was predicated on a number of shifts, whether we cali-brate those in terms of crisis or possibility – the withdrawal of nature, revolutionary fervour, internally antagonistic models of mind, disavowal of habit as the prevention of immanent experience, for example – then what are the core beliefs of our time, and how can the arts place them under sig-nificant pressure?

The target of Clark’s question, particularly as it influences the study of art history, is the Internet. Clark argues that the ‘pacing and structur-ing and sedimentation of experience are increasingly invaded – interfered with, overtaken – by the different rhythms and transparencies of the shift-ing visual array’.3 Clark provisionally provides two myths of our times. The first is that the Internet provides an immediacy of information which robs us of space-time materiality in favour of virtuality. The second is the presumption that we have made a shift from a verbal to a visual world, that we now have a ‘technology of visualization … that truly can emulate lan-


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guage’s flexibility and power to make otherwise, but augment that power by its own unique offer of vividness, its promise of worlds laid out in an instant’. In this world, Clark comments ‘Grammar gives way to perspec-tive’.4

This shift is a myth, according to Clark, because its images are still tied to the promises of language use: ‘image clarity, image flow, image depth, and image density are all determined by the parallel (unimpeded) movement of the logo, the brand name, the product slogan, the com-pressed pseudo-narrative of the TV commercial, the sound bite, the T-shirt confession, the chat show q. & a. Billboards, web pages, and video games are just projections – perfections, perfected banalizations – of this world of half-verbal exchange’.5 This is most obviously the case in the nature of the search term: Google will find for you millions of ‘hits’, but only if it reduces all visual experience to semiotics, to signs.

The first myth, that of immediacy, mimics one of modernism’s great obsessions: presentness, how to live in a state of immediacy. And before it was an obsession of modernism it was an obsession of the lyric; how to find present experience amidst draws to memory and futurity. The obsession has a new twist with the connection of telephones to the In-ternet and back again. On the one hand there is a new fiction of social immediacy on offer, but on the other the present it offers is a present that will continue without you. An anxiety for our time is the knowledge that the present is happening elsewhere, that conversations are continuing by email and text and on Facebook without your inclusion. Everyone is talking behind your back. And I think this leads to a crisis of attention, the practical difficulty of ever not being at least a little bit also on email, also on the phone, always interrupted.

What kind of person does the Internet want me to be, and why might I not want to be that person? I confess this paper is motivated in part by self-excoriation; it expresses my fears about being a worse scholar (no less) because of the permission Google offers me. I am concerned about being stupefied by Google. I am concerned about losing a certain kind of brain, a brain I hold dear, though not a brain, sadly, I hold in my head, but a brain of a mythic creature of academia who is an actor in the theatre of memory – I will name that mythic brain for the sake of clarity as the ‘Pat Coughlan’.6 Thinking about the Internet I visited the Urban Dic-tionary, via Google, to check on ‘googleatrophy’, defined as ‘Brain Blight. Diminished neural capacity. Specifically, the inability to cognate relative minutia or trivial information due to an over-reliance and/or dependence on Google’.7 Not only did I find googleatrophy, but a plethora of terms all describing the kinds of idiot we (arguably) become in Google’s wake: Google ADD, Google Amnesia, Googlebrain …

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So what kind of person does the Internet want you to be?8 The following is taken from one of the founding documents of our times. This by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page stands at the beginning of Google; it is from a document titled ‘The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine’ (1998):

PageRank can be thought of as a model of user behavior. We assume there is a ‘random surfer’ who is given a web page at random and keeps clicking on links, never hitting ‘back’ but eventually gets bored and starts on another random page. The probability that the random surfer visits a page is its PageRank. And, the d damping factor is the probability at each page the ‘random surfer’ will get bored and request another random page.

Hence my perhaps rather random-seeming title: Pavlov’s Surfer is the ‘ran-dom surfer’, the ‘user’, written into the bible of the Googleverse. And what do we know about this user? They, we, are bored without end. I’ll come back to Pavlov’s Surfer.

The poet and theatre maker Chris Goode writes brilliantly of the same falsehood as Clark. Goode describes the fallout from the potentially trans-gressive ‘liminality’ of the 1960s, which is due to the use capitalism has made of the techniques of liminality (what we might highlight as liminal-ity’s formal aspects, or rather its presumption to be removing one formal convention after another). He writes:

[The] revolutionary change that arose from and resolved the social and cultural liminality of that period would in fact be a series of extensions in the functioning of capitalism: a programmatic exploitation of the fluid and seductive permissiveness of the liminal experience. Directionless velocity, deregulation, the proliferation of choice, the creation of synthetic indicators of social mobility, and a dismantling of the rhetoric of stable civic identity and of the upscale narratives of Cold War and boundaried ideology: all these features of the Thatcherite and Reagonomic programme are obviously liminal in character.9

Goode understands the ‘array of communications technologies and rec-reational matrices’ that have produced a ‘subjunctive conceptual space we call “virtuality”’ to be inextricable from global capitalism’s propounding of liminal experience. For Goode, his use of the subjunctive in descriptions of virtuality is crucial, and the wonderful lecture from which this quotation is taken, The Forest and the Field, is in some ways a refusal of the dispersal of possibilities afforded by the subjunctive; Goode wants a theatre that states ‘what is’ rather than ‘what if ’ to counter the fluidity of virtuality.

What is wrong with the proliferation of virtualities, of possible futures, of subjunctive spaces? Do we not require ‘if ’ statements to be able to en-gage in utopian thinking or any kind of hopeful prospecting for other social orders?

Clark’s consideration of a possible tearful farewell to modernism is pred-icated on the failure of modernism’s desiring and dreaming to have forged something like a socialist future. The crisis the Internet causes, I think, is


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because it mimics the structure of desire too ably, it reflects back to desire too precisely its enabling force; the Internet mimics desire by being uncon-scionably moreish. There is always more desire, and there is always more Internet, and the structure of desire as fundamentally insatiable is reflected in the Internet’s drive to offer repletion through endlessness.10 The Inter-net is the interminability of desire.

Back in the early days of the Internet, and I’m conscious of being prob-ably the last generation to grow up without the Internet in the home, there used to be a web page that read, simply, ‘This is the last page. Thank you and goodbye’. Reminded of this I thought I’d check to see whether it was still out there; now, there are thousands of such pages, including pages col-lating all the other pages that are like it.

The endlessness of the Internet, and the implied endlessness of subjunc-tive states, is, I think, one reason why a restatement of indicatives, of stat-ing ‘what is’, has become important for Goode’s practice.

Maurice Blanchot retells the story of the Sirens attempting to lure Ul-ysses onto the rocks that might give us a better idea of the surfer we’re expected to be. The story of the Sirens’ song is one of desire, the promise of satiation offered elsewhere and of, for Blanchot, ‘the encounter with the imaginary’, the desire for those things that you cannot even know you de-sire, the desire for experience beyond knowledge.11 For J. Hillis Miller this ‘imaginary’ is the origin, the source, for that which literature makes ‘vir-tual’, the other realm we inhabit when we read. Blanchot’s ‘imaginary’, un-like Hillis Miller’s is ‘featureless, empty, an abyss’.12 But what is the sirens’ song? Something and nothing. This is the fascinating ambiguity of the story. The song we hear (though only in the story) is not the Sirens’ song; it is only the sung promise of the real song that will follow. It is a song that promises us some later, better, more final song. But it is that promise, the promise of the song to come, that mimics desire, and that makes the song we hear genuinely the sirens’ song. It is so persuasive because it promises a further song. Blanchot writes:

The Sirens: evidently they really sang, but in a way that was not satisfying, that only implied in which direction lay the true sources of the song, the true happiness of the song. Nevertheless, through their imperfect songs, songs which were only a singing still to come, they guide the sailor toward that space where singing would really begin.13

Poets have always surfed the waves of cadence and of song, riding into dan-gerous waters where the song threatens to envelop them. And for Blanchot, the final song is a return to the origins of poetry in a lethal submergence, the surf rising above the ears, and washing silence into noise. Arguably, modernist poetry was forged by Pound’s saving of the music of Swinburne and Hopkins from drowning in the power of their cadences.


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The sirens’ song, which I embarrassingly align with the Internet, is so al-luring because it makes a promise, a promise for the real Sirens’ song. Hillis Miller writes: ‘The Sirens’song is always proleptic, a beckoning toward the future’.14 This, I think, is the curse of the Internet’s promise. It says, over and over again, that the text you desire, or the image you desire, are like this one, but better, because as yet unreal; and if you keep going, if you keep clicking out of trig-ger-happy boredom, that’s the nowhere where the real siren’s song resides; a peren-nially deferred virtu-ality, not utopian in needing to be made, but rather merely the expectation that the utopia just has not yet been clicked on.

This is why I’ve called this paper Pav-lov’s surfer. Everyone remembers the story of Ivan Pavlov I’m sure. What Pavlov’s experiments showed was not that we, or ‘dogs’, salivate over food, but that we salivate over signs connected to the giving of food. The Google surfer is a product of conditioning. We are conditioned not on the point of immediacy, but proleptically. We hear the sound of our futures, and salivate in the present, even if no food is forthcoming.

So how do we test these myths of virtuality and the surfer? Since much of the poetry I hold dear takes issue with Clark’s reading of language above (not, by the way, a summation of his understanding of language), we might find common ground between the art historian’s critique of contemporary visuality and the poet’s critique of contemporary language use.

One such case is the putative ‘freedom’ of the reader. A strain of British and Irish poetry has, I think, been fastidious in its assessment of the impos-sibility of the author ever, finally, divesting themselves of authority. The ‘open text’ can only be an invitation to false consciousness. Instead, brand names and product slogans show just how pervasive the coercions of lan-guage. As John Wilkinson writes, no writer can free themselves ‘with one bound from the economic, social and linguistic orders within which she has negotiated her position during her development – she can never be free and neither can the reader’.15 The strain of poetry I have in mind has distrusted the logic of the free play of the signifier as it has been watered down and spread around in academic discourse, and of the putative freedom of the

Sam Ladkin,University College Cork


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reader, which has accompanied our progress into the ‘fluid and seductive’ information revolution.

I want to double Clark’s critique: the myth of the visual array is not only a falsehood because it is tied inextricably to language, but the model of language it is tied to is also a falsehood. Briefly, it is a semiotics without a syntax. What Clark critiques is virtuality’s loss of distance, its instantane-ity. The Internet is bad at promoting the motility of eyesight, its promise, as Merleau-Ponty described it, of perception as the feeling of distant touch with our bodies. The implied travelling tells us about distance, about separa-tion, as well as contiguity. Language has its own way to figure distance, and it is an aspect of language that Internet use and search engines are notori-ously bad at and, luckily for me, it is the arena in which formal experimenta-tion is most imperiously continued in poetry, that is syntax and prosody.

Pavlov’s surfer, conditioned as the figure of outward, ‘never hitting “back”’’, easily bored, clicks on. There’s very little distance inside the In-ternet, only endlessness. And there’s very little space, only another hidden door. This isn’t anything as daft as a promise of a new freedom due to syntax, but syntax is threatened, and might be a form of resistance, to the people the Internet wants us to be. British poetry has been concerned with syntax because it plays out systems of authority, of control and direction, and their critique.

Syntax, derived from the Greek for ‘arrangement’, describes the order or arrangement of parts, whether referring to the composition of a sentence or the ‘constitution’ of a body (OED). Much recent poetry has played off the possibility of whole sentences against the provision of either too much, or too little, syntactic work. Normative syntax, or ‘correct’ grammar, de-pends on the ‘agreement’ of constituent parts. Just as prosody can include a displacement between underlying rhythm and overlaid stress patterns, in which the rule of meter might be broken, and so gather some other value by this act, so might we conceive of syntax as the construction of agreements which threaten to be exceeded, disordered or broken. Syntax can disagree. Syntax can also model contingency and restrictions on freedom. The Inter-net presents immediacy with perpetual deferral when what I think we need is attention with distance and, finally, real touch, with the strings of attach-ment more apparent rather than less.

I thought originally about presenting a close reading, as a resistance to the type of synoptic generalities I’m offering here. When I did, I wanted to place side by side the following two passages. The author of the second, he assures me, did not have the first poem in mind. The first is from Chris Goode’s astonishing ‘Gay Twist Variable Disaster Revert’:

[…] ask you

how is your body local to me? how


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now the kindness you cling to fast toofascinatingly fast the air gone turmoil

And later:

once and for all your sweetness

your innovative need reworking a space craftmark my/how we love these sounds for

the words they make each tongue in the othermouth itself a commitment to public

speaking […]16

Line-breaks open this quotation as severance, ‘how/now’, the little burst of preparation to catch ‘now’ mitigated by its sound echo of what precedes it. The distance might be broached, however, by making ourselves, rather than objects in space, alienated one from another, instead into ‘space craft’, flying fast to speak again. In fact, we soar closer than near, ‘each tongue in the other/mouth itself a commitment to public/speaking’. That’s one way of countering virtuality. This tongue in the other mouth is partly a commitment to the experience of touch, itself a moment of stating ‘what is’ by being of the flesh, but also and more surreptitiously also what we do in speech, tonguing the same words into voice that countless others have also chewed up to spit out. We might even have been taught how to speak by the echo of these sounds, the ‘how’ to ‘now’ in ‘how now brown cow’. And what are we learning by repeating that phrase? The pleasures, and the class codes, of the dipthong, the glide between two sounds with the movement of the tongue. Take your lessons in elocution and practice in the confines of another’s mouth. I noticed a resemblance to another important recent poem, Michael Kindellan’s Not Love,17 part of which reads:

… So how ‘now’? You speakexpletives inside the stitch of your famous trap. And what other outbursts really

know a known love that lasts this long,so wholly into the minimum of asters,that when the light’s calmed, it shines on?

A less sentimental revision of related ground, but here ‘expletives’ fill the space of speech, the mouth in its kiss, with recrimination. What is now usu-ally merely a profanity, the expletive, has meant in the past a word which fills out a sentence in order to complete a metrical line. We can infer, per-haps, that though love might not be in its first blush, it has its own measure, and asks of its participants to play out its duration. It is another line with which I would like to end, and my apologies for wrenching it out of such a complex and reflexive poem, but its own miniature back-biting is my con-clusion:


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[…] The world not only is up to you.

The figure of onward, never clicking back, fails to feel the strong undertow of this line; its syntax is always bending back to the beginning. It is a line that understands the strength of the undertow, a warning to surfer’s, and poet’s, who want the crest to carry them over the rocks. We hear, ‘the world is up to you’ as utopian possibility, and to you the world is over (as the pa-thos of ‘not love’), and we have the negative world, a counterfactual world, which is the only thing that is up to you, for you to imagine, or that which is up, as in over. And we have the world that is not only yours, and you cannot, therefore, be alone in your plans for it. This feels to me like subjunctive pos-sibilities skewered on contingent syntax. It is the kind of knowledge only available through and by syntax, and it is a kind of knowledge that search-engines condition us out of. It is a tiny object lesson in the mental undertow we need in order to return to ‘The world’.18

Notes

The following paper was delivered at the Irish launch of the 1 Journal of Brit-ish and Irish Innovative Poetry, held at University College Cork on Tuesday 16 March 2010. Minor corrections have been made, but otherwise the following stands as a first foray into the relationship of the Internet to lyric. Clark, ‘Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam’, October 100 (2002), 154–74 2 (p. 172).T. J. Clark, 3 The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 175. The Sight of Death4 , pp. 175–6.The Sight of Death5 , p. 176.The ‘Pat Coughlan’ is an avatar created for this paper, who happens to resemble 6 the Pat Coughlan, lecturer at University College Cork, renowned for her re-doubtable facility for recall. Similar anxieties are expressed over the detriment to memory of printing technology, on which see Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). See http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=googleatrophy 7 (ac-cessed March 2010).Though not used for this subject originally, the formulation of the question is 8 taken from conversations with Neil Pattison, and in the company of Edward Holberton‘The Forest and the Field’, a lecture that has been given in a number of mani-9 festations, can be downloaded here: http://www.leanupstream.info/2009/10/from-forest-field.html (accessed 10 March 2010). Goode’s blog Thompson’s Bank of Communicable Desire (http://beescope.blogspot.com; accessed March 2010) includes various relevant posts, and for more substantial readings see


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Goode’s ‘“These facts are variously modified”: American Writers in an Informa-tion Economy’, ‘the darkness surrounds us’: American Poetry, ed. Sam Ladkin and Robin Purves, Edinburgh Review 114 (2005): 126–57; Chris Goode and Sam Ladkin, ‘Some Correspondence’, Chicago Review 53.1 (2007): 126-38; and two articles in Complicities: British Poetry 1945–2007, ed. Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2007), those by Sara Crangle (‘The Art of Exhalation in Poetry: Chris Goode’s Bathos’, pp. 201-21) and Malcolm Phil-lips (‘“Loss Format”: Liminality and Incorporation in Chris Goode’s Poetry’, pp. 222-37. Complicities is now downloadable at http://issuu.com/litteraria /docs/complicities (accessed 13 March 2010).

Andrea Brady, in an interview with Andrew Duncan, refers to this endless ver-10 biage as the ‘sublime’: ‘I argued in a little article about blogs (“For Immediate Delivery: on the semiotics of blogs” in Put About: a critical anthology on independ-ent publishing, ed. Maria Fusco, London: Book Works, 2004) that information has become a new category of the sublime: apprehensible by the imagination but occasionally terrifying in its extent, it veers over the workstation and distracts every waking hour of the day with episodes in a quest narrative. If poetry is one mode of information management, I could say that in my work, it oper-ates in two ways’ (http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Brady%20interview.htm; accessed 13 March 2010).Quoted in J. Hillis Miller, 11 On Literature (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 69. The

essay to which Hillis Miller refers is ‘The Song of the Sirens: Encountering the Imaginary’ from Le livre à venir of 1959, translated as The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3–10.Hillis Miller, 70.12 Hillis Miller, 71.13 Hillis Miller, 70. 14 John Wilkinson, ‘Tenter Ground’, 15 The Lyric Touch: Essays on the Poetry of Excess

(Great Wilbraham: Salt, 2007), pp. 21–32 (25). See also Keston Sutherland’s ‘Junk Subjectivity’, Mute (http://www.metamute.org/en/Junk-Subjectivity; ac-cessed 13 March 2010), anthologized in Proud To Be Flesh, ed. Josephine Ber-ry Slater and Pauline van Mourik Broekman (London: Mute, 2009); and J. H. Prynne’s ‘A Letter to Steve McCaffery’, The Gig 7 (2000), 40-46, among other related formulations. Chicago Review16 53.1 (2007): 69–70. Its ‘churned’ sestina form is discussed in

Chris Goode and Sam Ladkin, ‘Some Correspondence’, Chicago Review 53.1 (2007): 126–38 (135–8).Michael Kindellan, 17 Not Love (London and Brighton: Barque Press, 2009).Compare again to the close of Keston Sutherland’s ‘Ethica Nullius’ (on J. H. 18

Prynne’s late poetry), Avant-Post: The Avant-Garde Under “post-” Conditions (Prague: Litteraria Pragensia, 2006), quoted by Goode in ‘The Forest and the Field’.

journal of british and irish innovative poetry (cork launch booklet)

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