THE LO-O-O-ONG POEM

(AND GOD BLESS US, EVERY ONE)

last time, i promised/ threatened, i would return to the long poem, with special emphasis on the “forward slash” in my own work and elsewhere. i will. kind of. in order to do that, though, i’ll need to unpack my somewhat niche reckon about what mark making means. ever. at all.

‘kay so, to define my terms: when i talk about “mark making”, i’m talking about any kind of pre-meditative symbolic intervention in or on the natural world: a physical gesture that leaves a deliberate trace in or on its environment. i’m going to say that “marks” are the evidence and expression of symbolic thinking and/or imagining; they can be, but are not necessarily, “signs”, which are a form of symbolic communication. so, in terms of writing (and imaginative writing in particular) the foundational metaphor is written language itself, the characters the writer shapes, as a symbolic representation, first and foremost, of their own breathing, sounding and doing body-in-the-world. ken?

big leap forward, into old english (because shut up, that’s why), and i’ve been trying to write something for a while about the way in which record began to replace ritual. that is, mark making in its earliest incarnation had sacred-symbolic or sacred/symbolic functions: making the mark invited the forces of the sacred, drew and potentially bound them to the maker. because the mark stood for the body, right? but, as written (usually legal) communication in a (more or less) common language began to become more wide-spread, one’s seal, one’s letter, one’s word stood for one’s self in a far more rigid and authoritative sense than before. to the extent that (i think) the marks began to gain a power of their own, a power that exceeded and usurped the bodily authority they purported to represent. the mark became the warrant and expression of its own authority; it no longer served the individual, even the community, but perpetuated itself in their records. an abstract, intangible, imperishable power. i.e. the law. i was trying to get at this in my daffy little lady m story, when i have my protagonist talk about ritual as being the way pre or illiterate communities such as hers preserved and extended themselves in time and in memory. within the gorgio culture into which she is married, the record has replaced memory; accumulates and stores history through the mark. she is (i think) rightly wary of this process, fears what memory may become if subjected to long contact with the distorting, estranging power of the mark. basically, writing works upon our intellectual and imaginative operations as much as we work upon it. it might well be a useful tool, but we surrender to it at our peril.

all of which is to say, that when i’m thinking about mark-making/ about punctuation/ about introducing or elaborating any particular expressive effect, i am very much thinking about mark-making in relation to the forces of the sacred as well as to the freight of impersonal authority and spectral power such marks might carry and contain. yeah, waffle o’ clock here at meltdown mansions, but bear with me. and can i perhaps offer you some adorno at this trying time? no? well tough, i’m gonna:

in a short essay i am somehow always forgetting he actually wrote (’punctuation marks’, 1956), adorno says: ‘history has left its residue in punctuation marks, and it is history, far more than meaning or grammatical function, that looks out at us, rigidified and trembling slightly, from every mark of punctuation.’ so far, so dour, but i love the idea of punctuation as simultaneously carrying the sediment of history, and being part of its gritty particulate trace. adorno seems to suggest (and i tend to agree) that there is a physicality to punctuation marks – what he calls a ‘physiognomic’ quality. nearer to body, nearer to gesture, nearer to the magic of the mark (he doesn’t say that last bit, that’s mine). and i know, i know. i’m well aware that adorno is my theoretical security blanket. i drag him into everything. guilty as charged. but my love of his work is sincere and undogmatic in nature. he’s not right about everything. but his writing was formative for me, so i find him helpful to think with and through, and i hope, in this instance at least, that you might too. see, i often forget that he wrote ‘punctuation marks’ because it’s weirdly “charming”, like something umberto eco might have knocked up, only with less of a centre-left ick factor. i relish the way he rhapsodises about the distinctive visual and expressive qualities of punctuation marks; the way they function almost like musical notation (the mighty a was a composer hisself, lest we forget), and this above and beyond their syntactic functions. like, he can hear things in punctuation; suggests they have aural/ oral dimensions, that they contribute to (that they have) a “voice”. he describes the exclamation mark as ‘an index finger raised in warning’, the question mark as ‘the blink of an eye’, and, hilariously, the semicolon, as ‘a drooping moustache’ (he wasn’t a fan).

and i’m bringing this up because? a) i think you should read it. it’s a hoot. and b) because i want to nail my colours to the mast in terms of punctuation in poetry. i want to advocate for thinking seriously– and with deep, intentional jouissance – about all the expressive marks we make, not just the words. which isn’t to say we should work ourselves into a pedantic froth about using punctuation correctly. oh no, what i’m after is thinking musically, idiosyncratically, creatively about punctuation. i think i want a poetry that minds the notes and tones of punctuation marks, that doesn’t just use them to limit and contour the words. i don’t want punctuation to feel like an afterthought, or simply mechanical. i want dickinson’s em dash, cummings’ ampersand, mullen’s ellipses’. i want punctuation that refuses, or at least complicates, standard english, and with it the histories and legacies of writing and learning that come to determine/ over-determine our writing. i want us to become exquisitely, painfully conscious of punctuation. does that sound dumb? it’s about to sound dumber.

here’s aged a again, on that adaptable, unobtrusive (so potentially insidious) comma: ‘literary dilettantes can be recognized by their desire to connect everything. their products hook sentences together with logical connectives even though the logical relationship asserted by those connectives does not hold. to the person who cannot truly conceive anything as a unit, anything that suggests disintegration or discontinuity is unbearable; only a person who can grasp totality can understand caesuras.’ ouch. but this parade of comma-driven grammatical logic, by which we are hurried and harried past concealed meanings (or indeed their total absence), is, i think, a fair enough point. whatever else its happy facilities, the comma (esp. within the political rhetoric of late-stage capitalism) is also an instrument of coercive momentum and specious reasoning. too much? i’m not suggesting we nail commas to a frisbee and fling them over a rainbow, i’m just saying – because i’m never not saying – no act without intention. consider. look again. also, commas, man. they’re everywhere, all over this text anyway, curling in on themselves. like dead wasps. or stray pubes. sorry. i suppose i do have a slight bias. the comma only arrived in europe around the 1500s, when punctuation was beginning to be standardised for the purposes of mass print production. and obviously woo-hoo! hurray for print culture! and all of that, but i can’t not connect it in my mind to a certain propagandist turn; or to emergent enlightenment discourses with the sledge-hammer of legal logic at their heart. the comma is, to me, most of all, a beckoning finger, wheedling and coaxing. or else a vaudeville hook, (mis)directing attention, yanking a flailing argument off stage.

which (finally) brings me to this happy character: ‘/’. behold his majesty. this is the figure from which our contemporary comma – much softened in shape and solidified in meaning – is descended; the mark our comma came ultimately, by the 17th century, to replace. an oblique line that, in old english, and in (eps. french) medieval manuscripts signified a multitude of different things: in poetry, the caesura, of course, but also a break or a pause in prose. sometimes it behaved as a full stop. it could imply connection, but also introduce distance between concepts, images, and breaths. it could be doubled or tripled for emphasis. in medieval ms it is often stylishly embellished, coloured and curlicued. it appears in music too, marks a secondary chord, a sonic interstice, variation, interruption. it is, in fact, somewhere between musical notation and syntax. more than any other mark it (to me, at least) seems to function autonomously, to live up to adorno’s assertion that punctuation articulates language, thereby bringing writing ‘closer to voice’.

it is known as the virgule, which means “little twig”. adorno mourned its loss; the poetic avant-garde attempted a resurrection. it now goes by the ghastly monicker of the “forward slash”, and tends to be used, when it appears in prose, to signal mutually exclusive alternatives. this is not my relationship with the mark. not at all.

briefly: i began using the virgule seriously at cambridge during my ill-considered tenure as judith e. wilson poetry fellow. i’d been encountering it in a number of manuscripts, and was intrigued by its variousness and versatility, by the texture – and by the sheer ambivalence – it seemed able to introduce into a text. mind but, i’d always rather fancied the “forward slash” – its rakish tilt between binaries. its headlong lean into the future. its pin-stripe sharpness. its switch-blade frisson. its slip and skew. queerly kiltered form. so much so, that it was the subject of an early (truly dire) published poem. here is said effort, which was my sorry contribution to laudanum’s asterism anthology (2016):

let’s not dwell. but two things stand out to me about this poem: even then, i am pleased to discover i was determinedly using the slash “incorrectly”, creating space on either side of it, as if it were a word in its own right, as if it had alternately escaped and repelled the words on either side of it; as if it had found the spot-light and was strutting there alone. on the other hand, i am less happy with the way i see myself lean into the violence of the “slash”, the way i disavow or fail to recognise its boundless possibilities, its gesture towards, its queer yearning, its seeming growth. it wasn’t really until cambridge that i started thinking about the mark, not as a tear in the fabric of the page, but a growth or protrusion: a young shoot, a quill or protective spine. possibly because that was something i needed there: protective spines. something my writing needed.

i can’t vouch for how it looked from the outside, but my own sense of things was that i wasn’t doing very well. bourdieu (and yes, those of you playing fran lock bingo at home, feel free to mark your card here also), describes even hedged social mobility as ‘a very cruel unhappiness’. in 2004’s posthumously published sketch for a self-analysis the working-class thinker describes his own difficult transit through elite intellectual and cultural space as generating an ‘extreme sadness and anxiety’ that became the microclimate in which he lived and worked. more than this, and the particular words i would like to speak for me about my time at cambridge, and inside of academia in general: that he lived his life ‘in a kind of stubborn fury’ and that ‘frenetic work was also a way of filling an immense void and pulling myself out of despair’. i wasn’t sleeping much at cambridge. i was writing at an insane pitch. one tangible result of which was vulgar errors/ feral subjects (2023) the other was the still-to-be-published the department of queer complaint, forthcoming from the mighty poetry bus press next year. one less happy outcome was the random and incredibly disruptive episodes of thought blocking that seemed to govern my every utterance or idea. thought blocking is a neuropsychological symptom that expresses itself as a sudden and involuntary silence in the midst of articulate speech. abrupt changes of topic and incomprehensible outbursts are both common. as are rapid and repeating words, neologisms, uncontrollable riffs and runs of speech. its origin is anxiety. it is, primarily, a trauma response.

none of which is the important bit. the important bit is that in the virgule i had found an expressive mark that allowed me to dramatise and incorporate my random episodes of thought blocking in ways that creatively destabilised poetic method. the expanded slash – forcing a stick’s width between words – allowing for the possibility of wildly tangential and unpredictable growth. this was intended for an analogue of what my brain does – was doing. it’s a leap, a high hurdle, a pole-vault over linear logic. it stands for loose connection. for a sudden swerve of thought. so, you could say i chose the virgule because it is dynamic and directional. it is also debris. a literal “stick” a “sticking place”, clutter. it can signify a relation of conflict, at the very east productive tension. the hangnail on which thought/ the reading eye catches and snags, and a way of disavowing the easy, fluid articulation of the lyric line; its mellifluous “flow”. which is why i ended up making the “baffling” non-standard choice to begin each self-contained line with a virgule. it’s the stress-position from which every new thought or articulation must begin. the virgule propels thought forward with a furious momentum, but it also returns that thought back to the beginning. there’s no (conventional) follow-through in these poems. there are abrupt stops at the end of each line, and a series of lunging, lurching abortive beginnings. the virgule, then, because each thought could be otherwise, because every action, idea, articulation is an attempt and a failure.

i feel this way about my mind. i know that i am restlessly, relentlessly inventive. and mostly that’s a good thing. i’m prolific, i have a capacity to become fascinated, and (while frequently boring) i am rarely bored. i have learnt to assimilate ideas quickly. new thoughts, theories, images and sounds are forever bubbling up and spilling out of me. what i find harder is slowing down and sustaining any one through-line for any great length of time. growing up, i had neither the confidence nor the leisure/ contemplative space to develop and fully articulate an idea in all the ways that seemed possible for my middle-class peers. as a working-class “other”, i adapted quite early on to the idea that i needed to bang out what i wanted to say loudly and with propulsive energy before a) i was spoken over/ interrupted. or b) before my audience affected boredom and stopped listening. even now, anticipating this disconnect in my auditors, i find one of two (sometimes both) things happens to me, especially in academic settings: i’ll lose confidence in what i’m saying part way through, reach a sharp, unnatural stop or trail off entirely with a shrug. or i’ll find myself rapid-fire ranting and rambling, surging forward in a frenetic attempt to deliver myself of the desired articulation before i’m shouted down or told to shut up. because (as previously and often discussed) my inherited speech rhythms are already typically faster than educated, middle-class english, this has brought me into conflict with my would-be listeners on more than one occasion. this, in turn, exacerbates the anxiety i already feel and makes my performative and presentational oddities ever more pronounced. larks! more than this, though, the material conditions of my life have often made sustained, considered intellectual pursuits incredibly challenging. i did my ph.d. in three and half years. which, looking back, seems fucking insane. i didn’t want to do my ph.d. in three and half years. i didn’t get the best out of it, and the end result wasn’t/ isn’t something i can be uncomplicatedly proud of. but i had neither the money nor the time to feck about with it any longer than that, to gestate and emerge from the process gently acclimatised to elite academe, a mature intellectual with a fully developed practice. i’ve been told often enough that my “intellectual engagement” is partial, shallow or “surface level”. i have been called “half-smart” and “pseudo” and academically “weak”. i have also (true story) had my ideas picked up, sheered of context, and parroted back, without attribution or acknowledgement, by middle-class wonks (they know who they are). so, there’s that. which is to say – what, exactly? in relation to the virgule, that it is also a mark to mean my mind: thrusting and stalled inside systems of thought. generative, teeming – but endlessly unfinished, hopelessly broken.

that’s not cheerful. but it might be quite wise. put a pin in it. or not. ‘cause now i want to bring us around to the lo-o-o-ng poem, and what i see my virgule doing inside of it. and one of the things i think it’s doing is acting against a kind of epic trajectory; or against a middle-class, or a classical, or settled english idea of duration and continuity. what do i mean by that. um... so this sits with my previous remarks about/ against posterity, what it is (a form of posthumous luxury) and who gets to have it (the wealthy, duh). i’m thinking about how the epic organises events into a single grand continuity; a movement towards summation/ climax/ an ending. virgule is the drag and stutter inside of time, the halting (and that’s a word with special meaning to pikeys) progress, slowgress, nogress of an incomplete serial. i think i’m after a fragmented, bitty, episodic work of persistence. and yes, i’m thinking about generational poverty, and all of the slithering down snakes this entails. but i’m also thinking about recursion, haunting, revenant survivals, historic glitch and loop. because the virgule haunts too, of course, is a haunting. nearer the knuckle of that first and oldest mark-making tradition. as each ‘/’ returns the reader/speaker to the start, so the virgule itself is a kind of return. how the poor carry the past with them. always something there to remind you. your roots in the shit. the bad old days... but hey, that’s just me. i’m weird. i mean, the other facet of my fascination is the virgule’s resemblance to the staves of ogham, which in irish are known as flesca or sticks, so again, like the ghost of one mark making tradition haunts another. all of which is really different to two of my favourite long-poem poets, duplessis and anne waldman, about whom and others next time. for now, it’s christmas eve, and luna and i are going to bed.

it hasn’t been great these last few months, has it? i’ve been having a tricky time since august, and my struggle to “self regulate” and be a functioning human being has been compounded by a fierce difficulty with inter-personal communication, and the different ways in which friends, acquaintances, and peers are apt to misinterpret that difficulty. let’s not dwell. but i realised the other day that i am using substack as a kind of refuge. telling a largely disinterested world about thomas hoccleve, or bernard of clairvaux, or hen wives and witches, or adorno, or the myriad ways in which the protestant reformation can do one, is my method of creating a space for myself in which thought is still possible; of finding something bright and shiny to share in a world and in a life that feels like the worst kind of medical beige. it’s how i redirect my thoughts, like goscelin’s evocation of the tabernacle of moses in the liber confortatorius, remember?

‘if the power of your mind has not yet allowed you to enter the land of the living; if you sometimes forget the homeland that you are seeking and are depressed by your solitude, your imprisonment and your enclosure; build yourself a column of faith and a tent of hope, and as in a tabernacle painted in every colour rejoice in the law of the lord, practicing and meditating in it day and night, with the manifold decorations of the examples of the saints.’ (tras. monika c. otter)

yeah, like the biddy that i am, i have built myself a tent of hope here on the stack. that, and it’s how i signal back to whatever community i have that i’m still in here – somewhere – when one-on-one communication feels too overwhelming, when i don’t know how to talk to you without all of this rage and sadness spewing out of my pie-hole and into your face like green pzuzu puke; when my brain is a demented hedge-maze and i can’t find my way out and my biggest fear is that i’ll say or do the wrong thing and suck you down with me. then this is how i say “hi”. this is the part of me (the thinking, reading, researching part) that it’s still worth knowing and getting to know. amongst other things, it’s proof of life. so – thanks for sharing the space with me. for your patience and various registers of grace. i’m sorry i’m this right now, but here’s all love and solidarity. labouring towards the light. good night.