Ken Babstock read last
Tuesday evening at Book Warehouse on Main St., for the Vancouver launch of his
latest collection On Malice, which
appeared a little earlier this fall from Coach House Books. The
book gathers three extended pieces and a skewed sonnet sequence: “Perfect Blue
Distant Objects,” “Deep Packet Din,” “Five Eyes,” and “SIGINT.” The emphasis
falls variously in each agglomerated text on distraction and noise, on riddled
and riddling semantic textures, on versions and variorums. A little like Tom Raworth, Babstock inclines
his ear closely to the saturated, thickened flows of mediatized language — “the
streaming of form from the machine” as the closing line of “Deep Packet Din”
puts it — catching at and contingently arresting on each page those overlapping
currents, those soupy waves of vestigial sense. Each poem presents itself as a
species of media drill core, a striated section of repurposed data-packets,
reconstituting voice as shifty aggregates of sedimentary, lexical samples.
Reading these lines, I rarely know quite who or where or how I am meant to be,
or to be positioned: “The excess space junk making / prayer beads of morning’s
screaming / party.” Speech cannot settle into consistency, and the speaking
subject asserts itself as verbal ragpicker, as audio splicer. “May we become /
noises,” somebody eventually does pray in “Perfect Blue Distant Objects.” Just
so.
Over the past year and a half I have
heard Ken Babstock read three times: at Tuesday’s launch, in late October at
the Vancouver International Writers Festival (as one of eight featured in the
Poetry Bash), and last spring at the Play Chthonics series at the University of
British Columbia, which I was coordinating. At each reading he concentrated on
presenting slices from “SIGINT,” the opening sequence from On Malice. Given the complexities of this poetry and my own limited
space here, I’m going to concentrate on making an initial foray into reading
“SIGINT,” rather than attempting to come to terms with the book as a
whole. Even as networked arrays, each of
the extended poems of On Malice is constructed
and derived from a principal source, an originary pool from which its draws much
of its noise; “Perfect Blue Distant Objects” refigures an essay on optics by
William Hazlitt, while “Five Eyes” “mines vocabulary” (as Babstock puts it in
his own notes, without which — or at least without a thorough Google search — I
would have a pretty hard time figuring this out) from John Donne’s tract on
suicide, “Biathanatos.” “SIGINT” is a set of thirty-nine hybridized sonnets, which
seem to gather voices at an abandoned surveillance station atop the artificial
Teufelsberg in Berlin, but are also built from translations of Walter Benjamin’s manuscript notes about his son Stefan’s language acquisition –
records of a preschooler’s various word-games, puns and whimsical infelicities.
The choice of the sonnet form may have a little to do with Benjamin’s own posthumously
published Sonette, a Jugendstil-ish sequence he began composing
after the war-protest suicide of his friend, the poet Fritz Heinle, in 1914
— a segment of literary history that may also link to the Donne piece. Despite any
gestures at late modern formalism (Benjamin’s sequence, for example, uses
Shakespearean and Rilkean sonnets as formal models), Babstock’s poems tend to
be fractured both metrically and structurally, hacking their generic/genetic
source-codes. Each poem consists of four tercets, substituting a hypermetrical
thirteenth line for a couplet, an imaginary “incident report” of collisions
between birds and aircraft, animal and machine, in Soviet airspace between
Siberian and Berlin. Place names invoked in these seemingly arbitrary last
lines are also ordered, approximately, alphabetically, another gesture at factors
of thirteen: twenty-six letters divided by two. The sequence itself is broken symmetrically
into three parts of thirteen poems. Thirteen, not quite fourteen: these are
sonnets gone to pieces. But rather than collapse, the form also suggests
reconstitution — not teleology or closure, but asymptote, approach. These are
sonnets in the process of self-acquisition, self-fashioning, assemblage.
 |
| Teufelsberg, from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teufelsberg |
The Teufelsberg station, haunted by
Cold War spectres, figures in the poems as a listening post that attends to
human aftermath. The poet, in Babstock’s sequence, takes on a role derived from
Benjamin’s reading of Charles Baudelaire, a cultural ragpicker: “’Everything
that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has
scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He
collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste.’ . . . Ragpicker
and poet: both are concerned with refuse.” Babstock’s poems collate by
listening to mediated human noise, attending to the “rattle again of splintered
waste” that aerials, ears and dishes manage to pick up. The poems both
catalogue shards and orts of discourse and aspire to regenerate meaning
tentatively from semantic refuse: “It is, I’m afraid, a symbol, dear rubble.” Writing
wants to devolve, fearfully, into replicant transcription, copy-editing: “I can
only read out / what we get back.” What those fractured symbols might impart to
us remains in abeyance, the mechanics of representation still fraught and
insufficient. “What gets learned,” our frustrated
ragpicker asks, “from all this
listening?” “One can listen all night,”
we’re told, without imaginative gain. Yet traces remain, nonetheless amid what
feels like aleatory jumble, of a “devotional commerce,” a vestigial lyric
religiosity, a texture of sense; or, what the poems at one point name “a
surplus of negative affect” onto which the voice opens, as a prayer to language
itself, a call to recover from informatics welter — by what the poems call
merely thinking, by cognitive and creative effort — whatever might be left to
us of singing: “in the post-informational gloaming” we “can never not finish
reading it as song.” Melopoeia prods readers, as listeners, into affective
involvement: “I have just thrown / the feeling into your mouth. Now you tell
it.” What Babstock offers as poetic throwing — and even as throwing up, an
abjected language that also frames itself as “desiccated scat” and refuse
—hangs in the hiatus, as the small lurch of the line break here suggests,
between repression and disclosure, like the uneasy stall of a double negative
(“never not finish”). “There will be no clarification,” our collator notes, so
we need, even at this late moment, to”[t]hink of a good reason not to quit
listening,” so that we might somehow
move past reiterative stasis. ”I am practicing dead songs,” the poet aggregator
declares, but, amid “constant surveillance,” swallowed in “the knowledge
industry,” the first person singular, the speaking subject, still inclines to
sing: “I’m repurposing myself.” The call to listening shifts reading away from
semiotic anxiety (“I’m afraid”) toward an aesthetics of mouth texture, of
shared speech and permeable selves, a remaindered eros: “Because you involved
me.” The hiatuses, the fractures and absences onto which these poems open, are
also — as linguistic surplus, as negative tropes — spaces of desire, of human
longing:
Because I am sleeping in
love’s room
now, the moment will have
received a promise to wait.
At such moments
Babstock’s sonnets become sonnets, although the trimmed tenth syllable of the pentameter
in the first of these lines, “now,” thrown forward into the next line, also
marks a disjunctive temporality, an abeyance: passionate stall.
Listening to Ken Babstock read these
poems out loud — briefly, quietly, even undemonstratively — gestures, despite
their apparent recalcitrance as texts that might be decoded, clarified or
understood, at reciprocity, at shared affect:
Perhaps you truly don’t own it
but it’s
in your mouth now so take it
for a walk.
(Again, a pair of skewed
pentameters, sonnet shards.) At the Book Warehouse reading, like a poetry nerd,
I found myself taking notes, transcribing stray lines, a little like the
ragpicker of these texts. It turns out, perhaps, that I was inadvertently
answering that call, getting involved, pulling a few good possibles from what I
thought I heard, taking his words for another brief walk. Just so.
