[REVIEW] People Skulk by Gordon Faylor

(GaussPDF, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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“No theoretical generalization is foolproof.” Marjorie Perloff

 

The broader San Francisco poetry scene has a long artistic history and has been called the “countercultural center of modern poetry,” associated with poets such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Allen Ginsberg. J. Gordon Faylor: an editor at San Francisco MOMA & Editor of GaussPDF, publisher of digital and innovative books, is author, among other works, of the highly-regarded, Registration Caspar [2016], a stunningly original novel/”long-form” poem, as well as, The Puppet Wedding, a 2017 pamphlet—both volumes composed experimentally using innovative grammar, semantics, form, and content, as well as, indeterminate semantics and non-sequiturs. A few words from The Puppet Wedding are employed in People Skulk [e.g., “puppet,” “half-pint”], a between-text repetition facilitating the perception of unity across the author’s oeuvre. Other devices employed to enhance wholeness in the new collection are the lack of a Table of Contents and serial pagination. Similarly, the phrase, “people skulk” is repeated in the title poem, and idiosyncratic punctuation is employed throughout the book to highlight structure, as well as, “referential” and “non-referential” elements.

Titles of volumes and poems may conceal rather than expose or stress meanings of compositions, particularly, if there appears to be no connection between them. The title of Faylor’s new collection is connected to its title poem’s first lines, “People skulk, / they really do; / match affinities, rain descent / arrogance volitive, dated / worthy blisters on Leonora’s / shells otherwise abandoned.” [36]. Experimental poems lend themselves to critical, including, textual, analysis [“close reading”], and the reader might ask, for example, is “Leonora,” Leonora Carrington, the British-Mexican Surrealist painter—possibly, referring to the author’s aesthetics or the lens through which he intends his collection to be viewed? Alternatively, “Leonora” may be an intimate reference or a symbolic name indicating, perhaps, that the text is to be read as a heteronormative one. This quote exhibits a common device of experimental poetry—the deployment of non-sequiturs and erasure to “splice,” conceal, obscure, or delete material that may or may not enhance meaning or facilitate interpretation.

For example, “skulk,” and other words, may have more than one, or archaic, meanings or may function as different parts of speech, and the reader must decide how the poet is using language that may be deployed in many different ways—e.g., intentional-unintentional, conscious-unconscious. “Skulk,” as a verb, may mean to hide or to malinger [Br.]—often with a sinister or cowardly motive; alternatively, used as a noun, “skulk” means, a group of foxes. Following Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept, “language games,” word usage is meaningful only insofar as the reader can determine what “rules” the writer has employed. The “game” for the reader is not to reconstruct what the author intended, but to use “close reading” to uncover “rules” or “associations” [n.b. “associative poetry”] derivable from the text. The title poem continues:

 

“I’m going to skulk myself

fudge fish chats with the NSA

these last days wagering

wipe-washing with my carrot

not behaving toward vocalizing

the glowed leftover, my standing here

unfollowed so to speak,

hoveling for present people

standing around here, dead guilty.”

 

—and, later in the title poem,

 

“You get to dress tape

understand animal

smarts not worthy

fuck and walk

undone go ahead hate me and my

pickled people love for putting up

with, at most, our kites’ reports.”

 

Cowardly or sinister motives are not addressed explicitly; however, the poem’s speaker refers to himself as skulking “with the NSA,” “not behaving,” “unfollowed,” “dead guilty,” and the like. Similarly, though foxes are not mentioned in the poem, the speaker mentions “fish” and “animal”— referentiality contrasted to and contradicting the non-referentiality of the composition when it is read as a whole and in parts. Furthermore, the components, “you…fuck and walk” and, “go ahead hate me,” direct the reader’s attention to an apparent relationship between the speaker-subject and recipient-object, while other  words and phrases may function parenthetically or as “fillers,” or they, also, may stand alone—referentially, or not. The subject’s “gaze” is, clearly, directed at the female, “you;” however, it seems throughout that the object’s gaze is not directed towards the subject or “voice,” who, we shall see, is Gordon, himself. Elements that stand alone, with or without apparent relationship to other parts of a poem, may be considered Functionally Independent components of a poem or, even, “fillers” or “stops,” devices common in experimental poetry [see “Collage” and “Erasure” below].

Joan Retallack made the following observation, “What I’ve found in my decades of teaching…is that the conviction that there is an entity called ‘poem’ with a discrete essence one should be able to discern and evaluate according to universal aesthetic principles continues to be widespread.” This point of view suggests, I think, that non-traditional, non-mainstream poetry—innovative, avant garde, experimental poetry—is not rule-governed. Retallack, and many others, however, would probably agree that different sub-genres of poetry may encompass different procedures and aesthetics. The brief discussion of Faylor’s title poem, for example, demonstrates writing that is formally non-linear, without surfical clarity or 1 : 1 mapping of parts of speech and meaning. Such characteristics violate and disrupt the  rules of classical art—what the 19^th century German art historian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, called, “true style”—incorporating, “noble simplicity,” patriotism, order, lack of emotion, symmetry, balance, emotional restraint, harmony, no distortion, and/or scientific precision, among other traits. Faylor’s compositions, instead, are fractured with respect to form and content, grammar and semantics. Like Winckelmann’s Greek Revival aesthetics, then, experimental poetry exhibits its own recognizable style that can be described no less clearly than “true style.” Consistent with this idea, Marjorie Perloff, speaking of collage, stated, “It does not follow that collage is essentially a “degraded” or “alienated” version of earlier (and presumably superior) genres.”

What additional information can we extract from People Skulk? Faylor makes clear that the “voice” of the collection is the author, himself—“Inside demand—inside demand, Gordon.” [14]; “stop apologizing, Gordon / people do it because they’re depressed / or unintentionally dreary,” [48]. As Rosalind Krauss has noted, speaking of Claude Cahun’s photography, the artist is “subject and object of representation,” a type of “mirroring” and “doubling” reinforced by the device that Faylor is, at once, speaking to himself and to an “Other”: “You’re a radiant individual and make me glad, / but if we’re done we’re done, I promise. / I’ll still send your / aerations a kiss and always tear up after.” [8]

In addition to identifiably “experimental” devices, Faylor’s new collection includes some traditional features—occasional soft rhyming, even, a few 14-line, sonnet forms [32], or near-sonnets, suggestive of the classical “love poem,” and the couplet on p 61 is  Shakespeare-like: “Answer me with both lolling now that I’m bare / let me bleed my share.”—a couplet expressing loss and, possibly, regret.  Apparently, as suggested above, People Skulk is, inherently, about lost love [“…secure until you finally see me off? / I’ll love you until I die, regardless.”, 5; “I’ll still send your / aerations a kiss and always tear up after.”, 8; “If and when you coddle her goneness”, [15]; “…in retrospect, bitterly.”, 27], and there are numerous references to sadness, regret, reflection, and loneliness. Also, conventional, if not, traditional, the volume includes quite a few words uncommon in US speech but more common in the British vernacular [“archegonia,” “aletheia,” “propaedeutic,” “psionic,” Latin phrases, etc.], a device that might be interpreted as pretentious or elitist, though archaic or uncommon words combined with inclusion of splicing, erasure, or non-sequiturs in a poem can be employed as a formulaic way of creating an innovative or experimental composition. Although, “death,” “necrophilia,” “dead,” “lifeless,” “malignancy,” “polyps,” and angry tones are elements of many of the poems in People Skulk, this is not a “dark” collection, in great part due to Faylor’s frequent word play, as well as, the indeterminacy [“undecidability,” “non-referentiality”] and fractured arrangement of the compositions. On the other hand, see 4-5, “They wanted the same minced baby / lowered into its cradle, sobbing.” The subject has his low moments—like all of us.

The device, “collage” [splicing], and its relation to experimental literature, whereby poets layer ideas or images, assembling various forms of speech to create a new whole, has been famously studied by the poetry critic, Marjorie Perloff*.   Collage subordinates and disrupts the voice and identity of the subject,  though each composition is likely to have dominant elements serving as moments of clarity or emphasis or, sometimes, normalcy. In the two-sonnet poem, “I Forget,” for example, “Gordon” states, “’You could’ve responded with so much more’ I tell myself….” [44]. Motifs such as the foregoing denote what dominates situations [see the poem, “Proof of Staff” (may become, “Proof of Stuff”?) on p 3], and strong units of speech may dominate through emphasis, making a point, or grabbing attention —similar to repetition. On the other hand, speaking of Dadaism and “anti-art,” Dietmar Elger has pointed out that the reader may not make “coherent sense” out of the works. Admittedly, fragmentary language [“text fragments”] often suppresses logic, and People Skulk includes several fragmentary, even, one-line, pieces [e.g., 40, 49, 58]. I am arguing, however, that collage poetry is not necessarily random, “stream of consciousness,” or “free association” though some content may be concealed in subconscious [dreams] or unconscious processes. Commenting on Kenneth Goldsmith’s idea that Conceptual Poetry is “unreadable,” Marjorie Perloff contended that each word constitutes a “choice” by the poet and is, thus, intentional. Thinking of a Bob Seger song, the poet must decide, “what to leave in, what to leave out.”

Collage poetry requires erasure and non-disclosure—of words, phrases, parts of speech. The Italian Futurist writer, F.T. Marinetti, for example, exclaimed that adverbs, adjectives, punctuation, conjugated verbs, and syntax, in general, should be abolished. Erasure might be employed to conceal or repress painful, embarrassing, socially unacceptable, prohibited, triggering, private, or otherwise unpleasant or proscribed material. Erasure, then, might hide [sic—“skulk”] meaning, though it would be a mistake to attempt to recover whatever thoughts or motivations Faylor [“Gordon”] may have had when composing his collection. Erasure might, also, function as a type of Wittgensteinian “language play” [“I take on the malignancy of the room / swept on by sterile water, / polyps of my itinerary.” [55], a complex line that might have been written by the German poet, Gottfried Benn. Examples of “word play” may be found in the rich poem, “Archegonia” on pp 26-27. Language and word play may entail the reader switching or adding words, such as in the lines, “I want to make you comfortable / I defied that one cracked night / and spun out apologizing.” [56]. What if we change the phrase, “one cracked night” to “one crazy night?” “Crazy” appears in several poems and, if inserted here, may facilitate associations and decipherability, substituting for “cracked.” Similarly, The reader might, also, elect to insert “of control” between “out” and “apologizing,” creating a more harmonious and normal phrase, “and spun out of control apologizing.” Both of these modifications may enhance the reader’s experience of, interpretation of, and/or accessibility to parts of the poem or of the whole composition. On the other hand, collage may, also, be effected for purely artistic purposes by the poet, and, according to Perloff, “…is, by definition, a visual or spatial concept.”, implying that collage poems are types of spliced visual art, in addition to spliced verbal compositions.

Because of the juxtaposition, intertextuality, and unconventional usages [e.g. using verbs as nouns or adjectives] of a variety of linguistic elements, collage and erasure may contribute to the experience of contradiction, ambiguity, ambivalence, tensions, oppositions, and conflicts, such as, those between male-female, imagination-reality, archaic-modern, native-foreign. Experimental poetry, then, is, in part, recognizable because of indeterminate meaning, yielding a “transrational” experience, according to the critic, Gerald Janecek. He goes on to suggest that, like many Russian Futurist compositions, poets strove to write independent of Nature—like Abstract Expressionists after them; elements were, often,  interchangeable, as they seem to be in many of the poems in People Skulk, and there seems to be no necessary logical or functional basis for the poems’ ordering in the text. Nonetheless, as pointed out by Perloff, some logical elements and relations may still be present, such as, negation, contradiction, similarity, equivalence, identity, and their negatives; as well, arrangement, association; assortment, repetition [e.g., 28, 36] are often used as “rhetorical devices” for clarity, memory, emphasis, or other functions, as in the following excerpt from the poem, “Safer’s Pet Rescue” [28],

 

“Gory repetition childish

your small dog isn’t. No you don’t bit by bite sled dog

the world war’s garage

my students’ crystals depicting ruby red

I want kids to band together

in uncooperative moments

cads ripping back-up plastic article “Stressed”

for the small dogs’ fiber, their backup system finally tested

yet no longer my own, which

I gave up depressed-guy style.”

 

What comes next [“indeterminacy”]? Logical conventions are not followed throughout [“transrational”]. “World war’s garage” does not occur in Nature—at least, not on surface. Words, phrases might be interchanged without loss of effect [e.g., “crystals” and “article”]. However, some logical and relational associations remain present, particularly, at the level of phraseology, if not complete sentences [e.g., “small dog,” “ruby red,” “backup system”], and repetition [“small dog”] is employed for emphasis, to enhance memory, to attract attention, or other effects.

Several critics have pointed out that Indeterminacy in literature is a device in which components of a text require the reader to make their own decisions about the text’s meaning. Often, the final lines of a poem leave the reader “hanging,” as in examples above. The text’s meaning, then, remains open to interpretation [“indeterminate”]. Some readers have decided that these features render the poems of John Cage, Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, for example, “incomprehensible;” however, I have attempted to show that close reading and critical analyses may result in intra- and inter-textual comprehension of some components of experimental poetry such as that found in Faylor’s new collection. In People Skulk, “Gordon” is never whole or self-actualized. Throughout the book, he is embedded in a “system” of contradictions, ambiguities, and oppositions: subjective-objective, plant-animal, personal-impersonal, part-whole, attachment-detachment, self-conscious-other-directed, instinctual-cerebral. Like the formalities of the text, “Gordon,” himself, remains indeterminate, fractured—“self” determined, primarily, by what the Other [“you”, the subject’s object] reflects back [Jacques Lacan’s, “mirroring”]. Non-specificity can be distracting and can seem like no more than distortion or obscurity or  illusion or tricks or games that the poet is imposing upon the reader; however, if we understand that “entering” and embracing an experimental collection, such as Faylor’s, People Skulk, relies upon methodology no less than traditional poetry, as outlined in this review, the reader’s efforts will be rewarded many times over.

 

*Chapter 2 in Perloff M (1986) The Futurist Moment. The University of Chicago Press.

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Clara B. Jones is a knowledge worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. In addition to other writings, she is author of, /feminine nature/ [GaussPDF, 2017].