Electrical Theories of Femininity
Poetry
by Sarah Mangold
Black
Radish Books, 2015
The first title of this collection - “I
meant to be transparent” - put a smile on my face. One thing Sarah
Mangold is not is transparent. I refer, of course, to the actual Sarah, the
flesh and blood Sarah, the Sarah who constructed these poems. The Sarah whose
devotion to the written word is so profound that she brings in an entire
community to share it with her as she herself remains behind the curtain. This
is among the most ego-less writing I’ve seen.
Mangold is a master of the collage form. Her poems
are pure constructions with virtually no subjectivity whatever at their center.
One senses her presence as a guiding principle, but it’s an invisible, not a
transparent vector of personhood. Mangold writes very much in the vein of a
contemporary Mallarmé. The work is based entirely on the life of words and
phrases resonating with one another, fragments in drifting, aleatoric collision
à la Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard (“A Throw of the
Dice will not Abolish Chance”). Mangold’s poems are non-linear mosaics, verbal
fragments pieced together in delicate convocation.
For
convocation is precisely what they are, different voices from the literary
world convened in a chorus of scissored calculus, exploring the sentence and
its parameters, occurrences, absorptions, shifts and changes and the space
between fragments, the pluridimensionality of different values in diverse
lighting. The lines do not call attention to themselves as linear
communications; rather, they refocus attention on the space the reader must
fill and cross in viewing the lines as volatile combinations, an associational
errancy in a state of becoming, aided by the reader’s ability to forge
intertextual relationships according to the author’s poetic manipulation of
space and elements of design.
Whereas
Mallarmé’s “Throw of the Dice” has an evident allegorical element overriding
its production in which the dispersed lines evoke the tumultuous waves of a
storm at sea, the layout reinforcing the rising and falling motion of the sea
waves and bobbing fragments, the loss of meaning threatened by the inherent
navigational problems, the spirit overriding Mangold’s poems is one of
femininity. Gaston Bachelard identified the spirit of reverie in poetry as
essentially feminine in that it is essentially non-utilitarian. Mangold’s
collages are pre-eminently non-utilitarian; her constellations invite multiple
meanings and forms, a recognition that poetry is ill-suited to carry conviction
beyond the sphere of the mutable. The Ondine comes to mind, elemental beings
associated with water, first named in the alchemical writings of Paracelsus,
and which are generally found in forest pools and waterfalls. Mercurial and
elusive, their beautiful singing voices are sometimes heard over the sound of
water.
There
are three sections in this collection and an appendix which carefully lists the
source texts for Mangold’s collage poems. “The Panic of the Multiple Narrative
World,” which appears as the first poem in the third section, evokes the
spirits of Whitman and Lincoln. Here is the poem in its entirety:
Whitman & Lincoln authorized all my
responsibilities. Two volumes of
trauma classroom
a custodian
of their hopes. Janitors all aims. Finding
these post
national backgrounds new bandages. The
archival
madness becomes apparent at this point.
biography bibliography
everything
that belonged to the lived space. All the
19th
century is deeply unrealized. There are certain
writers I
can’t think about.
Your eye otherwise
Sound is important.
Sound is successful.
What you do
is extend that space.
Add beats
within it.
Skirt the
work.
Meaningless is a form of meaning.
Beauty is
Unavoidable.
Salvation is totalizing but salvage is
Pulled and
put back into your heart.
There
are a lot of intriguing lines here. Which ones belong to Mangold and which have
been taken from another source I do not know. Collectively, they hold the
breath of a secret, a coition of words and things that propose a lush garden
where one is free from assertions and in which “meaninglessness is a form of
meaning.”
But
I’m intrigued: I want to know what she means by “All the 19th
century is deeply unrealized.” Is she referring to the western ideals of that
century, the beginnings of Marxism, the literary and political achievements of
figures such as Whitman and Lincoln mentioned at the outset, Mallarmé’s
metaphysical crisis, the basic unresolved and unresolvable paradox of the human
condition, which is to be perpetually hovering between absence and presence,
being and nothingness, life and death? Who are the writers the author can’t
think about? What is it to not be able to think about certain writers? I have
deep, unresolvable conflicts with writers such as Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound
and E.M. Cioran, chiefly because of their affiliations with the Nazi regime. It’s
not easy for me to reject them because their creative work is so powerful and
influential. I have to separate the art from the artist, the philosophy from
the philosopher. Is that what’s occurring here? Is it a crisis of conscience?
Oftentimes, just to have these questions provoked in me is its own
satisfaction, troubling as it is. What is of relevance is the way this poem has
been structured. By arranging lines in non-linear, paratactic settings, Mangold
alters their utilitarian function. The words cease to be reproductions which
imitate appearance and so reflect experience in that one-dimensional framework;
instead, the words become objects, things, essential matter; they don’t imitate
experience, they initiate experience.
I
particularly like her play on ‘salvation’ and ‘salvage.’ Salvation has strong
religious applications, and is generally accompanied by scripture and its
“totalizing” dogma. Salvage is pragmatic: that which is slated for demolition
is redeemed, repaired, reacquisitioned. There is no dogma, only an effort to
preserve, protect from destruction.
In
“The Machine Has Not Destroyed the Promise,” Mangold remarks “If motion caused
a disagreement of any kind we are regarding the same universe but have arranged
it different spaces. That is to be the understanding between us.” Flux is the
underlying principle of Mangold’s art. Collage serves her purposes because its
elements are reflective of time and space as simultaneities of phenomena
contingent upon observable events. Space is supple. No two events will be
experienced the same if they’re viewed from different locations.
In
his essay “Nature, Abstraction, Time,” Octavio Paz makes some points about
modernist art that are pertinent within this context. “Presence is not only
what we see: André Breton speaks of the ‘inner model,’ meaning that ghost that
haunts our nights, that secret presence that is proof of the otherness of the
world…Presence is the cipher of the world, the cipher of being. It is also the
scar, the trace of the temporal wound: it is the instant, instants. It is
meaning pointing to the object designated, an object desired and never quite
attained… Meaning lies elsewhere: always a few steps farther on.”
No comments:
Post a Comment