Bad Naturalisations
James Jiang on Cordite x Liminal
This essay is part of our 2022 collaboration with Cordite poetry review, edited by Bella Li, Cher Tan and Leah Jing McIntosh.
For this series, Liminal commissioned Asian Australian critics to respond to a work of their choice from Cordite’s Archives. As part of this collaboration, Cordite poetry review published 30 new poems by Asian Australian Poets. Read more here.
‘Criticism is committed … to helping us to understand poems as significant utterances. But it must ensure that in its desire to produce ultimate meaning it does not purchase intelligibility at the cost of blindness: blindness to the complexity of those non-meaningful features which differentiate poetry from everyday language and make it something other than an external thematic statement about an already-known world.’
—Veronica Forrest-Thomson
I take my title and epigraph from Veronica Forrest-Thomson’s separatist manifesto, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry. First published posthumously in 1978, Poetic Artifice is more than what its unassumingly vague subtitle suggests. In addition to being a ‘theory of twentieth-century poetry’, it is also: an ABC of reading, an extended argument with the critic William Empson, a critical genealogy of technical innovations from John Donne to Dada, and a fanatically clear-sighted insistence that poems use language other than to exchange facts and observations about the world outside themselves. The ‘Artifice’ in Forrest-Thomson’s title is the name for the total process by which a poem marks language—adding emphasis through typography and lineation, rhyme, metrico-rhythmic patterning, etc.—so as to hijack its ordinary communicative usages and arrive at a meaning that is as much about itself as it is about the world at large, a meaning that subsumes thematic content under a larger concern about the efficacy of its own meaning-making structures.
Forrest-Thomson was by no means the first person to make such a claim. Much in the way that Artifice works through a play of poetry’s continuity and discontinuity with other language games, her theory is less a radical break than a pivotal node in an experimental tradition running from Russian formalism to American L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, a tradition which we might define as broadly ‘anti-realist’. While this is not a tradition to which Australian poetry has historically been indifferent, Forrest-Thomson’s critical and creative work, curtailed by her early death at the age of 27, remains largely unread outside of relatively small coteries in North America and England.
So why bring Veronica Forrest-Thomson into a discussion of Asian Australian poetry? There are a couple of circumstantial coincidences: she was born in British Malaya (her father was a rubber planter) and found an able and sympathetic expositor in the Australian poet Martin Harrison, who gave a 1979 ABC Radio talk on Poetic Artifice. But the main reason has to do with the critical austerity that is her counsel, the vehemence of her objection to what she calls ‘bad naturalisation’—a way of reading that by-passes or liquidates ‘the complexity of those non-meaningful features which differentiate poetry from everyday language and make it something other than an external thematic statement about an already-known world’. It is an arresting and somewhat aggravating provocation: that in our ‘unseemly rush from words to world’ (as she puts it), we overlook much—if not all—that makes a poem, well, a poem.
While the categories of identity that are part of our critical orthodoxy do not feature in Forrest-Thomson’s study (all her case studies are white and only two—Edith Sitwell and Sylvia Plath—are women), I find her notion of the ‘bad naturalisation’ particularly suggestive. For ‘naturalisation’ also happens to denote the legal process by which a non-native resident of a country becomes a citizen; and Poetic Artifice’s main argument, we could say, pertains to poetry’s equivocal citizenship in the many worlds of discourse it constantly traverses. Rootlessly cosmopolitan—as fluent in the parlance of the office as in the language of the bedroom, in the theorems of science as in the paradoxes of theology—poetry is a perennial migrant in the republic of letters.
In what follows—a close-reading of three of the thirty poems sedulously edited by Bella Li—I wish to elaborate upon this hint that our negotiation of poetry’s generic difference may set a kind of precedent for our encounters with difference in other orders of meaning and being. I’ve chosen work by three younger poets representing what I take to be a generational congeniality towards Artifice and a shared instinctive appetite for the effects of aesthetic distancing. In their Artificing, one notices a sense of belatedness, a removal from—and perhaps a certain skepticism about—more securely transparent forms of personal testimony with their attendant authenticating affects.
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The interplay between the two senses of ‘naturalisation’ – as the domestication of meaning on the one hand and the legitimation of community membership on the other – appears to offer a way into a poem such as Vidya Rajan’s ‘Untitled Wild Geese Game’, a mashup of Mary Oliver’s much anthologised poem ‘Wild Geese’ and the indie video game Untitled Goose Game. A ‘bad naturalisation’ of it may read something like this:
‘Untitled Wild Geese Game’ is a migration poem askew—one that displaces the pathos of the diasporic crossing of geographical latitudes (a residue of which persists in the conventionalised image of the goose) with a wry awareness of the behavioural latitude (or the lack thereof) permitted under model minority citizenship (‘very few / of the people I know enjoy / the grace of mistakes’). The ambivalence of the poem’s attitude is captured perfectly in its subtitle: ‘[sorry Mary Oliver] [sorry House House]’, where the ‘sorry’ transfuses an unrepentant insouciance (‘sorry I’m not sorry!’) into a pro forma display of filial piety (an acknowledgement of sources being a kind of ancestor worship, textually speaking). This way of being bad at being good is, of course, the inverse of the objective in Untitled Goose Game, where, as the eponymous goose charged with wreaking havoc on an English village, one ‘gets good’ (in gamers’ parlance) at being bad.
This reading, while capturing some of the poem’s ironic inflections, proceeds from certain assumptions about who the ‘I’, ‘we’, and ‘the people’ in the poem are—that is, from fixing the identity (with some help from the geographical coordinates provided in the poem itself) of what linguists call shifters, those grammatical constituents (pronouns or adverbs such as ‘now’, ‘then’) whose meanings shift according to the context of utterance. What about this poem do we recoup if we forego these assumptions? What part of our vision is restored if we lose this crux of intelligibility?
We might be able, for instance, to think about the poem’s concern with the relationship between permissiveness and kinship—as well as its comic improvisations upon its source material—through the conventions of pastoral. When we substitute a generic ‘I’ for an empirical one, we see that the speaker’s unforced eloquence, ranging from the slight wistfulness of ‘very few / of the people I know enjoy / the grace of mistakes’ to the rancour of ‘this or that / shithole country of origin stress’, is reminiscent of that of a figure such as Meliboeus, one of Vergil’s herdsmen in Eclogues I, whose fortunes are similarly hostage to the arbitrary determinations of the imperial centre. That very sense of arbitrariness is also conveyed by the anecdotal informality of the lines in ‘Untitled Wild Geese Game’ that most explicitly engage with the history of empire:
why’d the brits leave
so much scrap metal – was it our own fault – we should
have cleaned it upwell, when we were young we didn’t have
all this, and the rice, the grains, if you trace them back,
were of poor quality, the best exported elsewhere,
for the empire?
and now all these illnesses, I guess I guess
Tonally and typographically, these lines are bracketed, passed off as a kind of small talk (which in pastoral is always thinly-veiled big talk). If there is a ray of migrant pathos here, it passes through the diffractive medium of pastoral melancholia—it is not just a family story being presented here, but a story about ‘the history and family of things’.
In examining ‘Untitled Wild Geese Game’ under the aspect of pastoral conventions, we might also be alerted to the way in which human-animal relations are mediated through this poem’s cacophonous soundscape. More than any of its discursive statements, it is the poem’s sonic exuberance that performs the most wholesale critique of Oliver’s catholicity about ‘the family of things’ (the concluding phrase in ‘Wild Geese’), a disclosure Oliver arrives at through a stateliness of repetition and address over which Rajan rides roughshod. Bits of verbal spare change—‘like’, ‘cute’, ‘ew’, ‘um’—are placed at line-endings to emphasise the porousness of the boundary between the semantic and non-semantic. It is a poem highly attuned to its own trafficking in noise. We can detect, for instance, a sort of counterpoint between the lexical and phonological repertoire centred around -es words (‘geese’, ‘knees’, ‘less’, ‘stress’)—all of which thematise psychic and corporeal vulnerability—and the cluster of -on words (‘honk’, ‘dominion’, ‘imagination’, ‘lonely’, ‘moon’)—words which mark moments of self-possession. The decisive change is rung at the conclusion, where an adaptation of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ (‘Honk me to the moon! / Let me honk among the stars! / Let me see what honk is like on / Jupiter and Mars!’) the poem to a new key—of wilfulness, if not freedom.
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I have tried to demonstrate that we need to attend to the Artifice of a poem like ‘Untitled Wild Geese Game’ if we are to keep its gamesmanship with the conventions of pastoral and with minute verbal instrumentation in play. While the poem does not put overt impediments in the path towards a ‘bad naturalisation’, much of its rhetorical verve and thematic resonance is lost if we do usher its words prematurely into the world. But I want to turn my attention now to a poem where a more apparent resistance to naturalisation has been incorporated into its structure.
Take, for example, grace ugamay dulawan’s ‘FAQ’:
Question: Please explain how to separate a body from a nation.
Answer: First, spread the body-nation out on a clean, flat surface such as a kitchen counter or an ironing board. Next, take a large blank piece of paper and lay it flat over so that it covers it entirely. [...]
We are presented with something like a closed loop that we need to prise open in order to understand what it is ‘about’. An initial guess we might hazard is that such a poem’s subject is, say, the pain of exile. But such a reading, while instinctively plausible, has very little to go on besides the infinitive phrase in the question: ‘to separate a body from a nation’. Is the ‘body’ an individual body or a body of people? Why or under what circumstances is this ‘body’ being ‘separated’? We might see a kind of clue in the distinction between the relatively gentle water-transfer laid out rather assiduously for most of the poem and the briefly mentioned ‘alternative methods [which] include cutting, boiling or even vigorous shaking until the elements rise or fall into distinct layers’. The metaphorical potential of these other methods may seem to provide a way out from the poem to the geopolitical: ‘cutting’ may make one think of the partition or ‘vigorous shaking’ the historical forms of apartheid. But in making these leaps, we are no longer reading the poem per se, but substituting for it our own allegory.
To put it another way, this poem very effectively blocks its own ‘naturalisation’—every attempt to say what it is ‘about’ has to face up to an ingrained tendency to overlook the poem’s most salient (and seemingly banal) aspect: its deadpan enumeration of a procedure that appears to pay homage to the tactile delicacies of domestic ritual (‘then, with damp hands, sprinkling water as you go’) and the mechanical routines of an instruction manual (‘if it is not imprinted go back and repeat the process’).
The curious thing about ‘FAQ’ is that its meaning (if we are not to substitute for it something of our own impressionistic devising) turns not on an individual word or phrase, but rather on ‘the circuit of communication’ (as Jonathan Culler has put it). There is no explicit ‘I’ in this poem, but there is a ‘you’—a ‘you’ made difficult to place by virtue of the uncertain distance at which this subject position is being held from (and by) the scripted voice, which is at times engaged in intimate instruction, but for the most part offers direction in an officious imperative. The predominance of the imperative mood is perhaps the most obvious way in which the didactic stylisation of ‘FAQ’ is connected to more conventional lyric utterance (cf. T.S. Eliot’s ‘Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair’), where the power of direct address (however fanciful) institutes a kind of fantasy in which it is the poet’s unique privilege to command forces ordinarily unresponsive to human petition (the most canonical example of which is, perhaps, Percy Shelley’s ‘Be thou me!’ to the West Wind).
Without going too far, there is an element of fantasy at work in ‘FAQ’ with its Carollian shifts in scale (‘For a small island nation A4 or A5 will do’) and its reconstitution of a putatively public process as household event—as well as in the impassivity of its mode of instruction. Perhaps there is a sense in which the recipe with which we are being furnished is a kind of spell, or a potent fable gussied up in the language of bureaucratic rationality.
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If there is a key to a self-enclosed poem such as ‘FAQ’, it is in the way it displaces the question of its content on to the question of its form. Indeed, the poem’s final line (‘These methods ... are not recommend if wanting to retain the wholeness of either part’) also contains a moral for poetry criticism too keen on the detachability of content from form. The word ‘content’ itself has undergone some telltale changes recently. In an age of data, content is no longer dialectically opposed to form—it is totally indifferent to it. Terms like ‘content creator’ or the substantive uses of ‘creative’ point to an atmospheric absence of medium specificity that is, arguably, one of the hallmarks of a neoliberal ethos of fungibility without end.
What are we to make, then, of the second term in the title of Eric Jiang’s poem, ‘Diasporic Content’? Is ‘content’ being used to signpost a thematic synthesis or is it being offered here in a spirit of mock-consumer advice (‘the following poem has been classified D and contains migrant themes and diasporic content’)? Whatever ‘content’ there is has been attenuated by a seemingly haphazard program of dispersal (returning us to the etymological roots of diaspora, Greek for ‘scattering’) across word, image, and the audio-visual.
Yet this feeling of the haphazard comes off as an achieved effect, as forecast in the first section: ‘It’s a conflict between what’s practical, valuable and sentimental.’ This is a poem invested in the volatile affects of seriality, in the pathos and bathos of lists as equipment for living and as chronicles of need and desire. At the level of its own form, there is an engagement with the listicle—that epitome of ‘snackable content’ in its minimisation of formal complexity for the sake of streamlining consumption. The very ‘burning house’ trope with which the poem begins initiates the reader into a kind of listicalisation of everyday life under the pressure of emergencies, real and imagined. Here, perhaps, forced migration meets lifestyle questionnaire.
But this is to get ahead of ourselves. The verbal scaffolding of the poem appears as follows:
[Diasporic Content]
As burning house: [...]
As mourning: [...]
As dusk: [...]
As malfunctioning microwave: [...]
As goodbye: [...]
As father’s words you’ll always remember: [...]
As broken clock: [...]
As pedagogy: [...]
As the sun and the moon: [...]
As seance: [...]
As plans: [...]
As online search to confirm name: [...]
As the physics of waves: [...]
As grandma’s conversational skills: [...]
As memory: [...]
As Google-translated title: [...]
As intention: [...]
As response to fast-approaching deadline: [...]
As grandma’s conversational skills five minutes later: [...]
As what happened to the blueprint: [...]
As family memoir postponement: [...]
As what might come after: [...]
As three further questions: [...]
As how I felt about it before: [...]
As zoom call: [...]
As paternal love: [...]
As transition from container to possibility: [...]
As unfathomable loss: [...]
As response to whoever left the door
ajar: [...]
The poem-as-listicle affords very little to hold onto, the intimations of narrative continuity in, say, the passages about the hapless character ‘David’ or the repeated encounter with grandma, refuse to set, appearing only to disappear into its minimal (or, rather, maximally paratactic) syntax. The most identifiable verbal structural feature is the ‘as’, but what kind of ‘as’ is this? It seems to be the ‘as’ of a construction like ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’, one which yokes together a necessary essence with a contingent appearance. That is to say, the ‘as’ is a fulcrum in a grammar of (self-) realisation about which the poet remains noticeably undecided: is each exemplary moment (each ‘as’-episode) a ‘container’ or some horizon of ‘possibility’, a closed room or a door left ajar?
As Forrest-Thomson shows in Poetic Artifice, poems so syntactically underdetermined are ripe for ‘bad naturalisations’ sanctioned by what the critic Yvor Winters called ‘the fallacy of imitative form’. A poem with the disjointed imagery of, say, The Waste Land is ‘about’ the disjointedness of the modern world. Similarly, a poem like ‘Diasporic Content’ which flits from ‘15 rules you must follow when saying goodbye at a party’ to a Youtube clip of the lyrics to Teresa Teng’s Tian Mi Mi to a screenshot of a Messenger conversation would seem to be ‘about’ millennial ennui and a generation driven to distraction by the ‘content’ economy. What else remains for us to say?
The poem opens up a little more, perhaps, if we shift our attention from the syntactical to the rhythmic elements established spatially and typographically. The prosaic and tragi-comic travails of David are presented uniformly in Georgia, size 12, while the lyric (or aphoristic) outbursts are confined, almost sotto voce, to Times New Roman, size 11. Indeed, the father’s commandment to ‘“Be the master of the events”’ is severely undermined not just by the following section, featuring the screenshot of the image search results for ‘even a broken clock is right twice a day’, but also and a fortiori the generalised sense of being overrun by the passage of time in such moments as: the clip from Before Midnight, the poem beginning ‘to be swimming in tomorrow’s pool’, the ‘fast-approaching deadline’, and the blank following ‘as what might come after’. A resistance to temporal progression (perhaps even chronophobia) characterises its inconclusive conclusion: ‘See above’. In the endless cycle of mediation and remediation (‘Later, he is unsure if it was a memory of the event or a memory of seeing a family video of the event’), there is no vantage point from which to synthesize the poem’s litany of minor catastrophes—malfunctioning microwaves, a laptop lost to soup, blueprints lost to the rain, a visit to ED, ‘Video unavailable’. If the poem can be said to dramatize anything, it is less the synaptic slurry of the millenial psyche experiencing diasporic dysphoria than the ever-widening gap between ‘content’ and meaning.
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This essay makes a kind of critical wager: that remaining in a state of ‘negative capability’ regarding real-world referentiality may reinvigorate our awarenesss of poems as chameleonic linguistic artefacts. It is a wager upon which Veronia Forrest-Thomson staked her critical project. I settled on the three poems above, because they seemed best suited to both illustrating and amplifying a theory of reading poetry that, while initially depriving the reader of so much, ultimately rewards them by ‘reinitiating them into the rites of mediation’ (that is, Artifice). They also happen to be poems I very much admire. Rajan’s ‘Untitled Wild Geese Game’ showed the power of generic convention to absorb and synthesize disprate allusions and registers of cultural experience. Despite the thematic reticence and self-enclosure of a poem like Dulawan’s ‘FAQ’, the circuit of communication (or I-you relation) remains a potent poetic device. In Eric Jiang’s ‘Diasporic content’, paralinguistic conventions are marshalled in order to both highlight and critique its formal organisation. Had I but world enough and time, I would also have liked to examine, among others, the Mayakovskian brio of Janet Jiahui Wu’s mode of address in ‘Ciao, Bella!’, the hortatory rhetoric in Wen-Juenn Lee’s ‘let it be known’, the polyglot musicality of Lou Garcia-Dolnik’s ‘susmariosep!’, and the typographic mediations in works by Christy Tan, Ren Jiang, and Joanne Zou. But, alas.
The encounter between Forrest-Thomson’s theory of poetic Artifice and these three poems has been a meeting, one might say, of mutual recalcitrances: the recalcitrance of a theory demanding that one read poetry not in the way we might read anything else; the recalcitrance of poems which give us less than we might have hoped for in terms of concrete biographical or historical texture (that is, more fulsomely delineated ‘diasporic content’). To some, this meeting will no doubt have been a dour affair, one in which the critic’s job is to slap the reader’s hand each time they try to reach into the cookie-jar marked ‘meaning’ (‘BAD! BAD NATURALISATION!’) But in a literary culture that continues to be dominated by the higher and lesser arts of self-disclosure (especially for those earmarked as ‘culturally and linguistically diverse’), these poems’ willingness to indulge in Artifice, even to the point of self-occlusion, can only be salutary. In such a context, where minoritarian writers are beset on one side by blind praise and on the other by opportunistic cavilling, this may be their only recourse if they are to secure for themselves the critical care and attention they deserve.
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James Jiang is an editor, writer and recovering academic based in Meanjin/Brisbane. His writing has appeared in Australian Book Review, Cordite, LIMINAL Review of Books, Modernism/modernity, Ploughshares and Sydney Review of Books among other venues. He is currently Assistant Editor at Griffith Review and Literary Essays Editor at Cordite.