Preface
I do not understand Norma Cole's poetry. This bold
and ostensibly self-defeating statement may suggest that I should not attempt
the impossible
and p r o c e d e to write my thesis
on a poet whose work I admit that I do not and perhaps cannot under
stand. However, it is
this impossibility
that I intend to examine. That is, the poetic space which intentionally displays itself as
unreadable.
I would like to explore what this unreadability
implies
for the reader
and under what conditions does a poetry like Cole's lend itself to defy the perhaps naive or
canonical standards of
readability.
This poetic inaccessibility underscores the process through which meaning is conveyed: in
other words, the process of reading.
After all, what does it mean to read and to be read?
The act of reading is a heavily connotative act for it implies that a reader u n d e r s t a n d s
under what genre or category to place what is before him or her. If I call Cole's work p-o-e-t-
r-y then I will read it accordingly, which is perhaps why her visual construction of words
and her use of language itself seem to be
unreadable.
The condition of mis reading
is what is most compelling about experimental or avant garde art and writings. The mis
comprehension of a text, if addressed, leads one to think about what it means to read, to see,
to acquire meaning. Ultimately, mis
comprehension leads one to reassess how a text is being constructed; it brings one to a
Brechtian distanciation from the text where one can then
rethink how meaning is being performed by language
and how, subsequently,
the reading subject is also being performed by language. Space is something that I do not see as a neutral abstraction that is
"a-logical" and "without explanation," as one critic writes of Mallarmé. Space
could not be more political: it is the primary field upon which all order is imposed
and subsequently conceived. false topography reflecting different intentions and starving both sides of the page at the same time Norma Cole Paper House
Space is what dictates relationships and associations in every circumstance: it is the visual plane that structures meaning. Space is only a universal phenomenon insofar as it is greatly relevant for every artwork, genre, city, country, and increasingly, for the global community. Space defines how a subject maps his or herself in relation to the outside world and subse quently how that subject understands his or her inside world. Space constructs the inside/outside dynamic that is neither culturally un iversal nor absolute. To misread a text such as one of Cole's is to become de-centered, de-stabilized, to experience a sort of violence because of it utilization
of space. To misread is also to become dislocated in space. My thesis will explore through Cole's
poetry and other primary sources the translation of space(s). Using Henri Lefevbre's The Production
of Space and Teresa de Lauretis's Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, and Cinema,
among other texts, I will stage the conflict between the homogenous representational space of ideology
(Lefevbre) and the heterogenous spaces that are unaccounted for by ideology (de Lauretis)
and how this conflict is manifest in Cole's poetry. It is this moment of conflict
that is pertinent to the phenomenon of misreading. What misreading implies is that a reading
subject is experiencing a mis-identification with what is being read, either
because s-he as a reading subject is not written into the text or because the text purposely
writes its own misreading. In this sense, the position of mis-identification can be one of empowerment,
especially where ideology is concerned. Mis-identification reveals the presence of
a dialogic, an active almost aggressive interaction between a reader and a text, in which the
result, as Judith Butler writes in "Sex/Gender/Desire," "may entail acceptance of divergence,
breakage, splinter, and fragmentation"(14-5). In The Production of Space, Henri
Lefevbre shows how space is a production of ideology, how the very basic and often times unacknowledged factor
of space, that in which we live (absolute space) and that in which we think (abstract space),
is a pervasive and powerful structuring force. However, he also points out that space
is not homogenous, meaning, we do not all live and experience our spaces in the same
way, but that space is
represented as homogenous. Similarly, in Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics,
and
Cinema, Teresa de Lauretis argues that "semantic fields" or "non-linear
semantic spaces" are not constructed by a one system language but "by the multilevel
interactions of many heterogeneous sign-vehicles and cultural units"(35). This is to say
that language and space are neither universal nor linear, although they both are represented
as such by ideology. The crucial factor that is often unacknowledged by ideology is that
identity, unlike its representations of homogeneous space, is not a stable or conclusive
unit. On the contrary, identity is replete with often times contradictory elements that
can neither be totally fulfilled nor completely accounted for. In other words, the moment
of conflict that I have described as instigating a subject's mis-identification also includes
the conflict between his/her social and personal histories. It is in this sense that I would like to examine how space, both
the spaces within and outside of the text, function in Cole's poetry. I will
explore the cinematic,
the poetic...[and finish with a discussion of the ever more pertinent topic
of cyberspace--not
included here. Editor's note] "writing burnt my tongue" - Norma Cole Paper House )Parenthetical remarks( When I began my research on Norma Cole,
I found myself searching for a space in which I could locate her poetry. Eventually, I found that I could locate it in many spaces. Although not all of them "literary," I have found it crucial to branch out into other disciplines such as architecture and film in order to effectively create the foundation for an analysis of Cole's poetry. As a Comparative Literature thesis, this work seeks to explore the relationships that exist between disciplines and by doing so argue that the finite distinction between them is no longer relevant. (I do not mean to imply that the disciplines are
irrelevant, but that the boundaries separating them are). Architectural
theory may be just as appropriate for a discussion of poetry as one of poetry may be for architecture. In the introduction of his book, Architecture and Disjunction, Bernard
Tschumi argues that his use of theory from disciplines such as film and literature in his discussions about architecture
is necessitated by the fact that any cause-and-effect relationship between form, use function, and socio-economic structure has become both impossible and obsolete (4). This phenomenon can be said to be the result of a postmodern culture that perhaps is best characterized as a culture of representation in which "authenticity" has been supplanted by the simulacrum. Despite the array of definitions, (or non-definitions),
that surround Postmodernism, it, as a theory of culture that includes
theories of the media, cyberspace or otherwise, foregrounds the importance of the visual for late twentieth century Western European
culture. What the numerous arguments surrounding Postmodernisms show is how much this period is concerned with crisis, whether it be the crisis of the subject, the crisis of meaning, the crisis of captialism, of authority, etc. In the late
twentieth century, nothing seems to be real, everything is a simulation of difference, an image of an image. According to Lefevbre, the visual is
that which represents: "in space, things, acts, situations are forever being replaced by representations. The Ego no longer relates to its own nature but only to things bound to their own signs and indeed ousted and supplanted by them" (311). The visual, the fragmentation or dissolution of boundaries between various genres and the crisis of the subject are all very pertinent to not only Cole's poetry, but to my discussion of it. Writing about writing, about poetry, is as much about the poetry as it is about the writing itself. The goal
of my thesis is not only to analyse and interpret Cole's poetry,
but also to explore what it means for me to write about it. In Woman Native Other, Trinh Min-ha states that "to write is
to become. Not to become a writer (or a poet), but to become, intransitively"(19). The idea that writing is intransiate, is constantly in the process of becoming, is something that is integral to Cole's poetry and to my understanding of it. To conceive
of writing as process, as a continually forming and reforming act without
conclusion is to not only recognize the inconclusiveness of language,
but also to recognize that this inconclusiveness contributes to the
argument that there is no one language through which meaning is conveyed.
It is significant that both Roland Barthes
and Jacques Derrida have focused on the crisis of criticism when confronted with avantgarde or difficult writings. In S/Z,
Barthes writes that "to interpret a text is not to give it a meaning, but
on the contrary to appreciate what plurality constitutes it"(5).
However, Barthes also writes that the work of the commentary, once it is separated from any ideology of totality, consists precisely in "manhandling the text, interrupting it"(15). This manhandling is precisely what I will inevitably do. Nevertheless, I do not necessarily agree with Barthes's description of manipulating a text, because it does not acknowledge the general crisis of criticism that difficult writing inspires. For his part, Derrida, explains
that for rhetoric or criticism to have something to do before a text,
a meaning has to be determinable (114). However, in referring to Mallarmé's writing, Derrida illustrates that when a simple
decision is no longer possible for the critic or the reader, the
choice between opposing paths is suspended. This suspension instigates a
crisis of criticism that obstructs the critic's ability to decide on a meaning.
As for my thesis, the non-traditional handling of a poet and her poetry is all perhaps in recognition of the crisis of criticism
and the intransience of writing, both of which are essential components
of Cole's poetry and of the act of reading and writing about it.
In creating a visual poetry, (a poetry
that utilizes movement much like cinematic images do, which through their movement on the screen, create a narrative,
or, in some cases, a non-narrative), the way in which the words function upon
the blank space of the page becomes essential. In Memory Shack, a poem from Moira,
Cole cites the reader as a spectator: "a string shadow or space / the spectator is alive / as
a messy site" (20). Words understood visually on the page can become much more then signifiers
that are locked onto a specific manner of signification, but they can, like images,
move on the page creating multiple readings, readings that are both visual and connotative.
In his essay on Mallarmé, Derrida describes this phenomenon as écriture: "the marks and white spaces on the page
[which] are only one realization of the articulations and systems of difference upon which the
operations of significations rely and which prevent signification from ever closing on itself or on the
world." (7) Écriture is language that understands or includes the spaces
that already exist in language; Écriture is about writing the spaces back into language, exposing
the systems of difference that make up language. However, unlike images, words are classically
understood to function not in a pictoral or visual manner, but in a stricly signifying
sense. Words are, in a way, locked into the manner in which they are supposed to be read.
In a fax that I received from Norma Cole, where she refers to her recent struggle with an
editor concerning the layout of some of her poetry, she writes:
The titles of these poems are sometimes
onomastic in their function, sometimes like introductory or prestanzic, or, in some cases, want to
be read into the first lines of the text, as text. Such relationships are
crucial to the work and to one's reading
of it. How this exploration, with its provocations, moves toward resolution, or new forms, reveals itslef
in the more recent work, where there are not titles in the sense of separators, where the text moves along
with small breaks as a serial piece, and where its visual texture in the page might be experienced as ...BLACK
AND WHITE FILM MOVING THROUGH A PROJECTOR, a composition of light and dark that is
constantly shape-shifting.8 Écriture, writing that formally situates itself in the visual,
alters the reading experience. For Derrida, the advent of écriture marks the end of literature
as classically understood. It marks a crisis of meaning because the realm of language has shifted
to include itself so that the "semantic fields" and the "non-linear semantic spaces" of language,
about which de Lauretis writes, become implicated in the writing itself. In other
words, the apparatus is exposed. The inside of writing is no longer insular, but open to
the confluence and divergence of other languages or sign systems. It is interesting that once a poetry
decides to create "new forms," it begins to reference other medias. A poetry that is visual, that is exploring the visual
and seeking to create the space for other reading experiences, becomes a poetry that feels
"cinematic" "architectural,"or "textural." It also becomes a poetry that can
no longer be read as "poetry;" it becomes a poetry that entices misreadings, that runs
over the poetic parameters of stanza, verse, rhyme and rather then evoke readings, evokes experiences
of readings. The poetry becomes writerly rather than readerly, to use Roland Barthes's
distinction. Misreadings, in their renaming or re-experiencing
of images or words, can ostensibly create the space(s) in which seemingly homogenous meaning and experience
can radically be undermined. Misreading can bring to the surface differences that
are hidden by ideology and consequently underscore transparency as the artifice that it
is. It is my argument that radical poetry such as Cole's constitutes a remapping of meaning
as plural and inconclusive, as open and therefore always subject to change, as
above all heterogeneous. However, this remapping entails a certain condition of being lost,
of accepting the horror of being lost. Really, it entails nothing other than what is already
there. But to foreground it, to make this the ground from which to work, is to not only defy certain
standards of readability, it is to create a space of destitution with which the
reader and writer are confronted. The reader can no longer be a passive spectator expecting
a condition of meaning that is predetermined and hence readable, but the reader
must learn to reread the spaces in which meaning is formed and therefore reread new spaces
in which new forms and or meanings can be created. The reader must examine the power
relations that make certain dialogics possible and perhaps question these dialogics in
the hopes for new ones. Poetic Space: Paper House "moving about in worlds not realized" - Norma Cole Paper House Paper House - space of violence, space of destitution. House of a
book made of paper, paper housing spaces, spaces inhabiting the house of paper. Paper House
a space of fraility where the structures are showing through the decor. The House threatens
to fall, to cease being the protective structure that it is desired to be. A House is a space
of shelter, one that like the apparatus seeks to veil all signs of turmoil from both the inside
and the outside. Once the structures are bare then the inside and outside are no longer
protected from each other. The outside can see in and the inside can see out but be seen by
the outside seeing. A Paper House is one that does not promise shelter. It promises transparency,
not the transparency of meaning, but the transparency of structure. The apparatus is thus
seen as structure that is structuring the internal and external spaces. The idea of the Paper
House indicates the importance of the boundaries that separate the inside from the outside.
This distinction is one of the fundamental bases for our understanding of our world;
it allows us private and public space divisions. It attributes to our understanding of our
bodies and their relation to the space that they inhabit and are subsequently framed by. If this
division is weakened then bodies are exposed, violence is exposed, the boundary between
private and public space is eradicated. The notion of the House functions on
various levels in Cole's poem. It is that in which we live and that with which we speak. It is a structure, symbolic
of the apparatus of language, symbolic of the nation. The House structures us, it defines
our notions of the spaces in which we live. In The Politics of Poetic Form, Bruce
Andrews writes that political or "radical" writing "reads the outside, it doesn't just read itself"
(24). In many ways, the House is the boundary marker between inside and outside space or
between private and public space. A Paper House is a visual manifestation of language.
It is the walls, the floor, the doors that we shut, for without language they all disappear.
The House reveals the architectural importance of space and of language. It is a rudimentary
structure like that of the alphabet which structures Cole's poem. The House reads the outside
because it defines it. Similarly, Cole's poem reads the outside because it reveals it.
The form of Paper House incites
many issues concerning the structure of language in poetry. There is indeed a poetic architecture that constructs how
a poem can be read. Be it stanza, verse, fragmentary form, the architecture of words builds
the walls of the poem, or, in this case, takes those walls apart. Cole's poem is divided into
twenty five small poems, one for each letter of the alphabet except for y and z. Almost instinctively,
one looks for the logical correspondance between each letter and its poem finding that
the connection, if there is one, is not obvious, perhaps is not even there. Under the
seemingly elemental structure of language, the alphabet, there lies a heavy and complex
network of signs and meanings that pull with it numerous histories of memory, experience
and violence. That the poetry consists of the same letters as the simply laid out alphabet
reveals the inherent inconsistencies within language. Which is to say that the process
by which meaning is conveyed and constructed is neither linear or clearly maintained:
there is always a certain violence inherent to the act. In poem "d" of Paper House,
Cole writes: why does it turn to me, a reductive story
all white, all red I'll jump into the sea dig a hole with both arms, bury eyes
in it a nation that apologizes to its war dead,
securing the chain that binds both arms
(excerpts from a Senior Thesis, 1998)
WORKING NOTE: Wendy Tronrud Throughout the process of writing my thesis, I have been constantly
asking myself why is space important, why is poetry important, and why is it important
that I am writing my thesis on them both? To a certain degree, it is easy to throw
around theories about gender, the crisis of meaning, the crisis of the subject and so forth,
without recognizing the important role that theory, art, literature, poetry, architecture,
etc., play in actively shaping our conceptions of the spaces in which we exist and subsequently
the ways in which we define ourselves and others. It seems like such an inconsequential
thing to write a thesis on an avant-garde poet and admittedly it is. At least, to a certain
extent. Who reads Norma Cole anyway? Certainly not academia. Certainly not the general public.
Whoever that is. Her poetry is difficult. A difficulty, however, that must both be
understood in relation to its opposite and in relation to a specific historical moment that happens
to discourage difficulty. At least at the level of the arts. A difficultly that
must be examined in order to ascertain why it is that it is named difficult and why it is that
clarity is important to begin with. Clarity, as does everything, has a price and that price is
arguably paid for by those who are excluded from the vision / representation that defines it/. I began my thesis with a simple statement:
I do not understand Norma Cole's poetry. What this means exactly is, of course, unknowable, but what this
means for me to say it is that I freed myself from the responsibility to have to know something
enough to write about it. This confession has, ultimately, enabled me to write. And
as it has enabled me to write, it has enabled me to write "intransitively," as Trinh T. Minh-ha
says. To move in different spaces and to rethink the spaces with which I thought I
was already familiar. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bio: Wendy Tronrud has recently finished her B.A. degree in
Comparative Literature at Barnard College of Columbia University. This is her first publication.
She is now living in France where she teaches English. Tronrud has worked at two film
festivals: "L'international festival du film des femmes" in Creteil, France,
and the "New York Lesbian and Gay Film Festival" in NYC. Her laser copy tryptich, "In
Site," --a piece dealing with space, identity and the city--was recently shown in NYC. go to this issue's table of contents
may suggest that I should not attempt