LinguaQuake, Heller Levinson
Book
Cover Image, “Quarry, VIII” (Detail)
Pastel
pigment on cotton paper
60
x 44 inches, 2015
It
Doesn’t Break
A
Review of Heller Levinson’s LinguaQuake
by
Nathan Spoon
LinguaQuake is the latest
volume resulting from Heller Levinson’s ongoing engagement with Hinge Theory.
Reading through it, the poet Geoffrey Hill repeatedly came to mind. This is an
odd correlation for many reasons. Hill is a poet of dense history, willing to
experiment within modernist parameters, which reluctantly reached into
postmodernism. He sees language as “fallen” from its prelapsarian glory and
admires poetry that creates “strongholds of the imagination.” Levinson, by
contrast, dispenses with history as a by-product of dispensing with narrative,
and he approaches language in a manner that embraces its continuously
bifurcating display of movements.
These are substantial differences, but what
links both poets is a commitment to the examination of words. Hill, as a deeply
English writer, moves in harmony with the OED,
while Levinson’s approach to words is far more experimental. Still, for all his
effort to have “Hinge depart from all other poetic fashionings in declaring
itself an ongoing ever-fulfilling linguistic enterprise,” Levinson is surely a participant
in what John Ashbery calls an “American poetry whose fructifying mainstream
seems at times to be populated mostly by cranks (Emerson, Whitman, Pound,
Stevens).”
*
While other aspects of Hinge Theory are
demonstrated in previous collections and outlined in writings referenced in the
notes of this collection, LinguaQuake
explores the two areas of Modular Collapse and Chaotic Symmetry. About Modular
Collapse Levinson writes,
we will see
modules morph, liquidate, & interosculate in multiple capacities. They will
self-destruct. They will convulse. They will mangle & entangle.
and about Chaotic Symmetry he writes,
the apparently
slop-shod and disorderly is integral to the Entirety of the Organism’s Lively
Burgeoning.
Modular
Collapse
A module may be understood as an amorphous
clustering of language around a word or words providing the occasion of a
starting point. As the language of modules “quakes”, one encounters “breaks,
highs & lows, pauses, gaps, elisions, lacunae” transpiring in a manner
“more resembling Breath than catalogue.” This last phrase favors “Breath” (an
amorphous sweeping that vitalizes, and which can be understood as “life”) over
the “catalogue” (a list of things or “a collection of detailed comments and
explanations,” OED).
Levinson’s descriptions of Modular
Collapse are relevant to what is enacted in this book as it unfolds. And
sometimes there is more. For example, and going back to the above description, “interosculate”
is a biology term meaning “to have some common characteristics: said of
separate species or groups.” It also means to interpenetrate. While modules in
this text do interoscuate, they sometimes also interosculate with poems by
other poets. Here is a passage that is resonant with Whitman’s “Song of
Myself”:
relying heavily on
graph analysis I plot my mate. I am exalted. fluttering with anticipation.
possibility. I am on my way to becoming someone. soon to emerge. into. person-hood. I cannot stress this too
strongly. how thrilling it is. to be about
to. on the cusp. of. hatching. pages pages pages. I am visualizing pages
filled with my Self. who wouldn’t be giddy. after years of deprivation.
submerged. an obliterate in a sea of commotion. (p. 49)
Another similarly Whitmanesque passage (although
the optimism is inverted) reads:
flutteration pins
me. I am comatose. broke. a slag upon the floor. low down. my delusions my
dreams smattered. to be. to be all you can be. haunts me. I crave to measure
up. to amount to something. to become. to to to yes, to formulate. to emerge. hell, if not
to be ― to resemble? (p. 35)
Importantly, Modular Collapse implies that
the text is not an arrangement of separate modules (poems). It is a singular
mass, a conglomeration:
at what point in
the gathering does the collection become assemblage. how does criteria
assemble. how does judgement discharge. (p. 109)
Chaotic
Symmetry
In Levinson’s brief description of Chaotic
Symmetry, the operative word may be “apparently”. The text itself speaks of
what it intends to enact, and this enactment grounds its language in the realm
of intentionality:
the wobble the displaced the
misplaced the
wayward the
awkward the
maligned the…
malignant the
belligerent (p. 21)
And elsewhere:
gruntled slop-
sustain
…swerves of
preservative in the dark undulate of dank demeanor (p. 60)
This last is a poem in miniature.
“Gruntled” is a humorous adjective meaning “pleased, satisfied and contented.” “Slop-sustain”
recalls “slop-shod” in the above description. “Slop-shod” is a play on “slipshod”
(“lack of care, thought or organization”) and, because “slop” means “spill or
flow over the edges of a container,” usually due to carelessness, is similar in
meaning to “slipshod.” To be “gruntled” with “slop-/ sustain/ …swerves of
preservative in the dark undulate of dank demeanor” implies that these things,
which are frequently excised from poetry, have their place. Presumably there has
always been a countermovement within poetry that extends active sympathy
towards things that may seem antithetical and contrary to its own spirit.
Hinge
Theory Quaking
Even as Levinson’s aim is to do something
different from what previous poets have done, his poetry has, until now,
represented a mostly insular contribution to the
American tradition to which he belongs.
A renowned Hindu teacher once said that a
person’s spirituality is like a fledgling plant growing in a pasture. If a small
fence is built around it temporarily, so that cows and goats cannot eat it, it
will one day grow into a large tree, providing shade for many. Similarly, a
poetic approach may at first need to be surrounded by a small fence and carefully
protected. But, once this has been accomplished and once it is growing, a key
aspect of nurturing the poetic approach is knowing when to lose control of the
very things one has worked at so diligently.
This is a significant moment for Hinge
since the two areas explored in this book are allowing Hinge Theory poetry to move
forward in larger ways.
LinguaQuake is Heller Levinson’s
most substantial collection to date.
Notes
Visionary
Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Words, by Matthew
Sperling, Oxford University Press, 2014
“Strongholds of the Imagination,” Geoffrey
Hill interviewed by Alexandra Bell, Rebecca Rosen and Edmund White, The Oxonian Review, Issue 9.4, May 18,
2009
Selected
Prose of John Ashbery,
edited by Eugene Richie, University of Michigan Press, 2004
Leaves
of Grass, First and “Death-Bed” Editions, by Walt Whitman, edited with an
Introduction and Notes by Karen Karbiener, Barnes & Noble Books, 2004
