Jargon by Brian
Clements
(Quale Press,
Niantic, Connecticut, 2010)
This is the first time I have reviewed a book that does
not have any page numbers. Whether the absence of page numbers is deliberate or
not I do not know. The contents page sets out six sections of five prose poems
and each section begins with a Fibonacci number: 44, 89, 144, 233, 377 and 610,
[F10 through F15]. The title of each prose poem is followed by an italicised
extract from the text. As well as being from the text, these may be quotations
from somewhere else or they may represent the core of what is being said. There
are section breaks consisting of poems in smaller fonts which begin by being
scattered across the page (making reading difficult) and then into other
formats. Like the Fibonacci numbering sequence, there are words and phrases
that are carried forward into most of the consecutive section breaks thereby
achieving some kind of cumulative effect.
Clements
doubtless chose to make use of the Fibonacci sequence because of its intriguing
connections between mathematics and the natural world; growth and patterns of
growth being governed by mathematical properties exhibited in the Fibonacci
sequence. (Examine the criss-crossing spiral seed pattern in the head of a
sunflower, for instance, and you will discover that the number of spirals in
each direction are invariably two consecutive Fibonacci numbers.)
The Chambers dictionary defines jargon as being the
terminology of a profession, art, group, etc., an artificial or barbarous
language, a pidgin, unintelligible talk, gibberish, etc. Alternative words for
jargon in Thesaurus concentrate for the most part on the “gibberish” aspect
with suggestions such as balderdash, bunkum, drivel, gabble and nonsense.
Jargon, in the sense of terminology, is certainly present here. Scientific terms,
especially words relating to particle physics, are scattered throughout the
text—everything from muons, string theories, gravitons and leptons to neutrons,
photons, sound waves and black holes. Clements’ prose poems are not impenetrable but
some of them are, at times, hard to follow.
In an interview with Cheryl Pallant in The Argonist
Online we get a glimpse into some of Clements’ methods of composition. The
starting-point is some kind of “collecting tool”—“any kind of operation like
cut-ups, random generation, n+7, etc.” out of which a poem is created. “In
other words [I] take an objectively collected word bank and filter it through a
subjective consciousness to produce a poem.
“Suspicion” from Jargon is probably a pretty good example.
The word bank for this prose poem was collected by performing a Google search
on the word “suspicion” and selecting random phrases or words from each of the
first 100 sites listed, then composing the poem primarily of words and phrases
from the bank (or at least a skeleton of a poem—I don’t recall the ratio of
collected to added words here).”
Clements tells us that he tends to write from small
projects, or around a certain question or set of questions. “Writing tends to
be for me a kind of problem solving, exploratory in the way that a
land-surveyor explores—mapping out a piece of land, finding its contours, its
boundaries, getting to know it by knowing its possibilities”.
In Jargon, the major preoccupations are science,
history, philosophy and religion. In the opening section, Clements poses the
question
What, you might ask, is
enlightenment? Does it happen in the brain? Is it a meeting of science and
faith or the erasure of both?
Later in the poem he asks:
Or is enlightenment Brain
Opens Door to New Dimension? Or is enlightenment You Are Nothing But a Speck on
a Map? Whichever, the brains of the bodies of this group are in the dark,
sitting in the dark and spinning, spinning a dark and regular thread in a
regular cycle that goes spin, weave, and dye, spin, weave, and dye, spin,
weave, and dye.
I like the reference to the Fates, the threefold
repetition of “spin, weave, and dye” and the suggestion of substituting the
word “dye” for “die.”
Xeno’s Paradox –which I take to be a reference to
the set of philosophical problems devised by Zeno of Elea to support
Parmenides’s doctrine that, contrary to the evidence of one’s senses, motion is
nothing but an illusion, Clements offers up a reflective meditation on motion
and stillness:
You hear a rumour that the
inner life is moving into the suburbs….
but then it’s nice sometimes
just to sit and be a stem.
There are some fine prose poems in this collection. Take Orange
for instance, in which Clements touches upon a range of seemingly disparate
topics that all have the word “orange” attached to them in some form or other:
You can have it with lemon in
the bells of St. Clement’s.
“An individual clothed in
orange is “afire”…a chariot or a car on fire has the same significance as a man
in an orange-coloured tunic” [Cirlot, Dictionary of Symbols]. The Orangemen
march through the streets of Ulster to stir things up per their King, William
of Orange.
It has its own mountains and
a Free State. It is a province and a tea…
One of the most lyrical passages in the book occurs at
section 233. It is the prose poem called Subatomic Particle Ritual:
Dance into a room repeatedly.
The first time just peek in the door, and another time come prancing in, waving
your arms. Another time stand calmly beneath the lintel and appear to be both
in and out of the room. Yet another time be in the room with only a certain
degree of certainty.
Pick a partner and send
him/her out of the room. Dance in your separate rooms. Though you cannot see
each other, an observer would see that when you spin one way, your partner
spins the other. When you change directions, your partner changes too. Surprise
your audience by momentarily disappearing, then reappearing in opposite rooms,
still spinning.
Once again, we see how Clements uses a process of
accumulation to build up his text: the solo dancer, the dancer with his / her
partner, the presence of an audience and then, in the next paragraph, the
presence of a larger audience and more dancers on the dance floor. It is a
wonderful extended metaphor on the idea of particles coming together and flying
apart.
In the next prose poem, the two dancing partners are replaced
with an image of two libraries from different parts of the world—one from the
West and one from the East. The Library of Congress and the Library at
Alexandria. Are these libraries travelling through space towards each other or
is it the case that one of them is moving while the other is at rest? An interesting take on the East / West divide
and the clash of civilizations.
One of the preoccupations in this collection seems to be
the question of where does history begin and end—does it have a beginning and
does it have an ending? What does it consist of, and how much of it is imagined
or real? In A Brief History of Brief Histories Clements says:
So what is a brief history?
There are a number of opinions: a scale, a structure, a note, a philosophy. One
problem is that brief histories aren’t sung or played. They are much freer and
may include the wild cry, the bent-over-backwards sentence, or the stage
whisper, without sacrificing brevity or historicity. They are made things with
organic insides and mechanical surfaces. Regardless of whether they are
constructed of brass, steel, string, mud, or spit, brief histories, like all
history, are products of desire.
The final section break comprises a concrete poem
composed of ten columns of one word: Bang. The word is typed in
different combinations of upper and lower case letters giving the impression of
varying intensities of “noise” being scattered across the page. Maybe this is
the “Big Bang” exploding the jargon that has accumulated since the beginning
into something more cohesive or, alternatively, nothing at all. As Clements
says at the close of the preceding section:
Forget about a personal God.
We’re getting old. And getting old means you get to say anything you want and
don’t even have to stick to the point.
This collection deserves to be read again and again.
Clements provides us with an intriguing text from which we can extract a whole
range of interpretations and be the richer for it. Recommended.
*****
Neil Leadbeater is an editor, author, essayist and critic
living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and poems have been
published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His most
recent books are Librettos for the Black Madonna (White Adder Press,
Scotland, 2011); The Worcester Fragments (Original Plus Press, England,
2013); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, England, 2014) and
The Fragility of Moths (Bibliotheca Universalis, Romania, 2014).
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