Meditation on Composition
He glows with danger. Most people just shimmer . . . he looks like a lightning bolt.
Noon, Zukofsky and Stein in Constellation.
Peter Fogarty
175.716
24 | 6 | 99
eXplication
A constellation of voices observed; three suns moving into alignment against the starsprent sky of literature. Hanging in space, scratch of vacuum pulls my skin as I listen, my eyes bathing in trinary radiation. Before me, Noon, Zukofsky and Stein float, their massive gravities tugging at each other, bringing me ever nearer. It seems inevitable that I must soon flare in the atmosphere of the closest orb, Noon. Within this boiling G2 star, language is remixed and rewritten. Text borrowed from OneList email cut up and renewed with noise and flavour, a voice never spoken, yet Noon speaks anew. Triumphant, spared a fiery death, I draw near the red dwarf, infinitely dense, Zukofsky condenses but within such density is a bubbling marvel of expanding understanding, if only we have the key. If only we have the appreciation of the new, cries the solar wind from Stein, no key but understanding, of generation after generation of work.
This constellation is formed from readings of Stein, Zukofsky in the first part of the year, combined with the contemporary stylistics of Noon, move into juxaposition, stripping the page of glue, links become tenuous and only the collage remains. More specifically, in this spiral inwards, I looked at Zukofsky’s AN ERA poem, at the condensing and mathematical symmetry underlying the simplicity of the work. Because of the extraordinary briefness of word limit, I could only allude, hint and direct understanding of the reader to the poem itself, resting beneath my presumptuous text. As this text is a collage, it becomes a collage of impressions, of veiled knowledge orbiting the true sources of light. Each generation needs new metaphors, new mediums of communication. Stein pushes and cajoles us into new beginnings, into learning anew, repeating and reiterating in loops of understanding, using simple elements to create music. Noon plays with metaphors taken right out of remix culture, from the readers of the future, sample madness and noise built into a deconstruction of communication, fragments of an idea recombined and re-expressed. Noon is the centrepiece of this collage of an array of authors whose work express the drive to change, to perpetual motion across time. It is his technique that looks toward the unknown, that compresses coal into diamonds. Zukofsky and Stein float in their contrasting modes of thought, of condensation and reiteration.
Elements of collage have steered away from the elements on paper tip. Instead, I have presented you with a collage of ideas pasted on the metaphor of three suns orbiting one another in a distant solar system. Iterations within the text unite the three pages as a whole. Think of this brief explanation as the balance that keeps the stars from tearing into each other’s immense gravity wells of influence, as the voice within the text comes from my mind, the underlying text speaks for the original genesis of idea. Language is unified by a sensation of collage, electronic cut and paste, in the dissonances to be found with such brevity. You will notice my experimental approach to the problem of referencing quotations. The entire Noon section is extremely problematic because there is not one word that I wrote there. It is all his work cut and pasted into the form which you find it. Where I have retained assemblages of more than two words in this essay, I have referenced them with book initals and page number. Let us evade this issue and concentrate, shall we?
AN ERA / ANY TIME / OF YEAR is as good a place as any to demonstrate Zukofsky’s fascination with numerology and meaning residing within consonant and vowel. Two ways of reading Zukofsky, the hunt for meaning by the ear. With Michele Leggott’s aid, we can look at Zukofsky’s process of constructing meaning. This is an extremely condensed poem, a poem that may have arrived whole, a subconscious realisation of a lifetime’s work of condensation: the process of making something increase in density as it gets smaller. Condensation is more than half of composition. The rest is proper breathing space, ease, grace. AT (81). AN ERA does not fail Zukofsky’s test of poetry. It breathes, the vowels sing with their beauty as they bounce off the consonants in between, no matter how you read it, slowly, quickly, top to bottom, letter by letter: it takes even, calm breaths with the grace and quiet confidence of old age in a lifetime of great confidence. Looking deeper than the sound to its etymology exposes an abundance of meaning, as Leggott has done: from AN ERA, she finds crude metal dug from the earth [aes] cohabitating with airy arias rising out of the construction of nines in a constellation of possible readings RZ (41). Zukofsky’s desire for immortality rests in his intense, cramped notes and without these Zukofsky remains difficult.
He has segued beyond phonemes and morphemes to juggle the letters, attributing to each infinite potential, denser than a neutron star burning in a galaxy of Objectivists yet as expansive in meaning as a supernova.
Each generation has something different at which they are looking AS (495). New generations of conceptual understanding thresholds of consciousness mapped and intuition ordering perception as we gaze at the new. With her iterations Gertrude Stein loops us in pulls us around and round in a spin of meaning in her repetition of key words until understanding evaporates and it is the time in the composition, the sounds of the words that we listen to. Hear it jump, see it speak and shout, taste its construction. The using everything brings us to composition and to this composition AS (499). A collage of concern for time for attempts to alter the way we see things to introduce new media and attempt to establish and consolidate perception. It can only be a defining mechanism: composition is the difference which makes each and all of them different from other generations AS (495). Yet the refusal to conform to established forms of expression is also a denial of communication. The response time delay in comprehension is prolonged when perception of the new is force filtered through our experience and definition struggles. A work of the new must communicate, must subvert and reuse, loop, recycle word and meaning until thought is lost, then found. The movement of the sound of the words passing down a monoxide stained service corridor, dopplering and shifting is just as significant as the ideograms infecting language with communication and time stretches and compresses as meaning condenses and expands in ever increasing spheres within spheres as we hang aloft.
I set my eye to ignition PJ (265). Elaborate, experimental. Remix the song, dropping words, sounds, noises in and out of the mix, a ghost of the original: a haunting song. Stripped down to the bone, exciting images randomised, mixed on screen, paper cut out in new connections, secret messages. Dub. Building it up order story feel a new life. Images on the screen move into groups of three lines, counting the syllables, seventeen. Work as a page, as a text, as a shimmer of meaning. Karaoke. Electric haiku remixes the ghost of original text. Language Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors’ Desire FR. Borrowing texts, pushing them through filtering devices, producing new texts: ‘the unreadable book’. Break these into words, phrases, juggle them around, looking for a new hit JP. Educating people, breaking down language. Segue. Isolate best images, only things that interest; series of poetic images. Random mix a scrap of meaning in it, maybe using the same language, atmosphere. When you first write a word there is a moment when it is still drying, you can move it around before its meaning is set. Language, different drummers. Remix techniques lengthen the drying time of a word FR. A completely different story jar jars so layer more input. Scratching. Series of words through a complete mess in and out of sense. Put the work in; the final piece has to be brilliant. The processes I use break the language down and then work it up again, then you can work the relationship and move through a narrative. Some experiments fail and have to be abandoned. Beauty is a dirty word in experimental writing FR. More minimal structurally, a texture of individual sounds. Noon has put the hours in. Sampling. A Chemical Generation guide to the English Language.
:referenceS
AB: Pound, Erza. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 23rd Printing.
AS: Stein, Gertrude. A Stein Reader. Ed. Dydo, Ulla E. Evanson: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
AT: Zukofsky, Louis. A Test of Poetry. New York: Celia Zukofsky Publications, 1980.
FR: Roberts, James [on Jeff Noon]. “Ghost In The Machine”. Frieze. London: Durian Publications, May 1999.
JP: Noon, Jeff. “Juicing the Pixels”. Posted by A.P McQuiddy. http://www.onelist.com/viewarchive.cgi?listname=Vurt&archive=137.gz
PJ: Noon, Jeff. Pixel Juice. London: Doubleday, 1998.
RZ: Leggott, Michele. Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989.
Noon, Zukofsky and Stein in Constellation.
Peter Fogarty
175.716
24 | 6 | 99
eXplication
A constellation of voices observed; three suns moving into alignment against the starsprent sky of literature. Hanging in space, scratch of vacuum pulls my skin as I listen, my eyes bathing in trinary radiation. Before me, Noon, Zukofsky and Stein float, their massive gravities tugging at each other, bringing me ever nearer. It seems inevitable that I must soon flare in the atmosphere of the closest orb, Noon. Within this boiling G2 star, language is remixed and rewritten. Text borrowed from OneList email cut up and renewed with noise and flavour, a voice never spoken, yet Noon speaks anew. Triumphant, spared a fiery death, I draw near the red dwarf, infinitely dense, Zukofsky condenses but within such density is a bubbling marvel of expanding understanding, if only we have the key. If only we have the appreciation of the new, cries the solar wind from Stein, no key but understanding, of generation after generation of work.
This constellation is formed from readings of Stein, Zukofsky in the first part of the year, combined with the contemporary stylistics of Noon, move into juxaposition, stripping the page of glue, links become tenuous and only the collage remains. More specifically, in this spiral inwards, I looked at Zukofsky’s AN ERA poem, at the condensing and mathematical symmetry underlying the simplicity of the work. Because of the extraordinary briefness of word limit, I could only allude, hint and direct understanding of the reader to the poem itself, resting beneath my presumptuous text. As this text is a collage, it becomes a collage of impressions, of veiled knowledge orbiting the true sources of light. Each generation needs new metaphors, new mediums of communication. Stein pushes and cajoles us into new beginnings, into learning anew, repeating and reiterating in loops of understanding, using simple elements to create music. Noon plays with metaphors taken right out of remix culture, from the readers of the future, sample madness and noise built into a deconstruction of communication, fragments of an idea recombined and re-expressed. Noon is the centrepiece of this collage of an array of authors whose work express the drive to change, to perpetual motion across time. It is his technique that looks toward the unknown, that compresses coal into diamonds. Zukofsky and Stein float in their contrasting modes of thought, of condensation and reiteration.
Elements of collage have steered away from the elements on paper tip. Instead, I have presented you with a collage of ideas pasted on the metaphor of three suns orbiting one another in a distant solar system. Iterations within the text unite the three pages as a whole. Think of this brief explanation as the balance that keeps the stars from tearing into each other’s immense gravity wells of influence, as the voice within the text comes from my mind, the underlying text speaks for the original genesis of idea. Language is unified by a sensation of collage, electronic cut and paste, in the dissonances to be found with such brevity. You will notice my experimental approach to the problem of referencing quotations. The entire Noon section is extremely problematic because there is not one word that I wrote there. It is all his work cut and pasted into the form which you find it. Where I have retained assemblages of more than two words in this essay, I have referenced them with book initals and page number. Let us evade this issue and concentrate, shall we?
AN ERA / ANY TIME / OF YEAR is as good a place as any to demonstrate Zukofsky’s fascination with numerology and meaning residing within consonant and vowel. Two ways of reading Zukofsky, the hunt for meaning by the ear. With Michele Leggott’s aid, we can look at Zukofsky’s process of constructing meaning. This is an extremely condensed poem, a poem that may have arrived whole, a subconscious realisation of a lifetime’s work of condensation: the process of making something increase in density as it gets smaller. Condensation is more than half of composition. The rest is proper breathing space, ease, grace. AT (81). AN ERA does not fail Zukofsky’s test of poetry. It breathes, the vowels sing with their beauty as they bounce off the consonants in between, no matter how you read it, slowly, quickly, top to bottom, letter by letter: it takes even, calm breaths with the grace and quiet confidence of old age in a lifetime of great confidence. Looking deeper than the sound to its etymology exposes an abundance of meaning, as Leggott has done: from AN ERA, she finds crude metal dug from the earth [aes] cohabitating with airy arias rising out of the construction of nines in a constellation of possible readings RZ (41). Zukofsky’s desire for immortality rests in his intense, cramped notes and without these Zukofsky remains difficult.
He has segued beyond phonemes and morphemes to juggle the letters, attributing to each infinite potential, denser than a neutron star burning in a galaxy of Objectivists yet as expansive in meaning as a supernova.
Each generation has something different at which they are looking AS (495). New generations of conceptual understanding thresholds of consciousness mapped and intuition ordering perception as we gaze at the new. With her iterations Gertrude Stein loops us in pulls us around and round in a spin of meaning in her repetition of key words until understanding evaporates and it is the time in the composition, the sounds of the words that we listen to. Hear it jump, see it speak and shout, taste its construction. The using everything brings us to composition and to this composition AS (499). A collage of concern for time for attempts to alter the way we see things to introduce new media and attempt to establish and consolidate perception. It can only be a defining mechanism: composition is the difference which makes each and all of them different from other generations AS (495). Yet the refusal to conform to established forms of expression is also a denial of communication. The response time delay in comprehension is prolonged when perception of the new is force filtered through our experience and definition struggles. A work of the new must communicate, must subvert and reuse, loop, recycle word and meaning until thought is lost, then found. The movement of the sound of the words passing down a monoxide stained service corridor, dopplering and shifting is just as significant as the ideograms infecting language with communication and time stretches and compresses as meaning condenses and expands in ever increasing spheres within spheres as we hang aloft.
I set my eye to ignition PJ (265). Elaborate, experimental. Remix the song, dropping words, sounds, noises in and out of the mix, a ghost of the original: a haunting song. Stripped down to the bone, exciting images randomised, mixed on screen, paper cut out in new connections, secret messages. Dub. Building it up order story feel a new life. Images on the screen move into groups of three lines, counting the syllables, seventeen. Work as a page, as a text, as a shimmer of meaning. Karaoke. Electric haiku remixes the ghost of original text. Language Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors’ Desire FR. Borrowing texts, pushing them through filtering devices, producing new texts: ‘the unreadable book’. Break these into words, phrases, juggle them around, looking for a new hit JP. Educating people, breaking down language. Segue. Isolate best images, only things that interest; series of poetic images. Random mix a scrap of meaning in it, maybe using the same language, atmosphere. When you first write a word there is a moment when it is still drying, you can move it around before its meaning is set. Language, different drummers. Remix techniques lengthen the drying time of a word FR. A completely different story jar jars so layer more input. Scratching. Series of words through a complete mess in and out of sense. Put the work in; the final piece has to be brilliant. The processes I use break the language down and then work it up again, then you can work the relationship and move through a narrative. Some experiments fail and have to be abandoned. Beauty is a dirty word in experimental writing FR. More minimal structurally, a texture of individual sounds. Noon has put the hours in. Sampling. A Chemical Generation guide to the English Language.
:referenceS
AB: Pound, Erza. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions, 23rd Printing.
AS: Stein, Gertrude. A Stein Reader. Ed. Dydo, Ulla E. Evanson: Northwestern University Press, 1996.
AT: Zukofsky, Louis. A Test of Poetry. New York: Celia Zukofsky Publications, 1980.
FR: Roberts, James [on Jeff Noon]. “Ghost In The Machine”. Frieze. London: Durian Publications, May 1999.
JP: Noon, Jeff. “Juicing the Pixels”. Posted by A.P McQuiddy. http://www.onelist.com/viewarchive.cgi?listname=Vurt&archive=137.gz
PJ: Noon, Jeff. Pixel Juice. London: Doubleday, 1998.
RZ: Leggott, Michele. Reading Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989.
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