Letter 3. Perversions.
‘Perversion’ has two distinct but related meanings, which describe the contrarian (‘perverse’) and the deviant (‘perverted’), both stemming from per-versus – turned-around, twisted, set against the accepted course. So I think about Nat Raha’s countersonnets, which has for many years been my favourite book of poetry, as a perverse and perverted text, which misdirects poetic material – ‘verse’ – away from the conventions of the sonnet. In a song, a verse is roughly equivalent to a poem’s stanza, but originally it meant a line, at the end of which you turn back and start from the beginning of the next line. Then ‘verse’ in poetry came to refer to a body of work or the practice in general – English verse, rhyming verse, Milton’s verse – which is fitting because these turns are the material the poem is made of. countersonnets continuously per-verts, is composed of contrary and deviant (queer) movements.
The classic pairing of ‘sound’ and ‘sense’ towards/as the poem has never quite made sense to me; the closest I’ve found to an explanation of how it actually works is this, from Giorgio Agamben’s The End of the Poem: ‘Sound and sense are not two substances but two intensities, two tonoi of the same linguistic substance.’ Tonoi are either tones or cords – think of them as two strings on the same instrument, constructed (in Agamben’s mixed metaphor) out of the same ‘linguistic substance’, which is poetic material. This metaphor of poetry as a complex but ultimately continuous kind of matter can be applied to the poetic line as well. When we think about poems as a single long thread of text which has been cut up according to various different sets of rules, we are missing all the ways in which they resonate with one another. We might not even have to read the poem ‘in order’ (Raha often performs using a loop pedal), because all of the strange turns in spacing, grammar, and punctuation make it unclear what the ‘correct’ order is. For example:
hair to cheek across delicate spins
memory out to your affects:
voice ,
its not known song quiet
populating daily &
rooms low lit to minds of text,
turning discourse/laughs out into
us gestures content
in close, leans
though temporal crumples in slip
through towns /
houses desiring-you
positing counter-sonnets / trilby
flickd hand to headstroke,,;
9.56pm lone dusk by room utterless of / or
swap of hallway
kisses balmy to
mornings open off love / tilt
head missed newly still,
left in care for your mindful
(‘Sonnet’ in countersonnets, p. 44)
This is part of what makes these poems counter-sonnets – the traditional sonnet, with its predetermined architecture of lines, anticipated turning point (volta), and extended metaphors that will spring up at the end as gotchas, make use of a certain pattern of feeling, but Raha’s sonnets aim to map the feelings of queer love which don’t have established patterns. Earlier experiments with page-space treated the page like a musical stave, with space introduced as a tool that can be varied, so that there is a new spatial form unique to each poem. With later writers, the page evolves into a compositional space; the writing process is revealed as the text is arranged on the page making the process of authorship transparent. But in countersonnets, page-space is a map of disruptions: its use displays breaking-apart of the trans-linear space through which the linear thought moves, like a tonos inflecting the ‘linguistic substance’ of the poem. Each new arrangement of line and syntax, space interacting with grammar, does what an aphorism would do in a poetry more confident of the ability of language to transmit meaning or truth. The interruptions, which are key to how the linear meaning gets divided for us, are pre-empted, resulting in what Karen Veitch calls ‘refraction of the linguistic and spatial grounding of the sonnet form’. ‘Refraction’ appears throughout the book, both as an item of vocabulary and as a structural concept; refraction is when light bends when moving from one medium to another, and when those mediums are lines of ‘verse’, refraction becomes perversion. This ever-turning quality of the poems means that as a reader you often end up tracking a part of speech or structure in the sentence, rather than a ‘theme’ as we would usually understand it.
[Image description: the front cover of countersonnets with the title and the author’s name, Nat Raha, imposed over a black-and-white photograph of two queer punks with mohawks making out, entitled Posers by De LaGrace Volcano.]
The best way to show how this works in this sonnet is to begin by reading the verbs. In text as grammatically fragmentary as this, what is a verb/noun/adjective is not always clear (or can be taken multiple ways), but in the text below I have indicated the words it is possible to read as verbs in bold and participles, i.e. verbs behaving as adjectives, in italics. (Note that I don’t do this for words which might look like verbs in other contexts but not here, like ‘text’, ‘close’, or ‘care’.) The participles – present like ‘turning’ and ‘desiring’, and past like ‘lit’ and ‘left’ – tend to be more straightforward to read but the other verbs tend to be more syntactically ambiguous: ‘spins’, ‘gestures’, and ‘kisses’ could all be nouns, while ‘open’ might be an adjective. So, for instance, in the grammar of the first line, ‘delicate spins’ seems to be an adjective followed by a noun, describing the patterns, as if pre-existing in space, that the hair moving ‘across’ to the cheek follows through the air. However, the sentence would make more sense if it were rearranged in this way: ‘delicate hair spins across to cheek’, making ‘spins’ a verb rather than a noun. Similarly, we could read ‘kisses balmy’ as a rearrangement (the hyperbaton typical in a traditional sonnet or other strict verse form) of ‘balmy kisses’, which links to ‘delicate’ and ‘low lit’ in establishing this as a love-sonnet.
hair to cheek across delicate spins
memory out to your affects:
voice ,
its not known song quiet
populating daily &
rooms low lit to minds of text,
turning discourse/laughs out into
us gestures content
in close, leans
though temporal crumples in slip
through towns /
houses desiring-you
positing counter-sonnets / trilby
flickd hand to headstroke,,;
9.56pm lone dusk by room utterless of / or
swap of hallway
kisses balmy to
mornings open off love / tilt
head missed newly still,
left in care for your mindful
‘gestures content’ is more complex, and as I see it there are four possible readings. If it follows the same inverted word-order pattern as ‘kisses balmy’ in the first reading, then we get (1) ‘gestures’ as a plural noun modified by the adjective ‘contént’ which happens to be in the wrong place – what we would usually describe as ‘contént gestures’, i.e. gestures of happiness, satisfaction. If we make ‘gestures’ a verb (as in ‘[she] gestures’), then two more readings appear: (2) ‘gestures contént’, where the adjective ‘contént’ stands in for ‘contentment’ or ‘contently’, or else (3) we make ‘cóntent’ (as in relatable content – subject matter) its object, and the subject (the thing doing the gesturing) would be ‘turning’ in the previous line. The other possible reading is that (4) ‘gestures’ goes back to being a noun but this time ‘contént’ is a verb, with another word (probably ‘themselves’) missing. To unspool:
gestures contént = happy gestures;
gestures contént[ly] = gestures happily;
turning … gestures cóntent = the turning of a body gestures (towards) subject matter / a text;
gestures contént [themselves] = gestures make do with
In readings (1) and (2), the phrase would imply the existence ‘gestures of contentment’; in (3), the gesture of turning indicates, or brings about, ‘cóntent’, while in (4) contentment has to be mustered up by the gestures, reversing cause and effect. Each possibility exists as a miniature counter-narrative, which you can turn on and off by flicking the switch of grammar, or maybe a more appropriate metaphor would be seeing either the duck or the rabbit in the famous illusion: once you’ve ‘seen’ both, you can switch back and forth at will. But any time we try to stuff the components of the sentence into grammar and the lines and stanzas of the sonnet into a form we can explain or paraphrase, the ‘content’ changes – ‘turning’ the words around creates new content, and that action (gesture) of turning on our part brings it into being. Try to read the next lines poem with any one of these readings in mind, and there are knock-on effects across several lines up and down the page, as other ambiguous words and phrases change their meanings and relationships to accommodate it.
[Image description: a drawing that can be interpreted as a duck’s head, with bill pointing left, or a rabbit’s head, with ears pointing left.]
Some parts of the poem are even more resistant to the attempt to deform them into ‘sense’, and so they are where our attention to the poem is stickiest. The hardest word to make work as a noun is ‘leans’, so the way to deal with it is to rearrange the line and make it into a verb, but the fact that it follows the most syntactically ambiguous line of all, ‘us gestures content’, puts additional emphasis on its grammar, and so to make any kind of non-perverted sense we would have to accept that something is either out of order or missing. This is further highlighted by a spatial strategy I call the step-down: when a line ends and the next one begins at almost the same distance from the left margin. ‘gestures content’, however we may read it, steps down to ‘in close, leans’; the transition puts them closer together on the page than they would be if new line was begun at the left margin, forcing us to confront the relationship between the two phrases even as we are presented with a fault line between them. The next line, however, does return to the left margin, and here as elsewhere this encourages a continuous reading across the line break (compare this with the line-broken phrases Alsadir and Nguyen place between lacunae). This kind of break is the inverse of the step-down relationship; paradoxically, the fact that the end of one line and the beginning of the next are as far apart as possible means that we read across them more easily, like an elastic band snapping back. It also creates a sub-stanza within the stanza, as if the indentation of the previous line were to signal the start of a paragraph, as in prose, an effect especially prominent in the final lines of this poem; the indented ‘kisses balmy’ introduces a four-line concluding unit, a mini-paragraph with a flush left margin where a tender moment is briefly held ‘in care’.
I’m not suggesting that to read these poems properly we need to explicate every possible parsing of every line the way we have here with ‘gestures content’ – the moments and moods they create are much more important, but I do think it is worth talking about how they are created. One the many things I enjoy about these poems, and others that really get me buzzing, is the way they offer words to be turned over in my mind without having to pin them down, and I have a strong, almost mystical sense of the tonoi, of poetic language as threads of continuous, resonant material, and part of this feeling is a desire to pass on of reflect the experience. The critical practice I’m trying to develop in these letters is one that can do that without the tedious academicism that requires me to prove my own knowledge. I based parts of this letter on a reading of this poem I did in an article that was repeatedly rejected for publication because it didn’t sufficiently take the history of the sonnet form into account. I learned to write more acceptable articles, but I do think that as they became more acceptable to the peer review process it made me a worse reader of poetry, and having failed to become an academic has given me the space to nurture the more important critical skills, like joy, confusion, boredom, and love. There are disadvantages too – I write this with my eye on the clock as I’m about to have to go and answer phones for my day job – but I think I’ve gained more than I’ve lost, because I finally feel like I’m starting to see how I can talk about the poems that have nourished me in the way they deserve.