Gary
Barwin
INTRODUCTION
This past November, I performed at the International Dub Poetry Festival in Hamilton. Much of the discussion at the festival focussed on how standard English marginalizes people of colour. Most of the participants felt that standard English had no place for them. “It’s not my language,” they said. My immediate reaction was that it wasn’t my language either. Yes, I’d learned to use the language of the dominant culture, but it doesn’t speak for me. It is predicated on a set of assumptions, on a world view, on a paradigm of identity that I don’t share. But yet, like radio waves, cell phone signals, or background radiation, this language beams through me whether I like it or not. Mild. Oh more than just mild. “You’re soaking in it.” And indeed, dear sir or madam, I frequently use it in official, institutional, employment, and formal situations. I am sometimes complicit out of necessity, convenience, or laziness.
And what exactly is this language? How how does it ‘write’ us? What does it expect of us? And what is our role, by gum? What are we to do? How are we to retain an active part in language, in the construction of reality? How are we to move forward, to find ourselves in its ubiqtionary? How are we to write and read, to think and speak of the world.
Tonight I have the great pleasure of speaking about Rachel Zolf’s fantastic poetry texts Human Resources and Shoot and Weep which engage these issues in powerful, vital, and incisive ways.
I should say that the views expressed here are the views of the author only and in no way reflect.
I’m resistant to simplifying or paraphrasing the complex that is a work of art for, to cite Human Resources, “there’s no moment of grace, hidden coherence or cordial for your soul.” (76) It’s a bit like boiling an entire cow down into one of those little cubes of beef stock, but I trust that you will be able to reconstitute my desiccated prose back into the living, breathing, multifaced reality of Zolf’s texts. As HR says, “Rather than kill the gift of art, consciousness can make it more…you thrill with fright plentiful.” (76)
Since Influency is a course which explores specific practises of reading texts, I would like this discussion to follow somewhat my process of developing an understanding of Human Resources, rather than beginning with the presentation of my final conclusions.
The first thing that I do on encountering a text is to try to orient myself. I attempt to establish what is in the text, what is the manner of its operation, and try to figure out where or how I should look for an aesthetic ‘payoff.’
So first a basic description of HR:
LOCUTION,
LOCUTION, LOCUTION
It is immediately apparent that Human Resources is comprised of a polyphony of texts drawn from a variety of language contexts. These include
Woven into these locutions are numbers derived from a rating in a word use frequency list, WordCount, and a complimentary list of the frequency of words searched, called QueryCount. In HR, words are sometimes superscripted with their WordCount or QueryCount or replaced by their numerical representation entirely. Indeed there are two pages (poems?) that are entirely numerical. Pages 89 and 90 are transcriptions into WordCount values of pages 4 and 5. These reveal something about the organization fo the text. The words “meaning nuclear increasing” are adjacent WordCounts – value 1267, 1268, and 1269.
A seventh type of text is derived from strings of WordCount or QueryCount words presented in order. For example, the phrase ‘vagina America.’
Further, there are words that have a ‘G’ number associated with them. These numbers are derived from the online “Gematria of Nothing” numerology website which uses as its inspiration the Jewish mystical (Kabbalistic) numerological practice of Gematria. I believe that some unmarked text in HR was derived by using this site, though I didn’t test this theory. I felt it best to wait until it was a full moon and I had a chicken to sacrifice.
There’s an obvious link between the WordCount and QueryCount values and the idea of numerological correspondences in the Gematria.
Finally, there are poems in a distinct style that were written with the aid of an algorithmic writing machine. (We know this from the Notes section at the back of the book.)
Now a word about the organization of the text. The book is divided into several distinct kind of structures, which increasingly weave in the various kinds of texts listed above. Each ‘section’ begins with a copywriting instructional text. For example, How to Write a Title, or How to Write for the Internet. Most of the texts on the left hand page combine elements from all types of text in prose-like blocks. The right hand pages are divided into three or four sentence-like sections or else present the machine-generated poems which look like traditional free verse poems with line breaks.
We’ll discuss each of the various kinds of writing and the thematic strands later. First, I’d like to discuss something of how the book reads on a sentence level and its use of humour.
HUMOUR
Human Resources is a profoundly funny and enjoyable book. I think of the dry irony of some of Beckett’s loquacious narrators, but also some kind of Ginsberg Beat poetry pile-on of word strings, its “excremental. . . provident hyperdocument assault.”(22) HR revels in virtuoso juxtapositions, word play, and sudden shifts. So, from p.28, “But used up buttplug YWVH G-spot glory store of what to share….”
Even though the contemporary consumer is assaulted by language everywhere, HR finds energy in language use and the dexterity of its own cross references. It delights in a Joycean way (p.30: “okay okay she’s come back to her sentences.”) except here we’re not hearing multiple Irish language uses, or a transhistorical multilingual Finnegan tumult, but the bit ridden byte driven language of the 21st century. “Or poetry butterfly 1391 from ambiguous octopus bacon.” And I definitely want to get me a pair of those polypeptide pants which show up in more than one place in the book. I wonder if I’d be allowed to wear them to work?
Zolf’s juxtapositions and irony are subversive. “How to make a name:”(53) begins with a straightforward list of instructions about how to create a ‘name’ for your customers. This appears to be a typical copywriting lesson, but then instruction 8, “Add a suffix,” morphs into the related but atypical and drastic instruction 9: “Truncate – low-hanging fruit, penectomy, nothingness” (Penectomy is, in case you didn’t know, the surgical removal of all or part of the penis. I guess that’s like removing a suffix.) Instruction 10 is “Rank your names” which echoes the WordCount stream that has been flowing through the text.
Part of the pleasure of the text is Zolf’s own piquant, sly, ironic quotation of the language of her world, even when debased. “I ass for jesus on dog you pussy he hate be bush with john as me by hello at vagina have America are bitch this cat not dick.” (48)
In a blogpost on HR, K. Silem Mohammed cites Wordsworth’s notion of using “a selection of language really used by men.” These WordCount derived texts are, I guess, quantifiably, a selection of language really used by men (and women.)
Very often, the seeming nonsense word and phrase stew of juxtaposition in HR, turn out to refer to the matter at hand. For example, reading “suckle a dangerous thoughtform Sepher Yetzirah” (p56) makes you think that that is indeed what the text is doing here, nuturing a dangerous form of thought.
This is the opposite of the ironic use of ostensibly plain language. For example, the opening page (4):
The job is to write in ‘plain language.’ No adjectives, adornment or surfeit of meaning nuclear increasing(W1269). All excess excised save the discrete pithy moment. Sonnet’s rising eight lines, sublime orgasmic turn, dying six: perfect expenditure. Brisk stride along the green green grounds, sudden dip, ha-ha!
It begins straightforwardly enough. “The job is to write in ‘plain language.’” but then we get ‘meaning nuclear increasing(W1269). Which isn’t plain at all. And then we’re into the poetic language about the sonnet, which is the iconic antithesis of plain language. The poem concludes with the “Brisk stride along the green green grounds dip, ha-ha!” an irrational leap into exhilaration, a rising above the plain.
In fact much of what is happening in HR is in the structure and manner of operations of the language. Sometimes the sentences are transcriptions of informational noise that enters the language stream. Here’s an example from p.65:
“Look through the mirror, it’s the Information Age, where every surface is 1793 brilliant urine requests scum wolf and nothing shines.”(65)
Rewritten, the core of the sentence is “Look into the mirror, it’s the information Age, where every surface is brilliant and nothing shines.” The actual sentence begins with what appears to be a straightforward idiom, “Look through the mirror.” But the idiom is actually, “Look into the mirror.” More noise in the line occurs with the WordCount number 1793 which stands for G. (‘G Brilliant’ is a rating for brilliance in diamond cutting.) Then some noisy slippage as the words “urine requests scum wolf” are interposed into the word stream, decidedly unbrilliant and unshiny words.
This intrusion of a opposite meaning reminds me of a Grade 7 student I once had who had Tourette’s Syndrome who, when asked if he did something wrong, would say “No –(yes!) – No – (Yes)!” Language wasn’t able to represent what this poor guy wanted it to. It doesn’t always do it for the rest of us either.
Zolf critiques the assumption that the structure of standard language assumes a privileged role in the representation of reality and human experience. “The tyranny of subject-verb-predicate is neither emotional nor balanced like belly or finger or the accident that no longer looks like symptom.”(54) This very statement is problematized by its own structure. The sentence wobblingly maintains a standard grammar but is destabilized by its content.
*
Zolf finds music in the pitter patter lexical drumming of the most common English words especially when combined with the rim shot syncopations of the WordCount values thrown in: “the w1 of w2 and to a in that it is was I for on w13 you he be with as by at have are this not but had his they from she which or we an there…” (34) The list pulls out of its rhythmic nosedive at WordCount100, only to bank up to ‘RSP’s and then, slyly, to a discussion of the Kabbalistic idea that each letter of God’s speech, the Sefirot, represents one of the different creative forces which made the known universe.
We can make the inference that each word of our common speech, our own 21st century sefirot, as represented in the WordCount list, is a creative force which makes our own known universe.
*
Rachel Zolf has given many articulate and insightful explanations about her work in interviews. It’s kind of intimidating, to be honest. I’ll append a list of some sources to the email version of this paper. I’d like to begin this section of my talk with a quote from an interview for Matrix magazine which I think provides a good starting place for the discussion.
In many ways I've jumped off from Anne Carson's question around Paul Celan's poetry: "What is lost when words are wasted and where is the human store to which such goods are gathered in?" I shift this notion to a very literal place where the subject of the book, a poet, wastes words writing corporate copy (mostly employee communications, hence the title) for pay and turns into a writing machine in the process. This body without organs is (semi) recuperated through ethical confrontations with multiple Others within and without her, while the book machine itself crumbles as it forms. There's a lot of psychoanalytical and general economy stuff on money and excess (shit, mostly), but basically it's about writing and survival and the deals we make along the way.
The interview was conducted before the book was entirely finished, so maybe it’s not fair to quote it, except to say that I think Zolf discovered some other things while finishing the book. I don’t think the book machine crumbles, instead I think that she was able to lead it to into some energized new places, taking the ‘waste’ words and turning into poetry.
This quotation also outlines a series of seeming oppositions that are developed in HR.
On one side is the language of the corporate and the Capitalistic where language is a facilitator of commodity. Here ‘plain language’ is proscriptive and is resistant to the possibility of multiple meanings and reader involvement in the construction of meaning. The writing machine’s circuits and indeed world view are ‘choked.’ (65) Of course the corporate world doesn’t know that its language is a kind of waste. As we will see, Zolf also connects this kind of sullied, compromised language to that of past historical regimes, notably the Nazis.
On the other side of the opposition, is a kind of language which encourages reader involvement, fluidity, and other modes of meaning construction. As it says in HR, “Avant-garde chaos frees the writing machine’s choked circuits.” (65) At the core of HR, is Zolf’s vision of reading and writing, her version of the formation of subject and identity through language. Where is the human store to which wasted words are gathered? Zolf reclaims these words, gathers them up, co-opts them if you will, to create literature.
In the interview, also Zolf establishes the notion of the outsider, the other, who finds herself on the inside. All of us may find ourselves outsiders inside somewhere that doesn’t completely account for who we are. We are strangers in an estranged land.
Actually, we may be professional strangers. As HR says,
the professional stranger makes multiple voices intersect the field and all their words are 34 skew-wise from all directions. Unable to choose one ’I’ or version of the events, modest witness tries to ‘tone it down’ to minimize the ‘piss-off’ factor native to human capital, artful deviation and fractured surfaces. (64)
The professional stranger refuses to choose one single simple identity (‘I’) or single version of the events. The professional stranger resists the monolithic interpretation of ‘plain language,’ its propensity to choose only one version of events, to essentialize identity.
THE JEWISH STRANGER
All through HR, concepts related to Jews and Judiasm appear, after all “Jabes the atheist says Jews can’t help writing about God. Nor can we help writing about being JewishQ709.”(22) In HR, there are terms related to Jewish mysticism (Gematria, Sefir Yetzirah, Ain Soph, etc.) and to anti-Semitism (Shoah, Arbeit Macht Frei, pogram, Goebbels.) Many Jewish writers and theorists are noted, from Primo Levi, Kafka, and Weisel to Celan and Benjamin. All of these references serve to provide the discussion of the language of employment, business, and capital with a larger context, an outsider’s view that is also the insider’s, that is the author’s.
For Zolf is indeed Jewish, and this biographic fact works perfectly: the Jewish outsider finds herself becoming a writing machine, writing the compromised words of the inside. In HR, the Jew becomes emblematic of the ‘other.’ She is the ‘professional stranger,’(64) and “all poets are Jews.” (35)
The construction of a complex identity mediated by history, culture and language can be observed keenly in the case of Jews (‘the people of the book’) and particularly German Jewish writers. In the presumably found language cited in HR, there is an association of Jews with language, writing, and money: “Jews are premature shyster kikes who can’t transcend the marks they’re made of.” (54) In this case, the word ‘marks’ refer to both German currency and writing.
Jews are pejoratively seen in opposition to plain language and direct expression. “The Jew infects money and language by sitting on books – and abstraction.”(66) But it is exactly this relationship to abstraction, to an investigation and belief in the patterns of language to form the world which underlies much Jewish mysticism, philosophical thought, and modern Jewish writing.
The Jewish experience addresses silence and the use of language by the oppressor and its complicity in power structures. Language can be sullied by its abuse: “We wanted to learn the mameloshn but it was too close to 883.”(86) (Mameloshn is Yiddish for mother tongue; 883, is the WordCount value for ‘German’.) Eli Weisel “emerged from 10 years’ silence.” (35) Celan, writing in German after the experience of the Holocaust, was forced to create neologisms thus “clean liberating the signifier from one but not all viral messages.”(86) He had to break his received language in order to be able to use it.
HR creates a relationship between the Jewish writer and the creative interaction with language and text. Indeed as we’re reading this, we’re aware that Zolf, a Jewish writer, is doing just that.
But here’s something that I find fascinating about this book. It makes us question the assumptions that it leads us to. How many of its statements should we take at face value, despite their apparent earnestness and ‘lyric’ or ‘theoretical’ weight? How much of any language event? Take this quotation:
“Perfect dehumanization then nothing…Except the word ‘Jew.’ Say it sixty sixty sixt six ty million million million i’m the million mazda man six million mazda times will not exhaust meaning.” (22)
Does this mean that the meaning of the word ‘Jew’ cannot be exhausted, that there is something essential to it, inviolable, no matter how much it is misused or maligned? Certainly there’s some kind of ‘language pollution’ or intrusion in the stuttering ‘sixty sixty sixt six ty million’ and the conflation of the six million dollar man, the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and ‘mazda.’ Does the word ‘Jew’ retain something essential? Does the notion of Jewish identity?
COPYWRITING, BUSINESS, AND PLAIN SPEECH
If the Jew and the professional stranger are the inside/outsiders on one side of the opposition that Zolf sets up, the bizspeak professional and the Copywriter with her belief in plain speech are on the other side.
The epigraph to HR is a quotation from a Harvard Business Review editorial:
Because literature concerns itself with the ambiguities of the human condition, it stands as a threat to the vitality of the business executive, who must at all times maintain a bias toward action.
The Harvard Business Review argues that business must adopt a simple, monolithic vision of human identity, perhaps an essentializing one, one that can be ‘sold’ to the consumer. And so, the corporate voice in HR tells us, “Trapped in this high-performance culture, let’s suspend all disbelief, ignore the elephants in the room.”(65) In other words, we don’t have time for ambiguity and questions – let’s suspend all disbelief and just plunge ahead, ignoring the roomful of elephantine issues regarding culture, identity, politics, economics, etc.
Zolf, the ostensible lyric subject of HR, works writing corporate copy. She becomes a writing machine. One reads the exhortations about copywriting to be instructions that she has encountered but also as indicative of the ideology behind corporate copy. (Incidentally, in Zolf’s introduction to her reading at the Test series, available online, she notes that her copywriting instructor turned out to be an evangelical Christian. This accounts for HR’s various allusions to fundamentalist Christianity and copywriting. It also makes a neat opposition between liberal Jewish poet / fundamentalist Christian copywriter.)
Copywriting is seen in opposition to the creative engagement of poetry and its understanding of “the ambiguities of the human condition.” So we read that “a communicator must be concerned with unchanging man” (35); that writing should “stick to the surface” (45), that we should “Heed the Clarity Commandment,” and “Avoid award-winning cleverness.” (27) Unlike the multivalent purpose of literature, copywriting should be goal oriented. It should “Take on commodity form” (45) and “Start selling on the first line.”(45)
There is an ideological utility to copywriting. In contrast to poets whose “poetry can’t stock food banks, warm bodies, or stop genocide from affecting my RSP” (74), the copywriting instructor states that “Writers help the economy” and “Writers help the needy.” (81) In fact, we are told that “Orwell says freedom and democracy bloom from plain speech.” (50)
Beneath the notion of ‘transparent’ meaning in clear copywritten language, there is a subtext. There are cultural, social, and moral assumptions embodied and espoused here by the fundamentalist copywriting teacher. The copywritten language of commerce can become compromised and unclean.
THE FILTHY LUCRE OF WORDS AND MONEY
HR makes a connection between waste, filth, money, commodity, excess, feces, words, and art. There is also play with Freudian psychoanalytic theory, particularly as it relates to the anal stage.
Things become sullied, made dirty through their commodification and their participation in the language of commerce:
One of the child’s first Fisher-Price playthings is its feces, transformed into property, gift or weapon, depending on a fluctuating will and viral marketing strategy. (24)
Art, too, through its participation in commerce can be tainted, which is the point of the performance piece cited on p.41 “watching an artist get fucked by a collector for $20,000 U.S.” or
“If shit is the work of art…If I have to keep making new work like food.”(79)
As we have discussed above, words can be compromised by their use and complicity in political and ideological contexts, for example, in the Nazi regime. They can also be compromised by their participation in economic exchanges, or simply put, “Money makes words into alien things.(40) Indeed we read that “There is no writing that is not in economicW383 loveW384 with commodity form.”(70) Language becomes filthy lucre.
Furthermore, words can be wasted (“a poet wastes words writing corporate copy,”(Matrix interview) but they can also be waste. The generation of excess or surplus meaning must also be noted. What is wasted and unrecognized in a term like “Make a pre-emptive strike” or “’Shock and Awe’ as it applies to the new Porsche?”(84) We are surrounded by this “ExcrementalQ34842 provident hyperdocument assault.”(22)
So the question is, what do we do? How can we clean language? How can we gather up its waste? How can we turn this filthy lucre into a lucky flicker that allows us to live in its “beautiful excess”? (74)
We can adopt the engaged, creative, active methods of the other, of the professional stranger, of Jewish writers such as Celan. The language can be re-Jew-venated (sorry!) and we can “wash the surface below sitcom economies.”(77) We can “cleanse words and salvage what is cleansed.”(31) Essentially, we can embrace the “fright plentiful” of language. “Shuffle it like cards and [we] may find another way of bathing language.”(55) We may find a new creative approach to parsing the language machine“ for “Avant-garde chaos frees the writing machine’s choked circuits.” (65)
The way I’ve phrased it sounds like Zolf makes bold unqualified unequivocal declarative statements. She isn’t. These are inferences drawn from the oblique mechanics of the text.
Indeed reading Human Resources requires you to do this. It asks the question, “Does the unreadable drive the reader from consuming to producing?”(74) In a word, yes. We are brought into the text. We, the readers, in order to render the text readable, must actively engage in the production of meaning, just as Zolf has actively engaged in the reading of the texts that surround her.
She has
salvaging out meaning. poetry machine from
outside lesbian. poetry machine over money.(69)
Zolf refuses to be bested by the barrage of language, free-floating assumptions and unhinged culture. Instead, there is a wry and ironic delight, a zestful besting of the materials and the circumstances. By seizing the language that attempts to write her, Zolf is not the written, but the writer. As we ourselves are not the written, but the readers.
SHOOT AND WEEP
I’m only going to speak very briefly about Rachel Zolf’s latest work, Shoot and Weep, which I think follows up on certain issues of Human Resources, notably the construction of reality through language, and the need for active reader engagement in texts. It takes off from the examination of the subject and identify as filtered through culture and personal history in Zolf’s second book Masque, through the examination of language, Capital, identity and our place in society in Human Resources, to an investigation of how we construct our politics and our ideological world.
The chapbook, Shoot and Weep is part of a longer project which will explore the fractious, complex situation that is the Israeli / Palestine conflict.
Like much of HR, it is assembled from a variety of source texts manipulated and shaped into poetic text. The texts come from documentary sources, fragments drawn from places like the Harvard International Review, the NY Times and Islam-Watch.org.
Reading it evoked two other kinds of texts for me. In Jewish prayerbooks, one finds prayers that are constructed from a quilt of quotations and paraphrases from the entire history of Jewish sacred writing, Biblical, Talmudic, and Rabbinic. One finds this structure in Christian sacred music also: texts and melodies are borrowed from a range of sources, sources which are rich in association and are often highly loaded.
The other thing that the text reminded me of was the Oxford English Dictionary, you know the big one with the quotations listing places where the word was first used. I have the sense of Shoot and Weep noting recorded uses of particular words and concepts, except in this case, the word isn’t listed. It didn’t previously exist. It’s a word that needs to be constructed in the reader’s mind.
Shoot and Weep opens with the naming of names, of movements, and military operations. It is quite Biblical in tone. It invokes the simple power of naming, of noticing, of documenting, of calling attention to. Indeed the epigraph to the chapbook asks if we will “feel compelled to learn how to say these names?” It notes the importance of learning how to say the names, of beginning to learn the field of knowledge, of beginning to understand something of the reality of the world we are reading about. And we begin with the language.
Through its use of source text arranged in a highly charged field, in a high poeticized field, Shoot and Weep asks us to begin the process of interrogating our sources of knowledge and our emotional, moral, and ethical reactions. It makes the case, for me, that knowledge is constructed from secondary sources. The sources themselves construct reality, they filter and privilege certain perspectives.
We must investigate sources of knowledge. What exactly are we being told? What do we really know?
Can we trust what we read and thus our own perspective, or is it a construction of reportage / language. Reading these lyrically charged texts, we wonder how does our desire to see things in certain ways, our desire to feel things in a certain way, shape how we see things, and shape what we believe?
Reviews/Interviews:
http://www.chbooks.com/content/?q=rachel_zolf_interviewed_by_matrix
http://www.drunkenboat.com/db8/canadapoetry/zolf/interview.html
http://www.chbooks.com/content/?q=review/xcp_reviews_human_resources
http://lime-tree.blogspot.com/2007/08/rachel-zolf-human-resources.html
Readings:
http://ia310109.us.archive.org/2/items/RachelZolfHumanResources_1/zolf_test_290306.mp3
http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/groups/XCP/XCP_141_Zolf_5-19-07.mp3
(There is a reading available of Shoot and Weep. Margaret sent the link, but I’m unable to find it at the moment! We’ll have to ask her.)
(A more complete list of sources can be found at: http://www.chbooks.com/catalogue/index.php?ISBN=1552451828 in the related info box.