A paper presented at the "short takes on long poems' Symposium, University of Auckland, Old Government House Auckland, New Zealand, 29th March 2012 & again at "Experimental" a symposium at the John Woolley Building, English Department, Sydney University, 7th July 2014
A paper presented at the "short takes on long poems' Symposium, University of Auckland, Old Government House Auckland, New Zealand, 29th March 2012 & again at "Experimental" a symposium at the John Woolley Building, English Department, Sydney University, 7th July 2014
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A paper presented at the "short takes on long poems' Symposium, University of Auckland, Old Government House Auckland, New Zealand, 29th March 2012 & again at "Experimental" a symposium at the John Woolley Building, English Department, Sydney University, 7th July 2014
Copyright:
Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
______________________________________________________________________________________ (The powerpoint thing won't be in-synch with me. It's there as a diversion and to give you a glimpse of the book & parts of this poem while I make my wildly digressive great extrapolations) This is a response to a poem not an anlysis of it ... ___________________________________________________________________________________
This is Kevin Davies on the politics of avant-garde poetry -
"I'm totally agnostic about the ability of unpopular verse to affect change in the political world. I just don't believe it. I don't think for a second, oh, here I am striking a blow against capital. Political change is not made by the choices that we're making in verse. We're doing this so that certain possibilities can exist in the world. So that works of art can exist, temporarily, and they'll certainly bear traces of our political vision because if they don't they're no good." (a)
*start slide show here
I really like the other parts of The Golden Age of Paraphernalia more than 'Duckwalking a Perimeter' because I find them easier to receive. But I decided to look at 'Duckwalking a Perimeter' because I couldn't immediately or easily figure it out. I followed the poem, kind of greedily, as it rapidly and unexpectedly shifted scenes and moods. But it seemed, at times, perplexing in its nano-moments of machismo or hubris - even though they can be read as subversive, undermining or perhaps ironic. 'Ironic or not?' is one of the questions the poem provokes. 'Yes or No' is one answer.
2 Does it make sense? :
*
The typeface on the book's front cover is gravestone type. Open face capital letters are filled in with a kind of golden amber colour like inlaid brass. A couple of headstones peep over the hillock at the bend in the road, plastic flowers are sitting untidily plonked on a grave on the right.
*
Like 'Congested Space' the picture of an overloaded house in the beginning of the book, the myriad scenes and images here roll past, are registered, and pile up, mostly unexamined. I'm accommodating the style and the turns and trails and by the time I get to this penultimate poem my cognitive cells are probably too buffeted, exhausted or overstimulated to make intelligible connections beyond my particular bias and poetic influences. What is comprehended? Like the stack of disused articles leaning against the front wall of the house, and the sign 'Private Road. Keep Out!', the poem seems to read 'Rational Meaning Keep Out!'?
*
The 'Contents' page is confounding. The first section's title, 'Floater', is within single quotation marks within double quotation marks. For the first three sections of the book there are symbols - a vertical line, a bullet dot and 3 a plural hash symbol in the place of conventional page numbers. Bullet-dots are inevitably associated with Power Point, the vertical line is used in maths to denote absolute value and in the UNIX computer system it's called a 'pipe' and is an organisational command marker or cursor.(b) The semiotics of these ciphers take some time to figure out as you approach reading the book. Kevin Davies has set up, before you've read a word of a poem, a kind of anti-book book.
The ciphers appear throughout the book as visual cues, separators and markers and, possibly, connectors. The sections aren't titled - so you just go by the ciphers and page numbers. There are five poems in the book. The page-numbered sections halt the course of the third poem, and go off into long digressions until, in each digressive instance, the poem resumes straight afterwards. (if you follow me).
The duckwalker speaks: 'I began to cut away my unneeded giblets and to tear up my copy of the contract.'
*
Although luck might operate (and, in poetry, it usually does) I think there's nothing really random in this poem. The poem is classically absurd. A parameter of the poem is that although it appears to set them up, it follows no rules of narrative. In fact it flagrantly disregards narrative, and any traditions, new or old, as it critiques them. It leaps out of context, recombines grand tales into a long montage from news articles, from a 4 wodge of utterance, from the mesmerising telereality of a triumphant contemporary telecracy (c) and all the time deploys edgy poetic language in a universal struggle with or against power and its favourite son, war. The syntax, however, is perfect. It reads sensibly, it 'makes sense', even as cutups and wreckage -
'it looked like random litter but it spelled out a message'
Overall, this poem is, in a word, 'disobedient'.
*
That brings Alice Notley to mind - another anarchic, coded writer, though utterly different in style and, most likely, method, from Kevin Davies. She has written the book-length long poem 'Disobedience' . In her essay 'The Poetics of Disobedience'(d) she says - "For a long time I've seen my job as bound up with the necessity of noncompliance with pressures, dictates, atmospheres of, variously, poetic factions, society at large, my own past practices as well." (e)
*
Does 'Duckwalking a Perimeter' 'catch the interrogative'? : Kevin Davies says - You won't often catch me in the interrogative. Enjoy this moment, Sunny Jim. For I am as 5 the cranberries in one's oatmeal, ... & then, in a flash the poem's off to the next proposition or question.
Canadian-ness might apply. Kevin Davies is originally from Vancouver and has lived in the USA for some years. So I'd say that he reads the USA, a super power, even if, economically, a weakened one, from a partially out-of- whack curiosity and experience. For instance, Canada, like Australia, New Zealand and the UK, is still hanging in there as a welfare state. The USA seems not to be. And although the neo-con influence is universal, Canada is yet different enough from the United States to influence a poet's insight. There are many brief notations of US history, bureaucracies and policies appearing like fast, illuminated signs or jolts throughout the poem. Because this is a quick response, not a lengthy appraisal, I'll offer only a couple of samples -
from the poem: 'You have taken all of the fun from statistical analysis with your constant harping upon the feral children of Oregon'
Founded in 1991, 'Children First' is Oregons child advocacy organization committed to improving the lives of vulnerable children and families. Quote: '..it is an entrepreneurial catalyst that brings critical community partners together to get better outcomes for children and families. It is the Commission's vision that all Oregon's children and youth will be safe, healthy, well-educated, employable, and valued contributors to their communities... ' 6 Australians will hear an echo - Prime Minister Bob Hawke in 1987 said "By 1990 no Australian child will be living in poverty". He has publicly regretted saying it. In Oregon, Kevin Davies knows there'll be ferals.
*
The poem's rapidity of cascading alterations might suggest a rhetorician on speed, a jittery anxiety arising from the familiar everyday globalised fuck- ups of dominant ideologies, but its impression or effect is never fleeting. Reading it I can assemble my own kind of semantic coherence.
*
In a segment recounting a context of oppression, of having been trapped, where
A riot of dull hues enhances the game room of our faction. These rare bits of happiness must go unregistered...
& further - Kulaks present an instance that's expressly sardonic.
'Yet,
if one's not mistaken, the kulaks were insufficiently suppressed.' 7
The Kulaks were independent farmers in the Russian Empire emerging from the peasantry to become wealthy following land ownership reform in 1906. The Kulaks were class enemies of the poorer peasants. Vladimir Lenin described them as "bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who fatten on famine."
When Stalin took power in the Soviet Union, he had a policy of collectivisation. But communist policies repeatedly failed, and supply problems became endemic. A scapegoat had to be found. The Kulaks were blamed for recalcitrance and officials violently seized Kulak farms and murdered resistors.
A campaign of deportation was begun. Kulaks were transported to Siberia, which was bad enough. However, many were simply dumped in the middle of nowhere, without food, supplies, or resources of any kind. Millions of Kulaks died. My sneaky, overt political facts : In July 2012 the U.S. government wanted to introduce various agricultural reforms -small ones like requiring commercial drivers licenses for all farm equipment operators, like tractor drivers. They were opposed with the rallying cry 'We're all Kulaks now'. In September Barack Obama was compared to Josef Stalin by the head of Americans-for-Tax-Reform who suggested Obama planned mass political repression in his government's efforts to tax the rich. He tweeted - Obamas new strategy to divide America: Get the Kulaks." 'Yet, 8
if one's not mistaken, the kulaks were insufficiently suppressed.' *
A perimeter - a boundary edge to be guarded, stealthily tiptoed around or simply a rim like a horizon - a path or line around what? Whatever, Kevin Davies' poem duckwalks it. Duckwalking deflates and displaces heroism and is also a very funny way for a human being to ambulate and especially funny if you're a warden or sentinel on the perimeter.
Here, then, in the hubristic enclosure : 'When it comes time to measure cocks however they are yes missing! A general hunts ordered, dogs and horses, great leaps over hedges. Disaffected German mercenaries form the bulk of the forward troops.'
The perimeter of capitalism, militarism, communism, boys-own machismo, blokey masculinity, totalitarianism - all subverted by duckwalking.
I don't think though that the poem is overtly or intentionally "political" in the sense of a jejune, straightforward ideal of seeking, via poetry, to effect change or to protest against political power. I've quoted Kevin Davies saying that that's not what he does.
*
9 Slim Pickens, the actor who rode the nuclear bomb in Dr Strangelove , was rumoured to not know that the film was satirical. In this poem he is a symbol of individualism -
'Be, an army of one big onion soup mix suddenly available through the agency of World Bank-sponsored microloans. Slim Pickens ruthless climb to the middle of the character- actor heap the bizarre codicils of his will.'
I willingly follow this digression :
After Slim Pickens died in 1990, a document was found in a small diamond- studded box bearing the signature 'SP' in his handwriting. It reads in part:
"Gosh darnit, this here's a great day! It ain't every day that I get a hankerin' to fetch a crayon and write me a story. But when I does, I does. I set a spell with Old Henry last week and spun a few yarns. Old Henry is my bosom buddy from long years ago. Now me and Old Henry get to talkin 'bout politics and we argue almost clean thru till the moon shines about them Demmycrats. When I die I'm fixin to leave all my bank accounts to the liberal Republicans so's they can get a feller elected president who is at least a little smarter than me and Henry.
' the bizarre codicils of his will.'
10 *
The poem's digressions prompt a simultaneity of digressions as I read it. Or, in other words, this is what I think about as I make my own digressions -
2007 - this poem is pre-Obama. There had already been six years of drones but also plenty of on-the-ground weapon, humvee and tank combat. Fifteen- plus technology war years - laser guided bombs and cruiser missiles - smart bombs - obedient bombs. In the Gulf War and in Iraq.
Drones - Nikola Tesla, the Serbian-American inventor and electrical engineer, described a fleet of unmanned aerial combat vehicles as early as 1915. Incredible - like science fiction. Now, a man in an everyday khaki army uniform, not camouflage combat fatigues, drives from home to work to direct unmanned aerial vehicles - drones - to undertake surveillance and, possibly, to kill before his lunch break. Interviewed on tv, he says "I can go home at night to my wife and kids, where I play the role of happy loving father". He's a playstation fighter pilot. Training in drone strike at a desktop is for a mere nine hours. "...the use of predator drones were much lauded coups for Obama. ... a President who received the Nobel Peace Prize during the first year of his presidency." (g) For eight years, the USA refused to discuss drone strikes on Pakistan. Now, the secret that we knew about anyway, is officially out of the bag. For instance, US drones targeted Pakistani rescuers responding to strike sites and then, the mourners at subsequent funerals. 11
When the great heroic mythological warrior Hector appears in the poem the duckwalker is not threatened : 'Get your hands up Hector, I aint foolin!'
*
Are there enough jokes in 'Duckwalking a Perimeter'? :
Yes, the entire poem is 'grimly hilarious' and has many dark, bleak jokes -
'Fill in this space with whatever occurs to you under torture'
'They call this art? I came here to see faltering players killed in the midst of their indecision, not hear random explanations by retired fat guys drunk on power and vodka.'
'A stylized, hypnotic performance of the data is all we ever were, right?'
*
12
To stretch an application, Kevin Davies' poetry can be read as a situationist dtournement. Dtournement creates anti-statements. It is the fluid language of anti-ideology. Dtournement upends the game, turns the tables. It's a device that restores subversive qualities to past critical judgements that have congealed into repectable truths. Needless to say, many of the lines in Kevin Davies' poems are plagiarised. Or, rather, they are dtourned.
And in my deviations or digressions - Dr Strangelove, drones, Barack Obama, the Australia-US Joint Defence Facility, Pine Gap's, role in US drone strikes - I am, in a way, 'dtourning' Kevin Davies' poem.
* 'The Golden Age of Paraphernalia' is a cogent, critical report on the cultural dystopia of this technologically modified and reappropriated world. The book has no blurb, no platitudinous praising endorsements. Everything is open to the reader to determine. 'Duckwalking a perimeter' is a consolidation of the delinquent disposition of the entire poem. * "I'm totally agnostic about the ability of unpopular verse to affect change in the political world. I just don't believe it. I don't think for a second, oh, here I am striking a blow against capital. Political change is not made by the choices that we're making in verse. We're doing this so that certain possibilities can exist in the world. So that works of art can exist, temporarily, and they'll certainly bear traces of our political vision because if they don't they're no good." 13 Notes: a. Kevin Davies quoted by US critic and academic, the real Steve Evans in The Disobedient Poetics of Determinate Negation, Poetry Project Newsletter, 2004
b. a vertical line is a 'pipe' in Unix sytems - Joshua Clover - Autumn of the System: Poetry and Finance Capital - paper for Modern Languages Association, San Francisco, 28 Dec. 2008 Tim Wright - a conversation in Alexandria, Sydney, 16th February 2012
c. telecracy - 'the unprecedented victory of the champion of telecracy over representative democracy's man, the triumph of audience ratings over universal suffrage.' Paul Virilio - Ground Zero, London New York;Verso, 2002 (page 30)
d. Alice Notley - paper written for a conference on Contemporary American and English Poetics, held at King's College London, Centre for American Studies, on February 28, 1998
e. The real Steve Evans has also identified disobedience in Kevin Davies' poetry in The Disobedient Poetics of Determinate Negation, Poetry Project Newsletter, 2004
f. At the time of his death in 1991, Slim Pickens owned the following property: Two ranches in East Texas Two savings accounts containing $20,000 each A plow and a mule 1600 shares of Texaco Stock
a further codicil : "My no good son Charles is a sap suckin son of a swine and I ain't leavin' him a dadgum thing. My daughter, the one at Harvard (wherever the hell that is), is to get the rest of my real estate including the ranch in East Texas. My other daughter is to get $600 to buy herself some fair to midlin whiskey so she will learn not to be so uptight at social occasions. Loosen up, Ethel, baby and tie one on!"
g. MUFTAH web site, www.muftah.org
h. P.W. Singer, Wired for War, New York; Penguin Books, 2010
n.b. Dtournement by Debord & Wolman: http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/detourn.htm (thanks, in part, to McKenzie Wark's book The Beach Beneath the Street and to Guy Debord, bien sur.)