In previous posts I have outlined 2 versions of Brathwaite’s SxVx. The first involves what other authors refer to as “re-mediation,” wherein Brathwaite, using the SxVx style, creates new versions of poems he has previously published. Certain poems have been published and republished this way many times across many books, as well as performed and recorded. I suspect there are the most versions of “Letter Sycorax,” “originally” published in X/Self (1987), and reproduced across his oeuvre in many different versions in many different publications. I refer to this kind of poem as a “first order topological poem,” because it references an “originary” point as the first publication, and then introduces a roving, diffuse set of points relative to this “original.” It also implicitly references a single printed version of the text produced by Brathwaite’s StyleWriter (Sycorax) that is then reproduced in book form by photographing that page, or by making a simulacrum in a separate design software. This reference to the single original page is shared by the second order topological poems discussed below. Another way to say this, in the theoretical language that I’m developing, is that the first order topological poems introduce a transformational point in the mathematical symbolic that emerges in a variety of ways relative to its infrastructural identity, or poetic symbolic being. An example of this kind of SxVx is below. In his larger retrospective critical/autobiographical SxVx works, such as Barbajan Poems and MR, Brathwaite will note where the “original” poem was published. Here, for example, after the quote, KB writes, “[see the ‘DreamSycorax New(s)Letter’ in MiddlePassages (1993)]. (I have inverted the color scheme of these passages to remain consistent with this blog’s aesthetic):
From this, a reader might track down the “original” publication and read the differences between that publication and this one. And many critics have. In this way, as the SxVx develops, Brathwaite’s poetic oeuvre becomes an infrastructural challenge to the reader or critic, where every reading increasingly feels partial, not just because, as in some difficult poetry, you don’t “understand” the poems, but because it explicitly references an externality you may not have access to. This novel form of partiality, an index of the proliferating media environmental of the late 20th century, has the effect of producing a latent, present absence in any reading. An implicit ‘non-knowledge’ emerges in every reading, a kind of indeterminate center-without-center, origin-without-original, or what Fred Moten has called, referencing Andrew Benjamin, anoriginality. On the other hand, there is no guarantee of any sufficient reading even should the tenacious critic track down every version of a given poem. Not only will the critic never truly exhaust “every” version of the poem (doing so necessarily begins to balloon into the vertiginous task of collecting every iteration of every published version in order to track the differences between copies of the same publication), but they will come to realize that this system under transformation, or infrastructuralist poem, includes them, the critic, in it, as the poem will have creepingly become a catalytic supplement to the critic’s life, a potentially fatal supplement that wastes time, drawing the critic ever nearer-death, as they realize, finally, the startling persistence of the poem. The poem, on the one hand, needs the reader, and on the other hand, dispenses with you by using you. We might refer to this as a fundamental lack of poetic sufficiency that has the paradoxical effect of producing a radical excess of existence bordering on the infinite. All poems could be said to accomplish this, but Brathwaite’s poetry accomplishes this uniquely as a spatial configuration that mimes (and is) the disaster of the contemporary present, and the fact of the present as a constant shattering of the stitch between past and future. My insistence on attempting to quote Brathwaite only photographically indexes an impossible to determine (but actual) measurement of time reciprocal to the poetic value I believe this work has. It is the time of my life given over to the poem. And this is precisely the beginning of living.
The poet has undergone a series of terrible disasters. Their cosmos has been disrupted. They have become without any guiding star (dis / astro) or, perhaps worse, have come under the sign of pure negation, where cosmos itself has disappeared. The result of this disaster is that the poet can no longer write, at least in any conventional sense. The poet’s fist of silent stone consigns them to nothing. The world itself becomes nothing.
From that Bermuda’s triangle emerges a new sign of hope, not an EYE, but a VOICE (Legba, Sycorax, KB’s deceased wife, his own poetic oeuvre now turned to stone for chiseling).
While Brathwaite will continue to write poetry, prose, criticism, and history, it will now be done under the sign of this cosmological disruption, a disruption that will be formally thematized in the SxVx, a disruption that will be indexed as an ongoing disaster. That Brathwaite refers to SxVx as a voice, I think, attempts to unify the phonemic and graphemic (and performative, and infrastructural) aspects of language into a morphic, 4-dimensional system that tried to take seriously Einstein’s general theory of relativity as the major cosmological disruption of the 20th century, the flipside of the terrors of genocide, colonialism, and environmental degradation.
If the first order topological poem refers to the poem that has been previously printed, the second order topological poem refers to the poem without any such origin. It is “born-topological” (or infrastructural), so to speak, in that it gives no privilege to any kind of published origin. This is work that is done entirely in the SxVx style, such as Brathwaite’s many publications in journals and magazines like Wasafari and Black Renaissance / Renaissance Noire, and in books, such as DreamStories, or work that refers to a recording where poetic material is inscribed without ever assuming the material formality of a published book, so things like lectures, readings, and interviews, such as conVERSations, Barbajan Poems, and MR, an interview, a lecture, and something like a seminar/course record, respectively.
The most baroque of these publications is probably MR, Brathwaite’s early 2000s massive two-volume publication that both theorizes Magical Realism in his peculiar style, and records, to some degree, a course/seminar he taught at NYU on Magical Realism. The book even includes part of an essay written by one of his students. These two books are fairly extreme magpie-like affairs, including visual imagery, photographs, paintings, diagrams, high stylistic variance, various levels of legibility, type-size, etc. The book is self-consciously incomplete and consistently references a book to come that will finish the many sections marked with astericks that indicate a more complete essay or book on the way. No such book ever materialized, leaving MR incomplete and partial both in the sense meant in reference to the first order topological poems above, but also in a new sense, a sense that I think importantly folds the critic/reader into Brathwaite’s SxVx project that would seek to attempt a new style adequate to the cosmological disruptions of the contemporary world, a world of disasters, yes, but also great possibility. The second-order topological poem, then, is what Brathwaite refers to as an “Open-System,” containing no formal closure, but retaining some invariance between the mathematical symbolic and poetic symbolic (as developed earlier). I.E. it retains a name (MR), but encourages readerly/writerly/critical intervention. I want to argue that this called-for intervention, an interpellating hailing without option, to complete the incomplete quite exceeds the kind of intervention usually associated with 20th century theories of readerly participation. It isn’t enough that a reader “complete the poem in their mind,” or “co-create the poem,” in order to mime constructivist subjectivity. There is no closure to reject. The point is that there is no “co-” here, and that the process of subjectivity devolves into a signification process whereby subjectivity and identity do not not obtain. In this sense, it is a radical call to enter, with Brathwaite and the SxVx, a new cosmology, one, he thinks, that is already underway, of rhizomatic palimpsest, of multiple representation, and of quantum relation, indeterminacy, and opacity.
In Lyn Hejinian’s famous “The Rejection of Closure” she writes, “Writing’s forms are not merely shapes but forces; formal questions are about dynamics—they ask how, where, and why the writing moves, what are the types, directions, number, and velocities of a work’s motion. The material aporia objectifies the poem in the context of ideas and of language itself.” I am arguing that this material aporia can be further radicalized against objectification, as a simple hypostatization of objectification, and the Brathwaite achieves this through the homeomorphic first order and second order topological poems. I hope to make a bridge between Hejnian, Umberto Eco, and Brathwaite, in that each uses “open” and “closed” in specific ways that are related but different. Hejinian closes her essay, reasserting her point that words can never “match” the world, thus open a creative/productive gap in their use,
“Yet the incapacity of language to match the world permits us to distinguish our ideas and ourselves from the world and things in it from each other. The undifferentiated is one mass, the differentiated is multiple. The (unimaginable) complete text, the text that contains everything, would in fact be a closed text. It would be insufferable.
A central activity of poetic language is formal. In being formal, in making form distinct, it opens—makes variousness and multiplicity and possibility articulate and clear. While failing in the attempt to match the world, we discover structure, distinction, the integrity and separateness of things. As Bob Perelman writes:
At the sound of my voice
I spoke and, egged on
By the discrepancy, wrote
The rest out as poetry.(25)
Resting is an egg. Writing can only be as poetry. Discrepancy (discrepant engagement). Speaking to sound of one’s voice is to speak to an internal difference, an internal discrepancy, a threshold of poetry that is never crossed, but is a continuous crossing. That Hejinian closes her essay with an appeal to poetry that ostensibly agrees with her previous statement offers a novel simulacrum of closure. Here, the essay ends only with poetry. In fact, the essay ends with a page number: 25 (or parenthesis, really). But of course the notes follow. The last note offers where the poem begins (p. 11 of Perelman’s “My One Voice” in Primer). We know the poem must be at least 14 pages long. But where does it end? There is only one way to find out.
MR includes many, many more citations and outright appropriations of other author’s work than do works like conVERSations or Barbajan Poems. Interspersed with citations/remediations of his own poetry and what seem to be transcribed lectures from his seminar are long passages from Cecilia Vicuna, Alejo Carpentier, Robert Antoni, and others, all presented in the SxVx style. One of the more extreme examples of this aspect of SxVx opens this post. It is a passage from a Wilson Harris essay on V.S. Naipul with extensive in-line commentary by KB. I have photographed and modified the passage so that it reads in one long block. In MR it is split over the gutter of two pages, a fact present as the cantilevered disruption of the printed page’s straight lines. To read this passage requires unlearning our expectations of reading, and a willingness to enter the style of the text to the extent that it allows us to know (and unknow) the difference between Harris’s essay and KB’s voice. We have to read our reading reading while KB reads. This difference between author, reader, quoted, quotee, poem, book, seminar, critic and conference isn’t so much erased as radically reconfigured toward a sensation of disoriented simultaneity, a palimpsestic cosmology (like the one KB tidalectically sketches in MR, as if writing on water, writing in light) where difference syncretically disseminates along the immanent plane of the poem’s distribution of invariant relation. It is an alien phenomenology, but not one from outer space. It is the alien within our own phenomenology opened by the catalyst of the pervasive and transforming presACTIVITY of cosmological anima. Our very reading of the poem is an alien poetics, and suddenly, out from under us, the rug of reading is pulled from beneath our feet and we stop trying to understand and start interstanding (KB’s word). The death of the author does not just yield the birth of the reader, but knowledge (and non-knowledge) of the poetic symbolic, a machinic super-dense dark matter firing the cylinders of creative memory, an experience we can only have in tandem with the Other that is also Within, where identity does not mean, in fact, where a definition of identity cannot obtain. Literally. At the end of the following excerpt, just as it seems that KB will give the definition of identity according to WH, some kind of completion of the opening clause, “a reallocation of,” the line breaks off, space emerges, and one turns the page to finish the sentence only to find nothing there, because after that break there is only a new chapter. The reallocation, the reader suddenly understands, is of us (*hand turns page*), whether we can write or not.
Reading this, where capacity is a causeway, where enlightenment is [darkness!], where ground of choice is a continuum, where identity is the location/relocation/ reallocation of […] produces a form of difference repeating for however long it will retain and create a metastability that also always threatens its very identity (and any identity at all) by admitting change into the system, and a threat of destruction. The difference is never final, and the reading, impeded by the many signs and symbols disrupting the quote(s), commentary that is also a reading-with, idiosyncratic spellings that cause great leaps (ISSURE of personality) must occur slowly, like water percolating through a sponge or coral reef. It must include (by producing) an expanded phenomenology of reading as we know it. Perhaps not expanded, but cosmologically disrupted. As we get our bearings in a cosmologically disrupted word, where every center is of the disaster, we are “of” what identity conventionally is not. Slowly. At the same time, it can be quick, lightning fast, eyes at the speed of light. Opening to this phenomenology, one realizes they have opened onto an infrastructuralist phenomenology, a distributed consciousness, and thresholds of sentience that are deeply textual, deeply social, and full of confusing and delightful opacities. This aspect of the SxVx, what we might call a third order topological poetics, bends space and time around itself at the moment that moments arise and cease, that is, at the moment when everything was once thought to be susatined. One feels one becoming, just on the threshold of a new order, a new order irrupting in order. A metamorphosis within and without. The reader that undertakes reading the entirety of MR gains new eyes. Eyes that can hear Sycorax’s voice. The critic of such work must make a choice when they attempt to write about it. How do you quote from it? The answer is simple:
You can’t.
