(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
Jordan Scott:
blishment (Coach House 2008), decomp (Coach House 2013) and Forced Drift (ongoing project)
Canadian poet Jordan Scott's writing is about voices losing control, and about poetry trying to find themselves i this event. IN blishment (2008) he started from his own stuttering; in decomp (2013), which was a collaborative project with Stephen Collins, he let Origin of species by Charles Darwin exposed to the degradation of five different Canadian ecosystems, and in the currently unpublished project Forced Operation he is dealing with the questioning situation.
Geology and Anatomy. «blishment is a text written to be as difficult as possible for me to read, "he writes in a note to the book. This premise culminates in poems relatively typical of Canadian experimental poetry over the past 40 years: phonetic assonance and broken syntax predominate. Even for readers who do not originate, these poems are difficult to read aloud – you have to activate both body and attention to an unusual degree. In addition, Scott utilizes another well-known Canadian method: letting various academic discourses slip into one another, in blishments case of geology and anatomy. For example, it might sound like this:
Buccal slinks into hoodoo. The dawn clots over. Bruise syllabic upon upturned halibut, welded to sky curve. We watch, in a book toss, the yap blip, and in careful, clasp to each blurt, clug clug the sherbet angels of wovel's echolalia. Trash lip, lisp smudge: July, muscus, raspberry. Inside, a toothful of jujube purls comma. We'll all meet on the tongue. We'll all meet in the tongue. Pickaxe plosive bloat and say: b is for by mouth's slight erosion.
Semantic implosion. Much of the theory behind sound poetry, from Dadaism to the nestor in Canadian experimental poetry, Steve McCaffery, is simply to let the effects explode and be liberated by letting semantic communication implode. It is difficult today to believe that sound poetry should have such a liberating power. "Bablinga" is ubiquitous, and among the genre's foremost performers, such as Christian Bök, the performances have ended up as a kind of showmanship: impressive performances, good entertainment and occasionally beautiful poetry (the latter is not meant to be ironic). However, I seem to look in blishments version of the Canadian synthesis of sound poetry and pataphysics a more acute event than in many of Scott's Canadian colleagues; it is more at stake than poetry itself, simply because the experience of using language socially seems to govern aesthetics.
Smoothing poetics. decomp has an equally simple, albeit strenuous, starting point as blishment: Scott and Stephen Collins placed five copies of Darwin's Origin of species in various ecosystems in the wilderness of British Columbia, and then sought out the books again the following year. The work has resulted in a very complex textual material whose origin is not easy to determine. On the one hand, we find descriptions of the placement of the books and the places that were chosen, the authors' reflections on the project, and the comments of friends and fellow travelers. On the other hand, poems that under the title «The Readable» reproduce pieces of it after one year only partially readable Origin of species, side by side with texts where the authors have used words and phrases from the torn and rotting pages to write new, poetic texts. Scott and Collins refer to the result as a form of smear poetry, a way to get nature talking by letting it break down and transform an already existing text. In the section "Englishman Spruce / Subalpine Fir Zone – Kootenay Lake" reads one of the "readable" fragments from Origin of species such:
the same // rocks // that // one // species // have // long // from
While the accompanying text, "gloss", reads as follows:
Something beyond solidified or pertrified, beyond what glints of sunlight graze such textual apparitions. We hope that it should happen this way, as vague and as indeterminate, 'the heart of depht without appearance' (Blanchot). But here we speak of another formation (not simply the how), but of language not detached from its conditions, separated from its moments of wandering like empty power. No, here we hope to speak of the outlet of weather, the reservoir of the day. And us, with our books, waiting at the edge in a kind of explicatory light, wondering what method mulch is, what understanding ensoilment. What is forbidden returned as litter. Our leaving in the ground, for the ground.
«Normal speech». Scott's work with speech impairments in recent years has been about interrogation techniques. In the lecture «The State of Talk, or Forced Operation"Notes Towards Speech Disfluences and State Interrogation Procedures" at the North of Intention conference in 2011, Scott tells how interrogation manuals and logs from Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib and the Vancouver police station, where Scott lives, show how speech problems are pushed forward. When the person being interrogated begins to stutter, it is seen as an expression that he or she opens up and confesses, and reveals truths that are either difficult to express, or that are tried to be kept hidden. At the same time, this uncontrolled speech is worth nothing if it does not also end in, or can be translated into, "normal speech" and included in a narrative that suits what the authorized power itself uses. Scott reproduces, among other things, a log from Abu Ghraib – an interrogation of an interrogator after a prisoner died under torture. It is told how the prisoner became more and more pressured and in the end just screamed. The interrogator is repeatedly asked if the prisoner "spoke normally" at any time during the torture, meaning whether he expressed something that could be written down and included in an authorized "truth".
For a poetry reader, it is of course tempting to think of poetry as a language that "stems", as a resistance to the authorized narrative.
"Normal speech" in this context is about submitting to both a power and a "valid" narrative, and about giving in and talking – in the hope of not having to talk. For a poetry reader, it is of course tempting to think of poetry as a language that "stems", as a resistance to the authorized narrative. But Scott is probably more interested in the dynamics of this acute language policy – in being i it rather than creating some outside. As he rightly points out towards the end of the lecture, stuttering is an expected part of the interrogation, as a step towards the confession and the "truth".
This project, which bears the title Forced Operation, is not currently available in book form; only a short excerpt is available. However, during the Oslo Poetry Festival in October, we were presented with some of the research material. In April, Scott spent a week at Guantánamo, after applying for permission on the grounds "that as a poet he wanted to record 'ambient sound' in the area." At the festival, he talked about the visit, and played some of the audio files.
Ethics. The absolute most acute thing in what Scott said, both from the stage and in conversations, was about ethics. How should he, as a poet, be able to give a representation of a place created so that the speech of those who are trapped there can only reach out conveyed by the prison guards? Scott and the journalists who visited Guantánamo with him had no contact with the prisoners at all. They were only allowed to look at them through a mirrored glass window, without the prisoners themselves being aware of it. All information about life on the spot came from the American prison guards. Scott has not found an answer, maybe there is not. So far, we have the audio files, as a kind of witness to both the prisoners' forced silence and the shortcomings of poetry. One of them, where we hear, among other things, the air-conditioning system (cooling down the prisoners is a frequently used method of torture), can be heard on Ny Tid's website.
