I am so pleased to offer you a selection of work by UK poet
Marianne Morris. In addition to a selection of poems, Morris has graciously shared with us a prose piece contextualizing the poems and their relation to performance and politics via live address and human interaction. Enjoy!
Marianne Morris started Bad Press in 2003, which has since published over ten, mostly female, authors, in the UK and North America. She has written over ten chapbooks; her first full collection,
The On All Said Things Moratorium, was published in 2013 by Enitharmon Press. She holds a PhD in performance writing from University College Falmouth, and a BA in English from Cambridge University; St. John’s College awarded her the Harper-Wood Studentship for Creative Writing in 2008. She is currently studying Oriental Medicine and herbalism in California.
MOTHER
POEMS
by
Marianne Morris
The sequence called ‘Mother
Poems’ is the result of a long process of my efforts to develop a poetry of
live address: it evolved out of editing original drafts of a poem variously
called ‘The Great Sublimation’, ‘The Unsublimation’, and ‘Greek With Me’. These
titles evolved in the aftermath and anticipation of ten separate public
readings over two years.[1]
The act of public reading provided assistance in the composition
and editing of these poems because it focused my attention on the idea that the
poems were being heard, and therefore belonging in the realm of human
interactions. After reading an early draft in New York, for example, I
significantly cut a long section referring to Hegel’s writings, hearing or
understanding in their live echo as I read, a disconnection between the obscure
references and the audience’s immediate ability to grasp their origins.
‘The Great Sublimation’, the first in the series, relies on a
framework of references to Ancient Greece to maintain its focus, but is also
marked by the extensive use of quotations from Hannah Arendt, G.W.F. Hegel,
John Keats, Jacques Lacan, J.H. Prynne, and Harvey Yunis. This focus on quoted
material links back to Plato’s conception of writing as unable to articulate
its needs for itself, ‘always
need[ing] its father to help it’, and its implied need for legitimacy.[2] Reference has also been associated with male tendencies in
conversational speech, which ‘men tend to orientate to its referential
function’:
Men’s reasons for talking often
focus on the content of the talk or its outcome, rather than on how it affects
the feelings of others. It is women who rather emphasise this aspect of talk.[3]
I employed reference material in ‘Mother Poems’ in order to subject
it to poetic language. I cut the quotes up, changed them, and added my own
words. They are intended to function in these poems more as raw materials than
as indicators of outside knowledge. In addition to the quotes already
mentioned, in the final poem, I also included fragments of the initial notes
that I made during composition. The earliest drafts of ‘The Great Sublimation’
were heavily footnoted, and part of the editing process involved amalgamating
the text of the poem with the text of these notes. This helped to resolve the conflicts
implied by the two different registers of discourse, and also to contain and
streamline the poem, reasoning that the presence of footnotes would not only
interrupt the flow of poetic discourse, but also to imply that there was
thinking about the poem’s content that needed to be done separately in order
for it to convey its full meaning.
The word feminism has a medical root. In 1875,
it denoted ‘[t]he appearance of female secondary sexual characteristics in a
male individual; feminization’ (OED). This root is particularly interesting with
regard to the semi-permeable boundaries of polis
and oikos, because in the early
medical sense, feminisation was the appearance of female characteristics in
places where they were not expected. In accordance with a feminist poetics,
then, I wanted to write a poem through the idea of the fixed, male, despotic
space of polis being confronted by
some of the female qualities of oikos
– permission, fulfillment, intimacy. I wanted to see what would happen if
Ancient Greek polis had a mother.
I came to this conclusion through various
public readings of drafts of poems that ended up as ‘Mother Poems’. I started
off introducing the early drafts at readings by explaining that I had some
grievances with Ancient Greece. In a January 2012 reading in New York, I
described the drafts as the result of my thinking about Ancient Greece and
‘trying to fight with it in my poetry’.[4] This description was a
modification of my earlier attempt to describe the poems in the introduction to
a December 2011 reading in Berkeley, CA. I discussed this earlier introduction
in an interview with the California-based poet, David Brazil:
DB: In your reading in Berkeley in 2011 you said, “Fuck
the ancient Greeks.” Were you thinking of any ancient Greeks in
particular? Would you rather root for the Persians? How about the
modern Greeks? How about petrol bombs against astunomoi, February 2012?
MM: Oh dear, how rude. I am so not punk. I am actually
pretty fond of a number of Ancient Greeks, Plato and Sappho among them. I think
maybe it’s just that the Ancient Greek ideal city-state of polis would benefit
from a mother. I have been working on a poem for a couple of years now that
attempts to address the faulty elitism of polis, the city space which excludes
everyone except the male heads of households, but which nonetheless still
retains important ideas for contemporary thinking about political engagement
(for example, in its conceiving of speaking and acting as equally valuable).
And I’m about to contradict myself, but I also get frustrated when I see so
much Ancient Greek thought sneaking into modern theory—Jacques Rancière I am
looking at you—at least partly because one of Plato’s best ideas in the
Phaedrus is that writing is just a little kid who needs its daddy to hold its
hand because it is immutable and doesn’t know how to speak to anyone, and the
reiteration of Ancient Greek thought in the present time seems like a perfect
metaphor for this hand-holding. I have many imaginings about a poetry of live
address that can and does know how to speak and who to speak to.[5]
These comments are tied to Plato’s description of writing in the Phaedrus, where he tries to discredit it
as being immutable, confined to a rigid space, unable to speak to anyone. The
paragraph that particularly bothered me was this:
The offspring of painting
stand there as if they are alive, but if anyone asks them anything, they remain
most solemnly silent. The same is true of written words. You’d think they were
speaking as if they had some understanding, but if you question anything that
has been said because you want to learn more, it continues to signify just that
very same thing forever. When it has once been written down, every discourse
roams about everywhere, reaching indiscriminately those with understanding no
less than those who have no business with it, and it doesn’t know to whom it
should speak and to whom it should not. And when it is faulted and attacked
unfairly, it always needs its father’s support; alone, it can neither defend
itself nor come to its own support.[6]
This seems to me the crux of the contradictions inherent in the
notion of a ‘political’ writing, or perhaps simply the anachronism of it.
Political space is, etymologically, womanless, and when it translates into
contemporary time, it carries that inherently masculine structure with it, in
patriarchal traditions of thought. Plato prescribes here for writing a
patrilineal doom: it is doomed not only because the written word amounts to a
helpless babbling Echo, but that its only hope is in its being helped along by
its masculine elder, who provides through his very presence a form of
legitimacy. Jacques Rancière’s recycling of this idea serves only to reinforce
this perception of the written word, both as helpless, and requiring the help
of its father. Rancière is speaking generally from ‘the Platonic point of view’
when he paraphrases this idea, without directly acknowledging its source:
By stealing away to wander
aimlessly without knowing who to speak to or who not to speak to, writing
destroys every legitimate foundation for the circulation of words, for the
relationship between the effects of language and the positions of bodies in
shared space.[7]
Rancière recycles the root of the idea and builds on it, crucially
altering the clause about illegitimacy to posit writing itself as the root
destroyer of ‘every legitimate foundation’ for its own circulation. Most
peculiarly, he also brings in ‘the position of bodies in shared space’ to
support his argument: surely bodies in space are the correct setting for reclaiming
the legitimacy of language, where ideas remain possible, unfixed, and subject
to dialogue. Rancière’s manoeuvre here in fact reinforces the anti-political
aspect of the written word that Plato finds so oppressive, first by attempting
to re-posit a stale idea, and secondly by sourcing this idea from the archive
of a fatherly figure, whose very presence ‘protects’ it, and gives it
legitimacy. Its legitimacy comes from the safety of repetition; it is
(literally) unimaginative, and thereby the antithesis of progressive politics.
For Rancière, therefore, it is no surprise that ‘[p]olitics
revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it’ (13) – essentially
prescribing a permanent re-positing of what is already in existence, a
championing of the status quo. His politics consists of the interpretation of
events, sealed in by existing actualities, rather than the imagining of the
future possible, in which the idea of change is rooted.
Politics here is submitted to a reading of itself as relating to
fixed categories of what is visible, what can be quantified, and what does not
change. The comments made in the interview with Brazil quoted above aim to
challenge this notion. What I particularly
like about the exchange is the way that, in re-positing my original aggression
back to me and challenging it through confrontation, the aggression necessarily
deflates and submits to more careful and articulate examination: a somewhat
crude example, perhaps, but therefore perhaps a striking metaphor about the importance
of poetry’s having an audience, or of being thought of as having an audience.
Not, perhaps, to the extent that a poet is writing for ‘a reader’, but that,
particularly in the context of a poetry that is read in public, it is part of a
social interaction, an exchange, and will encounter people in different
contexts on its way. I do not mean to invoke the category of ‘the reader’ as
the building blocks of a market, a mutable category exhibiting a particular
taste. This is not ‘the reader’ discussed by Barry and Hampson (paraphrasing
Donald Davie):
the general poetry reader will tolerate a degree of
surface difficulty, but only so long as the subject matter remains essentially
familiar.[8]
Nor is it the reader Don
Paterson describes as seen by ‘the Mainstream’ as ‘equal collaborator in the
creation of the poem’, contrasting this with the reader in Postmodern poetry,
who ‘is alone’.[9] These allusions to the
reader are tied to the idea of poetry as a product, and the idea of the public
as its patrons, who in turn expect a particular kind of service. I have come to
conceive of the idea of an audience in the sense discussed by Nicholas
Bourriaud as ‘relational aesthetics’, which produces
[…] an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm
of human interactions and its social context rather than the assertion of an
independent and private symbolic
space[.][10]
we
the massive majority in our bodies are few
as am
I from my seat upstairs alone being with you
being
with you
The reader, who does
not exist, becomes anyone; it becomes the category of people listening, which
is unfixed and uncertain. It is predicated on the only things that a person can
assume to have in common with any other person, the abstractions that fall under
the watch of the category of compassion, and under the motherly qualities of
care lacked by ancient polis.
IF YR A FEMINISTʼS
YR A
MOTHER
YR YR
A FEMINIST
YR A
MOTHER
Some of
‘Mother Poems’ became a weird pop opera, which I performed in London at POLYply
11 (June 2011) to a backing track of reggaeton and synth voices. Some of it went into the final manuscript for
DSK, a chapbook printed by Tipped
Press in Tokyo in 2012.
I read
the final version of this poem in June 2012 at a reading to mark the launch of
the fourth issue of The Paper Nautilus, a magazine devoted to women’s poetry
and poetry criticism. I read with four other female poets, all my age or
younger than me. In terms of thinking about the relevance of ‘Mother Poems’ to
the current sociopoetic landscape, this reading seemed an exemplary event in
that the other readers were all young women. In addition, each poet was asked
to read the work of another poet in addition to something of their own, which
opened up the reading to new voices and new poetries, broadening the dialogue,
expanding the sphere of knowledge, and posing a generous model for sharing
work.
[1] I first read ‘The Great Sublimation’ in Cambridge, May
6, 2011, and then read subsequent drafts at nine separate poetry readings:
POLYply11 and Intercapillary Places in London (June 2011), Hi Zero in Brighton
(November 2011), a house reading at Woolsey Heights in Berkeley, CA (December
2011), Segue in New York (January 2012), Lyric & Polis in Falmouth,
Cornwall (February 2012), Poets Against Dominque Strauss-Kahn in Cambridge
(March 2012), Stichting Perdu in Amsterdam (March 2012), the Arnolfini Gallery
in Bristol (April 2012), and the Poetry & Revolution conference in London
(May 2012).
[2] Plato
(1973) Phaedrus & Letters VII and
VIII. Translated by W. Hamilton. Middlesex: Penguin, p.56
[3] Holmes,
J. (1995) Women, Men and Politeness.
London: Longman, p.2
[5] Marianne
Morris, Iran Documents (Tennessee:
Trafficker Press, 2012), pp.44-5.
[6] C.D.C. Reeve, Plato on Love: Lysis, Symposium, Phaedrus,
Alcibiades with selections from Republic, Laws. (Cambridge: Hackett
Publishing, 2006), p.275.
[7] Jacques
Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible.
Translated by G. Rockhill, 2006 (2000). London: Continuum, p.13.
[8] Barry, P & R. Hampson. New British Poetries: The Scope of the
Possible. Manchester: MUP, 1993), p.4.
[9] Don Paterson & Simic, C., New British Poetry (Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2004)
p.xxix.
[10] Nicholas
Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics
(Paris: Les presses du reel, 2002), p.14.
