What is the relation between the creative and the critical?
What is the critical force of the creative?
I want to start with a story.
About twenty years ago I had a research student working on recent and contemporary poetry, looking at the work of poets such as Susan Howe, Leslie Scalapino, Fiona Templeton, Carla Harryman, and the multimedia work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. In short, she was writing a thesis about poetry and other texts that worked through disjunction, through parataxis, through fragmentation, and through a rejection of standard syntax. The thesis was concerned with the materiality of writing and engaged with the text as both written and visual. It broke disciplinary boundaries, and it necessarily questioned existing conventions of reading, viewing and writing. And this is where the supervisory relationship hit a crisis. How could I demand coherence, logic, and standard academic writing for the thesis, when everything in the poetry under discussion questioned this form of meaning production? I was sympathetic to this line of argument, but my anxiety, as the thesis supervisor, twenty years ago, was how I would find examiners who would accept a more radical form of writing for a PhD.
A pragmatic decision was made, and the thesis was completed in a form that conformed to standard academic expectations.[i] Fortunately, that experience didn’t seem to put my student off further writing or (I hope) hamper her subsequent work. Although she has published regular academic articles, most of her work has been in the form of practice-based research or practice as research – successfully using text and visual materials across various media and moving from live performance into film.[ii] I will end this story by mentioning just one text-based piece by my former research student, which has a bearing on the main part of what I want to say. This is a piece called ‘Not, a Conceptual Art Poetics’, which appeared in the anthology I’ll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women (Les Figues Press, 2012). The piece begins:
Not the poem as idea as idea but ideas in words as words. Not that the poem does not think that words are not made of materials. Not the dematerialization of the poem but the intermittent re-materialization of the word as object. Not an assumption of language as transparent but an exploration of its densities. Not that what is the matter with poetry matters to art much anyway …. (272)
The editors’ request for a statement of poetics is met with this poetic statement. As the comma after ‘Not’ in the title suggests, this is and is not a piece of conceptual writing. If it is a piece of conceptual writing, it is a piece of conceptual writing that questions conceptual writing. And it performs that critique through poetic devices. There is anaphora – with each sentence beginning with the word ‘Not’ – and there is parataxis (with each sentence striking off at an angle to the previous sentence) in the manner of the ‘new sentence’ of LANGUAGE poetry. There is also the density of the writing – not just the negotiation of those multiple negatives in the second sentence (‘Not that the poem does not think that words are not made of materials’), but also the way repeated words force the reader to slow down and make distinctions: ‘Not the poem as idea as idea but ideas in words as words’. Here the statement embodies its own ideas in its practice of words as words. Consider similarly those slippages around the word ‘matter’. What is ‘the matter with poetry’? Does the poem think? These ideas are all set running in the opening lines of the piece, but there is also another dimension to this work. The piece is a writing through of Sol Lewitt’s ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ involving substitutions and rephrasings of the original. As a result, there is an intertextual relation between the two works that, at some points, is effectively a rejection of LeWitt’s position. LeWitt’s original serves as another context for this writing.
Case Study
More recently I have been working with another research student, Agnieszka Studzińska, who has been developing a form of creative critical writing in response to similar issues. In her case, the particular pressure has come from an engagement with Derridean deconstruction. Hauntology has been particularly important for her recent poetic practice – as evidenced in her new book, Branches of a House (Shearsman, 2022) – and this poetic writing practice has raised questions for the critical writing practice.
I want to start, though, with a piece of work to one side of her doctoral research. The Polish Government declared 2017 ‘The Year of Joseph Conrad’, and I was involved in organising various events in relation to it, including a poetry reading at the Poetry Library. Agnieszka produced ‘Notes Towards a Poem’ in response. This was subsequently included in the special Conrad issue of the online journal Wild Court, ‘Conrad at 160’.
It is interesting to me that Agnieszka gave the work the title ‘Notes Towards a Poem’, suggesting an uncertainty about the genre to which the work belonged. The poem consists of 28 short, numbered, prose sections, and the subtitle points to its dialogue with ‘Heart of Darkness’. The poem begins:
1. The heat is camouflaged in the morning wind. The wind smoothes our faintly tanned flesh. An orchestra of cicadas are paged in a cluster of small olive trees. As we sip our coffee, their punctual opera maps the Aegean air. We listen to the measures of nature, the cyclical accents of a language, unlacing.
2. “And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heart, as if about to go out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men” (Conrad: 2015: 4).
3. And suddenly, the cicadas stop, on cue. The backbone of this landscape eases into its arid skin. I smell the whispered trail of burning as our children nosedive in the swimming pool. Innocence clowning with innocence, and innocence vanishing. And suddenly, somewhere boys and girls their age are stopped, on cue. Taken to the markets and sold like fruit.
As this suggests, the poem alternates quotations from ‘Heart of Darkness’ with descriptions of the contemporary world. Sections 1 and 3 establish the setting: a family holiday in the Aegean. But that third section is already opening onto another aspect of the contemporary moment: migration and child -trafficking. As the poem proceeds the privileged environment of the Aegean holiday is contrasted with events elsewhere in the Mediterranean – in particular, the treatment of migrants attempting to cross from Libya to Europe. As she watches her children playing in the swimming pool, she reads a report about migration:
10. In 2016, more than 180,000 migrants crossed from Libya to Italy. According to the UN, almost 26,000 of these were children, most of them unaccompanied.
When her daughter asks what she is reading, Conrad’s Marlow provides the commentary: ‘I could not tell her. It would have been too dark – too dark altogether’. Inevitably, perhaps, the reading of the novella by the Polish migrant and the report on contemporary migration leads her back to her own history:
11. “There were moments when one’s past came back to one” (Conrad: 2015: 36).
12. A school playground in October. No English on tongue. A spate of syllables on the outskirts of breath. A chalked blackboard with words. Copying. Learning their shape. Foreigner. Word. Disappearance.
Conrad’s critique of European colonialism as exemplified by the King of Belgium’s activities in Africa provides a prompt for thoughts about the current refugee crisis in Africa. These thoughts focus on the reported mistreatment of unaccompanied child refugees, and this in turn prompts memories of her own experience as an immigrant into England. Just as Conrad’s narrative moves between Africa and Europe, Agnieszka’s poem moves between African migrants and European holidaymakers. At the same time, this zone of privilege is not exempt from troubling memories – nor from the climate disaster that enforces migration. Thus, a later section of the poem records ‘the morning after the fire had ransacked the land behind our villa’. Agnieszka uses the fragmented form of this poem to move between her own familial situation and thoughts of the darker contemporary history of the Mediterranean: the boatloads of refugees, the drownings, the trafficking of unaccompanied migrant children. The juxtaposition of these different realms serves to articulate an emotional and ethical response to the plight of refugees. And the use of Conrad serves to provide an historical depth – in relation to the history of European exploitation of Africa – and also more personally in relation to a history of Polish immigration into England.
‘Notes Towards A Poem’, however, is obviously not, primarily, a critical engagement with Conrad’s work, but that implicit dialogue with Conrad provides a model that Agnieszka developed further in her critical writing. Unlike my earlier student, Agnieszka is doing a practice-based PhD, an option not available at RHUL twenty years ago. This means that the student produces a thesis which consists of a critical component and a creative component. For the critical component, Agnieszka is producing what is effectively a phenomenological reading of the work of three American poets: Caroline Forché, Alice Notley, and Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge. However, at an early stage of this research, Agnieszka met Alice Notley and had an email exchange with her. The result was a piece of creative-critical writing, ‘What Alice Told Me’, and the decision was made to insert a similar piece of creative critical writing after each of the critical chapters. Each creative critical piece would take the form of a dialogue with the poet – or, more accurately, a creative engagement with the work of the poet. I want to consider briefly the second of these inter-chapters, ‘What Mei-Mei Tells Me’, because it appears in the poetics section of the Creative Critical website.
‘What Mei-Mei Tells Me: The Search for ‘The Lost Ring”’, to give it its full title, is (as I have suggested) not so much a dialogue with Berssenbrugge, but, more precisely, a critical engagement with Berssenbrugge’s poem ‘The Lost Ring’ in which Agnieszka draws in Lisa Robertson, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Joris, critical work on Berssenbrugge – and her own memories. This critical engagement moves through a succession of short paragraphs, an assemblage of citations and Agnieszka’s own words and thoughts – as in the response to Conrad. The search for the lost ring, which is presented at the start as a search which has no expectation of success, produces an open-ended engagement with Berssenbrugge’s poem. Indeed, Agnieszka uses a quotation from Berssenbrugge that draws on particle physics to introduce the idea that the object of observation is shaped by the observer, the measurer, to deny the possibility of a conclusion. Through a citation from another source we are further encouraged not to expect ‘rational, linear and exclusive reading and explanation’.
The next section of the poem considers the nature of the fragment through quotations from Berssenbrugge and Blanchot and arrives at an identification of the fragment with ‘mobility of identity’. Berssenbrugge’s reflections on her marginalised position as ‘non-white (and half Chinese)’ ends with her conclusion that ‘there’s no set point of view’, which is juxtaposed to Robertson’s statement ‘sometimes “here” has no walls’. This leads to a series of fragments (and citations) in which the ‘embodied processes’ of the senses are juxtaposed to a haunted sense of the impermanence of objects – ‘furniture, wire chairs, glass tables, gauze’. Berssenbrugge’s list of objects becomes more in substantial as it proceeds. In this context, the durability of Berssenbrugge’s jade ring is invoked – a durability that represents ‘ancestry, belonging, home’, and by association Agnieszka thinks of the gold rings her grandmother gave her – and of her own children. But this is an illusory moment of security and continuity. Through another statement by Berssenbrugge, Agnieszka is forced to recognise that ‘Home is porous; the self is porous’, and, picking up another word used by Berssenbrugge, she arrives at a contemplation of ‘vulnerability’.
At this point, Agnieszka offers what initially sounds like standard critical language before it changes into something else:
Each line of Mei Mei’s poem is a fragment, unfinished separations (Blanchot: 1995: 58); each line, like New Mexico skylines, is rooted inside her; each line a vista of intangible beauty, the beauty found in the objects, implicit stories, in the abstract she makes concrete, in the concrete she makes abstract, they persist on account of their incompletion (Blanchot: 1995: 58).
As soon as Blanchot appears, flat description turns to something more poetic – the suggestion of Berssenbrugge’s situatedness through an evocation of the ‘New Mexico skyline’; the linkage of the beauty of that environment to the beauty of her lines; and a catalogue of the components of her poetry – objects, implicit stories, the abstract and the concrete – and the porousness of these last two categories. This, in turn, leads to a description of Agnieszka’s own reading (and re-reading) of the poem, pencil in hand: ‘a complicity of smell and space, wet surfaces, tears’. Thoughts of Pierre Joris’s Nomadic Poetics and her own ‘mobile and roaming’ reading lead eventually to thoughts of her ‘Polish relatives’ and memories of home in Poland:
Wood-smoke, coal, vodka, empty wardrobes, a child-ghost walking through these objects. Those are my wet surfaces, their complicity of smell and space in the margin of my own childhood in another country.
I am not going to follow all the twists and turns of thought in this creative-critical work. I will just note how, through fragmentation, citation, associative logics and personal memories – through evocations of the body, its senses and situatedness – Agnieszka proposes and enacts an academically rigorous creative-critical way of reading poetry very different from the more impersonal, disembodied analytic method I would use.
Covodes
At this point I want to step out from behind these two stories. My own work during the pandemic has been a short critical biography of Joseph Conrad and bringing to completion a huge editorial project on The European Reception of Joseph Conrad.[iii] While neither of these critical projects lacked a certain creative side, I wouldn’t propose either as examples of the creative critical. My other project during lockdown was of a very different nature: a series of 19 covodes – long, fragmented, public-voice poems designed to document the pandemic through the creation of various voices, characters and hints of narratives.[iv] While I would like to think of these as creative, the critical component is not literary critical – except in so far as there is an engagement with the form of the ode. There was much else, however, that these poems found to be critical about.
[i] See Redell Olsen, ‘Scripto-Visualities: Contemporary Women’s Writing and the Visual Arts’, PhD Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2002.
[ii] In 2018, her poetic film-essay ‘Now Circa (1918) was shortlisted for the AHRC Research in Film Award, and she was the winner of the 2020-21 DARE Art Prize. This resulted in a film, a song-cycle, and the book weather, whether radar: plume of the volants (Cambridge: ethical midge / electronic crinolines, 2021).
[iii] Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad (London: Reaktion Books, 2020); Robert Hampson and Véronique Pauly (eds), The Reception of Joseph Conrad in Europe (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
[iv] Robert Hampson, Covodes 1-19 (St Leonards-on-Sea, Artery Editions,2021).