Maggie O'Sullivan and Bob Cobbing:
Poetry as Haptic Allegory
with "a drawing where but not"

Haptic allegory is a literary mode, a class of texts organized around similar strategies, not similar styles. Haptic allegory is a mode that exploits the critical tension between the fugitive utterance, the fleeting performance, the contingent, material inscription and the chronic elisions, the synchronic occlusions of ordinary language in order to speak otherwise than one is spoken through, where to be spoken through is to uncritically accept the world as it is presented ordinarily in language. Poets who create haptic allegories give poetry a specific task, to sound what language ordinarily glosses over, that is, such poetry articulates (sounds out) the depths of what language leaves silent (takes a sounding).

Eric Mottram's indispensable Towards Design in Poetry offers a valuable point of departure for thinking about haptic allegory. He establishes an impressive twentieth-century lineage of experimental poems by people ranging from Henry Chopin to Roy Fisher that "are creations/performances which may consciously include surface and volume among the signs of the work as a kind of libretto for performances" (12). Such "plasticity of literary form" engenders a radically innovative space-time field of language, [in which] the forces radiate and interrelate without end, and their boundaries open as information expands, giving access to the ecology of all languages and forms of energy" (25). Mottram makes the work's physicality a necessary condition for the playful performance that liberates the poetic and graphic line from the constraint of linearity, from regulation by signification. William Rowe captures Mottram's understanding of design in poetry in the book's preface where he writes, "'Design', in this sense, comes to mean a series of interfaces whereby the poetic act—and the act of reading poetry—can open not just onto the universe of discourse but also to all the possibilities of making sense which are given in the sign-making ability of human beings and mediated by the made environment."

Patricia Farrell's a drawing where but not splices the surface of the image while leaving the branches of its gestural strokes intact, creating graphic continuity as much as openness. Woven into the graffiti-like texture, words from the series' title knit the sequence together. Signs are suggested; sounds adumbrated; a social situation limned. Farrell's work energetically expands the boundaries of linguistic possibility, bringing the reader to the brink of meaning but finally not collapsing the emotional and ideological density of the image into a simple, abstract signified. Her work like that of Brian Catling's The Stumbling Block, Its Index or Sean Bonney's Baudelaire in English shows how wide-ranging an aesthetic field is claimed under the rubric of haptic allegory.

In Maggie O'Sullivan's case, such poetry is associated with the potential for individual transformation. She cites Joseph Beuys as the epigraph to her "Kinship with Animals" section in In the House of the Shaman: "To stress the idea of transformation and substance. This is precisely what the shaman does in order to bring about change and development: his nature is therapeutic" (28). Bob Cobbing's approach incorporates technology in its material explorations of poetic voice. In "Some Statements on Sound Poetry" Cobbing writes, "Poetry has gone beyond the word, beyond the letter, both aurally and visually ... Sound poetry dances, tastes, has shape." In what follows I'll discuss Maggie O'Sullivan's and Bob Cobbing's poetry as haptic allegory, the poetic collective such work engenders, and the political world such work imagines as possible.

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a

Poetry is haptic because poetry is sounded and written or found in the poet's encounter with the sensuous world. Poetry appeals to all the senses, even if a great deal of poetry seems to forget it. "Poetry is in the world", as I heard the young British poet James Wilkes say on YouTube as he described his own ideas concerning the ensemble of poetry, politics, and place. Both Maggie O'Sullivan's and Bob Cobbing's poetry resolutely engages the world and their engagement is a radical aesthetic practice in which the worldly material of graphic marks, significant objects, vocalized sounds, and silence comes to a formal, public presence. Craig Dworkin's characterization of "radical formalism" is useful here: "As a 'pataphysical investigation of minute particulars, radical formalisms hew to the concrete. Where 'concrete' is what the street is made of" (5).

Dworkin's ideas about radical formalism emerge through his reworking of Bruce Andrews's idea of a "radical praxis." Maggie O'Sullivan and Bruce Andrews collaborated on EXcla (1993), a text whose aleatory composition process she describes for Scott Thurston in a 2004 interview. She recounts meeting Andrews at a SubVoicive reading where "it just emerged in the conversation, how about doing a collaborative piece?" (10). Thurston remarks that EXcla is "like an essay on the relationship between British and American poetics" (11). What's critical here is the coupling of a radical poetics with a dispersed collective that is neither community nor movement but a contingent assortment of people focused on innovative aesthetic practices.

This dispersed, focused collective is given shape by Gerald Bruns, who informs us that "such a community can never be sedentary; it does not grow or develop into a unitary order. A poetic community has the structure of a series of singularities rather than a fusion of many into one" (81). Bruns arrives at this destination from an initial insight that poetry is ecstatic, a species of exile: "Ecstasy means that (starting with myself) I am outside of and uncontainable within any order of things, an exile or nomad" (80). Radical form is a property of both the poetry and the groups in which it finds a home.

At the outset, a provisional definition of haptic allegory is needed. The word haptic is a modern vintage (1890) and is derived from the Greek aptikos, to come into contact with, which is itself taken from the verb aptein, to fasten. It designates a privileging of the sense of touch in preference to that of sight and to communications based on touch. I hear in haptic not only its Greek origin but also an echo of the Old English "haep" designating chance, good fortune, or an event. The word haptic limns three conditions for poetry, fusing together poetry's material existence in three-dimensional space, its coming to presence as an event, and the pleasure of the poetic encounter.

It's perhaps only coincidence that the word haptic is coined just as literary modernism is beginning to explode conventions of textuality. Stephane Mallarme's Un coup de des in 1897 definitively changed poetry's possibilities with its emphasis on sound and space, making explicit what had largely been a latent formal possibility. This poem's status as an artifact more visual than readily legible continues to delegitimize norms of textual scansion and conventional literary productions of meaning.

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drawing

Reading a text such as Red Shifts, to take only one of many possible examples from O'Sullivan's complex body of work, with its delight in breaking words and phrases across the page, with its combination of colored streaks and masses with text, with its words under erasure, one clearly sees how O'Sullivan has used her text's visuality to challenge the dominance of easy reading. As Charles Bernstein says in the introduction to O'Sullivan's Body of Work, "Maggie O'Sullivan is the poet of the 'unofficial' word" (7).

Bob Cobbing amplifies the haptic quality of vision when it is challenged by a radical poetics that embraces the materiality of the page, the voice, the ear, or the eye. In "random and system" he writes,

poetics of domestic noise
fabric of the everyday
a silent tongue sounding
an eye scanning
does a blank page not have a duration
is it silence or noise
we tongue it with our eyes

Vision as a tongue, a thick muscle connected to primal drives or desires. "A silent tongue sounding" reads like a koan, though within its local series it might suggest the fact that a tongue's speech isn't original but sounded from without, everyday speech being a type of conventional ventriloquism.

Cobbing's poetry wants other outcomes, other politics. If poetry is a species of ecstasy then to stand outside of the conventions one reproduces in everyday speech acts is to exchange capitalist interpellation for a kind of enthusiasm for emancipation. Such an unequal exchange between the spirit of capital and the gods of poetry is devoutly to be wished.

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where

In support of this claim, O'Sullivan offers a quote from Martin Heidegger as an epigraph to the "Prism and Hearers" section of In the House of the Shaman: "To be a Poet in a destitute time means to attend, singing, to the trace of the fugitive gods" (50). As it happens, the poem immediately preceding this epigraph is dedicated to Bob Cobbing. Impossible to reproduce in this text as it is, one citation leaps out: "OPEN TOTEM POWERTRY POETRY CARA MALL EYEZED" (47).

O'Sullivan presents the poem as an "open totem," as an attempt at power that reverts to poetry. In poetry sound finds its aleatory integrity and the rest of the line functions as a phonic rendition of a near-universal treacly mall culture. Burnt sugar being a sweetly empty commodity, used to glaze fruit and pastry so that they shine and crunch. The consumer's eyes glaze over, desiring that which only makes one hungrier. Yet, O'Sullivan's rendition opens the ordinary to another order of possibility, wholly unlike the sadly all too commonplace extraordinary renditions that can only confirm what power already knows. Ending on "zed" the poem offers its own nothing, refuses power, remains open.

Haptic poetry is necessarily political and therefore becomes allegorical. Critics tend to think of allegory as both a mode of artistic creation and as an interpretive category. Angus Fletcher's analysis of the word's etymology clarifies the common origin of those dual modes in their particular relation to public speech. Allo, other, is combined with agourein, the language of the marketplace: allegory is language other than that spoken in public, a language whose meanings are deliberately obscured, though not completely hidden. He concludes his etymological discussion with the observation that "the political overtones of the verb agourein need always to be emphasized, insofar as censorship my produce devious, ironical ways of speaking" (2). Indeed.

Bob Cobbing's and Maggie O'Sullivan poetry operates from the dual premise that ordinary, commercialized, commodified language is itself the censor and the only way to combat such censorship is by motivating language to perform otherwise. Cobbing's magnificent "Anagrams Ars Magna" is just such an action. Two lines of text oppose each other across a gap that runs down the center of the page. Halfway down the first page of this two-page poem that begins with "daemonic comedian" is "Chopin's phonics." Peter Finch describes the friendship and common aesthetic cause of Henri Chopin and Bob Cobbing in an interview available at The Argotist: "They would work on the notion that you could make poetry by extending language beyond meaning." "Errant ranter" Cobbing may be, but his comedic moments strip ordinary language of its claim to authority, revealing norms of speech and text as artifices beyond which something else altogether can be found.

Haptic allegory speaks other, though not by appropriating the right to speak in the name of the other. Such speech would be a type of resource extraction, a form of expropriation that simply replicates in alterity the object of criticism. In "Another Weather System" in In the House of the Shaman, O'Sullivan's poetry responds to the sounds of nature without claiming dominance.

Wolf
pattering
tabor
this
appeared
act
i
this
locate
space
            (21)

A lower-case 'i' indicates immersion without passivity and a refusal of the proprietary gaze. The tabor, a small drum often played with a pipe, hints at the music of the pastoral tradition, while the wolf, the bane of what has passed for civilization, patter(n)s the song. Isobel Armstrong lucidly notes

Maggie O'Sullivan has said that she wants to bring silenced voices into her poems, but part of this enterprise is a refusal to force sound into meaning. To respect 'unkown tongues', and to bring them into being without presuming to know or control the many languages of the many beings and entities in the world—including sounds made by animals, landscapes and the earth itself—is one of the poet's functions. (59)

Traditionally allegory is a means of producing literary artifacts that mean more than they say, and say other than they mean. It is a means of enhancing the capacity of a text to offer meaning, as an allegorical interpretation adds to a literal meaning, but also of restraining the capacity of a text to generate interpretations indefinitely, as allegory controls a text's polysemic potential. As Frederic Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious, allegory is part of an institutionally structured hierarchy of interpretation whose goal is to ideologically consolidate meaning in the interests of power. He writes:

Allegory is here the opening up of the text to multiple meanings, to successive rewritings and overwritings which are generated as so many levels and as so many supplementary interpretations. So the interpretation of a particular Old Testament passage in terms of the life of Christ...comes less as a technique for closing the text off and for repressing aleatory or aberrant readings and senses, than as a mechanism for preparing such a text for further ideological investment, if we take the term ideology her in Althusser's sense as a representational structure which allows the individual subject to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History. (29-30)

Traditionally allegory is a hermeneutic strategy of encoding and decoding the meaning of artifacts that explicitly interposes itself between material text and ideational meaning. The materiality of a text is linked to the ideality of the meaning by a performative bridge, and allegorical artifacts, whether paintings, texts, or performances such as masques, plays, or dance, use the tension between their material presence and their interpretive aim as part of their hermeneutic strategy. Allegory complicates the materiality of a text by emphasizing the excess of meaning that remains latent in a given text. The materiality of the text, far from being the simple vehicle for semantic inscription, is the physical form of linguistic performativity.

Haptic allegory both resists and recognizes master-narratives. It denaturalizes everyday language and reveals its artificial nature, while exploiting linguistic artifice in order to craft discourse outside culturally sanctioned ways of reading or writing or performing, thereby undermining socially hegemonic narrative. If a natural language is the dialect of the winning army, then such allegory is a means of retrieving the language of the defeated past, of the oppressed.

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but

Joel Fineman puts it well when he writes that "it is as though allegory were precisely that mode that makes up for the distance, or heals the gap, between the present and a disappearing past, which, without interruption, would be otherwise irretrievable and foreclosed" (5-6). Allegory revisits history, complicating the relation between textual materiality, historical narrative, and interpretive practice. Traditional allegory is written as a counter-narrative strategy. Haptic allegory is oppositional and unmoored, drifting against the current.

Haptic allegory differs from traditional allegory in its embrace of aleatory techniques. Where allegory traditionally proposes a narrative sub rosa, haptic allegory refuses the consolations of narrative and the well-formed subject. O'Sullivan describes the project of haptic allegory when she replies to Scott Thurston,

Fundamentally it's language—the materiality of language—that I'm concerned with a nd not whether it's the Irish political situation or the natural world or whatever. I've never felt the language or languages around me in any way to be enough, so I've had to make a way and, even more importantly, to make in language/s a way that I don't know. The language work to me is where it's all happening, the mining and shaking language up and the looking for new languages. (12)

Let me offer, then, a definition of haptic allegory. Haptic allegory is a mode of textual experience that foregrounds the event of poetic encounter as an embodied relationship to a cultural artifact in a particular historical moment. It is a recursive form of allegory that doesn't expend its desire on historical master narratives, but on sustaining dispersed poetic communities that coalesce around particular techniques or ideas and then dissipate as other ideas press forward or as experiment carries participants elsewhere.

O'Sullivan's and Cobbing's poetry moves well beyond the confines of representation and the strictures of realism while nonetheless still attending to poetry's worldliness and to the articulation of the poem as an event in the world. As Susan Howe writes, "the articulation of sound forms in time." To articulate sound, to move from sign to sound, is to move from the synchronic to the diachronic and by doing so to enter the historical, social continuum. O'Sullivan's and Cobbing's poems and performances, are experiments in the production of that continuum, a continuum that should be seen as the field of collective experience and memory. How could such poetry be anything other than political, though not political in a strictly topical sense, but it the sense that the poetry questions the conditions of possibility for the production of the polis.

Bob Cobbing calls his poetry a "mimesis of ur-language," in a poem, "random and system," found near the end of Shrieks & Hisses. He writes,

vocal sounds imitating meaning
complex knots of influential stress
the word the idea the concept
forged and driven to ground
aural and visual registers
create charged transitions
juxtaposing material elements
interweaving language and things
runic systems oggamic writings
dialects ideolects argots jargons
road test the stamina for absorption
such thresholds of social polyglossias
emgage with a ribald body

"Random and system" is a statement of Cobbing's poetics that is hard not to want to quote in its four-page entirety. It's a brilliant exposition of his poetry's revolutionary aims, a manifesto that begins with the "poetics of domestic noise" and proceeds through the

active erasure of existing common sense
interrogating conventional boundaries
through gesture and posture
through habitus and through manipulation
human society as a conversational swarm
formlessness of indefinite community
populations multiplicities territories

to then traverse the "artifice of page" as finally it ends, ambiguously

hingeing between continuity and discontinuity
underpinning or undermining
the desires that drive

The entire, page-centered poem delights in language's disregulation, happily dismantling norms that privilege meaning. The phrase "underpinning or undermining" poses a dialectical choice that Cobbing refuses to make. Cobbing is revolutionizing revolution, at least in the sense that he doesn't sign up for the classic Marxist historical line. Cobbing's poem is, as haptic allegories must be, a non-productive expenditure.

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In The Poetry of Saying, Robert Sheppard aptly finds in Cobbing's work a "commitment to a machinic sense of the production of productivity, as Deleuze and Guattari would put it" (223). The task of rerouting the production of productivity to more humane ends is aesthetically serious despite the levity with which Cobbing conducts it.

As I flip through the pages of Shrieks and Hisses, the deformations of the letter prey upon the hapless mark, dismembering it by zooming-in in a process of analytical collage. In this case, the whole is impossibly more than the sum of its parts. Rendering the letter as an assemblage of random parts, as a product of chance as much as history, Cobbing's analysis opens up a letter's latent sonic potential by destabilizing the relationship between sound and sign, between matter and meaning.

Cobbing's analytical collage is generated technologically through a détournement of the office copy machine, a wry and humble gesture that imports the very apparatus of the "bureaucratic society of controlled consumption" into the heart of the procedure that defies it. Cobbing's haptic poetry comes about by way of a highly technologized practice in which texts' graphic material qualities are accessed through the arts of mechanical reprodution and is all the more worldly for it.

Robert Sheppard's blog describes a Cobbing exhibition (co-curated by Philip Davenport and Jennifer Pike) at Bury Text Festival in which

Cobbing clearly utilizes the full possible articulations of the mechanical devices available (photocopying, overprinting, cutting, juxtaposing, enlargement, cracking images, dispersal through magnification, mis-inking, etc.) yet it is difficult to determine how he has produced many of these texts, possibly because techniques are mixed. After the exploratory to and fro and deliberate hit and miss of the Domestic Ambient Noise collaboration, the care over each page — and the stylistic individuality of each — is evident. In 'X' the letter is half obscured and wedged by other shapes. This points to a late development in Cobbing's work; there is often in (rather than on) these pages a clear sense of figure operating against ground, with the letter often, but not exclusively, acting as the figure.

Haptic poetry, then, isn't innocent of technology: it isn't a textual expression of a material plenitude prior to the tragic lapse into endless semiosis. Cobbing's poetry doesn't dismiss the copy machine so much as his poetry dismisses the ordinariness it emblematizes. Reworking the copy machine's potential, that's poetry.

For these O'Sullivan and Cobbing material language is form, which puts them in a long tradition of poets for whom aleatory, open-field, paratactic, collagistic, or concrete linguistic procedures take precedence over literary convention. O'Sullivan writes in "riverrunning (realizations," written for Charles Bernstein,

What 'Making'— 'Unmaking' is / a Mattering of
Materials (motivations and practise)—Living to live in
that Learning—Uncertain, Uncurtained Tonguescape
SUNG. SHUNTS. ARM WE. Living Earth kinships on the
vast-lunged Shores of the Multiple Body imbued with
wide-awake slumberings & cavortings. Constructions.
Intuitions. Transmissions. Radiations. Thinking.

"Living to live in that learning": O'Sullivan sets an open-ended task, one that embraces the perpetually unfinished world. O'Sullivan and Cobbing have broadened the field of such linguistic experiment, the field of what I like to call haptic allegory.

Works Cited

Ekleksographia:
William Blake and the Naked Tea Party

March, 2010

Todd Thorpe and Patricia Farrell

"Maggie O'Sullivan and Bob Cobbing: Poetry as Haptic Allegory" is by Todd Thorpe. Todd Thorpe is www.nthposition.com/sonnetforwcw.php.

The image sequence "a drawing where but not" is by Patricia Farrell. Patricia Farrell is robertsheppard.blogspot.com and www.otherroom.org.