ekleksographia

Joe Ross
Strata 
Zürich, Switzerland: Dusie Press, 2008 
In English.

It wouldn’t have happened without
the breeze or perfect secluded intervals.
The in between of history or naming
is this disease. Disguised as knowledge
he took his seat at his table. She had no choice
but to agree. Until
they are dead and forensics becomes foreshadowing.
We hadn’t the time to wait for the fruit to ripen.
Each music or something pleasurable. When forced
to respond to chains. How held
the fate is held back. The all
inclusiveness of repetition or something fought
over. Something re-begun.

So states Joe Ross’s captivating "Continuation", from his new collection Strata. To begin, and in an initial effort to map the very coherent preoccupations here at play, we wonder what "intervals" are being spoken of here. They seem, on a preliminary level, to be those intersticed sheets of defined matter subdividing an accumulated history. Personal or shared. Temporal or synchronic. Affective or objective. But such "intervals" are also indicative of the simultaneously composite and divided nature of our language. "Divided" need not, of course, be heard here in a negative sense: for division is also, and in the realm of the sign especially, a means of proliferation, accumulation, differentiation, movement, contact, dynamism. "By the shock of their inequality mobilized", as Mallarmé said of words, a conception wherein the apparent distance of alterity and division becomes not so much locus as motor: a prime mover.

All of which constitutes an initial hermeneutics for the reading of Ross’s effervescent, cross-cut syntax. But there is something else here too, this time on the level of life and language’s intersections, their similar twilight meeting points. Both of these contingencies often escape the grasp of our limited epistemologies – and our inability to "know" such distances is at the heart of this work – and often seem to be accumulations too great for any empirical tools. "Would the world not be the case?" Ross asks elsewhere, and this is our question too, especially in the midst of our incomprehension at causality – "How held/ the fate is held back" – its steady (and unavoidable?) march onwards towards Oedipal blindness or Achillean demise. Ross aims then, at many points in these poems, at what he calls "A quick chop at the ladder": an undercutting of hierarchies, of divided structures and progressions. But we can never, it seems, entirely break the axiological, metaphysical, phenomenal or historical ladders. Yeats, too, tried. But in the end he settled rather on an effort to explore the "origin" of such divisions, in the world as well as that "order of naming" called poêsis.

Ross then seems less interested here in entirely undoing the manifold spiral of hierarchical values – and thus returning back, as Yeats did in The Circus Animals’ Desertion, to that famed "rag and bones shop" of the isolated ethos – than he is at exploring, analyzing and understanding the nature of these stratified divisions themselves. "It wouldn’t have happened without" is a phrase best representative of such a composite juncture, its melancholia shaded with implicit regret. It is what we say when we wish the world could be "otherwise", or the walk of history and personal becoming changed, become other, different. Not, in short, this suffering, and not this loss. In the context of poetics, it’s an almost Aristotelian preoccupation, tracing parallels, in Ross’s case, between the linking of a praxis’s most dynamic movements and that equally dynamic linking of lived, loved, geographical, geophysical and historical events.

That is, of course, the strangest thing, of which Joe Ross’s poetics seems viscerally aware, namely that dynamism contains within it a powerful binary, that it is at once the thrill and latent ecstasy of what we may experience, while also the cause of our greatest pains. Ross says it far better:

Not knowing is the best state. And
privilege to be the head of it. A road map not
to be followed is what the guide said.
What is eternal is transfigurative, so
the book said. Take the nearest stairs
and wrestle with them is what I said.

If the last statement here is indeed a possible solution to our dilemma, I adhere. In any case, it seems there is no other option. For over this "choice" between knowing and not knowing, will or deterministic faith, what is chosen is rather a sort of vivid pragmatism, evident at the heart of this writing as well, to take what is nearest at hand, no matter its apparent unchanging solidity, and grapple with its makeup.

What do we care, in brief, for the frightening sturdiness of such structures? We tackle the staircases of infinite inherited histories, we wrestle, believing that what appears eternal contains the possibility of transformation, if not of it, then of ourselves.

And what else may we do but to "wrestle" with such stairs? With these patterns and overlappings of transcending order, which make up our daily decisions? It is, as Ross puts it:

The heaviness of yes, or the heaviness of no.
We divided the loaf in half,
and exactly half were left out. This is
invention. This is fable when asked.

The transfiguration of such, often painful, divisions into "fable" is indeed a possible definition of the poetic act. Are such fables enough? Do they in fact find a greater order, symbolic or shambolic, in our divided realities, or merely sublimate sufferings into a newer fixed framework? Put differently, we are obliged to pose the question of "the need to know/ versus the acceptance."

Ross’s poetry is always precise, and no more so than here: for such division, which at first looks simple, is not. It is not "knowing" compared to "not knowing" which is contrasted, but a need with an acceptance. It is not a question then, of what we may and may not come to understand, but of our fundamental disposition with regard to such contingencies. In short, we may be paralyzed by possibility, yet we live only in the very crux of its divergent paths, its numberless forks stabbing violently at our separable futures compared:  

Today’s dream is
tomorrow
revved up with
too many
places yet to go.

Naming, like history, is an imposition. This is what Celan knew too, of course, while walking with an allegorical Adorno in an imagined wood, pointing the long stick of language at amassed rocks and pronouncing their reductive sign. "Raise the flags/ name the names, flail about" writes Ross elsewhere, seeming to condense the absurdity of histories seen from inside their durational midsts. It is also, of course, an activity commensurable to many aspects of the praxis of our poetics: raising the flag, naming the name, flailing about with signs at some reality. There is thus a familiar antinomy here: for how can we ever hope to "undo" the names of history – with the requisite "in between" which, for Ross, is their "disease" – with an instrument (language) so concerned with naming itself? More optimistically, however, it is perhaps only with the tools of naming that any name may be "undone".

In any case, what is clear is that we live within these intervals, within the compressed spaces of such personal, temporal, geographical, geopolitical deposits, but cannot, from inside such narrow spaces, obtain much clear perspective with which to examine them from "without". Another irony thus becomes apparent, evident throughout almost all of these moving, impressive poems: that, to have any hope of a coherent epistemology, we must leave the flux of these spaces, their "in-betweenness" precisely, their eternal intervals, in order to gain, as Ross puts it, some "forensic" perspective: a post-life analysis.

But we cannot, of course, "stop" life, any more than we "stop" the accretion and secretions of history. Just as in the movements of our poetics, we can only look at such things while we live them, change our view of them while we too change: while we change them, while they change us. There is thus everywhere here, up until the complex formality of these poems, an appropriate doubling-back, a structure of recurrences taking place on the level of the poems’ semantic and formal constructions. But with each cyclical doubling, as in an occasional genetic mutation, we find in Ross’s work that some slight change has usually been introduced. Slight yet decisive, for the poem "Mass Conspiracy" may begin "Words broken before backs" and then, having spoken of "This sudden starting or stopping called history", give us this statement dramatically altered, in sense as in syntax, in the poem’s final coda: "Before broken words before backs".

It is here a common, complex trope: an eternal return, which mirrors, by means of specific syntactic modulations, those recurrent returns of history. The story is not so straightforward, for the crucial variation of these two lines constitutes almost an absolute reversal. To play the literal exegete, the question may perhaps be paraphrased: which has the determining role? In breaking our words do we lead to the breaking of lives? Or is it the reverse of this? The dense doubling of the re-written phrase rules out any simplistic unidirectional push: for what, here, is "before" what else? Does something precede all such breaking? It is a question, in any sense, of order and disorder, formulated – and isn’t this Ross’s most surprising achievement? – not so much by the "stairs" of an ascending axiology as by the shifting compass-points of a poetics: 

Any possibility without code. Frozen
            in attempts or all day in the square.
            A parade in perfect lock step with constructed
            emotion. If will were a way.

Is "code", then, necessary, in our poems as in our lives? Is such "lock-step", no matter how much our will may oppose it, a generating agent of the structures in which we dwell? "Any possibility without code": once again, a bivalency affirms itself. Anything is possible without code, or nothing is possible without code? If the second postulate argues, in a vaguely determinist vein, for language’s power as a causal agent in the parade of social and historical experience, all we may hope for, it seems – and this is something which perhaps poetry may allow for – is that in spite of the changes and contingencies of division, that all, above any literal logics of analysis or explanation, "makes sense":
 
            A cigar in the park
            parmi les deux arbres
            makes sense.
            Entre le bois sans bruit.
            Il n’y a pas de choix.

This final phrase – "There is no choice" – is itself repeated, again with subtle variations, becoming almost like a coda to the collection itself: "Vas-y, il n’y a pas de choix" we read later ("Go on, there is no choice"). Yet set against this obligation with which these layered choices, structures and hierarchies present us, we find perhaps a possible escape in the collection’s last poem, entitled "Beauty":

These layers measure not
the depth nor define
what is left when
the surface thins
to a point
of bleeding. Is it truly
easier to breathe
in the leaves? Looking out
into the next break, we pause.
Frozen into stare, the eye cannot help
see itself.

The contrasting imagery is important here, as, we may ask, have the divided layers of strata been exchanged here for the interlocking interconnectedness of "higher" leaves? Have we thus left the difficult, layered weight of our histories for the space of a new sublime? Is this beauty? This new openness seems arranged not in hierarchical, ordered deposits, but maps a divergent topology of interrelation, wherein the world’s layers are thinned to a visceral point: "a point/ of bleeding". This ideal space of the leaves remains however, in some sense, ideational: a simple possibility, which floats still above a hard and achieved earth.

Perhaps it is necessary then to attempt to take account first of the questions of these painful terrestrial strata – what limits and directs our directions and questions, histories and socialities, choices and conditions, differences and divisions – before any greater interlocking air will be granted. With Joe Ross, however, we remain always "looking out", past such set layers of language, history and becoming, save that now our inheritance has become, we feel, not quite so weighted beneath our feet.