Cannibalism and Pierre Joris' "Antlers"

[This is a continuation of the previous post.]

What is “cannibalism”? It could refer to two actions: eating your own flesh or eating the flesh of another of one’s own kind.

Stars cannibalize themselves. Then cannibalize their kin, their solar systems.

Cannibalism among animals is more widespread than often thought: chimpanzees, polar bears, and even, possibly, dolphins.

The universe itself, according to the current understandings of physics, cannibalizes its own energy, burning itself away into "darkness."

Cannibalism plays against similarity and difference. For instance, the individual eats another individual of the same kind. Or the mouth eats another body part. It would be tough for the mouth to eat itself, although some desperate or deranged people have chomped on their very lips.

Pierre Joris’ “Antlers” gathers the universe about a word, "antlers," a word of cannibalism, of defense, of killing, of awe, of a glorious story ultimately to be ignored because of the gnawing of time, the gnawing of other, more important concerns.

To live is cave into yourself, to grow hungry for your own vitality, to grow stooped as a result of your own voraciousness, to chomp against yourself: a law of nature as inexorable as gravity.

(If you don’t like it, go to another universe.)

The only body part you can't cannibilize is your mouth. But another will do it for you. Will eat away your most basic childhood enunciations, calling them anything but okay, twisting your talk into channels where it will die an acceptable death—slowly, rather than quickly.

I recall a dinner where we adults talked of the auto industry cannibalizing the streetcars. And a young child wailing when he found the restaurant had run out of his ice cream. He wailed, full-throated, from the ocean's spongy bottom. I loved him for it. And his parents, necessarily, had to hush him. And I loved them for that, but not as much as I loved the child—in that moment.

Maybe he would become a poet of sorts, singing of change.

“What does not change is the will to change,” said the poet Charles Olson, but change can’t be helped—will or no will. Change just happens. Here, Joris veers from the pronunications of Olson: Joris enacts change—as root deep to his poetics as ink and papyrus. As inevitable as the cannibalism of the universe.

To me, the antlers in Joris’ poem become an emblem of cannibalism, of the glory of the hunt and sustenance, of the losing of that glory in the grind of living and caring, of one priority chewing and discarding another, of old glories faintly pulsing, a pulsar, only an echo of what it once was.

Your very organs eat themselves—fire dropping to embers dropping to mere ash. Your hairline, your skin, your heart muscle—your child gnaws at as you worry. 

We will grow old, and, in turn, gnaw at our children. Most accept out of duty, some gladly and gratefully remembering what we did for them, others grudgingly.

Love sustains us. And eats us.

_____________________

Pierre Joris, Brecchia: Selected Poems 1972-1986 (éditons phi, Station Hill, 1987)

Pierre Joris, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999 (Wesleyan UP, 2001)

Peter Cockelbergh, Pierre Joris—Cartographies of the In-Between (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011)

Pierre Joris Post 2: on "Antlers"

I had to take about a week off from the blog while I successfully secured a full time job. But I'm back, now. I doubt that I will be able to keep it this up as well as I have been, but I hope to post about three times a week.

The recently published Pierre Joris—Cartographies of the In-Between (Litteraria Pragensia Books), begins with a quotation from Joris' early poem "Antlers," and for good reason—it is a memorable poem, perhaps a defining one for that era of Joris' poetry.

What follows is a series of observations, notes, and glancings relative to my personal experience with the poem. Given the particulars of my trajectories through this world, what does "Antlers," especially the sections collected in Joris first selected poems, Brecchia, do for me?

Early in the long poem, Joris mentions buying some reindeer antlers that
   
"          are still
& not mounted,
mildewed
next to the cracked flower
pots"

I grew up on a street of deer hunters, although my family was not one of them. In a special room or the basement they had gun racks and a deer head sporting antlers high on a wall. Though my friends, they were a breed apart from me. They told me of misdirection.

You could hunt by walking a glance through the woods, over trails common to deer, and searching for tracks. Or you could hunt by waiting in a stand attached to a tree. There, you hoped to capitalize on the deer's wanderings: misdirection.

One way of hunting had nothing to do with misdirection. A phalanx of hunters, about 10 feet between each, marched through a wood, flushing. Such work may be efficient killing, but it can coax no truth.

Coaxing arises from dancing. Truth—quick, effervescent, quickly camouflaged—stems from dance.

Even moving straight ahead in a certain fashion—alert, noticing, wondering, coalescing the manifold—can turn into a form of misstep, misdirection, sidestepping into truth. What was that in the corner of my eye?

Any truth is provisional:

(where rhythm
means death
there is no
such thing
as rhythm) (35)

In this moment, toward the end of the poem, Joris comes to realization, statement, insight. And, I think, he means what he says, philosophically, but equally importantly, he keeps moving. No concluding couplet, no Wallace Stevens wrapping up "The Idea of Order at Key West" with just such an idea. Where Stevens states, Joris enacts.

No ideas but in dance

of form
      of line
              of myth.

How do I approach the Classical and European allusions such as Artemis and St. Hubert? T.S. Eliot once snottily said that to understand "The Wasteland" you already had to have read a foot-wide selection of books. But, in a way, he's right: poetic allusion doesn't work well unless it reverberates in the marrow of the reader's bones. These myths cannot do so for me, because they are not my myths—not George Washington and Betsy Ross and Martin Luther King.

When I come to these allusions, I look them up, but they can penetrate me no more deeply than the upper level of epidermis, which I will soon molt.

I can only touch by misdirection; the myths are pieces of stories I overhear: compelling, involving, absorbing. I strain my ear in their direction, desiring a fuller rendition, and then Joris

moves.

Misdirection.
Tangent.
Torque.
Feint.

The best dancers turn up where you don't expect, ever.

"We kill
deer
& make of their antlers
knifehandles."

Before reading this, I could not have guessed that humans played a crucial role in deer (who are herbivores) cannibalism.

A misdirection.
A dance.
A weirdness at the heart of misadjustment

"   The young man's
initiation:
      to break
open
the slain deer.
My bone-handle knife." (22)

Joris not only alludes to various mythologies, he creates his own. Above, the young boy is initiated into death, rhythm, butchering, sustenance. Initiated into his place in the cannibalism of deer, into the cannibalism of earth, of the universe.

The stag's pearled antlers impale the hounds tracking the prize. Cannibalism. Hounds dying to get the antlers for the hunter, who will carve up other deer with them. Die to die. Die for killing.

Kill for the venison. But mostly for the antlers:

"  I learned all this
early
    I was eager
wanting antlers."

The antlers, of course, symbolize the hunt, masculinity (at least traditionally), and dominance over nature. But it is important to remember that Joris only gets to discussing the hunt and the butchering after he has undercut the very aura of antlers: he describes them early in the poem as sitting in a damp room, gathering mildew, rather than being mounted. Then, he mentions how women asked for the mounted deer heads to come down because they scare the kids.

Misdirection: decentralization: parenting concerns determine the home, a home partly fed by the hunt. Trophies must gather dust or mold: they represent a climax, but any climax is dependent upon anti-climax as background. Nurturing kids takes precedence over the symbol not of simple sustenance, but dominance. Over time, such symbols become a little bit empty, display yesterday's tired story, a story as impractical as a dead deer's head when the kids need food and care.

Before the hunt even begins, Joris announces the dissipation of the suspense.

But if we find those antlers in the attic, "spiderwebs span[ning] / the distance / from point / to point," a feint aura of hunting remains, and not only a hunt, but The Hunt: sustenance, glory, initiation, and, finally, prioritization. Put the glory in the corner where it won't scare the kids.

Joris ends the poem by referring to how antlers grow with the years and record change and time and rhythm. But ends with a reference to the wiping out of the Delawares and

"   the tail swallows the head
          for a change."

This difficult image echoes how change is enacted throughout the poem on all sorts of levels: with philosophy, poetics, narrative, myth, and childhood.

I guess Joris asks us to re-imagine an almost clichéd image, to see the end as the beginning, the tail being the hunter and eater rather than the usual head (face, mouth, brain.) Does the body cannibalize the head? Does the dance take over reason? Does the jittery, zig-zagging quality of Joris' lines and the misdirections and glancings of his observations, stories, allusions, turn into a dance both particular and whole? part of a universe that eats itself, not "at the barn-dance / of chaos," but in the multivalent admixture of all that can and will, turning and torquing, rhythm and death and dance and change? Any climax eats itself.

_____________________

Pierre Joris, Brecchia: Selected Poems 1972-1986 (éditons phi, Station Hill, 1987)

Pierre Joris, Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999 (Wesleyan UP, 2001)

Peter Cockelbergh, Pierre Joris—Cartographies of the In-Between (Litteraria Pragensia, 2011)

The Poetry of Pierre Joris 1

Pierre Joris, who grew up in Luxembourg, once told me that he only speaks Luxembourgish with his mother. He may have been exaggerating, but the linguistic nomadism demanded by living in this European crossroads provides much of the experiential mulch for his poetry, going all the way back to the earliest poems in his first selected collection: Brecchia: Selected Poems 1972-1986.

This is the first in a series of occasional posts on Joris' poetry that will stem from my rereading his two selected collections—Brecchia and Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999.

My first observation is a simple one that involves lineation. Poetry, of course, is defined by line breaks, and this is especially true of nonmetered poetry where such breaks are solely a choice on the part of the poet and define the rhythm, emphasis, and sonic lay of a piece.

When I think of Joris' poetry, I generally picture nervous, one- to three-word lines often placed in something of a staccato fashion indented from the left margin. However, this is only one of his many modes in his earliest work. For instance, "A Bundle of Rods Bound Up with an Axe in the Middle, Its Blade Projecting" often has thick, clotted lines of about ten words replete with little punctuation.

The light jitteriness of Joris' better-known early work, "Antlers" or the notebook poems from "Tracing," gives way to a compactness and, for me at least, semantic obfuscation (in the sense of Bernadette Meyers' "The Obfuscated Poem":

like acorns assemble the sows or
not like but still the glyph distilled
in place of which is nowhere & only
in time & first letter is a matter

For me, this poem bangs and crashes with possible meaning—"like...not like but still..."—not settling anywhere. When reading it, I feel overwhelmed with the violent potentials of language and its associations.

In his better known early poems, Joris seems to feel out and test turn and ripple away in a dance across and through language and myth and time and space. Here, we have just the opposite: a sediment of thick language left after the dance has been burned off.

My next post will be on "Antlers." I wanted, however, to begin by calling attention to some of Joris' less-known poetic practices.

_______________________

Brecchia: Selected Poems 1972-1986


Poasis: Selected Poems 1986-1999


Pierre Joris' Amazon page

Pierre Joris—Cartographies of the In-Between, edited by Peter Cockelbergh, contains essays on all things Joris.

Nomadics, Joris' blog—Currently, you can read an interview with Joris' longtime collaborator Jerome Rothenberg.