verse-crisis: mallarmé

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This article was downloaded by: [University of Calgary] On: 08 October 2014, At: 04:30 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Textual Practice Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20 Verse-crisis: Mallarmé Christopher Norris Published online: 10 Jul 2014. To cite this article: Christopher Norris (2014) Verse-crisis: Mallarmé, Textual Practice, 28:4, 557-569, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2014.919099 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2014.919099 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

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Page 1: Verse-crisis: Mallarmé

This article was downloaded by: [University of Calgary]On: 08 October 2014, At: 04:30Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Textual PracticePublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtpr20

Verse-crisis: MallarméChristopher NorrisPublished online: 10 Jul 2014.

To cite this article: Christopher Norris (2014) Verse-crisis: Mallarmé, Textual Practice,28:4, 557-569, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2014.919099

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2014.919099

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressedin this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content shouldnot be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

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forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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Turning Point

Christopher Norris

Verse-crisis: Mallarme

Introductory note

Going back to writing poetry after an almost 30-year break was quite aturning-point for me, although that hardly warrants the appearance ofmy poem under the TP ‘Turning-Points’ rubric, so I had better providea bit more by way of explanation. This verse-essay about Mallarme andwhat he perceived as the crisis in late nineteenth-century poetry andpoetics is one of several long verse-essays that I have written over thepast three years on a range of philosophical and literary (including lit-erary-theoretical) topics. In most respects, they are about as remote ascould be from Mallarme’s ultra-symbolist practice and prescription.Indeed, they would much likelier have served his purpose as diagnostic evi-dence of what he thought had gone wrong than as a hopeful prognosis ofthe best way forward from the current impasse. They were written with theaim of showing not just that it was possible to think, argue, reason, reflect,and even theorise in verse but also that verse might have certain definiteadvantages over prose if one wanted to do these things in a performative,self-reflexive, or other than straightforwardly expository way. I was hopingto emulate – as best I could – William Empson’s notion of ‘argufying’ inpoetry, that is, his idea that you could use verse of this sort to make a casethat fell short of strictly consecutive argument yet manifested a decentregard for the protocols of rational or civilised discourse. Empson wasno great admirer of French Symbolism – in fact he once described it, orits literary-critical offshoot, as ‘a technique for insinuating scandal, as ata cats’ tea-party’ – so the poem’s attitude towards its subject is, to saythe least, characterised by a certain (I hope) productive ambivalence ortension.

One turning-point that I have in mind is the growing present-dayinterest in critical-creative writing, or work of the sort that more or less

Textual Practice, 2014Vol. 28, No. 4, 557–569, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2014.919099

# 2014 Taylor & Francis

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programmatically crosses the line(s) between literature (whether fiction orpoetry) and criticism. Such writing starts out from the premise that, what-ever their rough descriptive utility, we had best not be overly categorical inapplying distinctions such as constative/performative, philosophy/poetry,or theory/fiction, all of which pairings tend to be aligned with the criti-cism/literature binary. At the same time – as I have argued elsewhere –those distinctions will need to be kept in play and those genres not dissolvedinto an undifferentiated textual flux if the kinds of hybrid discourse thusproduced are to retain a genuine critical edge and depth of philosophicalgrasp as well as offer chances for inventive exploration of poetic orfictive possibilities. In other words, they will occupy that zone of trans-generic writing which finds its closest historical analogues in the Jenaschool of Romantic (post-Kantian) poet-critic-philosophers and then inlater writers like Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. It seems to methat there are three specific features of their work that set it apart fromother, less impressive examples of the cross-over kind. One is an extremesensitivity or responsiveness to nuances of language – their own languageincluded – that, to put it simply, allows them to combine the offices ofcreative writer and literary critic. Another is the analytic power, or philo-sophical acumen, to reflect thoughtfully on just what transpires in thecourse of such critical-creative activity. The third – though strictly insepar-able from these – is the capacity for speculative thought that takes theorybeyond the confines of system or method (as with a good many ‘straight’formalist or structuralist approaches) into regions of linguistic-conceptualcreativity that again resist any straightforward generic classification.

Not that I am claiming, or slyly suggesting, that this poem achievesanything close to that classy specification. Certainly it is a very long wayfrom Geoffrey Hartman’s Romanticism-nurtured idea of how criticismmight assert its right to cohabit with poetry on the high ground of literarycreativity, or Harold Bloom’s equally Romantic conception of the ‘strong’poet as one agonistically driven to confront, assimilate, and ultimately turnto self-willed revisionist account the otherwise paralysing legacy of theirgreat precursors. If anything my verse-essay is closer to the eighteenth-century, discursive mode of poets like Pope and Dryden, who use highlydisciplined ‘classical’ forms – such as the rhyming couplet and a metricallyregular yet rhythmically varied line – as a background of relatively stableexpectation against which to do a great deal of Empsonian ‘argufying’,often to brilliantly pointed effect. Again it needs saying (or more likelydoesn’t!) that by offering these on the face of it immodest comparisons Iintend no more than to offer a bit of generic orientation for readers bewil-dered (or perhaps affronted) to find such anachronistic means deployed inthe service of such ‘advanced’ theoretical or speculative ends. Besides, theanalogy has sharp limits: although the verse-form here is tightly structured

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and the rhyme-scheme strictly maintained, there is nothing (I very muchhope) of the heavily end-stopped and at times overly sententious wisdomthat typifies the eighteenth-century style at its complacent worst. Indeed,one problem I often ran into was that of keeping the formal structures pro-minent and complex enough to sustain the reader’s interest over longstretches while not allowing them to settle into any routine, regular, orthought-constraining pattern. That risk is all the greater, for obviousreasons, with a long poem like this. Yet if it works more or less as intendedthen a large part of its effect has to do with those occasions – I hope not tooinfrequent – when exigencies of rhyme or metre turn out to produce somenovel idea or new turn of argument that would almost certainly not havecome to mind otherwise.

Such is at any rate the case I want to make for this particular sort of phi-losophising or theorising in verse. Formal requirements, so far from impos-ing artificial constraints, can in fact serve to extend the poet-thinker’s rangeof conceptual-expressive resources in unexpected, inventive, and revealingways. This they do most often through some seemingly random rhyme-induced prompt to explore certain up to now unlooked-for semantic possi-bilities, or some metrical resistance to the ‘natural’ flow of words that has thequite literally thought-provoking effect of a jolt to our normal, linguisticallyhabituated mental processes. Of course this will all be old hat to anyoneacquainted with the work of the Russian Formalists and their hallmarkstress on the de-familiarizing impact of verbal art, that is to say, its abilityto make the commonplace strange or to sharpen our jaded everyday percep-tions through novel poetic or narrative devices. Still the formalist case isworth re-stating since the main thrust of avant-garde poetics over the pastfew decades has been directed towards an idea of literary language that mark-edly deemphasises, and sometimes pretty much eliminates, the poetry-prosedistinction. Where resistance is spoken of it is taken to arise in ‘the text’ con-ceived as a tissue of codes, an assemblage of intertextual nodal points, or a siteof conflicting significations defined in terms that would apply with equalpertinence to poems or prose writings. Thus, it tends to neglect matters ofa formal (by which I mean primarily metrical, rhythmic, prosodic, gramma-tical, or verse-structural) character so as to engage more intently with thetextual and intertextual aspects of poetry. The latter are more amenable tostudy by those – especially critical theorists bred up on a mixture of post-Kantian idealist aesthetics and philosophy of mind with post-structuralistideas about language – who see it as their role to mediate (in Bloom’scase, trump, or dialectically sublate) the relationship between poetry andtheory. Or again, they are apt to exert a more powerful appeal amonginterpreters of a broadly Hegelian mind – Yale-School acolytes and agood few besides – who work with a historically informed awarenessof that same complex and evolving (whether genial or fraught)

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dialectic. Although these critics do on occasion take note of certain formal-structural-prosodic features, it is usually by way of a brief detour from thatother, to them more absorbing and philosophically as well as poetically vitalbusiness.

It also strikes me – no doubt as an interested party – that much ofthe modern or contemporary poetry approved, promoted, anthologised,and generally encouraged by such criticism can itself fairly be said tosuffer from a kindred defect. Thus, it often goes beyond the modernistrevolt against ‘traditional’ rhyme and metre – a revolt quite compatible(as in Eliot’s case) with a high degree of formal inventiveness in bothrespects – to something more like a cultivated disregard for such elements.The result in many cases is a flattening-out of verse-rhythms through thelack of any metrical counterpoint, or a sense that this might just as wellhave been written in prose since there is nothing – or nothing of apoetic, i.e. formally constrained but also formally inventive and liberatingcharacter – to warrant its description as poetry. The precedents here againgo back a long way, to the English Romantics at least, although it was notuntil recent times that the idea of radically re-jigging that dualism wastranslated from the realm of generalised or programmatic aim to that ofpoetic practice. Thus, Wordsworth famously said that the relevant distinc-tion was that between poetry and science, not poetry and prose, whileShelley – with larger territorial aims in view – said that all major thinkers,discoverers, reformers, scientists, and other visionary types should properlybe accorded the title of poet. On the other hand, neither of them, evenWordsworth in the prosier parts of Lyrical Ballads, went so far as todraw the inverse corollary of this and remove even those vestiges ofrhyme and metre that remained of the old (now despised) eighteenth-century ‘poetic diction’. Mallarme of course stands in a different line ofliterary descent, although one not altogether untouched by the Germanidealist and English Romantic traditions. Indeed, it is the Franco-German confluence of ideas and lineages that finds its way, alongvarious routes, into that Mallarmean/Joycean/post-structuralist con-ception of ‘the text’ that asserts and celebrates its way of overrunning allformal, generic, disciplinary, or work-based specification.

One effect of this has been the striking and surely regrettable aca-demic division of labour between literary theorists working in the self-con-ceived vanguard of movements like post-structuralism or deconstructionand scholar-critics of a generally more traditional (often philological)bent with a primary interest in prosody, metrics, stylistics, structuralist(minus the ‘post-’) linguistics, genre-theory, and so forth. (To be surethere are those, like Derek Attridge, who refuse that division and pursueboth projects with notable success.) Meanwhile, there is a good deal ofrecent poetry – including, non-coincidentally, some of the work most

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favoured by university-based critics (think Bloom on Ashbery) – that con-tinues to make a point, even a virtue, of its indifference to any such pre-sumptively obsolete or otiose formal concerns. It seems to me that this hasvery often gone along with a sizeable and uncompensated loss of thosemanifold expressive, technical, and (not least) philosophical-reflectiveresources that are there to be had from rhyme and metre. Anti-formalismand pan-textualism can be seen as flipsides of the same post-Romanticcoin, one that I think has quite a lot to answer for in terms of currentpoetic and literary-critical practice. If my verse scarcely hopes to mark aturning-point in the fortunes of contemporary poetry, it might at leastserve to mark the wider turn – one with a special pertinence as regardsthis journal over its thirty-year history – from radical textualism to anunashamed (if qualified) formalism that is notably more open to exper-iments in the critical-creative mode.

It seemed to him a full-scale crise de vers.Not long since a well-turned alexandrine,

Despite all its historic wear and tear,

Could still stamp genius on an end-stopped line.But now the whole contraption seemed to jam

On some root defect in the old design

That made it sound like just a way to cramMore words, or sense, or weight, or mere syllabic clout

Into each sagging measure. So iamb

And dactyl badly needed sorting-outLest the new zealots of vers libre took

This as their opportunity to tout

An end to all things in the poet’s bookThat cramped their style. Not in the least his way,

Our crisis-worrier, as the quickest look

At any line of his serves to convey,Though apt to leave his own verse-measures cramped

By some dereglement that Mallarme

Knew he’d not put to rights till he’d revampedEvery last notion of poetic form.

Better now turn the page on that tri-amped

Loquacity that once defined the norm,Then trust his muse to furnish some idea

That sheltered genius from the gathering storm

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Of mere verse-anarchy and so shone clearTo future times. On this brave view the crise

Would surely pass whatever might appear

Proof positive that all their expertise,Those hierophants of alexandrine skill,

Could frame no precept that the referees

Of free-verse conduct might not bend at will.Too deep-bred in him, that first rule of art

Which said: let noble precedent instil

The discipline it takes to give new heartTo those old forms and cultivate a blend

Of skills hard-won with genius to impart

An added grace. Let each line have its end,Whether between one strophe and the next

Or just so far as genres might extend,

With a fine sense of how the classic textSees off those new barbarians that throng

Its tight-sealed borders. Though their clamour vexed

His ear and wrought a discord in the songOf those more highly strung or less inclined

To heed the claims of metric right and wrong,

Still you might think the ‘crisis’, so defined,Was something Stephane Mallarme should view

As just a transient upset of the kind

That scarcely registered amongst the fewPossessors of a birthright unimpaired

By anything the vers-libristes could do

To queer its pitch. Yet, though our poet sharedTheir faith up to a point, still he divined

A crisis more historic than they cared

To take on board, those classicists, or findA source of growing discord in their own,

No matter how exquisitely refined

Verse-music. Such disturbance was unknownTo them since lying quite beyond the range

Of high verse etiquette by which the tone

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Of formal diction vetoed any changeBeyond the upper limit set to keep

Its alien note from striking false or strange

In ears long used to wandering half-asleepThrough their perfected measures. Yet, he thought,

The thing went too far back and ran too deep

For any quick-fix nostrums of the sortApplied by Rimbaud or Verlaine in hopes

Of fetching up in some exotic port

As far as could be from the crowded slopesOf old Parnassus. Rather it untuned

The music of those tutelary tropes

And classic forms that seemed as if maroonedOn some far island like Philoctetes

With nothing but a suppurating wound

And sense that the malodorous diseaseFor which they’d cast him out was the best way

To reinforce what mere good taste decrees.

So much at least the Zeitgeist had to sayAbout those verse-forms that they’d soon describe,

The free-verse freaks, as worse than depasse

Since offering a large state-sponsored bribeTopped up by notions of the poet’s aim

To ‘purify the language of the tribe’,

Or kindred variations on the sameFine theme that made a gross syllabic count

From line to line the mark of lasting fame.

This reckoned genius strictly by amountOf metric tacking back and forth required

To press upstream against the ceaseless fount

Of syllables along with the desiredHigh-classicist conjunction of a grace

Past reach of art and inspiration fired

By antique muses. So he has to faceThis way and that between the rival suits

Of native genius and what still gives place

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To every skill that poetry recruitsTo ride this crisis out. Then he’d redeem

At last the ancient promise that the fruits

Of nature/nurture might transplant the themeTo a new key that modulates beyond

That false dichotomy and comes to seem

The tonic note to which our souls respondOnce they’ve seen through the mimicry of good

Poetic form that waves its magic wand

And lets us into the enchanter’s woodWith no path leading out. Yet there’s his point:

That even if by skill or chance he should

At length accomplish that degree of jointPerfection where the senses were all soul

And souls all sense, still what should now anoint

Him the arch-symboliste who might make wholeA shattered sphere that seemed to leave no room

For healing ministry? And so the role

Was one this Parsifal thought to assumeBy such self-emptying of voice and style

As left him quite uncertain what or whom

To thank when it turned out, once in a while,That on the page his words no longer fell

Into that isometric single file

By which the alexandrine worked its spellAnd marshalled even stragglers to comply

With its strict remit. Now the words strayed well

Beyond his own parole to overflyLa langue until the constellated page

Had more the aspect of a cloudless sky

At night than any verse that could engageThe eye and ear in metric give-and-take

Whereby its very movement might assuage

Their mutual need. And yet he asks: why make-Believe that some mere trick of rhymester’s speech

Could do as much to cure that mortal ache

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As interstellar distances where eachNew signifier in each cosmic zone

Betokens how a single word might reach

Beyond such mere velleities of toneAnd metric pulse that kept old verse alive,

Like formal greetings on a mobile phone

Or other means by which we still contriveTo feign communication. Whence his task:

To show how poetry might yet survive

The letting-drop of that archaic maskWhose features once took shape in all the modes

Of a poetic diction that would ask

The hypocrite lecteur to scan its codesWith ear half-cocked or eye half-turned aslant.

So might they credit that Horatian odes

And suchlike artefacts grew like a plantFrom the rich culture of some native clime

Which alone had the wherewithal to grant

That seeming spontaneity of rhymeAnd verse-form that, no matter how remote

From customary usage at the time,

Seemed what the genius loci underwroteAs nature’s way with words. This he abjured,

This alexandrine metric got by rote

Yet spliced with speech-like rhythms that ensured,At least to ears tuned up on Mont Parnasse,

That its high artifice would be obscured

By letting such demotic notes amassA volume not so weighty as to bring

The great tradition to a brute impasse,

But just enough to let its accents singA tune that kept those ears on the qui vive

And gave les prolos just a glimmering

Of such arcana. Yet we might take leaveTo question so complete a stripping-bare

Of every fibre in the subtle weave

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That balladeers and hautes-Parnassians share,Or sacrifice of everything that went

Into the hard-won synthesis of their

Verse-discipline with freedom to inventNew genres, styles, and ways to juxtapose

Speech-stuff with forms that metre would accent

Ineptly if decoupled from what goesAptly with natural language of the type

Most often found in good colloquial prose,

Or poems where the style’s not overripeAnd diction never gets far out of touch

With lively talk. Then you may think his gripe,

Though fairly aimed at loosening the clutchOf pure-bred classicists, is apt to jar

When hitched to a poetic creed of such

Exorbitance, at least to those whose starShines brightest when it lights a human frame,

Since de vulgari eloquentia

Gave voice not only to the poet’s claimFor mother-tongue, but to his sense that she,

His Beatrice, and not some ‘shapeless flame’

Was the one guide whose ministry might freeHis restless soul. ‘Angels affect us oft’,

As Donne remarks in neo-Platonist key,

But more by faces, forms, or accents softThan any of those more ethereal traits

Supposed to bear the Christian soul aloft

Or show how wisdom truly correlatesWith love and beauty only by command

Of disincarnate logos which dictates

That flesh be dumb. So should we understandWhy Dante chose this terza rima scheme,

Out of the many forms that came to hand,

As the best one to bring his cosmic themeBack within range of human hopes and fears

By just that combination of extreme

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Soul-hankering with what, to mortal ears,Declares how skilfully the poet wrought

A language where the music of the spheres,

Though vibrant still, must note by note consortWith musica mundana or the strains

Of a speech-melody that runs athwart

The metric bar-lines. So the pulse remains,A heartbeat that from bar to bar resounds

With everything his poetry contains

Of griefs infernal, suffering without bounds,Or paradisal joys that else would strike

A discord so intense that it confounds

All harmonies of sense and soul alike,But for that impetus from verse to verse,

That rhyme-led switch of view or rhythmic hike

By which his terza rima lifts the curseOf end-stopped lines or souls that seem dead set

For endless weal or woe. What they rehearse,

Those chain-linked tercets, is a way to getClean out of making any such bad choice,

Whether (like Mallarme’s) the one that let

No echoes of the poet’s speaking voiceDisturb the silent zone he opted for,

Or (as with Dante) one that would rejoice

The heart of any grand inquisitorFired up by worshipping the savage muse.

Still, if we read like this, then we ignore

How rhyme and rhythm sound a note that skewsOur sympathies flat counter to the creed

By which he felt self-commandeered to choose

Against his better self and so accedeTo a harsh doctrine that his every word,

Rhyme-words especially, declare in need

Of transmutation by the feelings stirredWhen its inhuman edicts meet the test

Of finding voice in ways that might be heard

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As not too out of kilter with our bestAll-human-ways-considered sense of things

And not too soul-upliftingly expressed.

One hopeful sign of that’s a line that sings,Not necessarily a ‘singing line’

In lyric mode, but one that spreads its wings

Enough to lift it just short of cloud nineAnd show that what we need’s a verse-form apt

For middling themes, not dismal or divine

As with the paysage moralise mappedBy Dante’s stark cosmology. It’s more

Like his tight cross-laced rhymes that still adapt

To rhythmic shifts the purist might deplore,Or the arch-symbolist declare passe,

And yet by grace of which a fine rapport

Of sound and sense allows him to essayThe kindred shifts of moral ground whereby

Whole cultures may find out some better way,

Or read their Dante with a keener eyeTo how his every verse-effect redeems,

Even while his doctrine damns, those souls that cry

Aloud for the compassion that he seemsIn principle forbidden to extend

By that least human-kindly of regimes

That he devoutly served. Yet we transcendNot the conformity but more the will

To break its hold if we endorse the trend,

Post-Mallarme, that takes the poet’s skillTo lie in figuring how best to trace

A constellation in the words that fill

Disseveral portions of the soundless spaceThat terrified Pascal. This should perhaps

Give pause to those who think it a disgrace

That versifiers even now should lapseBack into forms where rhyme and metre stand

Prepared to suture all the textual gaps

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And substitute assurances of blandVoice-music for the salutary shock

That comes when they reject that helping hand

And let the word-stars signify en blocYet at such distances that call-signs pass

Only if synchronised by Einstein’s clock

At speed of light. So texts post-structuralists classAs cutting-edge are mostly those that break

All fond illusions save the looking-glass

In which our own self-image tends to takeThat same remote and abstract form that he,

Its first deviser, made-believe could make

The world anew by textual alchemyOr, by some bouleversement in the roles

Of signified and signifier, see

An end to those old realist protocolsThat bound the bourgeois sign. Not so, we find,

After much scanning of the sacred scrolls

Marked ‘Mallarme’ or ‘Joyce’, then intertwinedWith much high theorizing in the mode

These world-to-text transducers had in mind,

Thus leaving later theorists to decodeHow best the process might be turned around

And launched upon the post-post-structuralist road

By which some switchback portal might be foundFrom text to world. It’s Bacon’s truth we learn

As wanderers through this signscape without sound:

Pitchfork dame nature out, and yet she will return.

Christopher Norris Verse-crisis

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