by Dr <\/b>Matthew Jarvis<\/b><\/p>\n
[This extract follows a consideration of some reviews of Nerys Williams\u2019s 2011 poetry collection Sound Archive<\/em><\/em><\/i>.[1]<\/a>]<\/p>\n In the context of assessments that register notions of difficulty, complexity, and bafflement, it is helpful to turn to Williams\u2019s commentary on her own work that she advances in interview with Alice Entwistle in the 2014 volume In Her Own Words: Women Talking Poetry and Wales<\/em><\/em><\/i>.[2]<\/a> Here, then, Williams expresses the intriguing idea of pursuing what she calls the \u2018collapsed lyric\u2019[3]<\/a> \u2013 a notion that is, Williams suggests, intended to describe a poetic practice that is to do with \u2018a breaking-down of lyrical expectations\u2019,[4]<\/a> most particularly the notion of a single, coherent voice. Thus, Williams explains that:<\/p>\n What Williams appears to be suggesting here is that her concern is to create a sort of poetry that is crucially variegated, both embracing and<\/em><\/i> steering clear of the coherence of the \u2018single speaking voice\u2019 or the \u2018one solitary tone\u2019.\u00a0 A key reference point in Williams\u2019s thinking at this point is the twentieth-century Russian literary critic and thinker Mikhail Bakhtin \u2013 specifically his notion of polyphony<\/em><\/i>. And this refers to ideas put forward in Bakhtin\u2019s 1963 volume Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics<\/em><\/i>, in which he argues that:<\/p>\n Williams\u2019s point, of course, is to see the embrace of the \u2018plurality of unmerged voices and consciousnesses<\/em><\/i>\u2019 that Bakhtin outlines as one that she seeks somehow to move beyond<\/em><\/i> \u2013 in pursuit of a poetics in which polyphony can exist alongside<\/em><\/i> the \u2018single speaking voice\u2019, but without assuming a primacy for the latter (without, in her terms, \u2018taking [the single speaking voice] for granted\u2019). Indeed, in her use of the word \u2018cacophony\u2019 as expressing what she is sometimes trying to achieve poetically, Williams seems to evoke not just multiplicity but the sort of radical incoherence that Bakhtin suggests would be a fundamental misinterpretation of Dostoevsky\u2019s polyphonic aesthetic. Thus, Bakhtin argues that:<\/p>\n Williams, by contrast, seems happy with \u2018cacophony\u2019. So her notion of the collapsed lyric is seemingly a vision of a poetry that is both monologic (in other words, a single-voiced enterprise) and also<\/em><\/i> disruptively polyphonic \u2013 by which I mean that the latter may be pursued to the point of dissonance. Or to put it another way, the collapsed lyric as Williams proposes it both draws back from<\/em><\/i> and goes disruptively beyond<\/em><\/i> the organically unified polyphony that Bakhtin sees in Dostoevsky.<\/p>\n \u00a7\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a7\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a7<\/p>\n Perhaps the clearest place to start in considering such matters is with the issue of multi-vocality itself \u2013 at least in part because the opening poem of Sound Archive<\/em> <\/i>is, I think, an interesting negotiation between \u2018solitary tone\u2019 and \u2018competing notes\u2019 (to use Williams\u2019s own terms for the formal issue that is in play here). The poem in question, \u2018Kinetic Melodies\u2019, starts with a speaking voice that suggests an origin in academic discourse in its discussion of \u2018phonemes\u2019 and \u2018dialogic imagination\u2019:<\/p>\n Notably, the reference to \u2018dialogic imagination\u2019 here is another gesture towards Bakhtin, this being the title given to a 1981 translation of four of his essays.[8]<\/a> However, what is significant in this context is the speaker\u2019s sense, across the second and third lines of this stanza, that she has no \u2018right\u2019 to a \u2018dialogic imagination\u2019 \u2013 in other words, no right to an imagination which is defined by polyphony. Someone else\u2019s language \u2013 \u2018your purring phonemes\u2019, in the words of the poem \u2013 is not hers. As is the case in Williams\u2019s interview with Alice Entwistle, there is a suggestion here that \u2018Bakhtinian ideas of polyphony\u2019 are somehow not entirely satisfactory, or at least not a desired culmination-point within this poetics. Stanza five is different again, as the loss of both \u2018I\u2019 and \u2018my\u2019 creates the stylistic impression of a far more objective narrator:<\/p>\n I do not think it is the case that such shifts in register and style constitute Bakhtin\u2019s radical artistic vision of a \u2018plurality of unmerged voices and consciousnesses<\/em><\/i>\u2019 that I referred to earlier \u2013 although, I think one can certainly argue that the more objective narrator of stanza five is a distinctly different voice from the more personal, first-person tones of the initial two stanzas, with their deployment of \u2018I\u2019, and \u2018my\u2019.\u00a0 Nonetheless, even if there are only a couple of distinct voices in the first five stanzas of \u2018Kinetic Melodies\u2019, the shifts of register and style do seem to gesture towards a certain linguistic plurality within the poem\u2019s texture. Moreover, in addition to this, the poem\u2019s sixth and final stanza unequivocally introduces a completely new voice, ensuring that the overall movement of the piece is out and away from the first person lyric voice of its opening \u2013 and towards at least an element<\/em><\/i> of vocal plurality. Here, then, the tree mentioned at the end of stanza four is given the chance to speak, which it does in terms that gesture towards elemental forces:<\/p>\n But what is perhaps most interesting, in terms of a poetic engagement with ideas of voice as such, is the sense in which one voice in this final stanza calls for the response of another, as it urges the reader (or an unspecified interlocutor) to \u2018serenade me with your speech<\/em><\/i>\u2019 and \u2018curse the carrion crow below<\/em><\/i>\u2019. There is, in other words, the strong sense here of the desire for an antiphonal ethos, a notion of call-and-response. Or perhaps, as Williams puts it to Alice Entwistle in discussing her experience of bilingualism (Cymraeg and English): \u2018I really do think that knowing more than one language teaches adaptability and gives you an openness to shifting gears from early on.\u2019[11]<\/a> The movement between registers and voices in this first poem of Sound Archive<\/em> <\/i>is, in these terms, precisely \u2018an openness to shifting gears\u2019 within the poetic moment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n by Dr Matthew Jarvis [This extract follows a consideration of some reviews of Nerys Williams\u2019s 2011 poetry collection Sound Archive.[1]] In the context of assessments that register notions of difficulty, complexity, and bafflement, it is helpful to turn to Williams\u2019s commentary on her own work that she advances in interview with Alice Entwistle in the … Continue reading “Extract from work on the poetry of Nerys Williams: Writing the \u2018Collapsed Lyric\u2019”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13396,"featured_media":0,"parent":17,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1982","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P9R2R9-vY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1982","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1982"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1982\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2241,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1982\/revisions\/2241"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/17"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wordpress.aber.ac.uk\/devolved-voices\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1982"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nyour purring phonemes are not my right
\nnor any dialogic imagination.<\/div>\n
\nNonetheless, notwithstanding this opening element of the poem\u2019s sense<\/em><\/i>, it is simultaneously the case that the poem as a whole tends in a direction that seeks precisely to include<\/em> <\/i>a \u2018dialogic imagination\u2019 as part of its textual character \u2013 however much its opening speaker may declare that she has no right to \u2018phonemes\u2019 from elsewhere. Most obviously, the narrating voice of the poem\u2019s first five stanzas is a striking tonal mixture. Specifically, its initial style of academic reference gives way, in stanza two, to what reviewer Alison Brackenbury describes as a \u2018humorously surreal\u2019 quality,[9]<\/a> with the speaker finding herself \u2018nude, addressing a crowd\u2019. The second line of stanza three shifts to a mode which introduces the wittily gnomic utterance of \u2018An empty lectern, a thousand eyes\u2019, whilst stanza four variously incorporates:<\/span><\/p>\n
\n2. another hint of academic discussions of language (in a reference to dialect); and3. the English idiomatic phraseology of \u2018tall tales\u2019.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
\nsulphur fills the air where the tree stands.<\/div>\n
\nroot and hollow, rub my charcoal into clean hands,
\nserenade me with your speech,
\ncurse the carrion crow below.<\/em><\/i><\/div>\n