What The Matter Is

This month the Icelandic Embassy in London is hosting an evening of readings by four Icelandic poets – Bryndís Björgvinsdóttir, Ragnhildur Jóhanns, Jón Örn Loðmfjörð and Eiríkur Örn Norðdahl – with responses presented on the evening by eight British poets. I’ve been invited to join in as one of the British contributors, and in preparation I’ve been looking at the work of Ragnhildur Jóhanns.

The disruption and reassembly of her cut-up books (the first picture I’ve posted is one example of these) brings to mind the line drawings I first wrote about in posts #9, 10 and 11. These line drawings – lines drawn between things and pages – are attempts to write things down, or keep them, in a way that words cannot. The lines either begin from the page and stretch out until they reach their object, like extruded words that lack the marked separation of language from the materiality of the object; or they begin at things and then land on the page, extending the materiality of the object all the way to the paper and landing there as material things rather than referential words. And of course once the lines have been drawn their original directions no longer show, and so they hover between referentiality and materiality.

For my reading I’m tempted to reserve a small portion of wall space on either side of the room and draw the lines of a poem between them. It’ll mean fixing a blank sheet of paper to one wall and another to the wall immediately opposite (each framed, with no glass) and walking between them drawing a series of unbroken lines from wall to wall. I’ll carry the lines between the walls in a notebook, and as I carry them I will crimp and curl and form them into words. The words will move with me across the room as I write them into position, and as the pencil moves across the page it will move across the room too, and up, and over, in arches and valleys following my hold on the book.

This week I’ve been experimenting. The second picture I’ve posted here is a spread from my book of line drawings which I’m borrowing for the purpose. I touched the pencil lead to one wall, pushed the book up against the wall and drew a line from wall to page. With the line on the paper I carried the book to the other wall, pushed it against the wall, and drew the line back off the paper and onto the second wall. Between walls, I used the line as words.

(These words aren’t a poem, they’re just temporary words. And ignore the bird, it’s showing through from the page behind.)

I’m not sure yet what will remain after the event to constitute the poem. Words will be written on the pages of the notebook, though I anticipate composing these words in advance to recite and transcribe from memory on the night, so the words themselves are not the entirety of the poem. The poem comprises the words, their movement about the page, the marks they leave at either shore, and the movements of the book about the room which, after all, are the movements of the lines of text.

And I wonder whether the two pages from either wall might ever meet, and whether one day they might be sellotaped together, forcing the pairs of apprehended ends to join and eschew the interim lines of words.

(The event is in association with 3am magazine and Maintenant – there’s an interview with Ragnhildur Jóhanns at maintenant.co.uk > poetry.)

On the train yesterday I was reading the London Review of Books (having unrelatedly had a pot of tea with four words in its name at the LRB Cake Shop the very same day) (and cake).

One of the articles was Do Not Scribble, Amanda Vickery’s review of two new books on letter writing: The Pen and the People: English Letter-Writers 1660-1800 (Susan Whyman) and Becoming a Woman in the Age of Letters (Dena Goodman). Vickery writes:

“No lady’s desk was complete without a secret drawer in which to hide valuables and letters. A place of privacy is central to Goodman’s conception of the autonomy of the letter-writer. The secrétaire guarded a lady’s secrets and advertised her claim to thoughts of her own.” (LRB Nov 2010: Vol. 32 No. 21, p.36)

Advertising one’s secrecy is contradictory. (We can talk about gender or colonialism here if we like, or about artist statements.) Keeping things in a known secret place makes the secrecy a public practice, and only the detail of the secret remains private. If the compartment weren’t generally known about, it follows, then the secrets would only be half valid, the private mind being significant only in relation to the public perception of that mind. (The artist’s anguish.) There is still plenty of space for secrecy within the detail of a secret, but its nature changes somewhat when its form is prepared for in the carpentry of a desk.

Instead one might choose to keep a secret compartment with, secretly, no secrets in it at all, or to hide secret things in another truly secret compartment while leaving nothing of particular interest under lock and key in the known hiding place, or to just leave secrets lying around indifferently, disguised as everyday things.