Poetry in Common: On Terrence Arjoon’s “The Disinherited”

---

Terrence Arjoon writes in his preface to The Disinherited: “I, like everyone, am lost in the wilderness of this century.” To find his way, Arjoon writes alongside and with nineteenth-century French poet Gérard de Nerval, attempting to “make sense of this mess.” The two, Arjoon and Nerval, “unwrite” each other, collapsing the poem and time into acts of communication, speaking toward the contingency of sense and of poetry’s stable role as that which attempts, at all costs, to bring together the loose arrangements of the world into meaning, if only for a moment. Sense-making is what we ask most often from the poem; it is what gives the poem its weight. The writing of the poem becomes, in Arjoon’s textured and tectonic language, what not so much brings together the world, but what unravels, making visible the limits of poetic speech to congeal any historical moment into a communicable whole. If, as Marcel Proust writes, Nerval wrote from a kind of madness, a place just before sleep, Arjoon writes from a place of wakefulness to the morass of “daily living,” as he writes in “How We Got Our Names.”

Gérard de Nerval, the nom-de-plume of Gérard Labrunie, was born into an accelerating world. Well-traveled and prone to nervous breakdowns, he hanged himself in January 1855 and left behind the famous last words in a note: “Don’t wait up for me this evening, for the night will be black and white.” Perhaps we might read this parting declaration as a photographic vision of the new world he was leaving. Or, they are a final act of clarity, carving a legible line between the ambiguities of so much of his poetry. The impulse toward legibility is an impulse toward communicability, of understanding not simply what a poem is saying, but the language from and through which a poem reveals its own method of expression. In a sense, a poem is only made of possibility; it is only the potential to communicate, never the finished act of communication. Arjoon’s poems outspread themselves across the book, blending images and characters, fixing poetic language to chance encounters and a world overflowing with insects and bogs. 

Early in the book, Arjoon opens the poem “Moth Light” by giving form to this kind of  possibility: “Point by point the body renders new landscapes/calls firm logics of its matrices.” Throughout the book, Arjoon navigates between the firmly rooted image and the abstraction of language, found most readily in the series of poems titled “The Secret of Nerval.” This effect is doubled by Arjoon’s photographs, which punctuate the text and mirror the instability and ephemerality of the early photographic experiments of Louis Daguerre’s Boulevard du Temple (1838) or Nicéphore Niépce’s Point de vue du Gras (1826/27). In the first of the “Secret” series, Arjoon plays in a kind of Language-esque cascade, providing a method for reading the structure of communicability in the book’s poems:

Ambiguity is a matter of style.
Style is a stone.
Stone is a transparent body in my heart.
My heart is a flat-headed fungi.

Paratactic and emotive, earth and body fold into each other in a similar motion to the folding of mythic image and concrete language found in the work of Nerval. Nearly every line of the first “Secret” poem is made from the final word in the line that precedes it, and the first and last lines contain “door,” creating a closed loop. What this poem’s chain verse, anadiplosis form points toward is that, contrary to a Poundian impulse toward individualized, craft-centered poems, poetry is always working from within and outside of itself in a lineage of writing and unwriting. Arjoon wrestles with the writing and unwriting of the poem, and in “Drone Acupuncture (After Leslie Scalapino),” the image of the leopard drifts through lines where, “In the real light of day, dreams become real, or, unclassifiable emotions.”

In The Inoperative Community, Jean-Luc Nancy writes of the possibility of community by way of the act of communication that works of literature, art, music, etc., are always tied to. For Nancy, the work always operates at the limit of subjectivity. In the chapter which deals most directly with the relationship between literature and the possibilities (or impossibilities) of community, “Literary Communism,” he writes, “That the work must be offered up for communication means that it must in effect be offered, that is to say, presented, proposed, and abandoned on the common limit where singular beings share one another.” This limit, that is the point at which individuals come into contact, forms the poetic impulse by which Arjoon communicates with and through Nerval in his “adaptations,” as Arjoon calls them, of various poems from Les Chimeres (1854). These translations, however, are indirect, shifting language, adding and subtracting. They do not render Nerval in literal and exact translation. Rather, following Édouard Glissant, they function to illuminate the transparencies and opacities of language. For example, we can look at several lines from “Golden Lines” (“Vers Dorés”):

Respecte dans la bête un esprit agissant:
Chaque fleur est un âme à la Nature éclose;
//
Respect in animals an active mind:
Each flower to Nature is a blossomed soul;
//
Respect in animals their agile spirit;
Each flower inhabits the whole soul of nature; 

In Arjoon’s version “Golden Lines” (bottom) put against those of Nerval’s original and Peter Jay’s (middle) faithful reproduction, we see a more living, verdant picture-scape. Besides the various ways one might translate a word such as agissant (the present participle of agir, to act, to take action), what Arjoon plays with is how we read across and with language as both a visual and sonic medium, creating a kind of somatic translation of effects rather than pure language reproduction. Nature’s blooming soul becomes “the whole soul of nature,” and in torquing the scale, Arjoon discloses the ways in which translation (or slant-translation) is always bound to both encoding and decoding meaning, writing and unwriting language from the inside. In Arjoon’s skillful hands, Nerval’s chimeras become the hope of bringing together the moments from which language first gestures at meaning, and throughout the book, poems radiate against one another. Here, the limit of translation is not the moment of pure difference but the barrier between similarity when what is being translated veers too close to its translation. They perform, then, with Nancy, an act of communization: difference fades for a moment, words share one another. 

In another Nerval translation, “The Hours” (“Horus”), Arjoon introduces Cinnabar Kid from the lines “Les dieu Kneph en tremblant ébranlait l’univers:” which Arjoon morphs into “The Cinnabar Kid shook the universe.” Cinnabar Kid roams throughout the book, appearing in several poems, including the eponymous “Cinnabar Kid”—the poem which follows “The Hours.” In his titular poem, Cinnabar Kid becomes elemental; cinnabar is itself an ancient mercury-based dye. With a “bituminous” laugh, waltzing to “helium,” his image etherealizes, appearing in a poem named after another of Arjoon’s mythic characters: Eight-bog Marie. The circulating of both creates a new mytho-poetic range, again, speaking with and through Nerval’s own cast of mythic characters taken from a myriad of ancient cultural traditions. He writes in “The Mapping to Hexagram Earthy,” 

I indulge in forgery. Through error, we learn
relic thieves operate differently
than other merchants. 

But we can’t call Arjoon’s repurposing a kind of forgery, nor is it a thievery. In poetry’s effort to communicate, it must always deal in the dirty commodity of the word. It trades and hedges, extracts and reproduces so that between Nerval’s myth and Arjoon’s mythic register, we find a kinship built from the shared, but uneasy and slippery, impulse to universality. There is a sense in which myth might trend toward the obscure, the abstracting, that it takes the concrete to the ephemeral sphere of cultic knowledge and aura. Of course, modernism’s impulse toward the seemingly unintelligible was a legible reaction and a wrestling with the speeding up and intricate reshufflings of life. But what myth injects in Arjoon is not the continuance of a kind of narrative which imbues culture with a deeper form of import or meaning; rather, it is that which breaks from this lineage, creating gaps between the moments when obscured reality becomes visible in reflection of that which is seemingly legible, myth itself, which Arjoon winks toward when we writes “I was marked by History. / It marked me with its irritated tongue,…” in the poem “Antlers.”
The Disinherited concludes with the final of the three “The Secret of Nerval” poems. We return to the scene of Nerval and the photographic world out of which he wrote materialized in Arjoon’s photo of the smooth underbellies of clouds and a sliver of the house in the bottom corner opposite the poem. Within the poem, the idea of the past is complicated by Arjoon’s ambiguous use of the word. The narrator enters a house, then moves toward a room at the end of a hallway. Guided by an unnamed painter, Arjoon moves through the past. The two walk “Past genocides and heroin deals…,” “past wainscoting and holy basil, / past scanty clumps of date palms.,” “Past madness and rivers and rotten teeth,” and finally “Past redemption.” But the uncertain terrain of this past (these pasts) jostles between a sense of the movement past these images and memories, while also moving through them as historical pasts. Finally, reaching the room, the narrator finds that “I lost my European hair.” We are left with a question of the presentness of history, and the poem arrives at the very moment when past itself is left atemporal, always occurring in and out of the life of the poem. Left in this room of the double past, Arjoon’s poetry fixes us to always arriving present, the moment when, at last, we are made in common.