Work by Alison Croggon:
Interview
by Alison Croggon
By Rebecca Seiferle
It’s not too often that a poet will appear with such a range of theirwork as Alison Croggon has with the appearance of Attempts atBeing (Salt 2002 ) and The Common Flesh (Arc Books, 2003)which includes work from her first two volumes, This Is the Stone (Penguin, 1991) , and The Blue Gate (Black Pepper Press, 1997).Despite their differences, for The Common Flesh is moreconventionally formal, its subject matter more rooted in the personal,with that rawer intensity characteristic of a poet’s earlier work,whereas Attempts at Being is more formally inventive, includingshort lyrics, sequences, prose poems, a full-length play, severalperformance pieces, an essay, both of these works have a commonality ofpoetic preoccupation. Both evince a continual intermingling with otherliterary forms—varieties of prose, from prose poem to fairy tale and fable, music, the theatre, the essay—which suggests a restlessness withand a refusal to be confined to any narrowness of the ‘poetic.’ Animagination that finds the poetic not in some narrow confinement ofdefinition or school or theory but everywhere is at work here. Thisamplitude of embodiment in itself makes Croggon’s work highly originalamong contemporary poets, who are more often concerned with the narrowlypoetic, presenting a collection of definable poems gathered within acommon theme or preoccupation.
A few reviewers have faultedAttempts at Being for its inclusion of the theatrical pieces,feeling that their presence mars or interferes with the power of thelyric poems, in one case, attributing that critical sense to a lack ofinterest in the theatre, in another case, feeling that the theatricalpieces were weak in comparison to the poems, and in still another,feeling that the theatrical pieces were a kind of prop, disguising theweakness of the poems themselves. This sort of either/or seems to missthe point, so distracted by the difference of form, that what’soverlooked is the presence of poesis in all of these works,rather than a narrowly defined sense of the poem as definableartifact. Here, we have a sensibility extending itself with fluencyand fluidity of poesis writing into any number of forms and,while so doing, expanding the sense of what might be called the‘poetic.’
Croggon is undoubtedly an Australian poet if one proceeds from thecharacteristics of Australian poetry as defined in the PrincetonEncyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics where it is defined as evincing“a hard earthy skepticism’ a certain fondness for the ballad whichhas of course been moderated and developed into more contemporaryterms” and the “ manifest reluctance of the poets to subscribeto an unreservedly intellectual poetical convention” and evenperhaps in its use of “ dream time” altjira , thataboriginal sense of native mythologies where one dreams awake, andwaking, dreams. Croggon’s reluctance to ‘subscribe to an unreservedlyintellectual poetical convention’ is evinced by both books’ formalvariety, though she takes it further than most, in that she not onlyrefuses to subscribe to a particular poetical convention—writing thesomewhat conservative sonnet, the open field form, the prose poem— butto the convention of poetry itself, by expanding poetry into other areasof writing: the performance or theatrical piece, from which poetry isformally separated and subscribed. Nor is there any evidence ofsubscription to any particular school of poetics or theory in thesevolumes. That ‘fondness for the ballad’ is here, a form seldom seen incontemporary American poetry, though ‘developed into more contemporaryterms’ particularly in The Common Flesh. It should be noted thatCroggon’s ballads eschew the narrative common to that form; they areunabashedly lyric, and more in the mode of song. This simplicity of formused to convey complex emotional states has the effect of emphasizingthe complexity of feeling and idea, for the simple form moving by meansof association rather than narrative creates a fluid movement, which,while as easy to follow as a song, is full of contrasting edges whichrefuse to blur into one another.
The usage of dream time requires some explanation, for I do not mean bythis that Croggon’s work is preoccupied with the local, there’s nomention of aboriginal culture or a preoccupation with it. Rather I meanto suggest a way in which a poet may come to embody or express aparticular landscape in an autochthonic way, the work arising out of thecultural and linguistic intersections found in a particular place,wherein the idea of dream may be in the air itself and so enter thebreath of the poet. Given the harsh honesties, the hard-edged sense ofreality, and their formal sense, it may seem odd to describe the poemsin The Common Flesh as those of a kind of dream state. But thepoems, like dreams, for all they are clearly and sometimes painfullydelineated, their underlying movement always seems to originate in akind of subterranean self. The realm of dream is marked by a fluidity ofidentity and embedded or submerged emotion. So while Croggon’s workeschews the merely regional, for there’s nothing in these works of theobvious trappings and symbols of Australian aboriginal culture, her workis aboriginal in sensibility, in its use of ‘dream time’ and thresholdstates of being, where one dreams awake and waking dreams. For thestate of dream which underlies her work is not connected to the Westernpoetic of surrealism but rather is some intuitive and natural state ofbeing, which allows one to delineate the exact characteristics of anobject encountered while in a dream state, and it might even be possiblefor the unaware reader to be so caught up in the honesties and realdelineations as to not notice how the reality so delineated is premisedupon a a submerged and complex dream of being. The ‘speaker’ of thesepoems is always behind or beneath or below or less often above therealities depicted, curiously disembodied. This has the effect of makingthe reality so compelling that one might almost not notice the spell iscast by a particular original sensibility.
Most of what Croggon does in The Common Flesh could be mistakenfor certain cruder resemblances. There are many poems in this text whichmay seem autobiographical, from the opening poem ‘Quickening’ which isa poetic account of the family of the poet’s origins and the origins ofher own family, or the sonnets and series of poems that follow thatdelineate a painful love relationship, but these are not confessionalpoems. Rather in these poems, the personal is used as if it were rawmaterial like everything and anything else, and, unlike confessionalpoetry, where the poem tends toward the poet, the unveiling orrevelation of the self; these poems originate in and move toward a kindof representative feeling of being, an anonymonity, instead of the‘everyman’ of Medieval plays, every self, the no self. The poems arenever merely biographical, what chronology is traced is less that of aparticular ego, bound by particular life circumstances, confessing its“weird losses” through a particular and demaracated self, as it is thechronology or biography of a ‘self’ which is both oneself and ananonymous no one. Though it should be said that the imagination at work in this theatre of everyman’ ‘every woman’ is relentlessly heterosexual, operating on the assumption that Monique Wittig, critiquingLacan among others, replies to when she writes “No wonder then that there is only one Unconscious, and that it is heterosexual,” for the fluidityhere is very much within the ‘he’ and ‘she’. Even Croggon’s angels to which Milton granted the flux of fluidity in gender are, at the least, implicitly, male, and the value of her ‘poeis’ is hinged upon an implicit valuingof the erotic, of sexuality as that which produces a child. The powerful opening sequence ‘Quickening’ of TheCommon Flesh , intersected as it is by the landscape of Australiawhere “the ash-dry grass was a joke/ mocking our lush memories of green”and the requirements of culture “a cold land of money” “fathers strungin their fiscal skys” and of confinements of gender “The first lie/ youare a woman and smile in your pain,” is the birth of the child that onewas, the birth of the child that one will have, the birth of one self, a representative anyone.
From the beginning of her work, Croggon is preoccupied with the voice ofthe other. In The Common Flesh , there are poems to FridaKahlo, Emily Bronte, Billie Holiday,but again they are characterized not by narrative, but by the qualitiesof voice which speaks interiorly of a complex emotional state, so thatthey seem to speak both of these particular people, but of that statein their being which intersects with the reader. The theatrical piecesin Attempts of Being are a natural outgrowth of this poeticpreoccupation, the particular voice which tends toward the anonymousintersection with others. For instance, in ‘Billie Holiday’ it is hardto confine the ‘you’ to any particular reality, who may be variously thesinger, the singer of the poem, those listening to the Holiday, or thoselistening to the poem—a kind of anonymonity prevails and this is furtheremphasized by the bodily sense of these poems which is always rooted inthe erotic, as if the rhythms of sexuality and procreation in particularwere the underlying reality, “seeing in your drowning voice how theirflesh collapsed inside you/ and how the pure note hardened like a child”where the imagery is of the erection collapsing in another’s flesh andthe agency of hardening, of power, is given to the child and the purenote of the voice. In a sense that passage is a key of key to thesepoems in which an amorphous self is entred by many realities, and unableto enter any, even the girl in ‘Quickening’ who jumping into the sea onfaith nearly drowns, as if it were impossible for this speaker to entereven the water, though as a result of this, she is entered by the sea,and it remains in her. When these presences enter the amorphous self andcollapse in their “weird losses” what remains is the poetry, the purenote of the voice, the being gravid or pregnant with language “the wayto push/ through these softening walls/ its whole inevitable voice.” Theunderlying theology of these poems, is sexuality, by which I mean not somuch that all the poems, or even many of them, which given theirsubjects, could be expected to be, are given over to conventionallyerotic imagery and relationship, but that the underlying premise of themall is generative, sexuality, as as a correspondence between variousrealities which results in the quickening, the birth, or sometimes thestillbirth or abortion of the word. It is as if in these woundings ofbeing, all that remains is the voice, one’s own, or another’s admittedinto one’s own ,
- except a stubborn voice
casting out its shining length to where I walk alone
sick and afraidand unable to accept defeat
singing as I was born to
There’s a sort of apocalyptic vision at work in these, so many wounds,so much broken or rotting flesh, and no shrinking from violence, and yetthe vision is less otherwordly than rooted in knowledge of what existsin the world, as if images of injury were significant in heaven. Inthis, Croggon is less like most contemporary women poets than she seemsa descendent of Eliot, the sense of the wasteland everywhere. Kisses rothere, love is a fist, there is an underlying sense of pain that isunlocatable. If there is a sort of Blakean element in these, it is theharsher sounds clinging to the skin of Blake’s “London” nothis latter works of prophetic vision, even the angels here are made offlesh that breaks and decays. And if there is also a hint of Whitman, itis less his celebration of the body politic, the democratic many, as itis of the many that exist in the self, the delight felt only in aparticular body.
In Attempts at Being, which came out earlier but which isactually newer work, a fluidity of being becomes dispersed throughoutthe language. The formal qualities are more open and diverse, and thepoems have a less self-contained quality, in that many of them could beread as if from one long work, rather than as so narrowly bounded simplepoems. In this they are more of the nature of the sequences, and it isin the sequences, that some of the most powerful individual piecesoccur. For instance, “Mnemosyne”, which is again preoccupiedwith the coming into being, reproduction but not just physicalreproduction but the birth of the self. In this, it might be argued thatCroggon is one of those women poets for whom the giving of birth was thebirthing of the self, for instance I am reminded of Rukeyser in lateryears rewriting her Orphic myth to include the realities of her birthingherself by being torn open to birth her son into existence. It may bethat the romantic model of the muse, the male poet attended by someinspiring feminine figure, is in women poets altered into the eroticrelationship, with the self, with the other, by the process of birthing.That the metaphor of labor, of giving birth, is fundamental to suchworks.
The performance piece “The Breach” which is the voice of a policeman,recounting a terrible event, is utterly compelling, in part because of the poetic power of the voice, but also because of this intersectionwith the metaphor of labor and of giving birth, “the breeching”, withthe sense of belaboring and being broken, “breached” like a wall.Croggon is best when she is possessed by someone, like a medium, or achanneler of other voices. And it should be noted that in these poems,even the voice of the ‘self’ arrives as if it were someone else’s. Thismay also be why the landscapes here are those of a wasteland, ofestrangement from being, as if speaking were being born and torn intoanother, so far and estranged from oneself.
The erotic is the premise of all of these poems, which is not to saythat they are necessarily or even many of them given over to eroticsubject matter. It is rather that the energy on which they are based isthat of the erotic, a kind of coupling with all things which gives birthto the voice, not an exacerbated or aggravated sexuality, but rather amingling of being with other beings, whether of another person, astranger glimpsed on the street, an event, and I describe it as acoupling because as in the erotic encounter, it is hard to tell who iswho, whose hand is this, whose feeling is that, a kind of interminglingof being and voice, and a certain mysterious quality (though always within a heterosexual matrix) since theencounter can never be reduced to a mere statement about it but can onlybe embodied in that intermingling. The surface qualities of Croggon’swork, the linguistic ease, the formal sense, the intelligent awarenessof other forms, are so accomplished and compelling that it might be easyfor the undiscerning critic to rely on them alone, to see in the formalelements of The Common Flesh a kind of conservatism, or in themultidisciplinary approach of Attempts at Being , a kind ofpolygot multiplicity, in which the theatrical pieces and the shorterpoems, might be seen as weakening the purely ‘poetic’ effect. But thisunderlying complexity of movement and feeling, the erotic nature ofphysical existence juxtaposed with the anonymonity of being results in adeeply aboriginal sensibility at work, where I is always another, oryou, or someone else, deeply anonymous but rooted in a particularlocale, autochthonic in the sense of originating from a particularplace, full of the intersections of detail and experience.
