Lately poetry in England has been occupied with antique dreams, of Baudelairean reverie, translations from bygone Chinese, revalidations of iambics, that sort of thing. Here latter-day poets are apt to renovate the discourse as if heaven were perpetually betraying the earth; their shows of progress require retrogression, but not like the backward advance of scuttling claws; and no critic, whatever their stripes, really should blow a loud note of exultation before some grand new epoch, even as its makers busy themselves in keeping the old news moving. Still, tramp on, ye generations! For outside of any set has here emerged a certain phenomenon recently started up in Brighton—one Sara Crangle, author of Wild Ascending Lisp. Her poems have, so far as I can tell, inexplicably yet to receive by a selection of her countrymen and countrywomen any serious comment whatsoever. Is she a fool; a prophet? For myself, I am not disposed to accept her poems as evidence of either, having less faith in latter-day fools or prophets than in this poet; assuredly, we cannot regard her as a deceiver, though her poem messes us about with its no-nonsensical assault on our brains. Sara is one of the most amazing, one of the most startling, one of the most perplexing creations of the contemporary poetical order. Her verse is abundantly eccentric; but her book is no mere food for laughter, even as there’s orts a-plenty for reading about. The sometime difficulties of her verse undoubtedly contain much that may not easily and fairly be considered only defenses against ridicule though prolepses are often at stake:

XVII

Ticker-tape loss beats on, one letter
per second per day triumphal flake
admitting blur and so obscuring gape.

From soul-covered sidelines watch:
consume strained trees with mouths
worn from helpings of stupefaction.

Dig the hole and lie down, the wrest
is yours for the making. From such depths
a small blue blast of gas signals victory.

The singularity of the author's mind—her utter disregard of ordinary forms and modes—appears on the very cover-page of her work. Not only is there no author's name, (which in itself would not be singular) but it harbours no signal other than a white square upon which is shown a faint green smear. An all-pervading atmosphere of the unknown comes over us and we can only infer that this unroisterous grass blade indicates something at once unique and rhizomatic about the intentions of the book. It does. What then follows is a long poem whose fifty-two numbered, but otherwise anonymous parts, form a system that carries out some intricate re-versioning of one Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”. In the construction of this artifice, we begin to acquire the notion that Sara, a scholar as much as a poet, has pledged each self to the business of auctioneer. Ask yourself if you recognize the ensuing wares: “a spear / of grass”; or “sidecurved”; or “barestript”; or “bedfellows”; or “ya-honk”; or, skipping to the end, “awp, y”? Of course, these are mere highlights, and some of them have been snapped off. Other interconnections abound; and though quite copious in measure, they are themselves reinvented as smithereens, violated and infringed, fitful and failed, injured, kaput and unsettled. We must say, now, that the encounter with Whitman, as conceived by us, is less haunted by the delusions of its original than by the obligation to sell what’s left intact by harm. A passage whose original facility offered merely discreet intimations of loving one’s self must now be read against its new second life:

IV

Watching cloud, horizon, grass I—
surprised to discover I am
preparing to rape
myself

To allow the reader chance to form in her understanding a clearer idea of the mechanisms employed, withholding at the same time specification regarding the particular algorithm (if one exists we don’t know it) established for the transmutation, we will give an illustration, risking the obvious, but hoping it will be enough to show rather than say how here it works. The subject from which the poet starts off is equivalent to the following:

27

To be in any form, what is that?
(Round and round we go, all of us, and ever come back thither,)
If nothing lay more develop’d the quahog in its callous shell were enough.

Mine is no callous shell,
I have instant conductors all over me whether I pass or stop,
They seize every object and lead it harmlessly through me.

I merely stir, press, feel with my fingers, and am happy,
To touch my person to some one else’s is about as much as I can stand.

In response, Sara wanders off this fecund track, and an attempt is made to specify how sorely the originating paroxysm is aggravated by the incidental mention of just anyone in particular. She sees that expression itself is again capable of subdivision, so that:

XXVII

Enchaired,
I spin electric,
Awaiting brings no ease:
I finger the carbuncle,
Stir pus, remain
Sated.

What was something of a furnucle quite oozing multiple occasions of happiness is drawn severely down to a bright gem, a garnet unpolished but cut into linear facets. What is detectable therefore is less an ethic as a method of re-reading the oversupply. Whitman: “Is this then a touch” ≠ Sara: “Proxy me” as a violation of all reflection.

Each section of Wild Ascending Lisp, to degrees at times apparent while at others only tendentious, is matched to its corresponding unit in “Song of Myself”, and we note in passing as a possible insight into the process, the sheer sibilant speech sounds of Sara’s “lisps” notwithstanding, that lisp is defective speech; and that the word ‘lisp’ as onomatopoeia implicates her simulations. Her poem is written in wild, irregular, mostly unrhymed, certainly unmetrical “lengths”; that no one section replicates the form of any other; it offers at the very level of form a legible treatise on originality, or an inspection of Whitman’s assertion that every existence has its idiom. The external form, therefore, is startling, and by no means any more seductive that Whitman’s, however unaccustomed we now are to the sumptuous music of ordinary metre; and the central principle of the poem is equally staggering. It seems to resolve itself into an ego-ism not contracted by nostalgia or sentiment or future promises fulfilled. Hopeful of an eternal presence of the individual soul of Walt Whitman? Hardly, as in all things difference blossoms, yet in such wise that Wild Ascending Lisp represents his poem as a type not too dissimilar from itself as a matter of protocol. Crangle goes into the rough world of that devil-may-care Yankee whose industrious provisionality has now been overthrown by permanence so that

50

[…] I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid,
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol

L

She identifies herself with forms of being where getting experience or portrayal into composition without a shred of composition is the principal task at hand, and where a mirror by the writer’s side becomes a model for the line composed as though looking at its own tight reflection:

XLVIII

selffleS

She riots with a kind of Bacchanal fury in the force and fervor of senses:

V

sidecurved

slither jut mouth
bounce taut ching held,
soundless roar heartclung

convexed arch creased beneath
wracked toes,

barestript

And she beholds all things tending toward the central and sovereign:

XLII

I know perfectly well
my owny
go

Such, as we conceive, is the basis of this strange, fantastic, and bewildering book; yet we are far from saying “Song of Myself” is a key that will unlock all the quirks and oddities of the volume. Much remains of which we confess we can make nothing even with the crutch of Whitman’s poem at the periphery; much that seems to us purely extraordinary and unresolved, though Crangle does not construe openness as absolute permission for writing just anything; her poem is burdened by its task and is the part-record of that struggle; much that appears to our muddy vision gratuitously anti-prosaic is the needful pain of speaking; it is baffling not without purpose, it is singular in result.

There are so many evidences of a noble spirit in Crangle’s pages that we regret these aberrations of commentary. A closer inspection into the peculiarly efficacious labour of her prepositions, or the flagrant ambiguity of mood between description and imperative, remain outstanding. But it is also good, sometimes, to leave the veil across.