Towards the Blanched Alphabets

Abstract

In his sixth collection, Towards the Blanched Alphabets, expatriate American poet Gustaf Sobin presents a series of poems composed in the territory between Emerson's announcement that fossil poetry and a more skeptical, post-structualist dismissal of such a romantic portrait of linguistic origins. These poems are by and large meditations that follow from Sobin's encounters with the artefactual detritus-the axheads and potsherds-of the Neolithic cultures that once inhabited the Vaucluse Region in Southern France, where Sobin has lived since 1963. The poetic labor of this book might be called a translation from the heft of these eloquent vestiges into the breath's transparent coinages of the poet. This encounter between the Neolithic and the modern, accompanied by Sobin's deft attentiveness to lineation, leads to a meditation on origin and passage that both quiet and stunning. The book begins with the poem Genesis, in which Sobin translates his almost mystical encounter with a Neolithic needle into a language that rifted with rewards. The following the half of the poem: from the very outset, a needle, a no-thread, run inextricable through the living mass. flared, then guttered, that ore, that either, that that is. (3) The ore of or Sobin's matter here-the isn't that is that permits the flare of recognition. To extend the metaphor, the threadless needle leads to a seam that Sobin mines, opening into a moment of transitory recognition, one that must, invariably, gutter. But the mining occurs all the same, and the poems collected here present the material arrived at by this process. In this sense, these poems convert the artefact's immediacy of the (8) into an identification with people who'd existed...in the sheer immensity of the immediate (41 ). The poems in this book are about the temporally remote becoming spatially simultaneous, an etymology of sorts abolished in the exact same instant as its formula- / lion (7). When this happens, as Sobin puts it in a pithy line, the past and present clot, thesaural (35). Sobin's attentiveness to the material of the past cognate with his attentiveness to the material of In the introduction to his marvelous collection of essays on archeology, Luminous Debris, Sobin describes the connection directly: I'd go out `silexing' after a day's work as a writer, and find myself, once again, scouring the empty expanses before me, scouring the ground for a second set of stray vocables, lost nominals.' This nostalgic coordination of words and things is, however, balanced by a more skeptical semiotics that crops up frequently in this book: For language, as you'd learnt, never more than the arbitrary imprint of a silence. (17) These poems, then, mark the gap between an archeological underworld, legible through its underwriting (8), and an eschatological afterworld with its concomitant after-language (30). Although such skepticism imprinted with post-structuralism, Sobin stubbornly retains a romantic belief that archaic objects permit entry into a bygone moment of linguistic transparency. In a later poem we find the following reversal: for creation, each time, implies anteriority; implies entry, re-entry into those earliest alphabets, languages. (104) In spite of the cautions of post-Saussurian linguistics, Sobin demands for himself an entry into origin: once, every / word, its every / blown vocable I came rippling out of an else- / where that I was (49). The success of several of these poems a consequence of his refusal to refuse the possibilities of creation present in a first language. This trajectory (which occurs in individual poems as well as through the book as a whole) moves from the idea that language a violated silence to a more ambitious, aggressive appraisal of language as a sonorous usurpation ( 17). …