Cutting Verse

For a work like The Unconditional – a work comprising 235 pages of unbroken verse that mostly amounts to something like iambic pentameter, often falls into something like heroic couplets, occasionally breaks into something more like free verse, fills itself with neologisms, sometimes pads itself out with nearly unpronounceable collections of letters, and is so constantly cut up by parentheses that one loses count of which have opened and closed – it seems sensible to offer readers something of a road map with which to orientate themselves. One way of doing this would be to provide an account of possible intellectual references and influences in the poem: its very learnedness is one of its most obvious characteristics, and it is indeed full of references and half-references to various philosophical texts, philosophical poems, and philosophical writers. Theodor Adorno, for example, pops up all over the place – and is the source for the title – and pages 57–60 contain what the poem calls an 'incompetently englished afterbirth' (p. 61), and is in fact a very competently creative version of Stéphane Mallarmé's Crise de vers. But this strangely popular approach to difficult contemporary poetry runs the risk of simply displaying its own learnedness rather than attending to the poetry itself. Instead, this review will take a circuitous route through what is admittedly a difficult and long poem, and try to map the ways in which it cuts through any interpretative road one chooses to take.

While the notion of a road map may seem an ironically pedestrian way in which to talk about poetry, it is not entirely inappropriate in this case for two reasons. First, although the poem at every juncture – or junction – resists being read as a narrative, and resists even linear progression by creating a constant need to flick back and see which sentence a five-page parenthesis cuts into, certain fragments of language and story along the way make it sound like a road trip. As far as it goes, this starts on page 11 with what the endnote punningly calls 'the character = x.' getting into the car, and ends parked by the coast on page 234. Secondly, other fragments of language and story in the poem seem interested in both roads and maps as metaphors. Modern tarmacked roads, and the cars that ride their surfaces, are held in tension with the ancient Greek metaphor of the path of song, and with the metrical feet that are both steps in the path on which to travel, and the footsteps of the travellers themselves; poems, after all, are supposed to scan, but then so too are readers. The question then, which the poem throws around and throws itself against, is: how, now, can a poetic metrical voice 'speak from within the bitumen or choke' (p. 12)?

For this is an unashamedly, even an aggressively, metrical poem. It declares itself as such in its endnote, but this is really only a reminder of the similarly declamatory insistence that its overt formal features have already made. This is not to claim that the poem is unique in its use of metre in itself: blank verse is still played around with by other contemporary poets, partly because it can be played with to the extent that it becomes nearly invisible as verse. But The Unconditional, through a regular pattern of indentation and through that most overtly poetic and Augustan form, the rhyming couplet, makes sure its pentameter is neither missed nor hidden. It is metrical with a kind of obstinacy that can seem like necessity; the poem, like the elusive 'I' of page 228, cannot stop 'Turning myself alone wherever I | Stand quite unable to remove a foot', with 'turning' being the root of 'verse', from the Latin, versus, as well as 'foot' being a metrical term. Seemingly, for Jarvis, a metrical voice can only be heard through the tarmac if it aggressively cuts through.

And here the maps come in again. Consider page 15:

                                                  Where there is a map it is always incredible verse should have died.       It is...