Peter Manson’s Language Surfaces

The article analyses the conception and construction of ‘the language surface’ in Peter Manson’s poetry. It explores how Manson’s dual commitment to language’s materiality and its fundamental ambiguity effects a relation between a kind of ‘secretive’ non-communication and a kind of disclosure or, Manson’s own term, ‘candour’. In an interview with Tim Allen (2006), Manson claims that his prose work, Adjunct: An Undigest (2001), drew ‘everything that was happening to [him] up into the language surface’ – disclosure of sorts – yet, across his more formal poems, there’s a kind of obfuscation: ‘…I could use my formal interest in the language surface almost to “distract” myself from the often quite personal material which was being drawn in underneath’. After some introductory comments about how Manson’s language surfaces are constructed, the primacy they afford to the materiality of language, and the dynamic subject positions they solicit, this article offers readings of two poems, each of which presents a coded commentary on the construction of the language surface. In ‘raven A’ (in Facticious Airs, 2016), the poem thinks its own language surface by invoking a stringed instrument constructed out of taut cat skin, on which ‘the position of the cat’s nipples can still be seen’. In ‘Four Darks in Red’ (collected in For the Good of Liars 2006) the reader is invited to think the relation between surface and buried personal material alongside the effacement of deep-vein cinnabar extraction in the application of vermillion red paint. The article ends with comments towards a poetics of ‘candour’.

geometrical term for ' a line which approaches nearer and nearer to a given curve, but does not meet it within a finite distance'. 3 Potentially, the lines we open in dialogue fall close enough to ensure the adequate transmission of instrumental contentargument, imperative, apology or plea -but they never fall together or overlap, approaching their destinations only insofar as they veer away from them.
Poetry for Manson, on the other hand, is 'the original, unqualified statement of language'; 4 the presentation of language itself in its fundamental ambiguity, outside dialogic strictures. 5 A reader of poetry doesn't have the benefit of an interlocutor across the room. Their production of meaning is much more open-ended. Ambiguity cannot be negotiated down till it dips below some threshold of ' adequate' shared meaning, resulting in a secret released and a secret kept. The reader of poetic language -instead of being bounced around inside the shifting shape of a pragmatic speech situation, and constantly encountering the limits inaugurated by dialogueis only rebuffed by the material properties of the ' original, unqualified statement of language' on the page. They also extend an asymptotic line towards the text, but they are bound, if their wish is to discover or finally meet some unambiguous 'truth' of the poem, to an infinite task. 6 This essay's first contention is that Peter Manson expresses his commitment to this understanding of poetic language in his own poetics by developing a specific conception of 'the language surface' across interviews, critical writing and his poems' encoded reflexive commentaries. 7 In much of his formal poetry, Manson's 'language surfaces' resist the reader's proprietary will to disambiguation; his poems' non-communication is formally built-in. In the playful ways in which they rupture communicability -for example, in their foregrounding of the acoustic, oral, sculptural or visual elements of language, and so typically framing any 'sense' based on semantic coherence as subsidiary -Manson's poems ostensibly withhold direct expression.
However, Manson's language surfaces do not simply block communication; they also offer Manson, he admits in an interview with Tim Allen, the means of writing, 'with a candour I couldn't have attained by more direct means.' 8 There is a complex assertion here of an indirect sharing, in which it is exactly the language surfaces' modes of resistance, their misdirection, that inculcates frankness of a sort. Non-communicative acts can nonetheless summon the (indirectly) communicative.
Although Manson's poems at times can feel hermetic in their resistance, then, without necessarily feeling dense, the poet is not subject to solitary confinement as in 'au secret'. 9 There is no straightforward sense in which Manson's poems annex a space of withheld material, 10 a potential refuge for an oppressed lyric subject, in order to escape readerly modes of surveillance or interrogation. 11 Nor is the reader co-opted into a coterie of secret-knowers by following clues towards sites of confessional unburdening. Manson's poems preclude simple distinctions between public and private, confessional and hermetic, open and closed, reader and writer, and his language surfaces stage a dynamics of concealment and disclosure that results from his commitment to both the materiality and the fundamental ambiguity of the language on the page. 12 It is impossible not to mention that Manson's claim for our 'asymptotic approach' to dialogic meaning invokes the same geometrical analogy that Jacques Lacan uses in his essay, 'The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I'. Lacan uses the analogy to express the disjunction between the infant and its ideal I: the fictional, unified subject with which it identifies itself. 13 Manson's diagnosis of the difficulties of approaching shared meaning in dialogue is lent further complication here: not only is Manson committed to a poetry, and to a concept of the language surface, that seemingly isolates the positions of reader and writer, foreclosing simple transport between them, he also invokes Lacan to gesture towards each position's own fundamental splitting; prior to socialisation, the self is already fragmented, identifying itself with an ideal it can never attain. This drama of the split subject and its relation to language (though perhaps not straightforwardly 'Lacanian') is consistently staged across Manson's poems, which seem to solicit, from reader and writer both, a kind of subjectivity in process, bound to subjection to text.
This essay seeks to establish that these manifold tensions and complexities are actively maintained by Manson's specific conception of the language surface and its example is preceded by this critical voice, 'it begins', and followed by 'because I can't speak'. 18 The maintenance of the capital S in 'Softest' (as with the other foundlanguage fragments) ensures both that the two modes remain distinct, and that we understand the initial 'beginning' or 'intro' to have been deferred, embedded within a new one retrospectively applied. In later stanzas, the same dispirited voice that began 'it begins' can be traced from 'if I could caw // to you across the intrusive spur' to 'it would turn out […] as it always does'. 19 But the voice also pulls two lines of found language into its commentary, lifted from www.gojapango.com, which offer an instructive initial schema for thinking the relation between Manson's language surfaces and what they carry: On the skin of the best shamisen the position of the cat's nipples can still be seen 20 The shamisen is a three-stringed Japanese court instrument similar to the lute, with a long, fretless neck and a cuboid resonating chamber made of gourd, traditionally bound in cat skin. The poem thinks its own writing by evoking the tanning process ('in tawny unison flattening hair to a scale/frayed into feather eroded to dander'), pointing to the application of consistent pressure upon a surface from which the remnants of living matter fall away. The cat's nipples are striking because they mark a point of incompletion in the abstractive process of the cat's tanning: the finished product, the 'skin of the best shamisen', maintains a trace of the prior lived relations of the cat (its nipples), so that the eventual surface binding the shamisen's hollow gourd bears witness, however indirectly, to the dependences and sufferings it effaces.
When the shamisen is plucked, everything we might index to the cat's nipples resonates: their position and number, as well as the unique tension, thickness and suppleness of the skin that holds them, lend the amplified vibrations their distinct sound signature; the cat's prior existence is indirectly sung. As well as offering an initial schema for thinking through how the craft of Manson's language surfaces both efface and maintain the conditions impelling their creation then, the shamisen cat skin also anticipates the privilege Manson affords to his poem's sonics and their activation when read aloud, which I'll return to when looking at 'Four Darks in Red'. 21 Manson's most well-known publication, the prose work, Adjunct: An Undigest, also presents a language surface that works to unify a diverse range of language fragments. The book is a transcribed and edited notebook, kept for seven years, in which pieces of found language, often selected for the comic effect yielded by their The basic language surface here is guaranteed by the fragments' random allocation, with the effect that the more straightforwardly personal material is relieved of its confessional or exhibitory sense having been, in Manson's words, ' drawn up' into the same language surface occupied by the other fragments in play: 'There's only so upset you can find something', Manson observes in an interview with Tim Allen, 'when it's resting next to the sentence 'Jobby by Hans Arp'. 23 That the personal material is not experienced as 'upset', in the sense of 'raised up', testifies to the levelling effect Adjunct's language surface submits its fragments to -though the cognate verb 'to upset', or to cause distress, is also gestured towards. Elsewhere, in '"Love Poetry"', a prose piece collected in Between Cup and Lip, Manson problematizes the impulse to represent in language the sensory impressions that precede it. 'Every time I tried to settle on something which felt as if it ought to be a sensory image,' he writes, 'it turned out to be groups of words, which didn't describe the image but which were it.' 24 Manson's texts consistently recall the reader back to the signifier rather than the signified, another sense in which Manson's language surfaces tend towards the undermining both of hierarchies and straightforward distinctions then, insofar as they avoid the 'upset' image, or the figure, emerging from the background of the material of the language on the page: the words are the image, and Manson is explicit about his preference for poetry that 'makes its points' by ' embedding them in the material properties of the language'. 25 Writing on Adjunct, Craig Dworkin argues that this levelling effect complicates tensions between public and private, inner and outer: in Adjunct it becomes 'increasingly difficult' he writes, to ' distinguish the falsely intimate address of public language from the coldly unemotional register in which Manson jots genuinely personal material, the observed from the confessional, voyeurism from exhibitionism.' 26 Because the reader's approach to meaning in Adjunct is guided far more by the contiguity of seemingly unrelated materials from disparate sources than by similarity between them at the level of sense, distinguishing distinct modes of address -public or personal, intimate or distant -and then selecting them as discrete objects of scrutiny feels like a wild goose chase, arbitrarily demanding of the text that, for example, its more personal material is expressed with little mediation.
On the other side of the language surface, the writer's side, Manson claims that to compose poems guided by a will to expression would be akin to ' emo[ting] at a brick wall.' 27 Perhaps counter-intuitively, the only way in which we could conceive a language surface as a wall that blocks disclosure entirely then, would be if it were, hypothetically, to wield poetic language as if it were a straightforwardly communicative instrument of confession or exhibition; in poetry, such a claim to simple disclosure would only serve to undermine the fundamentally social nature of language. By this schema, the poems that would presume to share the most, to reveal the most about the feelings impelling their creation, are the least social, the most narcissistic. Although the language surface is resistant then, and although, for Manson, '[u]ltimately, you're alone with the text, whether you're the writer or the reader', 28 thinking of Manson's resistant language surfaces as walls through which nothing passes seems like the wrong metaphor.
A more useful, preliminary metaphor might be the language surface as a window onto darkness, before which, looking out, the subject is met by an uncanny reflection: a surface that does not allow any simple recognition of a pre-verified self, on behalf of reader or writer, but rather encourages, in the process of encountering that comprise the peculiar, vibratory mobility of his language surfaces, on which I'll elaborate towards the end of the essay. That through ' distracted' writing, the writer's relation to the text begins to resemble any other reader's, however, also points towards the dynamic subject positions these surfaces solicit. In one of the many fragments in Adjunct commenting self-reflexively on its composition, the 'writer' submits themselves to a distancing process guaranteeing their continuing existence, albeit in a shifting, dynamic form: 'the language surface.', Manson writes, 'Which is not to say that everything is language, but that the writing makes a place where death and disaster can be read as well as lived'. 30 The author is ' othered' 31 by submitting themselves to the material properties of language: the compulsion resulting in the solitary act of writing becomes displaced, as a kind of relief, 32 by the social experience of reading; 'the total process of writing… is a social one at every stage other than the "siege in the room"', 33 Manson insists, following Beckett. The sociality of language is foregrounded in the same movement by which the authorial subject is relinquished.
This fluidity between private and public, inside and outside in Manson's works is reflected in the demands he makes of readership, not least his own. His formal poetry, Manson explains, is 'full of deliberately distracting word-collocations which mess with the reader's ability to parse the text'. However, this process of obfuscation is guided by his commitment to the creation of poetic artefacts that operate as, he writes, 'transitional object[s] between human consciousness and its material basis'. 34 Another psychoanalytic term worn lightly in Manson's writing, the transitional object (developed by D.W. Winnicott) 35 stands in for the infant's direct relation to its mother as it begins to achieve relative independence on its way to selfhood, accepting external as well as internal realities, and securing their interrelation. Transitional objects -often a doll, or an item of clothing, or a blanket -enable us to overcome our omnipotent, narcissistic pretensions as children. We overcome our sense that we create our mothers, for example, and correlatively, the world. Transitional objects both circumscribe the loss of that original, material relation and ensure the ability to move fluidly between inside and outside.
Manson claims in 'Let it Be' that there are levels at which a poetry that accepts language's fundamental ambiguity is able to stand as ' a profound act of reconciliation with our status as material beings in a material universe, animate only for the time being'. 36 But I think reconciliation too passive. Manson's language surfaces might behave like an infant's transitional blanket insofar as they undercut narcissism, refusing, by their 'finely-measured openness', 37 any straightforward reflection of the reader's concerns or, and this is rather familiar, resisting any proprietary will to impose a final meaning. But in the particular way in which they privilege the materiality of language, they also continually refer the reader to the physical presence of their body, the vocal apparatus, the breath, as they activate the acoustic, oral, sculptural and visual qualities of the language, eliciting far more active, dynamic and tense processes of engagement with our material basis, through this language, than 'reconciliation' would suggest. As Ellen Dillon argues in her "' A poetry at the gates of existence': negotiating (with) the outside in some work by Peter Gizzi and Peter Manson", 38  and only for so long let this name come to the fore as a paradigm's endgame 39 The poem affixes an occluded mouth that stutters, fits and chokes in song, to the often deadly process of cinnabar ore extraction. Both are drawn into further relation through the apparent transformation of the facture of paint -the blacks and reds of Rothko's paintings, and correspondingly, the material properties of the poem -into the more fragile, twitching and short-lived materiality of the ' cinnabar/moth', a redand-black-winged moth common to Europe, and Western and Central Asia. This alongside closely layered lexical fields relating to child birth and dentistry. 40  Purves calls them, 50 so that a preoccupation with labour and childbirth (the obsessive loops through effort and headstrong, etc., seem to circumscribe an obscured image of crowning, for example) interact with an interest, informed by psychoanalysis, in the child's entry into language too, 51 this latter perhaps the most noticeable 'theme' across Manson's various works. 52 This entry into language is a stuttering one (cf. 'because I can't speak'), the mouth wheezing and spluttering -'violent asthma', ' choke on gladly' -in the heat of a Pompeiian cinnabar mine, lungs cut with sulphur, hands awash with quicksilver. 53 Rothko's painting obscures these murderous conditions of the mines in which vermillion paint finds its origin, it ' drapes' the 'fit' in ' cinnabar'. 54 However, Manson's poem critically reclaims this history in order to explore the relations between the 'finished' artefact and the material conditions of the labour it effaces. In 'Four Darks in Red' we find a language surface that refuses to obscure the conditions of its production and an account, embedded in the materiality of the language, of a kind of continual, stuttering attempt to reacquire language in an encounter with its material basis, underpinned by the physical activation of the poem in the vocal apparatus. Manson's extraordinary long sequence 'Sourdough Mutation' insists on this consistent return of language to the biological body, stating in its epigraph that 'The audience imagined for this is of speakers reading'. 55 Manson's refusal to mystify the undeniable obstacles poetic language poses to communication, and his poems' corresponding withdrawal from direct communication, could become, in the particular ways in which he conceives and constructs the 'language surface', the basis of a poetics of candour. A poetics foregrounding candour must recognise the enclosing logic of the will to direct communication in poetry, in which 'writer' and 'reader' are consolidated in the false assertion of a dialogic relationship. Crucially, it must also recognise that in poetic language, because direct communication cannot achieve what it seeks to, there can be no candour without simultaneous concealment, or alternatively, that candour cannot avoid the non-communicative. Correspondingly, poetic languageis the site where concealment's dependence on the social is most legible: secrets demand interlocutors (from whom the secret is kept) and, when shared, inaugurate social configurations. Manson's poems are artefacts designed to solicit encounters with our shared material basis, a praxis of readership in which the writer relinquishes their privileged position; an appropriate place, in its universality, to begin thinking about poetic candour which avoids ' emo[ting] at a brick wall'. Poetry. Manson's poetry recognises that the potential for 'public' disclosure is crucial to the logic of the 'private' secret, an act of wilful concealing which depends on the social configuration from which the information is kept or 'set aside'. More, secrets are shared as a means of inaugurating social groups based on trust. Secrecy is a condition of poetic language due to the latter's ambiguity and its materiality. Poetic language obfuscates and withholds the straightforwardly communicative.
Manson's poetry, in recognising and committing to these fundamental conditions of language, counter-intuitively is far more capable of ' disclosure', as sharing, than poetries that might seek this result through direct communication. 13 '[T]he important point', Lacan writes, 'is that this form situates the agency of the ego, before its social determination, in a fictional direction, which will always remain irreducible for the individual alone, or rather, which will only rejoin the coming-into-being of the subject asymptotically, whatever the success of the dialectical synthesis by which he must resolve as I his discordance with his own 23 Peter Manson and Tim Allen, Don't Start Me Talking, p. 285. This quotation reads strangely, and it's tempting to assume that 'upset' is a misprint of 'upsetting'. Having said that, the passage from which the quotation is taken discusses the relief granted by pulling personal material up into one language surface, or subsuming a particular kind of declarative language under the rules of a formal space that foregrounds amusing disjunctions between different kinds of language rather than the ostensible contents specific to each of them. So, 'upset' does achieve some force.