Pure Work: Mallarmé, Mondrian and Adamson

It seems that the specifically Mallarméan experience begins at the moment when he moves from consideration of the finished work which is always one particular poem or another, or a certain picture, to the concern through which the work becomes the search for its origin and wants to identify itself with its origin—‘horrible vision of a pure work.’1

Approaching Adamson’s collection Waving to Hart Crane,2 one is immediately confronted by the conjunction of Crane, Mondrian and, almost peripherally, Adamson himself. The title of the collection not only invokes Crane, but suggests the figure of Adamson communicating to him through the book and that the book is itself this gesture of greeting or dismissal (whether the wave is in farewell or greeting is, at this first glance, difficult to gauge). The centrepiece, Mondrian’s Victory Boogie-Woogie introduces the conceptual element of Plastic Art and its relation to poetry as the reproduction is in turn shadowed by blocks of Adamson’s poetry. Comparing Waving to Hart Crane to Adamson’s antecedent collection The Clean Dark,3 the reader would be hard-pressed not to note that the latter signals a significant detour. Waving to Hart Crane presents a departure from the more familiar vein of Adamson’s metempsychotic renderings of the natural world into a pared down ‘experimental’ mode. Adamson goes so far as to underscore this departure in the book’s acknowledgement section.4 It is this departure that this essay seeks to address, not so much in relation to Adamson’s earlier work as to the ongoing development of a form of reciprocity with Mallarméan poetics, particularly as this relates to the function of negativity in poetic language.

The movement between the plasticity of Mondrian’s work and the concrete nature of Adamson’s poems reproduced on the book’s cover (we are as yet simply judging the cover) suggests the parallel relations between word and object, word and art, and the underlying presence of the authorial voice. Initially the authorial voice exists as this conversation between/of Crane, Adamson and Mondrian, but is extended to include Mallarmé. Mallarmé is included on the cover approximately five times throughout the poem fragments (dismembered as ‘Mal,’ ‘Larmé’s’ and ‘Mall’). Moving from the figures that pre-face the book, the reader is quietly confronted by several concerns raised in the book metonymically through the figures of Crane, Mallarmé and Mondrian. Crane’s commitment is to a reworking of poetry away from the simply subjective toward the illumination of a new, if unspeakable word. Mondrian’s desire approaches similar ends: ‘a plastic expression of our whole being’5 not simply the subjective. Mondrian’s last work Victory Boogie-Woogie was left in a state of incompletion at the time of his death.6 Its use on the cover of Waving to Hart Crane underscores the book’s concerns with death and the fragmentary. Covering the margins of the book’s cover, one reads the conjunctions of ‘SILENCE,’ ‘WORD,’ ‘TRUTHS,’ ‘GRIEF,’ ‘PRESENCE,’ ‘EXISTENCE,’ ‘DEATH.’ The construction of the book from the outset is of borders and limits, of the abstraction of the artist into metonym. The readings of ‘Lozenge for Mondrian’ and ‘Lozenge for Brennan’ that follow, examine the poems as the endpoint (thus far) of Adamson’s strictly Mallarméan work. Subsequent poems, such as ‘Meaning’ and ‘The Night Heron,’ or more recent works in The Goldfinches of Baghdad while dealing with Mallarmé, do so in an effort to redetermine poetry in regard to a markedly different understanding of poetry’s relation to absence and negativity, one that can more effectively be read in terms of Blanchot’s reading of Rilke or reaching toward Bonnefoy’s poetics.

Waving to Hart Crane was released in 1994 and followed on from Adamson’s then most successful collection of poetry, The Clean Dark, published in 1989. Waving to Hart Crane as a collection signalled a further departure for Adamson into a leaner use of language, that, while returning to the Hawkesbury as an imaginative site, furthered Adamson’s efforts in experimentation. In this collection (as in earlier collections such as The Rumour), Adamson draws from numerous antecedents—Duncan, Lorca, Radnoti, Mallarmé, Brennan, Crane, Montale, Stevens, Whiteley, Shead and Grainger—but maintains a markedly individuated if not original position. The poems that invoke these figures affect a form of conversation. Unlike in early works such as The Rumour and Canticles on the Skin, Waving to Hart Crane expresses a confidence to operate in a more thoroughgoing relation to negativity at an ontological and linguistic level and more than ever develops an experience of idiomatic expression.

Adamson published his most substantial poetic statement to date in Meanjin number 3, 1990: ‘The Shadow of Doubt and “Derivations” in Australian Poetry.’ Discussing his own poetic inheritance, he remarks:

It flows out from Robert Duncan’s essay on Whitman, then meanders through the French Symbolism of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, rushes under Crane’s bridge, has a creek running through Brennan’s prose and McAuley’s final canticles and through Webb’s tributary; then it comes up into my swamp in riddles. There are other streams of it that even shoot out into the rapids of New York.7

Adamson’s ironic treatment of his recurrent use of the river metaphor belies a degree of sardonic detachment from, if not unease with, the development of such charts of literary inheritance. Nevertheless, the statement offers a valuable insight into Adamson’s own perception of his poetic. His references to Hart Crane gives an entree to the work that follows, especially as they raise the ‘on-going book our work belongs to beyond us’ (an appropriated Mallarméan idea), the question of faith in poetry and/or God, the development of poetics along more and more abstract lines, and poetry’s relation to individuated experience, Crane’s ‘real’ world.

Adamson develops an image of Crane perceiving the construction of his major work, The Bridge, as ‘a span over the abyss between his belief in poetry and his belief in god.’8 Readers of Adamson will note that the same could easily be said of Adamson’s own work. Adamson supports his claim about Crane with two quotations. The first, from one of Crane’s editors, T. A. Vogler, places Crane’s project directly in a negative relation to ‘an ultimate Word,’ the transcendent signifier, the name of God. Vogler states: ‘The Bridge is a record of the poet’s attempt “to hold each desperate choice,” and an outpouring of the poet’s own word rather than the reception of an ultimate Word. Recognising it as his own word, he can never know if it is cognate with that other Word.’ Adamson gathers this into his own conception of Crane’s poetry, emphasising the nature of ‘choice’ upon which Vogler commented, constructing an image of Crane in the poem ‘moving cadences around, building it up word by word.’ The Bridge itself becomes in Adamson’s reading ‘strangely crafted’ and gives an impression of being ‘roughly-hewn.’ Adamson does not go to any lengths to draw out the contradiction here, suggesting that the poem though overworked is not laboured, thereby tacitly emphasising his respect for Crane’s capacity for artifice. Adamson then quotes Crane’s ‘General Aims and Theories’ of 1925:

It is my hope to go through the combined materials of the poem, using our ‘real’ world somewhat as a spring-board, and to give the poem as a whole an orbit or predetermined direction of its own. I would like to establish it as free from my own personality as from any chance evaluation on the reader’s part … Its evocation will not be toward decoration or amusement, but rather toward a state of consciousness, an ‘innocence’ (Blake) or absolute beauty. In this condition there may be discoverable under new forms certain spiritual illuminations, shining with a morality essentialized from experience directly, and not from previous precepts or preconceptions. It is as though a poem gave the reader a single new word, never before spoken and impossible to actually enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle in the reader’s consciousness henceforward.9

From this ‘absolute beauty’ we can draw an understanding of the poem detached from the experience of the subject and the reader alike, offering the unfolding of the spiritual within an impossible signifier. Poetic language, for Crane, effects a negation of subjective experience as it affords a residue through the poem, ‘an active principle’, which becomes both essential and unspeakable. Adamson makes a similar comment in a 1985 interview with Michael Sharkey. In this instance, Adamson acknowledged Mallarmé’s influence: ‘The artifact, something totally imagined that may be sparked off by reality. You didn’t have to tie down the poem to what had happened, or what could happen, could be.’10 A comparison of Mallarmé’s and Crane’s ideas concerning the relation between the experiential world and the artifactual work supports a complicit reading such as Adamson gives. Crane stresses in the above that the poem as artifact should be free from associative interpretations, either stemming from his personality or the assumptions of the reader endeavouring to evaluate and so interiorize the poem within their own experience. For Crane, as for Mallarmé before him, experience itself was the essential quality of the poem, experience as absolute in the poetic field and autonomous from ‘experience directly.’ The question of what determines ‘experience,’ exactly what the word defines is of singular importance, as these poets are engaged with a lyricism that seeks to negate the individuated subject. Lacoue-Labarthe sees experience as ‘a crossing through danger,’ demanding that ‘we avoid associating it with what is “lived,” the stuff of anecdotes.’11 From these reference points, there would appear to be three possibilities in regard to poetry and experience: a poetry of confession which bears witness to experience (the stuff of anecdotes Lacoue-Labarthe sets aside); a poetry as experience, in which the world is transformed in its relation to absence (Rimbaud, Rilke, Bonnefoy); and a poetry which rarefies experience and creates an artifact, where the world is transformed as its relation to absence (Mallarmé, Crane). It is this last poetry which Adamson’s lozenges follow.

Crane’s effort is to illuminate a state of consciousness or absolute beauty through the vehicle of a ‘new word.’ This word is itself unutterable, ‘impossible to enunciate, but self-evident as an active principle.’ This notion of the active principle looks to Kristeva’s analysis of the semiotic device of the Mallarméan text12 and reiterates a key device of the Mallarméan Livre: ‘which is a total expansion of the letter, must find its mobility in the letter; and its spaciousness must establish some nameless system of relationships which will embrace and strengthen fiction.’13 It is the experience of this word, the passing through danger towards this word—the word itself presents a danger to the experiential subject—that the poem seeks to offer, offers as it seeks. Crane intimates the same understanding premised upon the motility of language and the unutterable goal of the poem as absolute, removed from the experience of reader and writer alike.

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