Reference break-up: now enter “ Alakanak or anywhere”

Reference in Berssenbrugge’s ‘Alakanak Break-Up’ is veiled with ambiguity. Reference is full of possibility and potentiality in conjuring up images in the reader’s mind those that we “can see,” and those we cannot which are created through prose language, becoming an image-making operation. Here reference functions dualistically. Impossible worlds may be created. Essentially language can only take us so far in the text’s literal situation. While deictic expression brings us immediately to aspecific moment and situation reference propels us beyond, into a more imaginativeand abstract zone, that can be seen through language or imagined. Reference conveysmeaning about something not present.

Something separate from the immediatelinguistic/ textual situation. Reference language is denotative and descriptive tying usto a physical or metaphysical world. Although it does not, necessarily provide clarity.It rather expresses multiplicity and transports the reader, with fluidity, from the deicticimmediacy, Berssenburgge’s descriptive reference pushes us beyond the specificlinguistic situation we are positioned in, however her poem does not depend upon it.The title ‘Alakanak Break-Up’ has historical and cultural implications of settlementand colonisation. We may bring, or we not may bring, this particular referential“reading of text” forward. The references to ‘frozen’ matter and rocks and silencemay evoke Alaska vividly or obviously, however these references are not used toprevent readers imaging some other place, or if they are to image, anything related tothe reference to Alakanak at all. Allowing us to ‘see’ through the language of the text to create image.

Instances where the language refers to something we cannot see must be imagined, as exemplified in ‘it splays out like contents its occurrence there.’ ‘Splays’, seems problematic and out of place. ‘Contents’ is spilt or poured out, we could imagine rock crumbling, or breaking up then imaginethe pieces of rock ‘its insides’ which are now exposed. ‘Splays’creates an image difficult to see, the implications of its use are not particularly clear. It requires, the reader to diverge from seeing the rock to imagining something, which splays outrather than is split, the reader must examine, how reference shifts through at onceimage-making and simile. ‘Splays out contents’ made me think of surgical procedures, incisions-openings-autopsy. The image of medical surgery does not see to belong in the setting of Alakanak similarly the word ‘splays’ disrupts a cohesive image. That of a broken rock. The image of human organs being splayed to be examined surfaces for me however it does not displace other images that could arise.

Ultimately the reader determines the image. This does not erase the landscape.Reference to landscape creates the space for image associations. Counter-intuitive it may seem. This idea of splaying the contents of the landscape as a referential moment is extremely dense, it may be read in conjunction with the social, cultural and historical readings of this poem. Moving from the specific situation to a space wheredifferent readings proliferate. To follow this progressing idea further, focusing on reference as mobilising language, we see ‘splays’ disrupting the image, but also allowing us to unravel them.

Alliance, between image and the words of images, is established so language is mobilised. ‘With silence as a material’. Like a material silence becomes pliable and shapely matter. This is at odds with our understanding of silence, still and empty. Silence as material becomes something we have to imagine a reference we cannot see as given in the language/ text. We may connect to ‘plane itself is silent’, although this intra-textual reference is not necessarily present, there is no origin to find – to give reference meaning. As the doubled reference ‘plane’/ ‘plain’ indicates. We connect these references through their sound.

Berssenburgge is playing with our expectations of referential language. How may we distinguish between ‘plane’ and ‘plain’. There is a disparity between what we see and hear. We may associate many things with these two words. Distinct low relief uniform colour without additions. Surface without slope aircraft level of existence. The reader invests in referential possibilities of the image created or not created through language.

Notes

Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge has been a really important poet for me over the last couple of years. Inspired particularly by Empathy (1989) I thought it would post a piece of writing about reference in her poem 'Alakanak Break Up' (I also have a component piece about deixis in the same poem that I will post perhaps another time). Decisions regarding how many words per sentence and the number of sentences were made in advance (closely following another piece of writing as a model). My expression was forced into a particular syntactic arrangement, creating fragmentation and anacoluthon.