"You have no choice but to live in your time" - A Deconstruction of Martin Harrison's poetry collection "Summer"

This is ever so true of Harrison’s poems which comprise of antithetical objects to produce extensive insight to postmodern preoccupations.

Harrison illustrates the frustrations of attempting to live and write in his time by undertaking a Neo Formalist approach in his writing. In his lecture, Harrison exclaimed the activeness of writing, the disposition of languages took precedence to philosophical suppositions. Perhaps this explains his preoccupation with illustrating, ‘describing and prescribing’ (his words) ‘made spaces’, rather than provoking resolutions. This is evident in the stream of style that runs through most of his anthologies. Most of his poems are presented in a uniform style as they adhere to a consistent structure and metre. Distinctively, his form appears to be a response to shifting cultural paradigms, events and inadequacies which problematise the epoch of postmodernity. 3 Living in a culture of “Post” and “meta” which proposes its own set of anti-establishmentarian concerns, and not because the world at large has become rebellious, but rather due to a decomposition of establishment, a dismantling of hierarchy and a suspended belief in a unity with an epicenter. Globalisation, internationalism and hybrid identities, seem to be definitive of the 21 st century mindset.

Harrison is drawn to literalising the complexity of the contemporary temporal state by focusing on infinitesimal moments in ones daily life. In his fist poem Summer from his anthology of the same title, Harrison engages in extracting meaning, exploring the words which prescribe the priori and meta 4 , and articulating the concise words and sounds which may define the lonely tourist’s existence, who like the poet, is engulfed by the anxieties of living and attaining meager comprehensions. From this perspective, the global, cosmopolitan individual en mass, is this lonely and overwhelmed tourist. Seeking a home, a comfort zone, a loci of emancipation, only to be suppressed by ‘artifice’ and lacking any understanding. This is eloquently established through intertextuality, in the universal persona of ‘Odysseus’, whose epic journey had once conjured reverent findings according to the Aristotelian model of peripeteia and anagnorisis. In contrast, the postmodern hybrid ‘tourist’ merely confronts a ‘swimming pool’, disappointingly definitive of modern constructs. One may consider the metonymic disposition of the swimming pool, as a substitute body of water. Unlike its natural counterpart, the ocean, this man made construct provides some superficial comfort in its ‘coolness’. Intriguingly, Harrison’s inevitability of writing in his time is most evident here, particularly since the persona is apparently distressed by the lack of familiar.

Additionally, the repetition of the word ‘coolness’ structures the poem. The constructed swimming pool seems a surrogate for the postmodern persona’s dilemma of seeking answers in an epiphanic sea of enclosures. This swimming pool ‘reflects’ the city, thus signifying a mirror of the evolution or digression of industrialization. Despite its derogatory connotations, its ‘coolness’ is the only component which offsets the perils of ‘summer’, described through the word choice of ‘quiet water’, however, immediately juxtaposed to a metaphor of ‘stagnancy and grief’ in the tenth stanza. One may contrast this to the ‘bare seas’ in the previous stanza, perhaps a ‘nostalgic’ inclusion of the ‘unattainable’ 5 , nature. This metonymy of the ‘swimming pool’ is attributed to ‘a texture which seems to look past

you’, and emphasised in the parenthesis, a poetic device which conveys an utterance to a feeling of disappointment since the function of water and the ocean has lost its majestic qualities.

Here too, one is given the impression that the cosmovision of the postmodern personage is altered, even if the symbology has remained essentially familiar. Despite, Harrison’s attempts to write in his time, a number of his poems adapt the ocean is a universal signifier, even though its connotations insinuate an ambiguous, unfamiliar entity. The universal symbol of the ocean has been replaced with the omnipresence of the ‘image’. In the poem Summer, the epic search for ‘home’ as Odysseus had long ago yearned, has transcended to a transformative mindset, since in the twenty first century, the hybrid persona is preoccupied with the pursuit of the ‘world-famous shot’. The conveyance of a few fleeting moments with their ‘priori’ and ‘meta’ of significations culminate to ‘figures drifting, ghostlike, on a riverbank.’ The tourist persona, and poet, realises their rootlesness, suppressed by disorientation as their corrigible existence is ‘meaningless’. Cultural restrictions abound due to the barrage of complacencies. This description of a moment in time, ‘this split second’, Harrison prescribes, is nothing more than a distorted image, further enhanced by the fact that the tourist is ‘jet-lagged’ and engulfed by superficiality and epiphanic surroundings. The poet’s illumination of time is portrayed by the fleeting snap shot, a minute depiction ‘snapped’ and ‘already visualised’.

The contemporary poet is subdued by the images and cinematics. Specifically, the motif of the image, poignantly disclosed as a ‘snap shot’ is reminiscent of Jean Baudrillard’s essay ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ (1994) . The distortion of reality, the image, a disintegrating malevolence within the search for the real, the unique identity. Disconcertingly, the image does not present substantial answers, but instead reminds the persona of their own displacement, in Summer even the Americans walk through ‘a golden shrine’ ‘heiffer- garlanded with cameras’. The world has become a smaller place, however appreciation of identity is a distant camouflage. Particularly, as Baudrillard asserts, a cosmos of ‘signs’ and codes have saturated the contemporary mindset. In his fourth proposal of the ‘simulacrum’, Baudrillard claims the sign ‘bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum’ 6 . There seems to be a diminishment of what is termed ‘reality’ since manufactured products are reflective of dysfunctional aesthetics rather than ethical pragmatics as culture is mirrored through the acquisition of object, or commodity rather than spiritual fulfilment. Therefore, it is almost unavoidable for poets not to infuse such preoccupations in their writings, as the dominance of commodity, cinematics and image proliferate modern society.

From this perspective, it is obvious that Harrison composes his poetry in a way which stipulates such dilemmas of the contemporary human condition. Harrison describes a search for meaning in a cosmovision of ‘meaningless’ ‘greyness’ 7 . This search for meaning in a time, which is uprooted, becomes accentuated in his poem Flowers: 1. Landscape, with its nostalgic portrayal; ‘in another nearly forgotten image’ that of a slightly familiar, largely unfamiliar natural ‘landscape’. Here, Harrison experiments with the externalized and internalized perceptions of the hybrid, emulated by a ‘Country with too many names’ while the natural is becoming obsolete since the ‘dead branches’ are

‘of mirrored white gums.’ The reader is evoked by the loss of authenticity, a ‘mirage’ of naturalness. Similar to the poem Summer, in this poem, Harrison utilises the metonymy of the ‘ocean’ as a distorted image, through the simile; (it’s an ocean as abstract as snow on a TV screen ) This poignantly perpetuates an image of a superficial existence, an image driven spectrum as the ‘tv screen’ dominates our perceptions. The familiar metonymy of the ocean, the universal symbol for existence and being with its ‘ebb and flow’ is reduced to an ‘abstract’, ambiguous entity, far removed from the life of the contemporary mindset. Instead, the persona is confronted with a system of ‘signs’ and codes of the familiar, only to acknowledge how unfamiliar they have become. In Letter From America – to Lewis Ruark, the persona realises; …….. - an example of a school influenced by photography, film, other image – technologies

with all the longings and absences

which natural things compose these days we glance at them and they pass us

Nonetheless, these descriptions propose a need for stability, a nostalgia, to fill the internal void and existential loneliness. In Flowers: 1. Landscape, the youth ‘..are trekking back home/ over dunes bare of shadow’. Therefore, through the genre of poetry with its universal inducements, Harrison’s anthology is exemplary of the poet having no choice but to write in their time, describing and prescribing their vulnerabilities, and angst as they search for a comfort zone.

Contemporary poets, like Harrison, seem to avert their attention to the element of time and the treatment of time, by describing antithetical objects, events, and movements within the temporal flux. While ‘time is in all arts’, poetry is a significantly unique genre since the language utilised is not as important as the evocative semblances it bestows upon the responder. In our class Harrison prescribed his poetry as lucid projects in which he explores the persona and thing, the existence of things, and the nature of things. More significantly, he proposes the definition of ‘things’ have, in contemporary settings, become malevolent commodities. Indeed, the rhizomatic nature of capitalism has induced perpetual extremes where sensibilities towards ones existence are unattainable. Paradoxically, definite appreciations are almost an impossibility especially since grand narratives and structural paradigms are somewhat inapplicable in the chaotic manifestations of the modern city lifestyle. In his essay What Can Poets Teach? Harrison

Poetics…articulates a space necessary for interrupting what threatens to be a seamless relationship between managerialism and massively technological, over – realized determinations of the interface; it would energise a writing which risks being numbed by its uses as a merely political instrument. 8 Perhaps this explains Harrison’s interest in exploring a space of familiarity within ‘made spaces’ where the montage of objects are unfamiliar sequences.

This could provide an exegesis to much of his poetry illustrating the inevitability of technological development which posits an apprehension towards the real and natural since there are no signs or codes which explicitly define them. The individual of postmodernity lives an experience without depth or certainty, hence suggesting the complexity of defining a time which offers no solace, no insights into the here and now. ‘Image’ and time process a verisimilitude, and even more discomforting is the displacement of the individual in this capitalistic world. In Letter from America, he depicts this verisimilitude;

‘Stocky, they look like they spend their lives

working with machines – their day – lives, which is to say – working

with the contraptions which underpin

American life,

Harrison’s anthology exemplifies this plight, the image of a ‘non reality’ encompassing the everyday, making it indefinable, except through regulated codes and ‘signs’ which only reinforce the individual’s displacement. Nonetheless, Harrison’s preoccupations do not lay with patronising the postmodern personae, but rather, merely describing and prescribing their predicament.

This notion is similarly conveyed in Harrison’s collection; Music Prose and Poems 9 where Harrison’s experimentation with the verse prose form portrays the dwindling of structure and form within contemporary social and cultural paradigms. In the poem Double Movement, the juxtaposing of nature and human nature in this time of postmodernity is portrayed in the line; ‘In the human world too, a dry force is introduced, one which requires everyone to acknowledge a separateness in the relations between living things, in how one person values another.’ The interaction, or more so, the lack of interaction between nature and human nature is constantly reiterated throughout his poems. Essentially, this provokes a debilitating assumption that the ‘I and things’ are far removed from one another. Despite the distancing, a precondition of the contemporary hybrid, Harrison perseveres to uncover answers, or refine exegesis of ‘what is’. This exegesis is presented in his essay What Can Poets Can Teach as he explores a necessity for the study of poetry and poetics. He explains;