A TONEMENT
Standard Schaefer


Laura writes of unfinished gestures, a lack of one-to-one correspondences between strategies and meaning, coincidences: “Narrative coincides with meaning” but is taken up and recycled through “rhetorical continuity interrupted”. Interrupted continuity is probably not just between the various A Tonalists styles, but also suggest an affinity beneath the various styles. It seems true to me as well that Laura’s work and Norma’s share a “thoughtful, meditative” element that Laura mentions as part of the “old tonalism” as it “suggests suggestion.” Intriguing too is the notion of vision as connected to some musicality. And there does seem to be a lot of lyrical concern among some A Tonalists, though in my case there is often a concern with history— like and unlike Brent’s interest in historical rhetorical forms or Laura’s tweaking of historical musical forms, (Portuguese fado, for example) and Norma’s Spinoza that makes these lyrical concerns less tied to say the “analytic lyric”. So there seems here a sense that writing, no matter how “avant-garde” someone might hope to be, also has an element of conservation. Maybe even a sense that one is hoping to find something sustainable even in traditions about which one is suspicious, such as the lyric. Laura says, “The present and past enter into /A prosody of unfinished gesture/Against formal predictability.” What perhaps goes on in that moment is pruning of any weak elements from the past and a reinscription of what was strong there, what can still be useful. Apropos Brent’s mention of Badiou, Badiou seems interested in what might be called “sustainable ideas” such as justice, both like an unlike Plato’s. So a “radical conservation” is possible—which is something I think I hear in Brent’s and Laura’s comments.

There might be a distinction between transgression and experimentation. Brent’s carving out the possibility of a politically aware poetics that doesn’t necessarily produce the in-your-face political poem implies something sober and tentative about experimentation.

Experimentation might well be any activity that may get you free of the feeling of necessity and ineluctability that attaches to practices such as writing (which everyone is trained to do in one way or another). But I think that however cross-genre or contemporary an A Tonalist is, they are not likely to be transgressive, and even less likely if transgression is seen as purely randomly setting out to fuck with boundaries. I suspect that anyone who is leery of self-proclaimed transgression feels that it has to do with the notion of power.

If you see power as pure repression, if you live in a world that believes some language is politically correct or incorrect, and if you attempt to attack such a conceptualization by being incorrect, offensive, or just plain contrary, you’re reinforcing the idea that power is exercised from above. The danger is that you remain tied to the very significations you hope to transgress.

Against transgression, Deleuze wrote, “The signifier [on one level, the poem] is always a little secret which has never stopped hanging around mummy and daddy…The little secret is generally reducible to a sad narcissistic and pious masturbation: the phantasm! Transgression, a concept too good for seminarist under the law of Pope or a priest.”

Experimentation unlike transgression seeks to affirm positive alternatives. This is why Laura can speak of “beauty” in her “rules,” one that is “unfashionable as the fact/ Of particularity” so not likely a general metaphysical beauty. Or put another way, a beauty that doesn’t hang around with mommy or daddy’s notion of beauty, that isn’t just an inversion of their’s.

For me, experimentation in poetry and life is a search for forms, for configurations of power that can be lived with, not simply overthrown forever. This doesn’t preclude any revolutionary potential, but it would not be the grand narrative of revolution, more akin to recent “post-anarchists” or the DIY crowd, the people who go off the grid, the indigenous peoples movements that do not try to seize state power, but create autonomous zones, the squatters movements, levelers, ranters, the slow-down movements, the Muggletonians. People who remind us that power is diffused across the terrain and that even those on the bottom have some. There’s no one-to-one correspondence here. There is always asymmetry between political movements and artistic ones, all the more so here since A Tonalism is not a movement, but an affinity group among other poetries.

Like those social experiments though, artistic experimentation is a sober and often tentative activity. It can certainly be fun but not in the “look ma, no hands!” sort of way. One experiments with constructing practices that may well have to be abandoned if their effects become intolerable, if they do not enhance one’s ability to experiment or if they become fashionable in away that begins to produce norms.

To me A Tonalists are experimenting not unlike in the sense of Deleuze’s “becoming minor” in which a practice is taken up while within some social terrain, maybe some awareness of a tradition running through you and others, dead or alive. The practice is situated within this network of connections, say a kind of lyricism, not trying to transgress them or become resolutely alyrical, but disrupting the dominant mode by showing how creativity can still take place within what is already there.

It would be distinct from writing as a producing a dialect or ghettoizing poetry. It’s different from satires without referents or attempts to celebrate what used to be called “low culture”. It is not a task of making the minor into a new dominant. It is about carving out an autonomous zone. On the micro-level, to be an A Tonalist might mean to carve out a space where many small gestures, musicalities, and coincidences can be legitimated within your own work.

On the molar level, there are perhaps affinities within the various works and writers that cannot represent A Tonalism. There is no reason to represent it. If I come out of or work in a tradition that is against representation, I might seriously consider myself unrepresentable. And if I were to have any connects to a movement, it would likely be a movement that does not require legitimation from others about its status as a movement, where membership is really one of shared affinities, a state of mind or an interest in poetry that “thinks” in the way Badiou writes. Or maybe it produces thought or vision but not knowledge or certainty. There is no shared style and no efforts to legitimate the differences and similarities between us.