Little Review: Drew Milne, "Satyrs and Mephitic Angels"

March 29, 2005

[Here's something I wrote a long time ago and never properly finished, a review of the first sequence in Milne's very excellent first book, Sheet Mettle. I think most of Milne's poetry can now be found in one of his volumes from Salt Publishing.]

Sheet Mettle
Drew Milne
(Alfred Douglas Editions, 1994)

The poems of the first section of Sheet Mettle, “Satyrs and Mephitic Angels,” occasionally toys with a visionary Romantic rush, or perhaps suggest Thomas Carlyle’s spiraling hyper-referential prose (in such works as “Sign of the Times”) but whereas these writings sprung from a conviction that vision was possible, that totalities held in the mind's eye could both be in extravagant motion but still as a perfect thought, Milne is constantly descending into the trough of having to engage with a culture that perverts, by its inability adequately to witness these times, any sort of breath from “paradise.” The language is dense, an effect buttressed by several syntactic slippages: words (often names) that were once nouns appear as verbs (“Warhol? I'll Warhol you!” and “Campbell it out along the soup high way”) and words that were not nouns become nouns (“Camera my maybe as I fleet it to crashing / guitars!”), while double adjectives and other aggregating structures are used (“a dispiriting melancholia screen” and “my armour random bores”) as well as reverse word order (“and feels blood apocryphal drive the denizens”). Commas are often missing in complex phrases in which word order itself is both stately yet improvised (“I am not nor hope be lest this history yet...” and “and will be jargoned to those guittara yes strains / by those back to second nature word boys of ach!.” Latin, Greek, German, French, and bits of antiquated English, but also slick contemporary coinages (“lumpen / prole boho”), not to mention a slews of words and phrases that one would unlikely use in conversation (“kandym,” “figaro applique,” “verstehenden application”) spill forth as if proselytizing a new synthetic language – the language of the tribes, not the tribe, creating a sense of motion that is as hotly synchronic as it is diachronic. In opposition to this funneling of effects is both the insistent tone and the form of these poems, and seem in some ways frustrated, angry soliloquies or satires from some partly destroyed face just on the verge of total dissolution. The sequence would have a stronger relationship to satire if could make out its object -- it seems as close to the “objectless satire” that Wyndham Lewis describes as there is in contemporary English poetry), but there does appear to be an object, if one can take the entire pantheon of structuralist-critical practices as an object, or any hope for a stable, objective view of the historical situation -- “scholasticism” in Bourdieu's phrase in Pascalian Meditations – and the language practices that go along with it. That is, the prevalent tone in these poems is that of disgust – it seems one long, serial curse, a Calibaning against the island – but the impurities, or seemingly heretical nature, of its idiom is not leveled against some exterior oppressor but against a sort of language field which Milne (who is a Marxist literary scholar at Cambridge University) is a part of. But equally, there is a stance against the all-over, Dada tendencies of the Language poets, in that these poems -- difficult as they are to “deep read” to the layman not invested in discourses concerning Hegelianism and the state of cultural studies -- are demanding of some sort of deep hermeneutical engagement, making something of a politics of attention amidst the flurry of mindless digital exchange. That the tone, and even some of the images (“blood” and “earth” crop up with some frequency) is more Germanic than, say, French, is not surprising. Milne is not so freely given over to the mystique of “writing” and the blank page, but is coming from a Heideggerian locus that longs for the physis of breath and speech, the grounding of words in some interior point of origin. Like in Language poetry (in, say, Andrews version), the author seems to be most present in the violent torquing and rearrangement of phrases, a sort of “de-socializing” tactic that is not content to simply deterritorialize a few phrases for aesthetic effect, but which has to inflict something like a moral tone amidst an encyclopedic abundance (this is where Carlyle comes in). Unlike Andrews, though, the floodgates have been opened to permit the entire welter of European history in – it is not just noise, but noise with a diachronic counterpoint.