For the uninitiated reader, a volume of collected poetry may well be intimidating, for where does one begin? This, as much a plea for guidance as it is a literal question, is an urgent concern as well, given the scope of Drew Milne’s work. His poetics presupposes forms of collective socio-economics found in culture. Twenty-five poetry books, chapbooks, and uncollected manuscripts comprise In Darkest Capital: The collected poems of Drew Milne (Carcanet, 2017). To begin at the beginning may be obvious, but to begin in the middle may afford a better way in.
A previously uncollected manuscript entitled “Blueprints & Ziggurats” is where I propose to start reading Milne’s volume of culturally bracing, mindful poems. We are on page 280, where Milne’s word-hoard dwells in accumulation and key architectural terms are aplenty. Not only do architectural terms, distributed throughout, create a vital domain of concern, but these terms express punning idiolects crucial to Milne’s own poetics. Even if a reader had nothing else to go on but “capital,” “column,” and “concrete,” a sufficient world is laid out for consideration, as in the poem “pylons & pyramids”:
‘It is
difficult
to know whether
the appearance of
the columns was responsible
for this word-play, or whether the
word-play determined the choice of capitals.’
Jean-Louis de Cenival, from Egyptian Architecture.
Serving as epigraph, this initial stanza sets out the speculative thought that informs this poem’s poetics: it outlines a construct wherein power relations may be inscribed in language—the sentence being a structural edifice, figured or not. The second stanza is more explicit:
ridges
of tone work
reinforce concrete
stone against absolute mud
ruined capital in the brick shithouse
said pharaonic party back to slavery classes
continuously bound to sky rock the sun how narrow
courts become machines for dying in the pillars pink hewn
through flood planes tombs for myrrh and pylons on pillaged land
a grim staircase in shifts the necropolis of unsung labours upon a dead song.
[p.280]
To perform his portrayal of social conditions, Milne deploys the concrete poem. From word to phrase and materials to sentence, he constructs a poem in functional analogy with the built face of the pyramid. And throughout this poem, Milne’s words are explicit in attributing the building of public monuments to unsung labor which is symptomatic of a system of exploitation.
What the poem does not say is that ongoing archeological research is changing the knowledge we possess about the construction of the Egyptian pyramids and the composition of ancient Egyptian society. We now recognize that imported skilled labor executed the artisanal work in building the pyramids. Beyond the sophisticated engineering and structural design of monuments, we have also learned from reading hieroglyphs and depictions that the pharaohs reflect changing social relations from embodied god and deity to something akin to the head of an organized administration and even a professional class. Putting it differently, the authorship of culture is more complicated than a master-slave dichotomy. Even so, slavery is a substantial factor and the pyramid format enacts the social stratification of that relationship.
More typical of “Blueprints & Ziggurats” are lines formatted in columns listing words—concrete in sense, ideological in significant implication. A wall is built line by line, from words and language whose thought depends on the linguistic rubble that is language. For example:
though the wall cast of local stones built
on no-one’s bones those dwelling locally
and how else don’t wish the walls down head
to ashes for some foundation salon ruse lung
posthardcore spatialism maquette
dactyl brick gargoyle faciatta
dogtooth ballflower foliage [p. 292]
Beneath or beyond the poem-as-columns, arrays or single words do not explicate these narrative lines; but even so, the page’s cultural space is occupied with these key terms whose juxtaposition establishes concrete structure. In other words, format conveys its own ideology. Just think of the prospectuses and manifestos of the Bauhaus, specifically, the typographic columns of material and techniques to enlist the house as a set of functions, as written by Hannes Mayer, the socialist director of the arts school from 1928-30. Mayer’s typographic columns of words correspond to social functions, yet also to bodily functions. These were his way of making concrete a theory of design that would benefit the worker. Formatted in lists of words grouped by function, Milne’s poems in “Blueprints and Ziggurats” attest to a praxis of the economic reality carried out in the name of the word as work.
At the heart of culture is the construction we make of it. It is common knowledge that in Europe, Napoleon’s wars precipitated widespread enthusiasm for the archeological knowledge that this adventuring brought about. Hegel was one of these enthusiasts, and his thoroughgoing analytic treatment of architectural typology in the age of Napoleon, which disclosed subterranean worlds beyond that of European knowledge and inspired study through archeology, has left an imprint in Milne’s poems about the substantially dialectical interrelation of culture and labor. His own concrete poems are not adequately understood, Milne seems to argue, until the social forces within and underneath the surface are revealed. And yet they are poems after all. So, to say that the poems comprising “Blueprints & Ziggurats” are about architecture or archeology as such is not quite right; and with its accumulated terminologies in stacks, a rather better characterization would be that of analogy. Think of El Lissitzky’s “transfer stations,” which referred to a crossing between architecture and painting, to specify this analogy: in Milne’s poems there are incessant transfer stations between tectonics and lyric—between social tectonics and poetry.
In Darkest Capital, organized chronologically, establishes the conditions and quandaries of the modernism to which the anthology is committed from the start. The collection presupposes the poetics, not the politics, of Ezra Pound, which in our collective memory depends on the writing and reading of cantos. Milne participates in an ongoing dialogue with the presuppositions of Pound’s poetics, answering by way of a rich set of artifacts of politics tempered through song. But instead of Pound’s narrative cantos, Milne’s collected work accumulates lyrical critiques. Put another way, in Milne’s poetry, lyric is no less culturally significant than narrative. In fact, it may be better at establishing a temporal flow within itself as a simultaneity of different events. So, instead of a foundation, let alone “Foundation,” which Milne believes to be a ruse, the general category Architecture is broken down, and in its stead are specifics: maquette, gargoyle. The field of spatiotemporal distributions sets out the way in which critical thought talks back to categorical concept; and this mode of organization certainly expresses the modernist tradition posited on cultural rubble yet informed through a dialectics co-present point by point. Nowhere is this reliance on lyrical engagement with space and time more apparent than in the subject choice for Milne’s most recent area of study: lichen.
Throughout the newly collected and final section, “Lichens for Marxists,” lichen instructs us in the culture of community in a clinch. The differences between algae and fungi are striking: algae are aquatic, fungi are terrestrial; algae require light to produce their nutrients, fungi do not, for they consume, and do not produce, their own food; whereas fungi are parasitic, algae are not. And yet as symbiosis tells us, the fungi have something to offer in the territory made habitable for algae, which could not survive otherwise. For such a slow-growing organism as lichen, combat is not the wisdom; cooperation at close quarters is, through a symbiotic affiliation made between alga and fungus. Striking for a union of opposites in highly specific terms, lichen embody the principle of contradiction in antinomies for those poets seeking a model in social critique, not to mention a bill of rights. From the inaugural poem, “News from Lichen Times,” comes this:
when the weave
words to fosse
how the lichen
born with cups
gives etruscan
melody bearing
we in symbiotic alliance of lichen
hold the evident truth to the self
namely that all lives are not made
the same and the carbon liberation
front will be the death of all but
the persistent solidarity of algae
now and in the calendar of lichens [p. 373]
In this excerpt we read rates of change and differing scales of time: woven through nature’s slow growth is the political urgency of now. Ecological processes yield to a sped up call for action.
And as straightforward as self-reflexive thought will allow, a declaration of grounding, persistent in nature as specific to conditions for life, emerges from ongoing revision of phrases that recall the arts: weaving, writing, singing, dancing. The arts are threatened with extinction themselves, appearing with extreme tact and not gotten rid of in the ecology of life; here is where Milne’s constructivist nature requires culture to complete itself, even as historical thought moves towards manifesto. As with the demands of lyric to be expressive song, all this woven space-time is highly compressed.
By my count, thirty-five short poems comprise this manuscript section of “Lichens for Marxists.” In keeping to short lines, these recent poems evince a weave of sense and significance, phrase by phrase, in juxtaposed stanza blocks, shifting weighed public speech away from private internalized conversation. The collectivity of the lichen poems is a gathering of individuals, given that Milne’s entire project considers socioeconomic constructions found in culture and, as here, in nature. It is tempting to call the lichen a Situationist, but that term won’t do for the constellation of many short lyric poems, each of which is informed by a different aspect of cooperative life—archaic, to be sure, yet also worthy of societies that valued the wandering scop and troubadour. Lines from “Preposition Stranding” might suffice:
up with this put will not put
orders standing by or dowsing
lichen put to stroll wordsing
not downs gone to the crevice
but nevertheless shoulders in
limestone ark, a spelt strain [p.388]
In that lichen opens a discourse, aspects of which become their own subject within the heterogeneity of lyric, to resist puts and calls, nature has something to teach culture. And that lichen appear to derive archaic knowledge from unlikely conditions of survival teaches us ways of world-making. Aspect and affect are spirited in this group, which is without doctrinaire treatment of category.
All twenty-five books, chapbooks, and uncollected manuscripts in this volume of collected poems are firm in their cultural politics and yet may be seen to change over time in other ways. Readers familiar with Milne’s poetry in, say, the section “Ready-mades in Vogue: a student’s guide to capitalist poetry” will have noted that the spirited wit of his earlier poems ever intelligently expressed is, in recent work, tempered and underplayed on behalf of imaginative reach and subtlety. Another difference is that the more recent work allows the phrase some prominence and in so doing argues for a word-by-word intensity throughout. Further intensification comes from the very lexicon, as broad as the cultural horizons themselves; rapid crosscutting of vocabulary from political, architectural, biological and other disciplines and/or distributing such vocabularies throughout a field to be read nonsequentially—these and other modernist tactics serve as antagonistic, radical poetics to problematize the political sphere by way of challenge.
Exemplary earlier work is the substance of the book Benchmarks. Here, as later, discourse derives from the choice of the key term, yet through the unruly genealogy of language use. His choice of “benchmarks” gives Milne the occasion to pit critical thought against political expediency. By means of definitional contingencies, Milne segues from the “standards of quality by which others may be measured” in culture writ large to specific economics, in order to counteract complacent performance metrics turned ruthless. An epigraph from Hegel directs our attention to humanity wrecked and sacrificed to dominant power. From this long poem in parts come these saw-toothed first lines of “Carte Blanche”:
Be out of this ear shot
to a least spirit level,
shaking rag hands off
through silvery vibrato
or bone shed languish
to quid whistle, where
languish suggests a rustle
and there is none nor rime. [p. 82]
Without sentimentality but with consummate grace is the purposeful “rustle,” wherein the cavalier lyric fascination with the beloved’s sensuous effects (Robert Herrick) meets the interference patterns of limit addressed in structuralist literary discourse (Roland Barthes). Published two decades before the collected In Darkest Capital, the book Benchmarks is in no way superseded by the recent group “Lichens for Marxists,” but rather, taken together, these poems demonstrate stylistic range and critical scope. Coming at mid-career, this volume of collected poems already demonstrates a furtherance of collectivities in utilizing the particular word for creative instrumentalities that develop critical thought, proof that the lyric poem can implement intelligent social policy.