Make/shift, Winter 2007
by Julia Bloch

 

There’s something voyeuristic about reading Sandra Alland’s new book of poems, Blissful Times, which is a little like a glimpse into one writer’s obsession not only with how to manipulate the poetic line but also with one particular constellation of 59 words by Samuel Beckett. Alland harvested the poem she calls "Blissful Times" from lines from Beckett's Happy Days and then conducted a series of 63 operations upon it, producing a volume of acrostics, prose poems, dialogic verse, concrete poems, sound and video poems (available online), a cento, and other generic "translations." The fact that Alland chooses a found poem for her raw material in a way heightens the delight in praxis throughout this work -- the "original" is its own experiment -- but also reminds me of Bernadette Mayer's belief that poetic experiment shows us exactly how much language can affect empirical meaning.

 

Often, the poems seem to want to exploit the theatrical expressivity of Beckett's original lines. "Blissful Times of the Month," which replaces words of the poem with clichés, offers a series of confident directives that hang together, soliloquy-like: "One-night stand does the right thing. Not interested in the opposite sex? Appear to the knuckle, be excused, asking for your papers. À trois? Great! Certainty: deal from the bottom of the deck." I'm not sure where Alland found all these "clichés" (Does "He-cow needs help, peace" count?), but assembled, they sound like some kind of weird avant tickertape. "Blissful Shillings," which switches out words for their "slang meaning," gives off a curiously clipped effect as it uneasily meditates on sexuality: "At shillings? The female sexual organ. Recommend, seem. Hardly money in rousing a horse to greater exertion. Unless like a sweetheart. Irish whisky whereas. Actually. See now! Next imagine about sexual appeal. Stare into your heart. Coit homosexuality as a criminal offence. Who?"

 

Perhaps as might be expected, the poems that result from fixed constraints (dictionaries, Google, an online English-to-Spanish translator, voice-activated transcription software) tend to carry less lyric energy than those composed situationally. Compare the pleasingly ragged “Les temps délicieux/Temps Are Delicious,” translated into French using www.freetranslation.com and then translated back into English homolinguistically, with the near-sonnet "Looking Back," in which Alland "considered the poem while thinking about a past relationship." In the first, sound and eye rhymes carry the poem's meaning and (mostly) leave discursivity up to chance: "Learn the napalm air/of detrimental grand affairs./The effect on temps in times ill-seeming:/impossible pain." The second, with its recursive intimacy ("it's the sharp slice of maybe"; "it's the nearly/that draws me"), ends on a candid closing couplet: "you nearly hit me,/I almost stayed." End scene.

 

I said there was something a little obsessive about these poems, but that's not really fair: I read practically the whole book while searching online for Alland's own explanations of her various experiments, something she invites at her blog, www.blissfultimes.ca, where she kindly lists the parameters of each piece. Maybe that's part of the beauty of the constraint: poems like these encourage the reader to look beneath the surface of language, only to find more words there. So that in "Secrets of the Game, The," when Alland writes, "The poem is rubbish," she could be reminding us of the productive task to be found in sifting through language’s detritus.