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Extract 4: Edited Transcript
[This extract begins with a close reading of Allen’s poem ‘Tensor’.]
Allen: Tensor: that's an unusual spelling from a book by a physicist on a kind of geometry that you expect to mean intense, or in tension, but it doesn't mean that at all, it's a much larger spatial idea. I was completely fascinated by the book.
Alex: Who wrote it?
Allen: Poston his name is, he's not particularly well known, I can't remember his first name, probably Tom Poston, but that might be wrong. 'Calcium waves carry understanding' - what I've got is some notions going around in my head that calcium is involved in memory and in the brain and it takes part in some of the interaction, some of the brain function that allows me to remember things. Then at the same time I've got a kind of mundane humour about calcium being crushed chalk.
Steve: But, chalk - as soon as you said about calcium being crushed, does that not relate to bone as well?
Allen: Yes. So there's a stack of things. '...we call cerebral / time mobilised messengers crunched through chaos functions / mediated by diffusable transport' - chaos functions in the sense of, it has a model effect, has a small and large effect, potentially. Chaos also functions on the mundane level of it being chaotic. 'mediated by diffusable transport' - so there's a moment here where I'm recalling some science that I learnt to do with membranes and the way passages between cells occur and how that's a process and not a simple barrier. I'm interested in that diffusion in the same way that I'm interested in tea bags becoming tea in a cup - it's not just osmosis, it's something more interesting going on.
Steve: And while we're on the subject of cells, you talk a lot about collage in parts of your work and quite often I'm aware, when I'm reading 'Gravity', this is a rewritten passage of [Walter] Benjamin, and I can sometimes identify the sources of the collage. I was wondering at what cell level are the collages rewritten, is it on the level of the word or the level of the paragraph or is it nothing to do with line length, is it just the idea?
Allen: This isn't meant to be a cheap answer, but actually it's all of those in different times, in different moments. And quite often I take off on the word because I'm moving into a sort of rhyming situation or a linking situation and in that sense you transform the word, but if it's from Benjamin it's likely to be that I'm much more interested in a concept of some sort, either reintroducing the concept for myself or re-translating it or misunderstanding it for myself... misunderstanding is not the right word.
Alex: Does that tie in at all with the term you use, 'renarration'?
Allen: It's partly to do with this context idea. If Benjamin's talking about something, then I'm using his vocabulary to talk about something, then I'm not in the same situation, so it's a renarration in that sense. Even if all I'm doing is reading his text, I'm renarrating it because I'm not Benjamin. So there's nothing particularly special about that in one sense, it doesn't put me in an any more special sense than it would be for you reading Benjamin. None of us are Benjamin, so when we're reading it we're renarrating it, in the sense that we've got our own narration as part of our own complex.
Steve: That's the term I found hardest, in ‘renarration’, the term ‘narration’. For some reason it seemed quite incongruous in relation to your work. I guess it implied objective stance perhaps, though you can have dubious narrators and it also implies a kind of teleology does it not? And you know, someone like Benjamin -
Allen: Beginning and end -
Steve: Time doesn't really work like that.
Allen: I do recognise some complexities to do with the arrow of time. We're still really not experiencing the future at this moment, in a way that we understand, or actually in a way we'll ever understand, potentially. By definition, therefore, narration is going in that direction rather than the other one, although quite clearly, as we say, we recognise as we pull in through our narration thoughts or memories and texts from previous narrations, so that that moment, it's a complex, it's not a singularity, it's not a single path. Renarration, I can't remember the context for that -
Alex: Not specifically about Benjamin, it's in general taking a collage of sources and then... renarrating, basically.
Allen: Well there's another element there, because the word collage I'm very particular about in the sense that it's used quite loosely in the art fields and sometimes, I think, poorly, because eventually it's no longer a tool worth using, all it means is glueing together. And you think no, actually, there's a history here that's much more interesting than that, and of course you know Valentine cards are glued together in the 19th century and you see them in books of how to make collages and you think no, this isn't [collage], really. What I decided at one moment, not as a person but I think decided from my research, was what Max Ernst did in 1919, 1918. His definition of collage is much clearer. Now, we've moved on since then, but his definition is clearly saying that he brings together two space-times or he brings together two realities, and the surrealists picked that up as being an inner reality and an external, descriptive reality. Putting the two together, they seemed to mismatch one moment, like a lion's head on a woman's body. That's a rather corny version but you see what I mean.
Steve: There's a real paradox which I feel very tricky to get my head around in collage, in the sense that you've brought two disperse things together to form something new, or it's creating something new in the positioning on the page or the concept of the positioning, where at that point they lose their original identities. But at the same time, they can only become something new in relation to these old, absent identities.
Allen: There's a sense of that, although there's a sense that you lose some of the old identities as well. There's another element here which will help elaborate something, and that is to take a collage that you wouldn't particularly think of as a collage, because it's not disruptive in a way that is more ‘traditionally’ thought of in the surrealist sense. If you think of the way that what was typically called Cubism or Picasso Cubism, 1914, 1912 or something, the artist is actually involved in multiple spacetime collages in the sense that although he’s looking at let's just say two cups, a glass, a microphone and a table, he takes a break, he goes off for coffee and come back, he fills the cup up again, he comes back. So the spacetime has changed, the light's changed, his circumstance has changed, how he feels has changed, in front of what appears to be the same piece. So that, in fact, is a multiple spacetime, a collage of experiences in the process of a day, even though it's not ‘surreal’. It's other than surreal, and gets labelled Cubism, which doesn't help anybody of course, except those that don't like it - I mean typically it doesn't help people to understand what is going on. What actually is going on is the artist is having an experience here which is changing but actually there's a pivot for it, you might say, or a group of pivots, which is two cups, a glass, a microphone and a table, and what that pivot does is give him an idea of his manners, his circumstance, his society, his being. Because of this he can use it as a contemplative means, as a means to contemplate, to think about his existence, or your existence, or anybody's existence, engaging with this. And so that's why this idea of space-time and collage are linked for me in a very special way and that’s why I think collage is very important, and it gets cheapened, really.
Steve: In terms of its formal elements it's already being recuperated. Advertising is great at doing that, but it's ended up reinvesting it with something, and I guess we've been talking about situations but of course you're a writer and a poet and those kind of things they're not represented on the page, they're re-enacted in some way. But that's for you and it's also for the reader. We've talked about it before, we have different experiences, they're implicitly different, and although you wouldn't ever put pressure or put too many guidance controls on what my experience could be when I confront the text, it completely changes the meaning - your collage set-up and my experience of that collage set-up.
Allen: You needn't say completely changes but you could say there's a whole range of tonal changes.
Steve: And are they considered in the writing?
Allen: Yes. But they're considered at a banal level as well as at a level I can't always articulate. Let's think of three examples. One example is, typically the work is written in English, so I consider that most people who are reading this are reading English. And I’m not being silly, but there are quite often horizontal lines, quite often a margin, and so on and so forth. So those sorts of things are because you want to make it readily available, or if you disrupt that you don't. And on a second level you could say that when I use a vocabulary that gets deliberately tricky - I'm putting in specialist vocabularies or arcane vocabularies - I'm then putting myself and the reader at risk of not getting it, or not bothering to get it. But that's likely to be the case whether you're reading a straightforward novel by Joseph Conrad or reading more difficult texts, because it's a matter or whether the reader wants to bother to go any further than just looking at it. So what I try to do - I don't always do it - but what I try to do if I'm reading and don't get something, is look it up. But I might look it up in the wrong place, and so on and so forth. The third level is where I've invented the word, so I know you won't be able to look it up, but if you do you've got something completely different from what I had, and I do that sometimes. Because I use something that is almost like a jazz improvisation technique, so that ‘glass’, becomes ‘everlasting’ because it sort of rhymes and it’s sort of internal, and then all of a sudden you go...
Steve: ‘Glacier’.
Allen: Yes -
Steve: But you're too close.
Allen: You come to a word which doesn't exist, almost an invented word that rhymes with or sounds like. And you leave it there. And it's kind of because you're involved in the rhythm of doing it. Now the reader of course is involved in a difficulty at that moment and that difficulty would be different depending on their experience and their capabilities and so on. So just to give you an example, when I was reading Ezra Pound at school, and I wasn't taught how to read it... I read it and I can't get most of it when I first read it, because it's in Chinese or Greek or Latin or something that I’m not typically reading. And I've got choices at that moment to try and find it out or just to get on with it, and I do both really, a bit of both. And I'm relieved when somebody can give me all the bits, but actually then I don't bother with all the bits sometimes, because there's just too much of it, you think ‘I'm ending up re-writing this bloody thing’. So there are moments when there's something else which is larger than the word-by-word text in the work that somehow carries as much importance, in some sense.
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Tuesday 13 January, 2009 
Geof Huth:
