Three Bell Zero
Miles Champion
publisher: Roof, 2000
isbn: 0-93780-482-7
price: $10.95
Each page of this young English poet's first stateside collection (Compositional Bonbons Placate was published by Carcanet in 1996) is brimming with the conflicts of intentionality and chance, design and improvision, or perhaps simply work and fun, but not in drawn-out meditations so much as by well-honed linguistic breaks, taking the project of the Surrealist explosion of the veils of reality to the level of the word.
Champion takes his lead from the American Language poets, and his poems sometimes resemble, page for page, works by Bernstein, Di Palma, Andrews and Coolidge, but his attention to this heritage -- for him an overseas import rather than "native" -- operaties as an engaged criticism of the conservative nature of English poetry in the century of Modernism.
But rather than take "innovation" as his guiding principle, Champion creates an entire culture or sensibility that, for all of its completeness and, at times, lyrical coherence (the metrical regularities of the quasi-narrative "Clovis," for example, greet aesthetic closure at every step), strikes always in the other direction, or as many "other" directions as can be contained in these careful, spare poems:
Signs the ever
Water & wine to form an oblong cut-off
Or baffle at social what's
That is, in Hegelian terms, the scarf cigar
A man is than made
I think ex-Parisian liver suit or difference
Perfumes the harder focus
Road or dog brains rise
Light is eat
You is in pellet-type pole
The clearing colour sort of adding the twig
& I found a kind of digital dried dill
Stick
[15]
Champion rigorousness, adeptness with staccato meters, and learnedness measure up against any in the Language camp, especially during their "heroic" phase, but because he doesn't cling to the principle of author as originator, or even copyrighter, of his words or works -- such that a Romantic or individualistic strain creeps in (this has affected a number of second-generation Language poets) -- he is able to focus on the central, universal concern, which is to make readers see and hear words.
His near-utopic faith in this project can bring on a Symbolist, quasi-mystic undercurrent:
The nod
dis-
members the
tactile
echo of
a solipsistic
gesture. Diffuse
summa-. I
mean, to
provide you
with layers. (Target
fit
mists.) I
was in
the twenty-
four-hour
metaphor, laundering
an intense
& crystalline
hush.
[45-46]
However, for all of his graceful maneuvering among the most difficult postmodern practices, the spirit of community always peeps through in the generous imagery and the sheer pleasure in perfoming language:
Candour disposes the lustre
tinctures for what chance
the person's mount or invisible taipliece
free brochurettes impressing the indefinite fold
cuffed hands spool to avert
is pierced or will burst
sewed
knees together partly knot
or stick that lies therein whetting [...]
[66]
Though a slender 68-pages long, the poems in Three Bell Zero will remind everyone of what it felt like to read poems for the first time, with excitiment and a sense of belonging and purpose.
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