Review: The Phonemes by Frances Richard

Reviewed by James Eidson

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Published: September 23, 2014

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Frances Richard’s The Phonemes is an experiment, and indeed game, of the restless transposition and inversion of phonemic units. As these phonemes drift transpositionally through the words of each poem – like transposons through the genetic material – they also (short)circuit through our own familiarity with those words’ definitions, so that lyric interplay is reactively intertwined with conceptual interplay:

“on the liminal hill, silhouetted

serrated rim

of that

inverted bowl we call… gauzy

sharpened hills,

irregularly

vectoring horizon impervious

to

closeness, existing to make

sense of space: field,” (26).

Richard is careful to shadow the treble of her phonemes’ movements with a wandering thematic ground bass. Consider above, how the “li” of “liminal” is inverted in “hill,” which is then transformed into the “ou” and “et” sounds of “silhouetted,” the upward thrust of the “li” finding its hill-like decline in the inversion of the latter “il” sound. In these “liminal” spaces amongst the hill-tops and valleys of phonemes, sounds function like landscapes and horizons.

Horizons are always simultaneously fixed but relative. It is a permanent feature of the world, yet moving in any direction towards it, it is transformed, remaining at a (ore or less) fixed distance. Movement is possible, and the space it defines must thus change. The thresholds of Richard’s phonemes are fluid, because the conceptual constraints of the words’ definitions reinvigorate their sounds. Both concept and sound work to define the “field” of each another’s movements, simultaneous to their “impervious[ness]/ to closeness.” Both experience each other’s activity, the minutiae of phonemic transpositions feedbacking upon the structures and tectonics of the poems’ other aspects (form, themes, etc.). Conceptual constraint and lyrical freedom form a dialectical binary, each mirroring, and subverting, its other.

In his preface, Ronaldo Wilson suggests that the book articulates its sonic narrative within “noise, disruption, slippage, dislocation” – that “The narrative ‘I’ is split by what the ‘I’ hears, sees, the speaker’s careful point of view in ‘horizon; stalled or circular/thought.’ ” In this fragmented space, the “world” as perceived by the speaker is disrupted and dislocated as these senses attempt to latch onto something, anything, familiar, to determine the underlying order of this space, to find meaning within this mélange of phonemic sounds, to flood each poem’s meaning with vascularizing, associative breadth. This movement characterizes the behavior of everything here, the movement of stanzas, poetic devices, the restless slant rhyming, the poem’s conceptual limits.

This dislocation is most fascinating in the non-linguistic units Richard coins as neologisms. Often these take the form of combinations of syntactical symbols, i.e. “(((((()))))),” which are defined in the book’s glossary – for instance, “(((((())))))” means “Car alarm.” While their meanings are playful, their resonances and linkages proliferate within the volatile contexts of Richard’s rapidly shape-shifting phonemes. A common tactic of the book is that sometimes you’ll know exactly what kind of tone a non-linguistic meaning casts off the heels of a dense, elusive lyric. It’s very much like laughing at a joke you get but can’t explain. In the book’s first poem, Blush Alarm, Richard writes:

Of the monster

technologies, paper

was subtle.

First trees in paradise

sweating articulate balsam –

Then I made

a mistake. Rearrange the rocks

because the creek bed

can’t shut up

imperfect efficient

machine of the sunshine processing

chopped area

(((((()))))))(((((())))))(((((())))))…” (20-21).

Here, Richard calls into question not only the conceptual parameters that define a poem, but also the conceptual parameters (horizon) that define whitespace, and even paper. She refers to the “first trees in paradise,” suggesting they were articulate, before Adam and Eve named them, and then follows this line with a tremendous amount of whitespace (which can’t be properly rendered here), in a sense giving voice to the trees in the paper beneath the text, permitting them to express themselves, their testimony that of whitespace. Here, the whitespace defines the conceptual framework of the poem as forcefully as a phoneme does within a word. A few lines inhabit he top of the last page of the poem, followed by an expanse of white space. Of what does it speak?

At the bottom of this page are a string of 20 or so car alarm symbols: “(((((()))))).” Could this stand, perhaps, for the (present day) inevitability of human incursion upon wilderness? Or could the symbol function differently here, perhaps no longer symbolizing the car alarms, but instead the increasingly desperate outcry of the razed forestlands of the world (what authority after all, can a text like this actually claim for its glossary)? It is in the juxtaposition of these symbols and phonemes, landscapes and habitats, that the poem’s conceptual identity is forged, their meanings/functions poised upon each other as they lift the poem’s edifice into the sky.

If The Phonemes is an experiment into the aesthetic attributes of meaning, into how meaning registers in its ineffability, one can argue that it undermines itself somewhat in the overuse of its juxtapositional and transpositional games. This investigation of ineffability at times veers precariously close to (seeming) meaningless and empty. One could spend a month working to decode all of Richard’s encryptions, discerning, or inventing, allusions within the phonemic activity to geology, to Earth First! trials. The book’s social exigency recalls the morbid playfulness of Gwendolyn Brook’s In The Mecca and Renee Gladman’s The Activist. Like these, The Phonemes allows its reader the opportunity to play and stumble upon its latent politic, which, registering in the midst of our game, becomes our discovery. Rarely do other works grant the reader this much opportunity to actually read, to interpret, to author.

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