“Thanks to this intersection, reasoned yet intuitive, Montalbetti offers us writing that is
both alert and of great philosophical depth, just as it maintains the sway of a dance.”
Reading a poem is something else
that is not entertaining (almost
never)
Montalbetti
The verse listens to its reader
Paul Valéry
1. The gateless barrier (or on reading)
Do not think the koan’s sense should be understood
when it comes to us as an object of thought.
Suzuki
I knew from the start it wouldn’t be easy, but once I accepted (I would write something about the poetic work of Mario Montalbetti), what mattered was how to read, which piece to cut out, from which perspective to consider certain traits of the poems, so varied and distinct from each other, that the Peruvian poet and linguist has been writing over the course of more than forty years.
A poem is like a koan (this is the first thing I thought of): “What is the sound of one hand?” This koan, attributed to Hakuin Ekaku, poses a problem to our minds. “A koan is unsettling because koans deliberately throw sand into the eyes of the intellect,” according to Philip Kapleau. A poem is also a problem, and it also unsettles us in the same way. In Zen practice, there are zazen and sanzen, which is not so well-known. To give a general outline: zazen is sitting in silence to dig deep into stillness; sanzen, on the other hand, has to do with words. In zazen, you do nothing; in sanzen, you’ve got to do something. As is said in the collection of koans The Gateless Barrier, the koan must be investigated “day and night as if your whole body were a mass of doubt.” Taisen Deshimaru notes that the “method of the koan requires the same training and the same concentration as the art of drawing the bow and shooting the arrow at the right moment.” Of the koan, he continues, “there can be no more than an intuitive understanding.” The koan can be neither paraphrased nor explained nor interpreted; you simply do something with or from it. Not being an expert in koans myself, it seems to me that everything I’ve said thus far could also be said of a good poem: the koan, like the poem, is an artifact made of words that destabilizes us. Reading and rereading Montalbetti’s poems, I felt that same sensation of being “a mass of doubt.”
Gleaning through his books, I found a few verses that have the same destabilizing power as the koan. I’ll cite a few of them, each preceded by an actual koan: “The fast current does not drag the moon” (koan), “Truth resists within truth” (M.M.), “The curved line cannot include the straight” (koan), “Language leads nowhere. I am happy” (M.M.), “When Choko drinks, Rioko is drunk” (koan), “The only language is not opening your mouth (M.M.), “To sit down, cut” (koan), “my left eye is the sun, my right eye is the moon” (M.M.), “The wind has grown calm and the flowers keep falling” (koan), “once we have understood everything, we have understood nothing” (M.M.), “Mu” (koan), “ti-ti, ti-ti” (M.M.).
I have taken the liberty of pulling these verses out of their respective poems because, following Montalbetti’s own conception, “in a poem, the parts are more than the whole.” And, following this argument, he then suggests, “verses abhor unity, they are essentially autonomous, independent […] The verses we appreciate, the verses that delight us, those that stay with us in the end, always contain an untamable remnant” (Cualquier hombre es una isla). Just like the koan, many of Montalbetti’s verses contain that untamable trace that imbues them with that strange quality of simultaneous transparency and opacity. This quality is also shared by his poems, I believe, regardless of the verses I pulled.
I propose a reading of Montalbetti that has something in common with the practice of sanzen: I tried to think (of doing) something with or from the poems.
2. …another way of working (or on innovative action)
An inappropriate fulfillment of the rule illuminates
Paolo Virno
Here I’ll make use, taking many liberties, of a few ideas from the text “Chiste y acción innovadora” [Joke and innovative action], from the book Ambivalencia de la multitud: Entre la innovación y la negatividad by Paolo Virno. The joke is another artifact made of words that can help us understand the Montalbettian poem-as-artifact. I should clarify that the intentions and effects of each artifact are very different, as is their reach; for example, the third time we hear a joke, it loses its strength, while a poem gains potency every time we read it. So, I’m not interested in drawing a close analogy between the joke and the poem, but rather in considering the linguistic action of the poem (what we enjoy, what destabilizes us) through certain resources of the joke’s modus operandi (what makes us laugh, what surprises us). Below, I’ll cite some of Virno’s starting points (where he writes “joke,” I’m thinking of the Montalbettian poem): 1) “The joke is a linguistic game,” 2) “The joke is the diagram of innovative action,” 3) “The joke makes full use of endoxa with the aim of corroding them from within,” (“endoxa” unite speakers), 4) “There are many other linguistic usages that bring the jokemaker into contact with his audience: stereotypes, proverbs, precepts, idiomatic expressions, traditional anecdotes. Innovative action takes advantage of the fact that they are familiar in order to disfigure them and knock down their sense,” 5) “The joke opens an oblique path that draws connections between heterogeneous semantic contents, hitherto unlinked,” 6) “Every joke focuses, in its own way, on the plurality of alternatives that present themselves when a norm is applied: before ‘following the path’ it is always possible to ‘take a detour or cut across country.’”
Reading Virno, I recalled an idea that José Ignacio Padilla mentions in his essay “Montalbetti antipoeta”: “…while [Gertrude] Stein showed us that, in repetition, nothing is ever the same, Montalbetti is more concerned about the linguistic error.” Later, he quotes an excerpt from an interview with Montalbetti: “I believe, when you use incorrect forms of speaking, you find the direction of language.” In this incorrect use, Padilla (and Montalbetti) detect an ethical act: an act of lashing out at all grammar and at the Academia de la Lengua as a whole. For his part, Virno also derives from innovative action an ethical act that translates to displacement (taking the detour) and exodus (flight): faced with crisis or stagnation, innovative action breaks the steady state and changes the grammar of a life. The joke, just like the Montalbettian poem, makes use of incorrectness and impropriety to impress a unique torsion upon language, and thus shed light on that remnant of the state of emergency present in every norm. Following Virno, we might think of the Montalbettian poem as a meaningful discourse on the crisis of meaning, since it highlights the independence of application (the universe of discourse that puts language in action) from the norm (system of signs). We can conclude, from all of this, that communicating the signified is not the axis of the poem (as Montalbetti has so often suggested); it is, rather, the possibilities that open up when the effects of its chains of signifiers are brought into play.
I don’t have enough space here to cite whole poems, so I will once again pause over a few verses to demonstrate these detours and flights, these unique torsions (incorrections, inversions, disruptions of familiar words or phrases) that Montalbetti impresses upon his poems so as to lash out against language, making use of the very sharing of language to which Virno refers: “se está respirando de vida y vuelta,” “que no se somete al mejor pastor,” “invierte en malas raíces,” “tirar hace al monje tirar hace mucho que hace al monje tirar piedras,” “daré mi mente a torcer,” “donde nadie se ríe / dos veces en el mismo baño,” “el desierto es mi pastor todo me faltará,” “puede hacer frío si tú lo estás,” “compañeros esto no es una ribera del ebrio,” “madre de dos elévese móvil a la dignidad del fascinado,” “los animales son perros a la intemperie,” “Todo lo que consideraba establo es un caballo,” “su luces su luces el sol,”1 “rompido por la mitad rompo la lengua hablo una lengua rompida en dos,” “Yo verás al ángel (lloverá),” “Llantos Elíseos,” “Son de quemar,” etc. This list of verses and, toward the end, titles of his poems could go on for many more pages, but these examples are enough to carry on reflecting.
“It is clear that the poem and the essay alike in-form each other mutually; nevertheless, this is a question not only of ideas, arguments, or genres, but also of distinct processes of thought that allow for differing strategies of writing and movement.”
The verses above refuse to follow the paths that established usage, a product of repetition and training, suggests as the agreed-upon order. The torsions that Montalbetti impresses upon language, with humor and irony, reveal his sonic-mental agility. This is a case, I think, not only of voluntarily-disruptive reasoning, but of listening work, surely sometimes involuntary, that suddenly uncovers, on the surface of language (in its materiality / sonic framework), the insinuation of possible associations.2 Which brings me back to Virno, whom I’ll cite and paraphrase at the same time: the lack of premeditation (the involuntary) evinces the return to a regularity in which the word is linked—yet again—with the original, natural expression of sensation. […]. The innovative action (the poem) retreats toward the bond between perception and discourse. […]. This return to impulse implies the possibility of elaborating language differently, of moving on to another way of working. The regularity that Virno suggests may be related to the language as biological object of which Montalbetti has spoken in various texts and talks, drawing an important distinction between tongue and language.3 The latter, according to the Peruvian poet, “is a biological object, it is part of the genetic endowment with which the human being comes into the world, and it gives us instructions by which to assemble linguistic units, mechanisms of articulation, skeletons of formal organization; what, in simple terms, we might call syntax.”4 For Virno, this regularity (biological language), preceding any system of rules (historical tongue) and positively determined, is human life at the point of taking on one form or another. From this perspective, one might posit that the Montalbettian poem, or at least some of his poems, displays this “articulation between impulse and grammar, between life in general and linguistic life.” One might say, again following Virno, that “in the beginning there was the application; only later came the rule.” In short, Montalbetti’s poetic oeuvre advises us that, before following the familiar path, it is sometimes possible to take a detour or cut across country.
3. Writing as tendency (or on practice)
Theory is never more than an extension of practice.
Charles Bernstein
In his book The Preparation of the Novel, Roland Barthes lays out the difference between “writing as a tendency” and “writing something,” taking Marcel Proust as his starting point to reflect on his vacillation and fluctuation between the essay and the novel. For Barthes, it is not a question of what is being written (novel, essay, short story, poem), but rather of writing itself: when the object is erased in favor of the tendency, the division between genres becomes obsolete. Writing as a tendency, Barthes notes, “means that the objects of writing appear, glitter, disappear; what remains is basically a force field.” In Montalbetti’s poetic work, the fluctuation between poetic thought and essayistic thought appears from the start: discreetly in Perro negro: 31 poemas (1978) and Quasar / El misterio del sueño cóncavo (1979), only to be openly accentuated starting from Cajas (2012). Nonetheless, although we might call these (as we do here) poems, poem-essays, essay-poems, and essays, it strikes me as much more productive to think of his poetic work based on this “force field” that unfurls; that is, based on the tensions that both modes of thought and writing imply and generate. While Barthes takes Proust as a starting point for this vacillation, I would like to take, in the Peruvian context, Martín Adán’s La casa de cartón, due to its fluctuation between the short story, the poem, and the essay. We might even glimpse a wink to this work from Montalbetti in Notas para un seminario sobre Foucault, a poem-essay or a poem-seminar, where he places the poem “Antisidro” in the middle of the book, in the style of Adán’s “poemas underwood,” which likewise divide his book, putting the reader in check.
Beyond this possible nod to tradition, a Poundian act of making-it-new, what interests me here is suggesting a couple of consequences of this transference between poem and essay in Montalbetti’s writing. It is clear that the poem and the essay alike in-form each other mutually; nevertheless, this is a question not only of ideas, arguments, or genres, but also of distinct processes of thought that allow for differing strategies of writing and movement. In Montalbetti’s own words:
What the essay gives you is that form of almost syllogistic reasoning in which there is an argument that moves and pushes onward. […] On the other hand, the poem offers something that the essay cannot give you, which is interruption, caesura, the idea that a verse can be cut and then continue in the following verse, and the first thing that gives you is, precisely, a discrepancy between sound and meaning. The poem breaks that down for you, and I believe it plays, above all, with this discrepancy that comes through in many ways. One of the clearest ways is the poem’s being cut into verses.5
Thanks to this intersection, reasoned yet intuitive, Montalbetti offers us writing that is both alert and of great philosophical depth, just as it maintains the sway of a dance. The arguments and digressions proper to the essay are filtered through the poem; while line cuts, accents, rhythms, and the game of signifiers become an essential part of essayistic thought: diverting, displacing, advancing, postponing, suspending, and interrupting are operations that move the poem above the semantic field, allowing for what Montalbetti calls sense: that is, the direction toward which the poem points. The essay-poem correlation disrupts the invariants of the construction and genre of each, and, by freeing itself of these frameworks, generates a different game. As an example of this, we might take the sui generis construction of this false (but beautiful) syllogism from his book Cabe la forma: “El color rojo es el color del cliché. / El color rojo es el color de la letra cursiva. / La letra cursiva seduce al pensamiento” [The color red is the color of cliché. / The color red is the color of the cursive letter. / The cursive letter seduces thought], which breaks the logic of identity proper to syllogisms and, thus, their argumentative logic, moving their terms into new, unsuspected places; or, instead, the cuts that break up the argumentative through-line in Notas para un seminario sobre Foucault, as we scan the following verses: “También me viene a la mente un verso de Arquíloco / apoyado en mi lenguaje, bebo / es conmovedor, / De sus palabras depende el pan / de sus palabras depende el vino // Arquíloco bebe apoyado en su lenguaje / …es lo que le da de comer y de beber // Ah, nos veremos el próximo martes entonces” [A verse by Archilochus also comes to mind / I drink leaning on my language / it’s moving, / Bread depends on his words / wine depends on his words // Archilocus drinks leaning on his language / …that is what gives him his food and drink // Oh, then I’ll see you next Tuesday]. Here we find these lovely symmetries, concluding with an Alexandrine verse: “También me viene a la mente un verso de Arquíloco” (13 syllables, rhythm: 2,4,7,9,12), “Arquíloco bebe apoyado en su lenguaje” (13 syllables, rhythm: 3,5,8,12), “…es lo que le da de beber y comer” (13 syllables, rhythm: 5,8,12), “apoyado en mi lenguaje, bebo” (10 syllables, rhythm: 3,7,9), “De sus palabras depende el pan” (10 syllables, rhythm: 4,7,9), “de sus palabras depende el vino” (10 syllables, rhythm: 4,7,9), “Ah, nos veremos el próximo martes entonces” (14 syllables, rhythm: 1,4,7,10,13). The syllabification and line phrasing, supported (here) by the poet’s ear, flow sonorously, seducing the reader’s ear, forcing her to pay attention to the matter of these verses, to their verbal reality, to their form.
On the other hand, and to close this last note, I believe Bernstein’s new equation: “Theory is never more than an extension of practice,” which exchanges the poles suggested by Creeley-Olson (“Form is never more than an extension of content”), is better adapted to Montalbetti’s intentions as a writer. In an interview with Damián De La Torre Ayora, the poet comments: “What interests me is language. I believe poetry is linguistics and is a constant investigation. Poetry allows us to understand experimentation and explore the limits of language.”6 This answer makes clear that his linguistic explorations, his essays and his poems, all form part of the same investigation, and it is his poetic practice that allows him to reach places where hard theoretical thought could never enter. It is his poetic practice, indeed, that allows him to make certain discoveries, that nourishes and propels his theoretical reflection and his sonic imagination. The discrepancies between sound and meaning, these poetic insterstices, open new doors through which to think of language, and different paths to walk as both poet and linguist.
Translated by Arthur Malcolm Dixon
1 In his essay on Montalbetti, José Ignacio Padilla suggests that this phrase imitates the incomprehensible phrasing of Peruvian children as they sing the national anthem.
2 In “Projective Verse,” Charles Olson addresses the quick connection between the ear and the mind in the construction of the syllable.
3 To delve deeper into the idea of language, I recommend reading chapter seven, “Chomsky,” of Mario Montalbetti’s book Geometrías variables del lenguaje, from Fondo Editorial PUCP. The connection I propose between regularity and biological language is simply conjecture, as I lack both the tools and the space necessary to get to the bottom of this idea and uphold it. I mention it only because it strikes me as possible and, above all, very intriguing.
4 El colapso del lenguaje – Mario Montalbetti | Valparaíso 2024.
5 Lucas Sánchez interviews Montalbetti.
6 Damián De La Torre Ayora interviews Montalbetti.
