Karen Houle's "during": oughtn't the poet-philosopher to have known better?

                              Out isn't where she thinks she went in (during)

I take it almost as a certainty that the academic ought not to write poetry. It's probably truer to say that subservience to theory is the  primary cause of the disastrous poetry being written at campuses everywhere, and there others—such as tenure, publication pressures, collegial self-esteem, etc.—contributing their small share. As an inductive proposition, of course, I anxiously await the one disconfirming case of the theorist who writes exemplary verses or would eagerly consider to what extent the exception isn't just an interesting coincidence. I've tended to cite only confirming instances because there are, after all, so many of them. Well, to be fair, they may not prove the conclusion but they certainly establish it as very likely.

Karen Houle's book of poetry titled during is very probably another case of disastrous academic poetry. Are the cards stacked that pitilessly against her? The Canadian associate Professor with an interest in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, author here of a book of poetry heavily staked in a key "plane of immanence" view of knowledge (such as its divisions into 'During', 'Duration', 'Endure" and 'Durable' strongly imply), will have to prove (to me) that contemporary 'process'-metaphysics can be wed to her lyric.Yes, lyric. If Houle must serve as the 'I'-observer of Deleuzian transformations & give voice to the interplay of language and the perceiving body,as in "Someone, or the thought of someone, plops itself down—/in my corolla region; in the rising sun's brief, seasonal/ struggle I can hear" ("Second, During", 11), the 'lyrical' property is one she will be obligated to keep. To lose the "I" to theory (as I fear she does) is tantamount to failure.

 In fact, the success of academic poetry, here in Houle's work & anywhere else, hinges on whether experimentation and the "I"-subject can appear together without having to endure too much permeability or a bad case of what Houédard calls "borderblur". To write, & make tropes conform to, a wilfully transgressive language—as per poetry exercise—isn't a processual aesthetics worthy of the name. For a poetry that properly incarnates the "sensations" of daily existence one must turn to Wallace Stevens, Hart Crane. Just how hard she tries to make lyricism a function of a predominantly inhuman, almost grotesque realm of "becomings" is evident in places like

Life boils.

Watercycles char
sideways, lateral-driven cyclone spumes.

Resin flees from one ring to the next
through the trick-hatch ("Fourth, During" 15)

or,

Like a borning calf sliding in fuck-ooze,
he imagines, homunculated feminine
capacity for endless more; a liar-shimmer
highway of rubber insides, bat-black
verminy thick: sickens. ("Discretion" 41)

or,

Getting to say how you need it said
is what we have been saying

all along and when we see it

no doubts frame it cheap as black-out,
no unsubstantiated charges hanging bitch
teat in the downward air,

no weapons-grade anger
spruce sting bat swoop above his and her heads
swarming between us ("Modesty Lesson No. 3" 49-50)

where the "life-boil" images try clumsily to become real "lines of flight". Deleuze & Guattari, champions of "a material power of language", do urge us, in very elegant & passional terms, to "witness a transformation of substances and a dissolution of forms, a passage to the limit or flight from contours in favor of fluid forces, flows, air, light, and matter, such that a body or a word does not end at a precise point."(A Thousand Plateaus, 109). And what better food for metaphor, what better gateway to the radical open-endedness of poetry in general, than "flows, air, light, and matter"? Bachelard certainly knew the poetic value of earth's elementals.

It's regrettable, however, that Houle can work her way only through predictable groupings or that she resorts to them at all. "During" & "Duration", for example, make an interesting pair. Presumably "During" is process to "Duration"'s fleeting solidity. In "During", poetry's "moving matter" is reduced to a woodcutter figure "[who] instructs me/on the legal centre of wood"("Fourth, During"15)—a too predictable carpentry tool analogy!—with plenty of ash & poplar images to go around;  representations of"air" appear, among other things, in watery and silky things ("Fifth, During"16) like fish & nylon; and Houle's "fluid forces" are recast as the "pre-vibrational undodgeable" ("Seventh, During"18) motion of a train or a rickety bridge. It strikes the reader more as fanciful automatic writing than the radical deterritorialization of objects, bodies & sensations. "Each day I tilt like zinc/tarp all day one way" ("It Was Summer We Decided to Marry"25) could have easily been read in Schwitters.

In "Duration", on the other hand, "fluid forces" have cooled—for the duration only—into a narrative in perpetual flux, presumably the poet's own. While we are too busy doing philosophy, Houle seems to say, life momentarily congeals and then escapes through one of many apertures, leaving the "holey" space of paper after confetti's been punched out ("Guilt or Dread What An Amazing Instrument You Are" 28) or dreams issuing out of a husband's mouth ("Modesty: Lesson One" 32) or, of all things, a sea draining from a stem glass ("Forgiveness" 34). And where holes don't only appear there's also a kind of supporting "meat", "skin" and "flesh" armature for something that looks very much like a "Body without Organs (BwO)", the symbol perhaps of the many indeterminate thresholds existing between bodies & sensations or a sense of their varying intensities. The poem "Because We Were Prepared To Make Use Of Each Other" (29), among others like it, is a perfect summing up of all the Deleuzian categories to be found in during, "matter", "fluid forces" and a BwO-type Figure arrayed predictably & faithfully down the page:

Two by two in a harness of blended capability—
our handmade house with its hundred movable parts:

Parts to organize the light for sleeping,
parts for being all alone and
parts for being alone with you.

Your voice soon bent to fit my keyhole
was the opening in you to the outside world.

One thing safe inside another,
the high talk began

brutalizing one's mouth by the questions coming out of it.

Feet melt on rungs of deadly daylight.
Skin bangs on its hinges all night.

My breasts still warm dead doves—
picture window, mistaken for open sky. (29)

"Endure" and "Durable" fare no better as opposable poetic principles: no lovable odd-balls these to engage the reader. There are the usual openings, endless transformations (of God into river, cotton candy into silly girls, to name a couple from "On The Paper Anniversary Of The High-Wire Act" 55) and fluid forces of change (such as "mangling pretty phrases out of/loamy inert matter" in "By This Method The Mother Tongue Becomes" 69). There are the interminable exchanges between language and a prevalent "process"-philosophy, such as "shit snow", "obscene float", "yellow ringlets dangling like giant sperm", "Sinuses' private lessons", "Tube-tanged air" (from "My Various Daughters" 71) multiplying beyond necessity. The concluding "Durable" section, with its exploration of other bodies, ideas & states of affairs, reads like an angry anti-logocentric (anti-socratic) feminist tract—very reminiscent of Atwood—with daughters ("Durable No. 4" 90), Buddhist misogyny ("More Women Advice From The East" 92) and even some environmentalist rant ("Durable No. 6" 94). Now Deleuzian "becomings" become social causes:  the "I"-observer the "I"-activist. Houle's clearly violated a key non figuratif non objectif principle of Deleuzian aesthetics:  almost every line on Houle's page signifies or illustrates or narrates.

Perhaps the object here is just to endure & trudge on, through Houle's tetralogy, into the interminable talkativeness to which the poet-philosopher's reduced language & the lyrical journey (after Beckett). If this is the game-plan, then poetry's been turned into self-critique (a parody?) of poet & her materials, and how differently during would seem to me. But I don't think Houle's self-reflexive enough for this: the one thing that would've saved her, the potential in lines like "Each year is nothing more than a rolling over to relieve the/stiffness" and "Today the sad riffling lean of March on the pack-ice at the pilings/tired like our believing it" ("Endure No. 7" 79), seems to have eluded her. Here the narrative can have turned into nonnarrative, the academic-poet narrator into what Deleuze (in Francis Bacon: the logic of sensation) calls the "Figure" (71), with rythmical variations on the "becomings" of things like "the sad riffling lean of March".

Houle's are always misspent energies, however: well-intentioned to be sure, eagerly availing herself of the theory but just not up to the job. For transformation an equally transformative language is required. The effect is decidedly that of the postmodern enthusiast given to writing spurts inspired by her reading of a single philosophical source, and in her hurry to make theory fit, she's stilled the "infinite movement of thought" (from Deleuze's What is Philosophy?). I ought to be able to say of her poetry (but can't) what Deleuze said rightfully of Francis Bacon's paintings, a body of work to which he himself went for self-validation:

In place of formal correspondences, what Bacon's painting constitutes is a zone of indiscernibility or undecidability between man and animal. Man becomes animal, but not without the animal becoming spirit at the same time, the spirit of man, the physical spirit of man presented in the mirror as Eumenides or Fate. (Francis Bacon 21)

That wonderful blending of spirit and artistic subject in a pure animality (materiality) of work is nowhere to be seen in Houle. Saying in repetitive, almost formulaic verse—as the academic-poet does—that poetry such as hers moves by real affections, & even more devastatingly real "chaosmic" & deterritorializing forces doesn't make it so: the work rather refers to poet herself & turns poetry into a bland narrative of ideas. The dynamism she's striving for must draw deep from the well of 'hidden' fires & leave the reader with real poetical "matters" irreducible to her books, and for that talent is required. She really ought to have known better. And she ought to have seen above all the effigy of the lyrical "I" that always results from a misappropriated reading of a favourite author.