Jordan Scott, Blert, Coach House Books, 2014.
View an Excerpt
read it at Google Books
You monsoon across the alphabet, croon turbulence, and whisper:
A is for alligator, against the Mississippi marooned on
my gums. Gumbo thrums from lips and you drizzle glossary,
soak into S like your throat gurgles the wrung-out cotton from
a humid Zandunga: say S, say sathasha sashatha, say
spoon. I hiss and that is all. Say S, shass shassha,
say..gymnasts squat bulk quads atop your tongue, S somersaults
warm into P and I geyser, hoot, o-o at this alphabetic
kinetic. Say S, say shrathra shrathrashra, say spoon, your
pucker hunkers in singsong.
The bright, taut, explosive poems in Jordan Scott’s Blert represent a spelunk into the mouth of the stutterer. Through the unique symptoms of the stutterer (Scott, like fifty million others, has always stuttered), language becomes a rolling gait of words hidden within words, leading to different rhythms and textures, all addressed by the mouth’s slight erosions.
In Scott’s lexicon, to blert is to stutter, to disturb the breath of speaking. The stutter quivers in all that we do, from a skip on a cd to a slip of the tongue. These experiences are often dismissed as aberrant, but in Blert, such fragmented milliseconds are embraced and mined as language. Often aimed full-bore at words that are especially difficult for the stutterer, Scott’s poems don’t just discuss, they replicate the act of stuttering, the ‘blort, jam and rejoice’ involved in grappling with the granular texture of words.
As Scott says in his author's note, 'Blert is written to be as difficult as possible for me to read.' Blert presents the stutter on its own terms - every tense moment of personal struggle with language as a rolling, unstoppable gallop of words within words.
In Blert, Jordan Scott has taken a lifetime of stuttering and turned it to audacious advantage. There are no arm’s-length accounts of stuttering here. Rather, Scott recreates his experience of language as a resistant physical medium—where every vowel and consonant must be traversed, claimed, made audible by non-stop bodily effort. And for the non-stuttering reader, the effect is boggling. As the initial disorientation begins to clear, our familiar relation to words is both dislocated and clarified. I also dig the pure racket, thumpology and bang-on-a-can exuberance of these tonguetide riffs. Scott takes us down to the basement of words, where sound and rhythm rule, and poets learn their craft. Blert is a strange and gorgeous work of linguistic materialism. - Dennis Lee
Jordan Scott’s Blert is the most original poetic project I have read in years. Undertaking a ‘poetics of stutter,’ the book is not primarily a mimetic representation of stuttering, or the reproduction of stammered speech, but rather an investigation into how the stutter originates. Enacted rather than named, the stutter here is thus no longer an affect registered in language, but rather an effect of language. At once an intimately personal confession and a coldly statistical abstraction, Blert defines itself in the same way Paul Valéry defined poetry: a prolonged hesitation between sound and meaning. - Craig Dworkin
Language means things, but no language is only its meanings: any word, said aloud, has a sound, and every phrase is also, in physicists’ terms, a set of waves moving through air, produced by tongue, pharynx, larynx, lungs, etc., as they act on the mix of gases we inhale or exhale. Since (at least) the heyday of Gertrude Stein, some poets have tried to focus on speech as physical event, on how brains make tongues create not meanings but sounds. These poets do not just complicate, but nearly sever, links between sound (“t” + “r” + “ee”) and meaning (what happens when you think of a tree). Such poetry gets repetitive fast unless the poet solves a knotty problem: how to give meaning and feeling (beyond the one-time-only flash of experiment) to language that comes across less as words than as sound?
Jordan Scott has found a smart, and a touching, solution. His poems of nonsense and near nonsense, of muddled or tangled articulations, have a subject for which his methods seem perfect: they review his experience as a stutterer, the emotional hurdles and intellectual paradoxes of being a speaker whom language may not obey. Marc Shell (whom Scott thanks) and other writers have depicted that experience in prose; Scott seems to be the first poet to make, from it, poems.
Scott dubs his work “a full bore squirm inside the mouth’s wear and tear”; “my symptoms,” he adds, “are the agents of composition.” The results can be nonsense (“Minnow fandango ossify estuary, woo uh-oh in Wang Chung haze”) but the book merits attention because, mostly, it is not nonsense at all: rather, it is a brilliant near nonsense, non-nonsense, bringing (as much as words can) to non-stuttering readers the misfires of one’s own short-circuited speech. Scott’s sentences, paragraphs, and versets (plus the occasional concrete poem) perch on the ridge between word and mere phoneme, instructing, e.g., “Muffle newfangled vow,” or complaining: “If therapy is a must, wad cakehole Blister Rust.”
Fake interviews ask italicized pseudoquestions (“What is the utterance?”) to which this paradoxically articulate-yet-inarticulate poem can give no obvious answer. Nearly blank pages suggest awkward silences: a few read only “chomp set” (i.e., teeth) at the top, plus one or two words—“glacial jiggy,” e.g.—underneath. Other pages veer past bizarre onomatopoeias to limn the space between speech and non-linguistic sound—“How the kitchen muzzles clang-clang enamel for floured prose beaten and rolled into sense, and how the steam of hot taps saunas the knotted tendons of difficult phrases.” Extended metaphors concern bones and geologies, asking what hard structures lie under everyday surfaces, exposed when those surfaces break.
Beyond the individual pages of hints and feints and muffled vows, the whole book works because, after all, it means something: it shows how it might feel to speak (or fail to speak) the way this poet sometimes does. It is an intentionally alienating, concept-driven work, nothing like (say) Robert Hass or Elizabeth Bishop, and a lot like other book-length works (e.g., Christian Bök’s Eunoia) by Scott’s allies in the Canadian avant-garde. It’s packed with roadblocks, train wrecks of baffled sound, flaunted miscues and indecipherabilities. And yet it is, despite itself, a lyric book, too.—Stephen Burt
Jordan Scott documentary wins two awards from Applied Arts
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