Peter Jaeger: Eckhart Cars (Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2004. ISBN 1-844710-37-8. 140pp, 8.5 x 5.5ins, pb, £9.95/$15.95).

Experience of Eckhart Cars makes anything other than individual response impossible. I'm going to begin by selecting excerpts Salt Publications supply as leafleted publicity blurb and on the back cover which before the book is opened give some idea of the nature of the task in hand. First of all, there's Charles Bernstein who tells us: 'Peter Jaeger's sprung lyrics and imaginary aphorisms...locate the body of the text in the mirage of the text's own vanishing...'; then there's Steve McCaffery talking of the text engaging '...discursive production and the "literary field" in mutually critical times that implicate a catina of paradoxes...; Andrea Brady talks of '... a poetry of constellated possibilities'; and, finally, there's Allen Fisher who confesses '...once locked in you begin to question your own sanity, you ask is this taking me into itself or is it just kidding...and then uses how it becomes to mean this, what itself reads through the reader'. So there you have it.

Perhaps, Fisher is the least opaque in his analysis as Jaeger certainly gives the reader plenty of work to do: decontextualised sound bites, postmodern cut and paste, lists, stanzas that read like notes or close procedure exercises where the reader completes meaning by selecting words from a personalised vocabulary. Strangely, poems such as 'So They Say' and 'Narrow' have the effect of overheard conversations mimicked by a child or an eavesdropped meeting where the serious register and vocabulary are underlined in the absence of coherence or outcome. But for me, at times, the work disappears into dense pools of unquantitative, unqualitative abstraction. Making conscious use of the abstract language of theory and philosophy in 'Pollen' Jaeger constructs for the reader 11 pages of aphorisms, some specifically designed to debunk the form (I hope), some earnestly intended:

Along with the purely life-sustaining function of a yield, a surrender
recalls profits which seemingly have no end beyond themselves.

The more I read; the more I lie.

Currency is ripe for lyrical finance.

Every apex sections.

Shirkers of the world unite.

The collage is to the lyric as the international bank deposit is to the
currency of origin.

The last aphorism is particularly interesting in the context of Jaeger's work and so too the following which I found helpful in responding to the poems:

The foremost way to read is to skim without considering too much...that way
the tone predominates over incarceration.

The style of Eckhart Cars certainly protects against any such 'incarceration' in the way that it avoids offering the reader (perhaps with the exception of 'Pollard') much to grasp on to by way of narrative, subject, character or description — preferring textual alienation to involvement, process before pronouncement. The problem with aphorisms is that they tend to offer the poet a chance to seem wise, which I distrust, but I do trust a poet who is trying to be honest, which for the most part is what Jaeger is trying to be. His texts show us what he believes about poetry, what it should encompass and its mode of expression in a world at the point of postmodernist meltdown in which the individual is assailed by endless babbling of rational/irrational utterance from which to select/endure meaning. Till in the end language dissolves into the gobbledygook of sounds, implied and approximate meanings of 'Sub-Twang Mustard':

troglo

blip whiff
sole re–
strudled scut

A poem which leaves the reader with a shaving of sense — real or imagined.

Eckhart Cars centres around 'Martyrologies', 8 pages of unbroken, blocked prose which comprise concluding lines expressing the gory, painful deaths of a long succession of martyrs:...

All 300 of them were suffocated in a burning limekiln. He was condemned to walk on burning coals, and is said to have walked over them without damage before being beheaded. 6,666 of them were put to death. He was seized tortured and then burnt alive. They had stones fastened about their necks and were driven into the sea...

This listing technique, or catena, Jaeger employs to effect in an earlier poem 'Extension of Standard Practice' where he sequences a sort of CNN newspeak to highlight the euphemistic vacuity used to describe conflict.

'Martyrologies' functions to create horror at cruelty, wonder at fortitude and fear for a world that places belief before humanity. But listing is a technique rather than a resolution, ultimately the reader must experience, discover and personally decide.

The final poem in the book 'A Black Tooth in Front' is in many senses the most sustained and 'elegant' of his poems. Its structure follows the sequencing of the alphabet (that which offers infinite possibilities of expression) and proceeds through an accumulation of clauses and phrases opening with the same letter. Jaeger uses the poem to juxtapose human anatomy, nature, science, convention and physical exercise (undoubtedly more if you feel motivated to look). The effect of this unfolding relentless, irrelevant formal process is disquieting as, engaging the reader, it gradually creates awareness of coexistent order and chaos, expressed not in terms of conflict but through simultaneous presence. Further, it functions to underline the vain endeavour of humanity and human language to derive meaning, even within the human form, from a vortex of infinite possibility. Even the formality of the alphabet is incomplete; I found myself anticipating how he'd deal with XYZ, only to discover he'd opted out of using Z and X completely, sadly no zeros, zodiacs and xenotransplants — but then completeness would always ultimately rest with me.

To survive and be of continued relevance poetry must take chances, explore possibilities, be self-regarding; Eckhart Cars explores all three tasks, though I'm not convinced that its experiments don't remain for others to perfect, which may be where Jaeger's true contribution to poetry lies. I was pleased to be invited to read this book and most certainly will revisit its ideas and effects, though its language maze is already beginning to fade. Yet for anyone truly interested in poetry it should be examined — it's a strange voyage in what might become a future.

 

copyright © John Couth, 2004. All quotations in this review are copyright © Peter Jaeger, 2004.

John Couth was educated at Warwick and Exeter Universities; he now lives as a freelance writer, photographer and translator; his publications include Buriton – Spirit of a Village, and Aveyron. He lives and works in Britain and France.