The Other Side of Language

I remember Nia Davies taking the stage at the 2019 Gestures Conference in Manchester, nestling up to a long table bedecked with mics from panel discussions and pulling one towards her. Without a word, she placed a punnet of blackberries on the white tablecloth and started eating, slowly, insouciantly, sensuously, rolling the fruit around her mouth, her face close to the mic so the slapping and squishing and breathing sounds were piped into the room, into our ears. Occasionally she stopped to lick the juice off her lips and fingers loudly, wetly, messily.

‘everything made in the mouth, can be combined’ (‘This would be a retrospective’), she writes in her second collection Votive Mess where the same bodily investigations and shared intimacies as that performance occur magically, transformatively, from the text on every page. The book traverses ideological and material borders around the globe and through history and Welsh literature, from the medieval Taliesin and mythical Tír na nÓg through ritualistic practices including tarot, folklore, witchcraft, and prayer, navigating their rubble, brambles, and mazes to repeatedly emerge just on the other side of conventional, graspable linguistic meaning. 

The morsels she plays with here are Welsh words, often ‘mwyara’, berries themselves, as the speaker embarks on language acquisition – ‘learn some vocab, repeat repeat repeat’ – both extracting and fetishising words from her lost ‘mamiaith’, mother tongue, which appear in italics and repeat repeat repeat until a certain assimilation comes to pass and the same words appear again in upright roman type. In this way, Davies induces her reader to perform the learning journey the poems reconstruct, until I – shameful monoglot – delightedly recognise ‘adfeilion’, ruins, or ‘symudliw’, iridescent, as I go with her. 

Indeed, feelings of both going and gathering are constant throughout Votive Mess. Themes (such as love, bodies, trauma, and memory), images (including thread, land and mines, shops and water) references (to texts, myths, and films) and connections (through collaborations and dedications) proliferate as the poems roll over themselves, the speaker picking things up and rolling them around her mouth, trying out phrases, objects, and attitudes. Sound- and meaning-play abound in whimsical puns and rhymes that continually construct language: as a bodily endeavour, as ‘an escape in the likeness of an otter, an arrival in the likeness of an utter’ (‘Ritual Steps, Paviland’), as a search for language, asking ‘where does / my not-lang a    a   â   a sit, lang-not, / before mouth or between breasts?’ (‘I Have Taken Many Forms Before I Took This One’). 

But this isn’t superficial – Davies insists on joy, jouissance even – as political resistance. Votive Mess is book about systems: generating them, refusing them, dismantling them. There are multiple manifesto poems here, from the opening ‘Ritual Steps, Paviland’, through ‘Scores for Ritual Poetry’, and ‘Anti-poetics, anti-techniques’, all operating like meta-analyses, categorising the book’s contents as it unfolds. Davies invokes various theories and poetics, from Saussurian distinctions between langue and parole, through post-structural écriture feminine and biopower, to psychoanalysis and pathologisation, asking always what these knowledge systems are for and why we might try to ‘keep record of a person’s constituent auras and vibrations’ (‘Multi/direction Bio/poetics’).

The poems traverse conventional societal structures of romance and family, reminding us that ‘gender comes in, we’re conditioned, I’m afraid’ (‘Theatres of the mouth’), and elsewhere that we too perpetuate these structures, feeling ‘their discourse settling in the back of my action’, often in the most stupidly self-defeating ways: ‘men were ’splaining but I love my father too much to tell them to go.’ From shame at ‘a festival of freedom I was Britishly attending / whilst trying to become less British’ (‘This would be a retrospective’) to frivolousness in ‘I’m allergic to you ziplock plastic bag / but I like these biscuits you contained’ (‘Dick Joke Poem’), whether Davies’s poems are grappling with labour and capitalism or colonialism and climate catastrophe, they never forget the individual’s propensity for absorbing these systemic toxins and ideas. But these poems also regularly refuse such systems, often by blurring the boundaries between categories, as when everything speaks: 

Says a chalice, says amber
Says I-am, the implement,
Says spine, out of pine
Says ever rose, says scream fetch,
or fetish.
(‘Blod rite’)

Or, as in ‘Wear the anklet as a mask: A poetics’ – the most astonishing piece in the book – a four-part sequence in which a ritual experiment with a costume of an ‘anklet worn over the mouth’ triggers a bodily recognition in the speaker, a ‘reminder of a violence’ that might resemble an understanding of enslavement but, equally, might not. As the poem queries: ‘when does a metaphor become its subject? What is the threshold between playing bondage and bondage? What is play and when is it not? When is it going too far?’

What makes this poem so remarkable is that even as the speaker tussles with ideas of ‘going too far’, whether she should ‘not write at all’ or should ‘write through the limit’, real feelings of horror and recognition are carried to the reader through the almost magical powers of costume: the speaker wearing the anklet and the reader wearing the poem, which unfolds by both offering historical information about enslaved peoples and asking a series of questions. Here, as throughout, Davies makes no claim to knowledge but probes the contradictions of living in the traumatised world we both inherit and create. As she writes elsewhere in the book: ‘and yet the / lore folds into this, your new years’ (‘Wassail’). 

It is the repeated, seemingly impossible, unearthing of joy from these very tangles that makes living with hope possible in these poems. ‘In this time, searching for a political method, / that is a body votive, a body social’ (‘This would be a retrospective’) – these lines encapsulate, for me, the big political work of this book that enfolds so much in its thinking. It suggests collectivity as a method, and offers a playscript for questioning living: ‘Clue: it’s not ghostly’ (‘Hafod Jam: Documentation’). 

Where Davies searches for something otherwise within material language, Ariana Reines grasps for something beyond it. It is curious how their projects operate in similar realms – wrangling with possibilities in communication, in occult and religious systems of knowledge and belief, in medieval and ancient histories and narratives – and yet emerge so differently. The Rose is steeped in a desire for nonverbal modes of knowing and experience, the speaker often chasing revelation through sexual encounters: ‘Can you blame me if I thought I’d learn something about the secrets of the universe if I kept taking that dick into my body’ (‘Statement of Fact’). The line makes a dumb joke of a key sentiment in Reines’s wider project, as she goes on to state, almost demand: ‘Sorrow communicated physically. // Sorrow undefiled by words.’ 

The frustration of the work, however, is that we are dealing in words. Bodily, spiritual, nonverbal experiences are necessarily difficult to articulate in this language we communicate in, so the book perpetually brushes up against something inaccessible that it earnestly believes in. It sometimes does this by invoking death-soaked symbols and figures, from the demons depicted in the endpapers – taken from medieval illuminated manuscripts – through mythical and historical characters including Medea and Aleister Crowley, to the devil himself, figured as the high-tech, late-capitalist world that makes zombies of us all as we entertain ourselves in the midst of the contemporary fascist fire burning up the planet.

If I’m completely honest, when I first read this book, I hated it. When I’d seen Reines read from and speak about another book, Wave of Blood, I was enamoured with her. Almost deliriously jetlagged, she was still quick, erudite, endearing. She spoke of and against the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians in ways nobody else was brave enough to: how she felt it in her body, how it’s fucking up all our existence, how on earth are we also meant to live. So when I read The Rose, I couldn’t understand how or why this candid writer had created the repellent, performative surfaces of these poems that refused entry by dealing out vague statements like, ‘I want you to know I too sometimes feel // An unnatural feeling’ (‘Death Has the Biggest Dick of All’), or, ‘I want a force // Of Nature. Nothing less’ (‘Hellmouth’). I wondered who this performance was for, feeling myself outside of it, unaddressed. I wondered if Reines’s project was a kind of theatrical auto-performance of female experience, watching herself being looked at, as Berger put it. A kind of reclamation, maybe.

Where I was implicated, it was by overhearing too much. Reines’s gruesome confessional poetry of oversharing is delightfully appalling, as with the overblown mix of self-pity and self-regard shown when recounting a friend’s words after the more worthy and virtuosic gifts of another poet shame her into wanting to give up:

              I'm sorry Ariana but you can't quit

& you are a greater poet than he is. (Cringe

To record this but it's how a friend speaks 

Who is trying to save a life.) I have 

Read his book. I never missed every stop 

On the train to read his book. I never looked 

Up from his book in tears the way I did from yours.

(‘Wife’)

Cringe indeed to share this anecdote in full. Keep it inside! I wanted to squeal at her and hurl my book across the room. But I am fascinated by where these poems push me, how they dredge up this deeply held, horrifyingly judgmental morality I didn’t even realise I harboured. And this is the trick, the test of the work. We both know she has gone too far, but by whose standards?

                                  We punish 

& reward one another for understanding 

& respecting these laws, this need

For tact: the rule not to speak

Of suffering.

(‘Jack & Joe’)

What is on the other side of these surfaces: the surfaces of language, rationality, society, belief? My feelings towards The Rose morphed as I realised that the poems call attention to and tease these limits precisely because they are where the inherent possibilities of the unknown are actively occluded. Reines tries to get as close to those unknowns as she can by asking how they’re shaped by what we ostensibly do know – by treading the shared borders along the in/visible, un/knowable, un/speakable. 

Thus, the double meaning of ‘What I can’t say’ refers to both inability, through the material limitations of language, and propriety: what one ought not say – but also because we just won’t get it. I’m imagining a spiritually enlightened Wittgensteinian lion who might want to speak of souls. Because the contemporary western world has worked hard to learn its incapacity for spiritual communion. As Reines writes sardonically, ‘the age in which I live // Compels me to respect myself // It is my duty to do so’, but ‘My longing’ is ‘true & unliberated // Carceral & unlimited’ (‘Death Has…) – its untapped potential trapped by the limited systems it feeds on. 

I was wrong about hating this book. The Rose opens unanticipated journeys. Picking at my ambivalence towards these poems for weeks, I’ve barely scratched the surface. That I know I’ll return to, and keep turning over, and trying to figure out this book, and all the unknowns it opens and obfuscates, is why I think it’s so brilliant. Frustratingly, delightfully, appallingly brilliant.