Caroline Bergvall

This is a collection of separate pieces with a long theoretical introduction (“Middling English”) about working with and through (“meddling”) in the historical mess (“midden”) English language. Bergvall writes a mix of concrete poetry, language poetry, experimental prose, graphic elements, and language and translation theory. She does performances as well as written pieces, and some of these are detached from their original contexts—so “Meedle English” can’t be judged as a book whose contents are only printed matter.

“Goan Atom” is often a very strong poem. There are pages for chanting (I’m assuming) that are especially wonderful (pp. 116-19). Several reviewers, including Matt Reeck in Jacket2 (in a pdf on Bergvall’s website) also praise passages in “Goan Atom,” especially lines that take sexual and violent subject matter and break it into phonemes and other word fragments. Several of the “Shorter Chaucer Tales” are also excellent; I liked “The Not Tale (Funeral),” with some broken echoes of Stein; and the echoes of Chaucerian English are sometimes funny and expressive at the same time:

“A new ideology of yvele evell evyl evil manaces society
and it includes gay weddynge jolly marriage” (p. 32)

I think Bergvall is at her best when she is crushing together Chaucer, Celan, and Stein, and pushing them all into a sort of performative rhythmic verse.

Other strategies in “Meddle English” are weaker. I don’t see that Bergvall has put much thought into her graphics, or even into the pages of graphical and concrete poetry. There are four pages of ink spots before the last text in the book. There’s no way to pay attention to them -- they don’t vary in accord with any motions of the framing texts. There’s nothing to do but page past them as quickly as possible.

I am also unconvinced by her ways of writing literary criticism. The essay “Material Compounds” compounds references to Anne Carson, Sappho, Sugimoto, the YBAs, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and others; but Bergvall is not careful or, apparently, well read on all those subjects, and parts of her collage of thoughts come across as in need of further pondering and elaboration.

“Middling English,” the opening essay, is only intermittently evocative or persuasive. It is too performative, too midden-like, too enmeshed in its own alliterative concepts, to also be a theory of middens, middles, or meddles. Bergvall sometimes says something succinctly and then follows it with an unhelpfully abstract paraphrase, for example here:

“The point is less whether it is a world language than the kind of world it perpetuates. The point is less whether it is a vehicular language than the kind of vehicle it charters.” (p. 12).

“Charters” here is strangely formal and hard to understand as a word choice, and the difference between the claim in the first sentence and the one in the second sentence, is muddy, both because it’s not clear what “kinds” of vehicles might be meant, but because the comparative analogy isn’t sensible. In the first sentence, there’s a play on “world”: first it’s the literal world, then it’s the world of a language; in the second sentence, there’s a play on “vehicle”: first as utility, then as literal transportation. Doesn’t make sense, and the kind of poetry it implies remains obscure unless we’re supposed to just be listening for playfulness: in which case I’d prefer the play to be more interesting.… (mehr)