Rewriting Descartes

Peter Dent is one of those poets who, in seeking how far language will take them, has constantly ventured
further into the stylistic unknown. Since he retired early from teaching in 1991, his writing has branched out
in so many directions as to become almost deliquescent. So, while he has achieved what is easily his most
successful prose work in Simple Geometry (Oasis, 1999), it does present certain difficulties of interpretation. Necessarily, since its subject is the epistemological problem of how valid our subjective interpretations of
experience are. Any we arrive at are necessarily conditioned and partial. Dent manipulates language in order
to make some sense of its meaning but occasionally admits that he himself is baffled by the result. The
problem is then passed on to his readers.

The eleven titled pieces of Simple Geometry appear to centre upon two characters – a male astronomer and a female painter – both obsessed with problems of definition, positioning and delineation. Each section
represents a thought-stream at a given time and place, shifting back and forth between the two of them.
What is at question is our place and function in a four-dimensional universe where everything is relative. Is there a way of knowing what our experience truly is, given that language was originally designed to express a
preconceived and false view of its nature? Descartes’ assurance that ‘I think, therefore I am’ appears simple-
minded when language itself is so conditioned: ‘what thought thinks about becomes reality but not the truth’
(“Transition”).

If you’re going to quarrel with your tools in this way, why write at all, one may well ask. Dent’s answer seems to be that each of us reaches towards self-definition through (rather than in) our use of language: ‘Translations A stream of words at last beginning to work Reconnaissance of what’s to come Some ease? A
distant line of chimneys from which drifts absolutely nothing’ (“Location: Inside the Hour”).

Naturally, such preoccupations crop up in his verse too. The short poems gathered in At The Blue Table
(Blackthorn Press, 1999) are typical of his work over the previous decade. They are short-lined quatrains of
haiku-like perception, laid out four to the page, interspersed with four-sectioned sequences in the same form.
The perceptions are often given metaphoric weight by the addition of titles. “Exit”, for example, connects
Dent’s scene-setting with the Venerable Bede’s comparison of human life to the passage of a sparrow through a lighted hall:

Laconic and riddling, the poems touch on the same uncertainties expressed in the work of Cid Corman and William Bronk. Dent’s addition is syntactical, the greater emphasis given to language’s polyvalence, the difference a slight shift of position gives to a word.

Settlement (Leafe Press, 2001) represents a further stage in his stylistic development. The long title sequence is bracketed on either side by two shorter poems. Most of the pieces take the form of rather halting couplets. The unity of impression created by a specific time, place and emotion has been Dent’s constant subject but it has been approached from a variety of directions. Here he seems to share Jaccotet’s conviction that each event, however trifling, possesses deep significance, but one sensed so fleetingly that it is hard enough to apprehend, let alone put into words. It is the poet’s duty, however, to worry at each bone dropped in the wake of the senses and then pass on to the next.

Ultimately we discover that the need for this always renewed effort is not because we can ever hope to define such moments but because it is they that define us. Only by maintaining awareness are we guaranteed the certainty of our existence. It is not so much ‘I think, therefore I am’ but rather that the assurance of existing arises out of the awareness of perception. The process is more tangential and not nearly so cut and dried as Descartes would have us believe. It is more like, ‘Being aware of the message of the senses, I emerge into being’.

Perhaps it is the attempt to seize things through the means of language, the urge to dominate, that holds us back from entering truly into these moments of perfect union with the immediate. More than that, however, we escape definition if we do not allow the Other to be itself. If all we see when we look out into the universe are our own categorisations, associations, memories, there is no escape from Descartes’ purely mental and ultimately unsatisfactory existence. What is required is a shift from monologue to a dialogue with the world:

The poem quoted above, and “Coming In” from the same chapbook, herald the arrival of Dent’s very latest manner in which the sense is packed even more closely. Perhaps the analogy should be with the concertina, since there are no discrete sentences or even anything but the most minimal punctuation. The sense of any ‘sentence’ unit opens out and is often syntactically dependent on what precedes it. This is the style of the work in Unrestricted Moment (Stride, 2002), Dent’s first major collection of verse since Distant Lamps (Hippopotamus, 1980). In between there have been some 20 pamphlets, some very substantial, but nothing that has suggested quite so strongly how far he has moved since then.

‘A parochial, pastoral, first-person imagist’ is how he wrote his past self off (tongue in cheek, no doubt) in a postcard to me, anticipating ructions over the new book. The first of its three sections does indeed give the impression of going over the top with its endless meditations on the poetic act in largely abstract vocabulary. In place of an object evoked and made a metaphor, we get a prolix discussion of metaphor without one in sight – or rarely. Dent has always aimed at paring down his means, forcing what is left to do more and more work. The poems in this collection aim to reach the realm of pure thought (towards which all his poetry points) without stopping at all the usual ports along the way -

However, this occasionally shuts out the reader from participating in the thought process and makes him merely a spectator. The author takes on an authoritarian role, rather than acting as facilitator of thought.

Happily, the second and third sections come back to specifics. There is still insistence on mental experience and the play of words, but in that the work is externally directed by what Dent calls ‘the nagging stimulus of nature’, the reader feels more included, even appealed to as sharer in the common experience. The dynamic of this later work reminds me of Wordsworth’s trajectory from the simplicity and questioning of the early lyrics to the theoretical statement of The Prelude. The important difference is Dent’s avoidance of anecdotalism and egocentricity. Wordsworth talks of losing himself in the Tao of Nature but belies that by his insistence on the personal experience of it. Dent, on the other hand, enacts that diminishment and gives primacy to the stimulus of the senses which initiates in the mind its grasping for meaning.

We experience much the same thing, having to track his meaning through the convolutions of a nonetheless precise syntax. At the end we gain a sense of completeness, comprehending the manifold possibilities of a given moment as the mind stills itself without, however, stilling the dynamism of the original impulse. When we substitute thinking about something rather than experiencing its fullness we lose contact with it. From the poet’s point of view, it is losing any sense of what is to be conveyed in a fussy insistence on language. The upshot of this paradoxical dilemma is “Withheld Particulars”:

1. Mediaeval almost blue in one corner of the sky
strikes out another hour disquiet imagines it is
all there is a choir sings deep and even into stone
the very words I ask

2. Cold as the turning where a blackbird shouts
alarm through brambles notebooks changing and
exchanging words one hears of small considerations
letting the poem be

3. Preoccupation this a seasonal distrust of colours
listed in the catalogue so trying to harvest nothing
but the matter of attention plain infinitives as written
hang more true

4. Black gradient it isn’t indeterminate this Winter
keeps its house in order a perfect to-and-fro set up
of would-be letters servicing the need that rising
knows its mind

The final section of Unrestricted Moment takes everyday living as its subject and includes some devastating political and social comment without losing a beat. This is not just poetry at the cutting edge of style but sharp edged itself. Dent proves himself capable of handling both countryside and brown earth site here, state of the art flight deck and the quaint early devices he used as stimulus in his earlier Days Out sequence (Trombone, 1998). Reaching the end of this collection and then revisiting its first section, the writing there emerges as the necessary theorising which aligns the mind to the direction it must go. Dent has little to be ashamed of. He is a poet to be listened to with respect.

© Yann Lovelock (An earlier version of this article appeared in PQR 18, 2002)