‘ a common idiom ... call it a place ’

Building on recent studies of the relationship between visual poetries and eco-poetics, this essay argues that language conceived of as systematic is an important consideration in the work of Thomas A. Clark. Beginning with readings of some of his meta-poetical work from the early 1970s, the essay suggests that the overt interest in poetic language as a system analogous to an ecosystem continues into Clark’s later writing, though in a less overt, more ephemeralized manner. The essay explores ways in which Clark conceives of poetry as anti-entropic activity in a language system.

ongoing interest in language and environment as systems or structures. That interest is particularly evident in Clark's earliest and more overtly defamiliarising publications, but also significantly informs his practice as a more minimal -I will later suggest the term ' ephemeralized' -poet. Before launching that argument fully I will amplify some of the concerns attributed to a poetry that is conscious of itself as an environment. ('Projective Verse'). They are practising a critical ecomimesis which ' entails a "stance toward reality" that radically unsettles the subject's distanciation from "nature" and places the human in an ecological relation, as an object among other objects'. 3 These poets, that is, make us critically aware of the construction of page and book space, just as they make us critically aware of the construction of place through all kinds of human intervention, physical and metaphysical. Reading their work, we do not immerse ourselves in the reassuring identification between reader, poem, poet and place; rather, pages, books and landscapes come to seem produced by various historical and contingent relationships between agents and objects. Bloomfield doesn't mention Clark, but her genealogy for and characterisation of the attitudes of Finlay, Tarlo and O'Sullivan hold for his work also. Moving over, in and through Clark's pages and books a reader is conscious of being in a place meaningfully analogous to a material geography, and conscious that it is a constructed place cut through, sometimes at the surface, sometimes a little deeper, by human social, political, and cultural activity. That Clark's work is aimed at something other than a rhapsodic immersion in an environment is clear from the project of cultural transformation of space summarised in his text On Imaginative Space. This text proposes initiating cultural transformation through a performance, or, in linguistic terms, a performative: an announcement, a declaration, an imperative to reimagine the value and function of shared spaces. The text proposes to remedy a misleading picture of material reality as replete and resistant: reality can be known better and more actively as permeable and open to transformation through practices of composition, through the making of space: places are not as they appear to be but as they are imagined or declared to be.

A simple announcement can open new demographic possibilities […]
Matter, a density without space, separate and ungiving, is a fiction we have taken as our model of facts.
What we think of as reality is neither literal nor virtual but imaginal, an array of images, invested with fear and desire, which we are constantly engaged in composing. […] Imaginative space is not the cul-de-sac of daydreams: it is not a temptation but a practice. […] Imaginative transformation should be considered as preliminary to a corresponding transformation at the level of materials and events. 4 Imaginative performance and practice are continuous with material reality and events -not an alternative to them. Affect-laden images compose our reality, and they are analogous to more nuanced descriptions of matter than the myth of ' a density without space, separate and ungiving' to which we often still resort, even though we are aware that what we call matter is a complex set of relations between energy, mass and volume. The generation of places is a human practice of composition within an environment and is therefore non-trivially comparable to poetry.
Clark is clearly interested in imaginative space as both analogous to and continuous with 'real' space, and in poems and books as environments. The open field, with its heritage in Black Mountain and Concrete poetics, is a good way to understand what is happening on the pages of Clark's books, and it primes readers for the pronounced visual aspect of his work. 5 I will offer a brief and selective view of 'Projective Verse' by Charles Olson and two essays by Eugen Gomringer to suggest the relevant context for reading Clark. Olson says 'the poem itself must, at all points, be a highenergy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge'. A projective poem is one that allows its content to determine, by extending itself into, its form, and which honours the swift progression from perception to perception that does, or should, guide negotiations with reality as much as the construction of poems. The syllable and line are the materials the breath forms into units. Paradoxically, the mechanism of the typewriter permits a truer representation of breath than ever before. Although the perceiving consciousness is clearly central to projective practice, Olson wants a poetry capable of being an object, and of being amongst objects, which means 'getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the "subject" and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects'.
The spatial organisation of the page by the typewriter makes possible an epic and dramatic poetry of humans in their environment, a poetry that will take its form from its content. 6 Eugen Gomringer presents concrete poetry as a practice congruent with the tendency of modern languages towards condensation. In its short form, the organisation of concrete poetry demonstrates a shift 'from line to constellation'.
The constellation is an arrangement or composition of elements that encourages readerly play amongst the composed forces. It is not an imitation of an environment, but something brought into being: The constellation is the simplest possible kind of configuration in poetry which has for its basic unit the word, it encloses a group of words as it if were drawing stars together to form a cluster.
The constellation is an arrangement, and at the same time a play-area of fixed dimensions.
The constellation is ordered by the poet. He determines the play-area, the field of force and suggests its possibilities. the [sic] reader, the new reader, grasps the idea of play, and joins in.
In the constellation something is brought into the world. It is a reality in itself and not a poem about something or other. The constellation is an invitation. 7 Longer concrete texts allow one to 'talk about the accumulation, distribution, analysis, synthesis and arrangement of linguistic signs, of letters and of words', but the ' conventional distribution' of signs is but one possibility amongst others in the structural organisation of elements from which systems evolve in the poem. 8 The concrete poem is a non-mimetic object composed from words and potentially other facts of linguistic structure to allow play between forces.
Mary Ellen Solt also emphasises the roles of structure and play in the concrete poem: 'the pure concrete poem extracts from language an essential meaning structure and arranges it in space as an ideogram or constellation -as a structural word design -within which there are reticulations or play-activity'. 9  What Clark has to say about imaginative space should also serve to prime readers to the continuing and vital importance of language in the poetry and in the environments the poems suggest. That is, there is a temptation to think the visual aspect of Clark's poems as a diversion or even liberation from aspects of language structure that are, in other kinds of writing and reading practice, considered highly or solely determining.
But linguistic organisation has not been supplanted by visual organisation in Clark's work. It seems obtuse to say that Clark's are poems in language -that what is on the page, that which is organised into constellation or field, remains language, even if it has pronounced visual and material properties of which readers aren't always or even often conscious in language. The analogies of constellation and field are ways of understanding and extending the means by which language is and can be organised, rather than an alternative means of presentation that somehow exempts itself from linguistic or other systematic organisation. System, structure, syntax -these aspects of language have been and remain vital in Clark's work, just as they are in projective and concrete poetics.
To return to the phrases with which this essay opens, the ' common idiom' that will be called ' a place', I want to suggest that various shades of the terms ' common' and 'idiom' are in play when reading Clark. Not wilfully extrovert in diction or syntax, his might be called a common poetry: 'In general use; of frequent occurrence; usual, ordinary, prevalent, frequent. Having ordinary qualities; undistinguished by special or superior characteristics; pertaining to or characteristic of ordinary persons, life, language, etc.; ordinary'. (OED A.II.10.a, 11a) That commonness is the grounds for a poetry that is also common by being: Of general, public, or non-private nature. "Belonging equally to more than one" (Johnson); […] pertaining to the human race as a possession or attribute.
Belonging to more than one as a result or sign of co-operation, joint action, The common idiom will be plain and ordinary, and permit us to hold it in common.
It is going to be called a place; but we shouldn't forget that it is an idiom. And this common place encountered in the poems as an idiom is not an idiom merely in the sense of it being 'A form of expression, grammatical construction, phrase, etc., used in a distinctive way in a particular language, dialect, or language variety; spec. a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the meanings of the individual words'. (OED I.3) This 'idiom' is also the more expansive concept of 'A language, especially a person or people's own language; the distinctive form of speech of a particular people or country'. (OED I.2.a and b) The idiom is a language with principles of organisation that are not merely spatial but also temporal, syntactic, categorical/classificatory, performative and so on. The contention of this essay is that conceiving of the page or book as an environment or place is to conceive of it as an ecological system. Thinking of this environment as systematic makes it more rather than less like language. As I shall try to show, Clark presents poetic activity as a way of recuperating the energy lost, as entropy, in the movement between levels in a natural system, such as an ecosystem or language. Further, language as a system is an important, perhaps the chief medium for the negotiation between people that constitutes imaginative and real transformation of life, as the oblique inhabitation of the landscapes of some of Clark's poems demonstrates, and as I hope to demonstrate in the rest of this essay.
Works from earlier and later in Clark's writing demonstrate the persistence of language as structure and system in the body of work that encourages the poem, page or book to appear as a place or environment. I will look first at works from the 1970s that are composed in a less common idiom, and which will, I hope, draw out some of the harmonics not so easily heard in the later work. Clark is one of the poets represented on the LP Experiments in Disintegrating Language: Konkrete Canticle. 11 In his contribution to the sleeve notes Clark states a position: I am interested in the poem as legitimate magic, i.e. science. The business of the poem is to insinuate perceptibly into the mind. The extent to which it will succeed is in exact relation to the precision of its structure. Plain, unadorned speech, of course, is structured […] These poems are magic in that they acknowledge correspondence. There are laws. We are not separate from the instances of space. Speech is articulation.
The necessary elements of the critical, environmental open-field poetics are here: the poet is in space, not separate from it. Speech is articulation in that it defines the speaker in a particular space, and in a particular relation or set of relations to that space. Articulating these relationships, or laws, is the science of poetry, its legitimate magic. Success in articulation is through structure, the kind of structure that allows poetry 'to insinuate perceptibly'. Structure is not necessarily or only metrical, stanzaic, stochastic, and so on; it is also just the structure of '[p]lain, unadorned speech', the kind of structure that is evident in phonology, grammar, pragmatics, the structure that is more found than given.
One poem Clark performs on the record, the text of which is given in the sleeve insert, is a 'Spell for Sarah'. It manages its perceptible insinuation by playing with word order and grammatical category, making us realise their co-dependence (in English), by putting text through permutations. Walton. 13 Clark says he has read Browne vertically. 14   and organised into coherence in speech. 16 Language is good for thinking the environment because they are both in us and outside us at once: the words that become ours were already there outside of us, and it is in composing or articulating that the relationship between ourselves and the other things that are there is made and remade. Having a language, having an environment is realising that blur of the internal and external in an act of articulation. 17 So the articulation relevant to poetry is not distinguishing one thing from another, but shaping one thing in another.
Several elements of this model of poetry as a kind of an organised and organising human relationship to environment, or a system, would have been available to Clark in contemporary texts on systems theory and cybernetics, the study of ' extensive parallels between the operation of animal nervous systems and the feedback control systems of machines'. Organisms are distinct from their environment but constantly draw upon it, at the molecular level, and shape it into their own form. This imposition of order onto the environment is negative entropy -the tendency towards order rather than chaos and loss that is said to be characteristic of biological and social, as opposed to physical, systems. 18 The picture of the poem that emerges from Clark's sleeve note and manifesto poem is a picture plausibly informed by recent synthetic or synoptic work in biological, social and information science from a systems perspective. 1 is the creative moment, the engagement, descent into matter. 2 the work, the embodiment of said moment, its articulation. Any mere verbilization [sic] "orally or on paper" must be accepted as 3.
To give shape is to insist. The drive to completeness, that is central to any Here is a view of the poem as ecosystem, as structure, as the relational possibilities of every element in the system, possibilities realised in a temporal succession of encounters with the language, and yet without any loss of information. The information that poems contain is precisely the information that makes us what we are, the hints and clues to our own secret nature we find in letters, syllables, words and lines, one that is here understood in a perfectly hard-matter manner as the lapse of a certain period of variously marked time between the coming into being and passing out of being of an organism. In the readings of Clark's poems that follow I will try to show how the hints and clues of letters, syllables, words and lines can disclose what is otherwise concealed.
Ecosystem is proposed as an analogon for poetry. In ecological science nearly contemporary to the writing of Clark's text the 'total flow of energy and materials through the ecosystem is a prime example of the almost incredible interrelatedness of its constituent parts'. 19 The standard work on natural ecosystems from which I take this citation, however, presents energy loss as one of their necessary features.
Insolation, solar radiation from the sun entering the ecosystem, creates the conditions for the existence of plant life. But with the move from each level of consumption within the grazing food chain -from plant life to herbivores to primary carnivores and so on -and also in respiration, energy is necessarily lost in very large proportions. The second law of thermodynamics relates to energy loss, and states that 'when energy changes from one form to another, some of the energy is lost to the system as useless heat, or entropy. It is not destroyed; it is simply rendered unavailable'. 20 Clark, then, imagines the poem as a utopian ecosystem, one in which entropy, through drops in productivity in the trophic levels of the food chain or through respiration, is unknown. In thinking this way Clark echoes contemporary techno-utopians. R.
Buckminster Fuller proposed that human intellect could and would recover that lost energy by, in effect, refusing to consider the world as a closed system, out of which energy might pass: Of all the biological antientropics, i.e., random-to-orderly arrangers, man's intellect is by far the most active, exquisite, and effective agent thus far in evidence in the universe.
[…] The Law of Conservation of Energy says, "Energy may neither be created nor lost". The physical universe is a finite system.
Earth is a finite sphere. The surface of a sphere is a unit area; any closed line such as a circle or a triangle, set upon a sphere, subdivides the whole sphere's surface into two sub-areas -i.e., the two areas on both sides of the line. 21 Human intellect will bring the ecosystem into greater order, reducing the energy it loses. Such losses are only ever apparent, or losses to one part of the system, as the truly systematic conception of the world is as one immense system, a system in which any energy loss is an energy gain. 22 Reconceiving 'lost' entropic energy as still part of the finite system of the world is the motivation to technological revolution in Fuller's utopian vision. Clark's poem as time-lag questioning the drive to completion and thereby recuperating the energy lost in its taking material form is not a distant parallel.
In 1971, then, Clark was arguing for a poetry that was environmental in as much as the environment is a system and language is a system, and poetry is the operation of that system that insinuates perceptibly -that makes readers aware of its own structuration. Poetry is when our own biorhythms insinuate perceptibly into consciousness through a temporally sustained encounter with the living structure, the ecosystem, of language. This is a picture of system or structure that refuses to think of the system or structure as distinct from the events that constitute it, take place in it, dispose it, subvert it. It is also a vision of system or structure that resonates intensely with both the accepted and the non-conformist scientific thinking of its moment.
One might even look to the environmental and technological utopianism of Fuller for a way of understanding the movement in Clark's work away from this auto-critical poetics towards a mode that will inevitably be thought of as minimal. Fuller describes the general tendency of the process that will produce technological revolution: 'Doing vastly more with vastly and invisibly less is known technically as ephemeralization'. 23 One might think of Clark's later work, to which I will now turn, as an ephemeralization of the overt, meta-poetic insistence on system and structure seen in his work of the early 1970s: it tries to do vastly more with vastly and invisibly less. There is hardly a word in this poem that isn't animated by the composition that makes some material features of the language salient. The run from 'still' to 'hill', from 'bell' to 'blow', and on to 'syllable' is complicated by the Gaelic names of four Scottish hills. The Anglophone reader might know that 'bh' sounds as 'v' in Gaelic, but that does not eliminate the eye-rhyme '-bhal', 'bell', 'syllable'. The imposition of schemes of pronunciation native to one language onto another, the relationship between languages in an environment -a contested environment like the Scottish Highlands, or pretty much any other -also introduces a political register to this work with its hints and cues of letters and syllables.
In Yellow & Blue page space/geographical space is not the only parallel between language and environment. There is, for example, a parallel between language and crystals: occurrences of feldspar and mica are called 'word gems', great finds for walker and poet alike. Geodes, crystals inside rocks, make an appearance. There is also a reference to inclines in the land. Lastly in this sequence of references, the elements are brought together, suggesting, perhaps performing the deep complicity of language with phenomenological experience, even with physiology, to produce One answer is by the mood of a verb: ' call it a place'. Is it the optative or the imperative mood? Are we invited or commanded to call this common idiom a place? The idiom carries through complex articulations, which is not quite the same as carrying them out, but we feel nonetheless that the idiom achieves the complex articulations.
The idiom carries them as a tune carries over distance or is carried by a performer.
The common idiom is a place we share; it is the place we did not mean to bring our resources to, but found we had. These resources are the attention we have as readers -our interpretive resources. This sort of readerly attention is that which transforms the space of the text, and which constitutes the preliminary act of imaginative transformation that will have real transformative consequences for other places and actions. The stanzas tell us we have brought our resources into the common place, we have made them public, equally available to all. I hope to have shown that Clark's earlier occupation with language and environment as structure and system has not disappeared in the later work, but ephemeralized as the poetry attempts the same kind of anti-entropic magic with vastly and invisibly less.