Mouth sounding room

Jordan Scott’s blert, simply put, is a book about stuttering that stutters. Which in fact means that it is anything but simple. blert is a mouth that mouths me as I mouth its phonemes with my mouth. It is intensely physical, clinical and my mouth becomes both hyper personal and treacherous.

“Imitate: frazil ice. Say clacra, frazil ice, clacracla.

Imitate: muskoxen. Say flafra, muskoxen, flafrafla.” (Jordan Scott, blert)

I imitate and my utterance “fails.” Or does it? For how can an utterance fail or succeed. Doesn’t an utterance just utter? Don’t all mouths approximate the sounds of other mouths? And yet we place so much judgement on accents, speech discordances, lisps, stammers, stutters, even pitch and gender. In these judgements we fable, much as the fables of cures for stuttering that blert dissects:

“The chichara has to sing inside the mouth… You will learn to use your mouth.” “You will lunge your thorax unto spring… You will sing like the birds.” “If you wish to become an eloquent speaker, you should bury the hyoid bone of a lamb in the wall of your house.” “You will learn to eat your grasshoppers.”

In blert, I stutter stratospherically, stumble and stomp through the mouth’s mandibles. I maw guttural. Grate gobbles until a mutter is me and my mouth is mouthful; morsel meat present. I do not grieve its presence; I gratify. Groan globules of syllabic sense. Gust gists. Glottal.

Recently, Scott created an NFB Interactive Documentary, Flub and Utter: A Poetic Memoir of the Mouth, where viewers can interact with poems from blert. The website creates various layers of reading (process and procedure) and allows the user to manipulate or “change directions” within a poem by clicking on words that portal into other discussions and interactions.

Jordan Scott is the author of Silt (New Star Books, 2005) and blert (Coach House Books, 2008). One of his current projects is a collaborative project with Stephen Collis, DECOMP (see my commentary on Collis). In 2009, he began, with Jason Christie, RespondencyWest, a literary salon in Vancouver, modelled on Margaret Christakos’ Influency series in Toronto. In January 2011, he presented blert and gave a talk on disfluencies and interrogation procedures at North of Invention: A Canadian Poetry Festival. He lives in Vancouver. To hear and watch more of Scott’s work, visit his website.

August 5, 2011

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About Folding Borders

If we dare to enter the laboratory of Canadian poetry what experiments might we encounter? What transgressions might we be asked to face? The Folding Borders commentaries will focus on poets whose work exists on some kind of boundary/border, poetry that exists in-between, perhaps as intertext, perhaps as hybrid, perhaps as network. The border might be linguistic (i.e. work written in more than one language), technological (i.e. work that exists in some kind of interaction with technology), collaborative, sound-based, performance-based, digital (i.e. work that has both a printed and a digital form simultaneously), geographical, architectural or a combination of any of these.

Some of the strands in Oana Avasilichioaei’s work traverse geography and public space (feria: a poempark, 2008), textual architecture, orality and multilingualism (We, Beasts, upcoming 2012), translation and collaborative performance (Expeditions of a Chimæra, co-written with Erín Moure, 2009). Living in Montreal, recent projects include The Islands, a translation of Quebecoise poet Louise Cotnoir, “The Mapping Issue” (co-edited with Kathleen Brown for Dandelion Magazine) and collaborating with musicians and sound artists as hex laboratorium.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.