Cahoots, direr than we'd-- by Thomas Delahaye

While reading Cahoots, I was also reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 

In the Introduction to the edition of Alice I have, Hugh Naughton distinguishes Alice readers who “simply wish to enjoy the story as a story, and rebuff all efforts to interpret it” from readers who feel the work’s nonsense warrants interpretation. 

“Begin at the beginning,” the King said, very gravely, “and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” 

 

The latter readers feel, Naughton writes, “that it is meaning and not meaninglessness which makes Carroll’s nonsense expressive.” Therefore, the nonsense that characterizes Carroll’s work may be read as the characteristic element of the story, driving it forward enjoyably (if meaninglessly), without pressure to be interpreted. On the other hand, nonsense is the work of something meaningful, deeper, that could be interpreted. 

 

“The first thing I’ve got to do,” said Alice to herself, as she wandered about in the wood, “is to grow to my right size again; and the second thing is to find my way into that lovely garden. I think that will be the best plan.” It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very nearly and simply arranged: the only difficulty was, that she had not the smallest idea how to set about it…

 

Reading Cahoots, I likewise found myself wondering what its “nonsense” (that is, its musicality, absurdity, humor, Language-centered tendencies) expresses, wondering whether to just enjoy it and ride it out, or whether to read meaning(s) into it. 

Dust of the stay

I said, the coughs were opulent.
Corrective rigor had its stance in me
You watched and said, "But was untrue
in the sense of past showers!" Long ago,
the qualities were watched after for,
clean in one sense, were baked and then
put out for. The trash, undertook, went
away in only that unexceptional state
and precise (unexceptionally precise),
that would clot looking outward for for
the sake of partial favors. Even so,
there might not be a classical one?
The only shore onto which any of these
pieces must descend, flourish or undergo
watts of their magnificent title, looks
like the Super 8 cannot maintain any
temperamental experiences--not so far
from being carried off or is there only
one round of water here before a dinner
that would wheel itself out felt more like
a faucet than like the jade upon which

it was thrown--that would settle it.

The musical language of the book—“Let red water park ersatz wets / In pike divots forever”—can be hypnotizing. Though complex to the point of absurdity, many of its lines stayed in my head, as though they were famous sayings: “To me, that point / of corned feet is all the world.” Other than the occasional repeated word (“or or”), the syntax is completely unfragmented. In clauses and phrases set off by parentheses and dashes, Delahaye also adds context and qualification, albeit—here is where the nonsense comes is—it can be unclear what is being discussed. Note the conversation in the poem above. “The coughs were opulent,” “I” said, and “you” said “But was untrue in the sense of past showers!” Deeply musical syntax with one strong sentence after another, each of which is on the precipice of letting the reader in on something—until another strong sentence comes in. 

On the bill, the metal fasteners don't fold
in exactly. Free to eat signature dishes
from the various diners of long ago,
then, the frustration grew within us
where the shufflers of heat lifted
their legs to urinate (leave unsaid
the venue in question) the trough was
a long white oval extended on either side
and I tended to take my shoes off ('dis-shoe')
at the foyer, before the other stances I
saw felt dribbled pee onto the ivory
like glass, then night covers the meant
of that pardoning, then what can't 
worry you enlivens the mind with 

pretence.

I enjoyed turning the page to find titles like “New place to pee,” “Clearinghouse of what happens,” “Alexander-on-the-Reservoir,” “Each other in the 1980’s,” or “A milk dud ends”—each having a stately air that belies something being amiss. Having listened to Composure by Expectation Lines many times, a Delahaye sound project, I heard these titles and the text as a whole in that album’s bizarrely Transatlantic, scholarly voice, which causes me to guffaw as well as marvel over the choice of words, which feel not quite “meaningful” yet also perfectly apt. 

                                "I think your observations are spot on.
And I wish I could have been there as well, because I have

no doubt that it's."

I laughed out loud reading “Afternoon shin” in Composure-voice in my head, with its 19^th century-sounding delirious declarations about how perception works:

 

A brain’s propensity’s casing

does enshrine the glance with a 

print of flesh. 

 

and this economic treatise(?):

 

                                   Occurrences 

of walnut limit the renditions

that take part in the register

of the creeks they include.

 

In one of the earliest poems, Delahaye writes of “human involvement unto / the word kit clinker.” One of the more direct lines in the book, it states that language is a prison, something in which one is inescapably involved. Another direct line is: “Either you wound the code or code the wound.” Here, the “code” could mean “the word kit clinker,” as though the code were a language spoken in cahoots, among powers-that-wound ("what can't / worry you enlivens the mind with / pretence"). Given one’s entrapment in language, in this dire situation made by its code, one can choose to continue to “code” that world forward, or “wound” that code to allow new states of affairs to arise. 

 

Another way to look at it is to say that the “nonsense” of the work can be read as language decomposed for enjoyment (wound the code, knock it out of shape) or, alternatively, as concealing a wound that, perhaps, the code cannot adequately enunciate. 

 

This inadequacy of language is nevertheless capable of wonder, as in:

Cannot describe mountains

Are there and plunge precisely with a 
flourish down to there (here at my bus).

They're not. In the air they seem to leave 
mortal signs of ourselves. They finish up
at the ibexes like very talented answers.
This is a surface from which picnics are 
always afraid and hot food is far apart

                                         A bathtub,
where light tries to hold still. Entourage
of unfair mist constrains my thoughts, yes,
a single vista can destroy a habitual sense
of location and distinction from the body.

The buttes look like glass from here, cause
dank, lowland pools to glisten in the day.
Must I stay to watch the cascading glare of
mid afternoon concur to folksy categories?
Seracs at modest points dip

From the sky. Cigarettes, I must.
New fog this? If rain were made of sauce,
it would be at ease. But once rain is gone,
it's all over for 'countries' and 'personality'. 
Exlet to where I am now, steep very; then
a road sign that reads, 'Far Atchison'...

Quiver do not we together, alpine snows?
I wrote "ait effects" on the boxes. I wrote,

"Their inlets stall the dew."

Elsewhere in the introduction to Alice, Naughton states “the world of adulthood is … dismayingly bizarre.” Delahaye’s poetry articulates this dismay about the world (“the rain’s / ungrateful tedium never snows / anymore”), using “nonsense” to critique the world ("destroy a habitual sense / of location and distinction from the body") as well as to create a music worthy not only of enjoying, but of being in.

Buy it here.