Patrick Herron
On Animals of Dawn
Were it true that language indeed invaded the human race from outer space, I suspect it would have first landed in Turkey where it immediately fused with some fleshy proto-human version of Eda. Regardless of the origin story we choose for it, perhaps nowhere in art is this ever-mutating symbiosis between the body and technology better captured than in the Murat Nemet-Nejat’s new long poem, Animals at Dawn. However we choose to describe media’s origin, whether of nature, of the body, of evolution or of other-worldly artifice it is clear that which we call human is shrinking in relevance. As it externalizes itself through computation, obliterates its own habitat, and constructs the conditions for its own extinction, that which we name human has seemingly created more than it can handle having backed itself into an apocalyptic form of material and psychic overload. What does this shrinking relevance of the human mean for poetry?
An artistic contemplation of time and its embodiment as media through some remediation of its temporality and mediality is one means of gaining some form of hold on our current predicament. How might we reconcile time as that inevitable directed flow with its programmatic steady appearances and disappearances with a new version of time, one infinitely divisible and rearrangeable and yet somehow always accumulating? I cannot find a better example of any engagement with the strange arrangements of our new experience of time, self, and media than in Nemet-Nejat's Animals of Dawn.
A renowned translator of Turkish poetry, Nemet-Nejat has proven himself a master of harnessing the meaning of cadence, regularly demonstrating control of a radically material semantics descending quite possibly from the agglutinative syntax of Turkish and the Altaic Turkish language family. His translations of Iskender's personal notebooks provide one such indication of Nemet-Nejat's half-earth half-otherworldly mastery of this peculiar relationship between the word and the body and the intersecting dimensions of time, technology and invention. We find this half-in half-out state in his essays as well. In The Peripheral Space of Photography, Nemet-Nejat's essay on photography, we are presented with the camera as an object whose lens confronts us with the very question of who we are while the lens itself exceeds this questioning, constructing the periphery which sets the full field of possibility for whatever subject(s) emerge.
Were it true that language indeed invaded the human race from outer space, I suspect it would have first landed in Turkey where it immediately fused with some fleshy proto-human version of Eda. Regardless of the origin story we choose for it, perhaps nowhere in art is this ever-mutating symbiosis between the body and technology better captured than in the Murat Nemet-Nejat’s new long poem, Animals at Dawn. However we choose to describe media’s origin, whether of nature, of the body, of evolution or of other-worldly artifice it is clear that which we call human is shrinking in relevance. As it externalizes itself through computation, obliterates its own habitat, and constructs the conditions for its own extinction, that which we name human has seemingly created more than it can handle having backed itself into an apocalyptic form of material and psychic overload. What does this shrinking relevance of the human mean for poetry?
An artistic contemplation of time and its embodiment as media through some remediation of its temporality and mediality is one means of gaining some form of hold on our current predicament. How might we reconcile time as that inevitable directed flow with its programmatic steady appearances and disappearances with a new version of time, one infinitely divisible and rearrangeable and yet somehow always accumulating? I cannot find a better example of any engagement with the strange arrangements of our new experience of time, self, and media than in Nemet-Nejat's Animals of Dawn.
A renowned translator of Turkish poetry, Nemet-Nejat has proven himself a master of harnessing the meaning of cadence, regularly demonstrating control of a radically material semantics descending quite possibly from the agglutinative syntax of Turkish and the Altaic Turkish language family. His translations of Iskender's personal notebooks provide one such indication of Nemet-Nejat's half-earth half-otherworldly mastery of this peculiar relationship between the word and the body and the intersecting dimensions of time, technology and invention. We find this half-in half-out state in his essays as well. In The Peripheral Space of Photography, Nemet-Nejat's essay on photography, we are presented with the camera as an object whose lens confronts us with the very question of who we are while the lens itself exceeds this questioning, constructing the periphery which sets the full field of possibility for whatever subject(s) emerge.
* * * *
In Animals of Dawn Hamlet appears but not exactly on the holodeck, hardly "opening up possibilities of narrative." The Hamlet here instead provides a Maguffin to help illustrate our new contemporary post-cinematic arrangement of time. In Animals of Dawn Nemet-Nejat's seemingly complementary interests converge and find their full realization: how the rhythm of language moves the body, whatever sort of corpus that may be, while creating meaning; how the features of a different language can be translated into a language without the same supposedly enabling structural features; and how a technology can define, exceed, and limit who we are while at the same time open us up, perhaps even wildly so. What sort of clock is ticking? What is exactly that beat of time? What ticks what? Does time inhabit us or do we inhabit things with time? The Hamlet of Animals at Dawn is forgetting as we forget him, being erased as he is being created. Slowing down speeding up, scattering and aggregating. Hamlet appears, he disappears. It is as if Nemet-Nejat is telling us Hamlet (and perhaps time itself) is and has always been in passing.
Epigrams
If Hamlet's job were computerized would it have happened quicker?
laid in your nest,
I became a bird.
In Hamlet the distinctions in the structure of time do not reside between past, present and future, but in the passing; fast moving slow
moving time. (p. 47)
Like perhaps any scene in a Robert Bresson film Nemet-Nejat’s Hamlet passes into and exits the view of the shot, the page like the camera providing that very artificial yet necessary and unavoidable stage of our reckoning. This, Nemet-Nejat points out, is a digital thing wherein he’ll catch our conscience, no less.
Epigrams
If Hamlet's job were computerized would it have happened quicker?
laid in your nest,
I became a bird.
In Hamlet the distinctions in the structure of time do not reside between past, present and future, but in the passing; fast moving slow
moving time. (p. 47)
Like perhaps any scene in a Robert Bresson film Nemet-Nejat’s Hamlet passes into and exits the view of the shot, the page like the camera providing that very artificial yet necessary and unavoidable stage of our reckoning. This, Nemet-Nejat points out, is a digital thing wherein he’ll catch our conscience, no less.
* * * *
Animals at Dawn may be the first post-cinematic poem. Rather than sticking with the too-familiar trope of merely lamenting what humanity has lost Nemet-Nejat’s poem at once inhabits and confronts the technoculture in which we are already immersed. Nemet-Nejat's poem plugs the visual content of language into the soul just as a post-cinematic film slips affect between the 60 frames per second of digital cinema into our bodies. Animals at Dawn embodies a poetics moving too quickly to hypermediate or remediate. Nemet-Nejat's poetic movements hurtle vertically like film goading us to engage visually with them, sometimes slow and linear, sometimes quickly and in different directions. His pieces ask us not to traverse them as atemporal 2-d concrete poems exhibiting length and width gesturing towards the peripheral space of the paper leaf but rather as sections of a poem which regularly demand our eye traverse them from top to bottom over time, as with the endlessly scrolling digital page. At points there is nothing but vertical movement.
As with post-cinema Nemet-Nejat's Animals of Dawn is rife with rapid jumps, cuts, and movements, something he calls a "cinema of words." As perhaps with any media the poem gets under the skin, striking the eye at once both completely unfamiliar and yet somehow penetrating, immediate, familiar even. Both seen and unseen. Yet even in this post-cinematic post-digital world that smacks of some transfection of consciousness as if it were from outer space we find in Nemet-Nejat's poem that the predicament of the human or post-human or whatever value for x belongs in x-human is still death and sex. Some of the names and faces and methods remain but the Titanic is still going to sink as it does inevitably for each of us. It's just that every time we look the deck chairs seem to have been rearranged, and we are struck with the feeling that we just aren't quite sure if they have been or not. Hamlet and Ophelia have been re-coded and re-configured, yet the result is the same. As a result Animals of Dawn seems like a new form of translation itself, translation of an old mode into a new one, landing with the same Eda.
To say that with Animals of Dawn Murat Nemet-Nejat establishes himself as a visionary poet would not be without its ironies given the terms of the present analysis. Yet the truth is, I can't think of more visionary work than Nemet-Nejat's, and I do not have a better analogue for it than vision. While there are other poets who engage the peculiar affordances of the new digital media regime and even regularly indulge in the dominant rapid-fire and often haughty aesthetic of the digital none to my mind do what Nemat-Nejat does: illustrate the historical and technical contingencies of this new temporality. Animals of Dawn shows us our experience is at once flat and yet far bigger than we might imagine. The poem even tantalizes us a little with notions of material and psychic liberation. There is a new narrative form which arises in the poem: one in which the reader is covertly cast into the poem of the Animals of Dawn as the character we may have been programmed to be: Ophelia, torn, scorned and doomed, ready to find her escape as her escape inevitably finds her. And here is the point to which Nemet-Nejat’s unique poetics takes us where time itself vexes us and our conception of what it means to be human and what it is when we take up a play, a photograph, a book, a poem.
As with post-cinema Nemet-Nejat's Animals of Dawn is rife with rapid jumps, cuts, and movements, something he calls a "cinema of words." As perhaps with any media the poem gets under the skin, striking the eye at once both completely unfamiliar and yet somehow penetrating, immediate, familiar even. Both seen and unseen. Yet even in this post-cinematic post-digital world that smacks of some transfection of consciousness as if it were from outer space we find in Nemet-Nejat's poem that the predicament of the human or post-human or whatever value for x belongs in x-human is still death and sex. Some of the names and faces and methods remain but the Titanic is still going to sink as it does inevitably for each of us. It's just that every time we look the deck chairs seem to have been rearranged, and we are struck with the feeling that we just aren't quite sure if they have been or not. Hamlet and Ophelia have been re-coded and re-configured, yet the result is the same. As a result Animals of Dawn seems like a new form of translation itself, translation of an old mode into a new one, landing with the same Eda.
To say that with Animals of Dawn Murat Nemet-Nejat establishes himself as a visionary poet would not be without its ironies given the terms of the present analysis. Yet the truth is, I can't think of more visionary work than Nemet-Nejat's, and I do not have a better analogue for it than vision. While there are other poets who engage the peculiar affordances of the new digital media regime and even regularly indulge in the dominant rapid-fire and often haughty aesthetic of the digital none to my mind do what Nemat-Nejat does: illustrate the historical and technical contingencies of this new temporality. Animals of Dawn shows us our experience is at once flat and yet far bigger than we might imagine. The poem even tantalizes us a little with notions of material and psychic liberation. There is a new narrative form which arises in the poem: one in which the reader is covertly cast into the poem of the Animals of Dawn as the character we may have been programmed to be: Ophelia, torn, scorned and doomed, ready to find her escape as her escape inevitably finds her. And here is the point to which Nemet-Nejat’s unique poetics takes us where time itself vexes us and our conception of what it means to be human and what it is when we take up a play, a photograph, a book, a poem.
* * * *
N.B. Quoted material from Animals at Dawn used with permission of the author and Talisman Press.