Nuar Alsadir – Fourth Person Singular

Disclosure: Met Alsadir briefly at a reading in Edinburgh in 2016. As ever, the book discusses many experiences outwith my own, not least motherhood and the pressures and anxieties women experience regarding public speech. Many thanks to Muireann Crowley for editorial and structural advice. Review copy purchased with help from my supporters on Patreon.

‘Transparence interests me, wrote Louise Bourgeois in a notebook. I want to be transparent. If people could see through me, they could not help loving me, forgive me.’

‘This book is for you (whoever you are)’
(Nuar Alsadir, Fourth Person Singular)

Review: A few pages in to a section of ‘Night Fragments’, a series of short stanzas written by the poet at 3.15am during a bout of writer’s block, the printed text is accompanied by a photograph of a page from a notebook, ‘All messy may / All messy maybe. / So messy it can’t stay on the page’. The handwriting in the photo is itself messy, paying no attention to the ruled lines and margins; without the reproduced text above it, it might be unintelligible. ‘Night Fragments’ is introduced by a lyric essay about the ‘true’, unedited self, Nietzsche’s aphorisms (‘little stabs at happiness’), writing that accesses the ‘sublime core’ by puncturing the conscious mind with something unexpected or disruptive, and enlisting the unconscious, dreaming mind into the creative process. Fourth Person Singular habitually takes an ostensibly simple, accessible thought (in this case, “I want to write in a way that is authentic”) and worries at its edges, unravels a series of possible avenues of enquiry until the very idea that someone might sit down at a blank page and merely begin feels breathtakingly hubristic.

The photograph in ‘Night Fragments’ seems something like a gesture of good faith. The rest of the book might be meticulously choreographed, it suggests, but these lines are just what the reader has been offered, notes written in the middle of the night, profound, nonsensical or both depending on your disposition; one fragment reads, in full: ‘I’m sure I’m breaking the rules – / let me hear them from the ones who care.’ Fourth Person Singular has no contents page, no poem titles in the traditional sense, and the several ‘sections’ are implied rather than signposted. The book may just as easily be read as a single, long poem in numerous formal guises, each of which is in conversation with the others. It’s a challenging book to read, to cross-reference the many recurring motifs (dogs, shame, crows, war) that insist on second, third sweeps. There’s also a lot of freedom for the reader to connect these ideas, though Fourth Person Singular warns against ‘a kind of intellectual Pointillism’, projecting one’s own meaning onto an unsupporting text.

The attempts in Night Fragments to access a socially unfettered self are part of a book-spanning concern with shame. From birth, Alsadir argues, via DW Winnicott’s research on child psychology, shame is a powerful inhibitor, an editor of disruptive or uncomfortable speech through one’s own mind’s projection of the future disapproval of others. Among the book’s opening aphorisms, the speaker (which the book seems to suggest is not-exactly-Alsadir, or one Alsadir among many) says ‘I have given a name to my shame and call it ‘dog’.’ It’s partly pitched for comedy, I think, but it finds a counterpoint thirty pages later in ‘Sketch 37’, which features the speaker’s dog’s joyful investigation of his own piss-marks. Here, a margin-note reads ‘kuntaton: most doglike, most shameless –’. The earlier line reads as self-deprecating, almost despairing, that undertone of ‘black dog’, but the act of naming it after its antithesis contextualises it, defangs it. By spacing this movement half a book apart, it incorporates the book’s thought processes as a key element of this (still understated, literally marginal) shift.

Or, maybe a dog returning with unselfconscious delight to the places he has soiled is a crude metaphor for the lyric impulse, which Alsadir describes as:

‘a kind of compulsion to invent explanations as a way of searching for and attempting to master what you fear finding that has already been experienced, an unthought known or a known that has been thought by a version of self that is yet to come’

The desire to – in Bourgeois’ words – be transparent, loved and forgiven comes into direct conflict with the socially conditioned instinct to amend oneself for the sake of palatability to others; ‘why is it’, Alsadir asks, ‘that writing a lyric poem that has an I that matches up with the person I consider myself to be in my everyday life induces shame?’ What the book does not say explicitly, but heavily suggests, is that not everyone is taught this self-editing impulse equally. A passage near the start of the book is one of several references to male figures failing to contain or control themselves:

‘The man across from me – lips narrowed, brows tilting downward towards his nose & falling into each other – stomps a foot. The stomp discharges his anger – a grain bounces off the door of the subway car and hits my eye – ’

Hardly coincidental, then, that this conflict between shame, social nicety and the lyric impulse has often been interrogated by women poets (Fourth Person Singular quotes H.D. and Marianne Moore on the matter), at a rate which seems to have intensified over the past few years: Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (2009), Anne Carson’s Red Doc> (2013) (which Alsadir reviewed insightfully in the Spring 2014 issue of Poetry Review), Vahni Capildeo’s Measures of Expatriation (2016), Denise Riley’s Say Something Back (2016), Emily Berry’s Stranger, Baby (2017), all spend a significant amount of time on the basic permissibility of writing one’s true self, safely and with due respect. When Alsadir notes how Norman Mailer valorised the lines ‘Don’t waste your energy and your time … throwing stones at the dogs that bark at you on the way. Ignore them’, it’s significant that these dogs are ‘on the way’, on a journey, outwith a domestic, private interior. Unlike Alsadir, he does not appear to have an internalised shame-dog to ignore simultaneously.

The artful lyric essays in Fourth Person Singular are not just critical apparatus, then, but a full acknowledgement of the difficulty of writing lyric poems while retaining a connection to the multifaceted, untidy truth of one’s experiences. The book is in this sense experimental, as much a critique of the state of the lyric as it is the truest, simplest distillation of lyric principles for an individual the genre does not exactly accommodate. The essays are a fascinating exploration into an aesthetic tension of the poet’s relationship with lyric poetry; as Alsadir states, shortly after a brief deconstruction of a graffiti artist’s concise, provocative, ‘FUCK LYRIC’:

‘even though I’d developed an aversion to confessional poetry, the poems I found moving, which served as my measure of a poem’s value, were invariably lyric, written in the first person and addressed – as is all speech – to a second person […] a you without whom the poet wouldn’t, or, perhaps couldn’t, have been written.’

How to work in a genre that structurally does not love you back? The investigation that follows is one of the most thorough conceptualisations of the lyric transaction between (imagined) poet and (imagined) reader I’ve encountered, as it attempts to locate the exchange phenomenologically while retaining a sense of the beauty that exchange embodies. It’s extraordinary, and the way the essay ties together its ideas, returns to its original thought in a new, startling, intimate light, is worth the price of admission alone.

‘What works intellectually doesn’t always work in the gut and vice versa – the basis of discord and interesting music.’

Though the book is, unashamedly, an intellectual challenge, it’s no less human and messy and peculiar. There are some pretty delightful puns thrown in at the margins: ‘electric ecstasy / elecstasy’; a defaced notice in an elevator: ‘NO P[O]ETS’; ‘a crow, a caw, / a flapparition’. These things delight me beyond words, and are no less a valid artistic strategy than the more recognisably ‘serious’ passages. The latter of these puns is found in a section about the poet’s daughters; they are not mentioned in the book until this point (page 52 of 66), and seem to call back to an earlier discussion of objects and motherhood. Alsadir (via Heidegger) describes tools as existing in two states: ‘ready-at-hand’ for their proper use, or ‘present-at-hand’ once they are broken, their sudden uselessness making them finally visible to the user. Not only this, but ‘An object needs to be defamiliarized in order to be grasped, understood as separate from its use’:

‘What was formerly a mere object becomes an object-to-subject relationship, lyric.’

On a first read, the book’s opening section feels like a curiosity shop of philosophical non-sequiturs and free association. As more of these free-floating ideas are mobilised into the book’s deeper lines of inquiry, the unity of Fourth Person Singular starts to emerge, as its focus on the question of what lyric is, what (and who) it is for becomes clearer.

The example of malfunctioning tools and human-objects is one of the book’s several approaches to defining lyric, the passage concluding that: ‘Like a mother, an object in use is phenomenologically transparent’. (I’ve just noticed the ‘parent’ hiding in ‘transparent’.) When the book dwells on the poet’s domestic space, the idea of ‘mother’ existing as a tool or role to be used (the poet coins the term ‘Autoplot: the unconscious’s scheme to take over your story of self’) is not so much outright debunked as it sits quietly in the background, an uncomfortable awareness the reader must bear while encountering these scenes. The feeling is not assuaged by the opening line, ‘I send them into another room so I can think. They fill me with their gift given – stolen – want it back – never! – too precious refuse’. Keeping the earlier formulation of motherhood in mind, these lines seem perfectly congruous; the children are unaware of their ready-at-hand mother, the mother is resentful of this aspect of her tool-ness. But the speaker also seems to implicate herself in the unconscious transaction being played out: ‘my pain is in my guise, the many roles I play on autopilot.’ The larger social or cultural structures that shape these autopilot settings are not quite within the poem’s remit, but can be fairly easily extrapolated. But the fact the book spends so long in this space, long enough to complicate the simple object-subject (read: lyric) relationship between parent and children, is itself a potent counter to objectification. Just by existing, by positioning domestic life and domestic space as worthy of critical-philosophical interrogation, the section aims towards a rendering of family life that is both philosophically alert and ‘work[s] in the gut’; within a conceptual exploration of the lyric, there is space for haircare, sandwich politics, the early onset of childhood nihilism. It manages to be genuinely, quietly heartwrenching without a jarring tonal shift from earlier, more philosophically intensive sections.

My experience of reading Fourth Person Singular, as one of the multitudes contained in the ‘whoever you are’ which constitutes one pole of the book’s lyric diagram, is sometimes of trying to keep up with a lot of ideas travelling in different directions, and at high speed. Others, it’s like playing Gone Home, a video game in which the player moves between the artefacts of a person’s experiences and tries to piece together some emotional, if not always narratively linear, sense (of course, the poet has anticipated such a feeling, talking about Hemingway’s strategy: ‘take out the event and leave only its reverberations’; or her warning about ‘our inability to bear what is before us – the absences, the unknown’). While the nature of aphorism means some don’t quite hit the spot – tying an 80s ad campaign for Coca Cola to Lacan’s ‘the Real’ feels a more like a party trick than a meaningful question – the book is bursting with ideas, itching to take assumptions about lyric poetry, about constructions of the self/other, and acknowledge their fundamental complexity. In the book’s central essay, the speaker questions how to make ‘the I of a poem maintain the same multiplicity as you’, and a generous reader might point to Fourth Person Singular as a damn good answer. The lack of left-aligned rectangles of text should not deter readers of lyric poetry, hopefully for whom this won’t be a first encounter with alternative lyrical forms. They’d be missing out on one of the strangest, most provocative books of poetry to arrive in these islands in many years.

Further Reading: Interview with Alsadir: Liverpool University Press

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