John Kinsella
Loop and angle, aggression and passivity, "handwriting resonates/ like the voice" I wrote in Graphology,Canto 1. In the same canto:
those amateur graph-
by time, which fades
So it was always historical, or maybe undoing the "big events"--coronations, battles, politics of vanity--by verbal, visual, and musical subtext. As for the exactitude, the precision of the science:
Degenerating
as theory angles
the specialist items
the upstrokes vigorous
Disorder--the error zones in which the "non-linear" (as Marjorie Perloff might have it) poetries form. The practical application of physics led to:
The mechanical skill
of the Victorian cursive
riven ripples of the river.
And the identities of history merged with the language that held them and their attempts to record it, or be recorded. The sign of presence and liberty becomes the signature. It's an inscribing of the world's different bodies: earth, water, air...
as formniveau
of variations in
Handwriting and Character,
of a sheet of gleaming
It's spatial, and that's what Graphologyhas always been: a translation of spatial dynamics. Graphology,a poem with a tentative beginning, and no possible closure, locates itself from the late 1980s--the earliest material was lost when two tea-chests of drafts and artwork were accidentally destroyed. In its second incarnation, Graphologybegan with a book-length group or sequence of poems, The Radnoti Poems,though in some ways it began before that with Erratum/Frame(d).The D & G poems I constructed via fax (in English, German, French, and Latin - handwritten, typed, and illustrated) with the Swiss-German avant-gardist, Urs Jaeggi, in 1995/96, are tangentially connected. However, the Graphologyproject "proper" began with the Equipage (Cambridge) publication of Graphology(cantos) in 1997. From that point on, sections have appeared in print and internet journals, and on sites such as the Electronic Poetry Center at Buffalo.
The pieces were occasionally composed in a sequential/chronological format, numbered accordingly, though at other times the numbering leaps and reverses and becomes - seemingly - inconsistent. This is the nature of memory and the instability of memory, text, and sign. History changes according to the time and spatial coordinates it is viewed from.
I envisage Graphologyto be a lifework. It is certainly absorbing all of my major concerns and is "adapting" linguistically as time passes. Time and the unrealisability of permanence are its focal themes, or questionings. The signature, written by hand, is a false fingerprint--it is a construct. And this is the clue to decoding the work as it unravels. It is also a poem concerned with issues of belonging, ownership and recording identity.
A pseudo-science? False science--alchemy--always interested me. I worked in a laboratory during school holidays, I planned on becoming an organic chemist. I did research into chemi-luminescence and read Meister Eckhart and Paracelsus. Exact and figurative sciences blurred. My mother always had handwriting analysis books around the house-she was a whiz. It was like fortune-telling and opening a secret dossier simultaneously. The fiction writer in me might have had a vague interest in the latter, though my politics steered me away from intrusion. But the mystical inexactitude of the former was attractive. I studied history at university. And English. And politics. The timeline of graphological studies, of a person's life read through the development and dissolution of their script, a different kind of history. It all ran together. My own handwriting is almost illegible.
ologists from Suetonius
to Poe legal & validated
like a secret signature
the unconnected writing
& forms against curves
of food production,
labelled brightly
in the specialist shops:
amongst the arrhythmic...
as the moon full & deliberate
flourishes amongst the tide-
is underwritten
by the rhythm
pronunciation:
Ludwig Klages'
and later Max Pulver
preoccupied by the world space
white paper...