Peter Manson’s Language Surfaces

• Main Author: Tom Betteridge
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Open Library of Humanities 2018-05-01
• Series: Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry
• Online Access: https://poetry.openlibhums.org/article/id/705/

The article analyses the conception and construction of ‘the language surface’ in Peter Manson’s poetry. It explores how Manson’s dual commitment to language’s materiality and its fundamental ambiguity effects a relation between a kind of ‘secretive’ non-communication and a kind of disclosure or, Manson’s own term, ‘candour’. In an interview with Tim Allen (2006), Manson claims that his prose work, Adjunct: An Undigest (2001), drew ‘everything that was happening to [him] up into the language surface’ – disclosure of sorts – yet, across his more formal poems, there’s a kind of obfuscation: ‘…I could use my formal interest in the language surface almost to “distract” myself from the often quite personal material which was being drawn in underneath’. After some introductory comments about how Manson’s language surfaces are constructed, the primacy they afford to the materiality of language, and the dynamic subject positions they solicit, this article offers readings of two poems, each of which presents a coded commentary on the construction of the language surface. In ‘raven A’ (in Facticious Airs, 2016), the poem thinks its own language surface by invoking a stringed instrument constructed out of taut cat skin, on which ‘the position of the cat’s nipples can still be seen’. In ‘Four Darks in Red’ (collected in For the Good of Liars 2006) the reader is invited to think the relation between surface and buried personal material alongside the effacement of deep-vein cinnabar extraction in the application of vermillion red paint. The article ends with comments towards a poetics of ‘candour’.