Unreadability (Part I)

To call a literary work “unreadable” is to make a rather flexible aesthetic judgment. Most commonly, one means they didn’t like that work, found it too boring, too gruesome, badly written, or obscene. “That book is unreadable!” could refer to anything from the tedium of a phonebook to the scandal of hard-core porn. Like many vernacular criticisms, it’s as much about taste and pleasure as it is about politics and morals. Less often, one means that the book literally cannot be read, that the signs and words inscribed in the book cannot be parsed, or even that they cannot be identified as signs and words at all. But works that can be described in that mode of unreadability—that screw with capacity, legibility, access, and semiotics—make up a vast portion of poetic composition. I’ve decided to dedicate this three-part essay to unreadable poetry as a kind of love letter to the tricks and games that it plays. As Steven Gould Axelrod put it in his essay, “Reading the Unreadable in Modern American Poetry,” the unreadable makes “an other world of overdetermined signs and underdetermined meanings.” If we think in terms of a content-form binary, unreadable poetry seems to lock the reader out of content, or otherwise keep content at bay while amplifying form until it becomes insistent, irritating, but also, perhaps, surprisingly pleasurable. 

Let’s think about some antonyms of “unreadable”: “Readable” is somewhat limp, so barely a judgment that it seems an insult (“This book is readable” would make a pathetic blurb), though it can also refer to a perceived ease of reading, usually in pacing and clarity (“after the edits, it’s much more readable”). Other terms like “engrossing,” “captivating,” “immersive,” or—to riff on a Roisin Murphy song—“unputdownable,” imply a work that compels continued attention, and sometimes connote escapism or addictiveness. “Immersive” and “engrossing” suggest a work attempting to make its form invisible, creating for its reader what feels like streamlined interaction with its content, with the “world” of the book. A touch of the unreadable, on the other hand, pulls someone by their hair out of the comfy scene of reading. On one end we have the compulsively reading reader, whose imagination is so synced to a book’s world that the words seem to barely register, and on the other end we have the reader faced with the unreadable, whose eyes are forced to adjust to a different kind of looking.

Indeed, that’s a good way of summarizing the unreadable: it devolves the process of reading to its roots in looking. This explains why so much of the unreadable in poetry is connected to the tradition of concretism, or what is sometimes loosely called “visual poetry,” as in the typewriter art of Ilse Garnier or d.a. levy, or in the equally humorous and sublime drawn poems of Robert Grenier. Much of this kind of work is less invested in poetry’s oral roots than in its roots in visual art and its instantiation in particular print technologies. These works aggregate, deform, transform, and expand the formal materials of written language to create text-art that cannot be taken in fully by reading. But I certainly don’t want to say that the unreadable poem automatically and only associates itself with the lineages of visual art. (In part two of this essay, I’ll be looking in-depth at a body of work that paradoxically connects unreadability with the oral tradition.) Nor do I mean to say that unreadability invites mere looking. Instead, I’m hoping my examples convey that looking at a poem can be as versatile, challenging, and three-dimensional an act as reading it.

One famous and notably small example of the unreadable in the concretist tradition is Aram Saroyan’s four-legged letter, pictured above. Often called a four-legged m, the poem might indeed be that, or it may be a fused m and n, or three ns; the more you look at it, though, the more it seems to distort away from any kind of letter. In “MNMLST POETRY: Unacclaimed but Flourishing,” Bob Grumman described the poem as “the center of an alphabet just starting to form,” but it may be just as right to call it an alphabet deforming away from its signifying functions, a cancer of the alphabet. On its four legs, this poem looks oddly animal, oddly alive. This is Saroyan’s minimalism and interest in the aesthetics of typewriting taken both to their logical extreme and in a new direction. Further particularizing the isolated single words of his works Cloth: An Electric Novel (1971) and Coffee Coffee (1967), but adding the distortion of unreadability, Saroyan’s letter poem revels in a very simple shock—that the base unit of language’s written form has gone rogue. That the poem resembles the familiar letters of the alphabet is a part of its pleasure; looking at it we want to see what it would take to make it readable, to rid ourselves of the burden of its bad form. Indeed, the unreadable in poetry often teases us with an asymptotic relationship to the readable, approaching but never reaching legibility (more on this in part two of this essay). It’s a sign that unreadability and its opposites are contained  within each other. 

And so the splash of the unreadable poem (should we call it a poemn, for Saroyan?) saturates us with form more than we might like, we whose brains repeatedly attempt to forget that we are reading individual letters and words to form the concepts we’re mulling over. Especially in these concretist iterations, the unreadable sets us back, and where we go from this setback is the great pleasure of it.