Unreadability (Part II)

In the previous installment of this essay, I gave a brief intro to the unreadable in poetry and why we might learn to love it. I focused especially on unreadable poetry’s life in the history of concretism, where visually manipulated units of language create pieces that pleasurably devolve reading into looking and bring us into an unsettling encounter with the form of our language. Now, I turn to an unreadable poetry based in orality, in (un)reading aloud. For this, I want to look to the under-sung poet David Melnick, a master of unreadable orality and oral unreadability, whose Nice: Collected Poems is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in July. Edited by Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander, Jeffrey Jullich, and Ron Silliman, the posthumous volume brings the once-hermetic Melnick out into the light of new audiences.

Melnick wrote only four short books between 1972 and 1987 before a lengthy reclusion and retirement from poetry until his death in 2022. He was primarily a poet on the periphery of the literary movements of San Francisco, where he lived and worked. Leftist in politics, but never an obviously political poet; gay and experimentalist, but never a member of New Narrative; sometimes a Language poet, in some sense a Conceptualist; if Melnick properly fit into any group, it was the Gay Artists and Writers Kollective (GAWK), an energetic (if somewhat short-lived) multimedia artists group he helped found. What he reveled in and excelled at was nonsense, specifically a queer non-sense of poetic language and babble. What Brian Reed wrote (in his essay “‘Show Me the Color of Your Flowers’: American AIDS Poetry Today”) on Melnick’s final book could be said of his entire oeuvre: “its truth is the inability of language to convey truth.” 

As Nice’s editors note, there’s a pleasing roundness to Melnick’s oeuvre: two books experimenting in sound, surrounded by equally personal and opaque first and last books. Let’s talk about those middle books first. In 1975, Melnick published PCOET through GAWK. As its title implies, with a ‘c’ lodging its way into the word “poet,” PCOET is a book composed of nonsensical poems that teeter on the edge of, just possibly, making sense. Poem no. 17, for one example, begins: 

oange astare
o lawe, o stareat
outcat lode hemapdne

The poems of PCOET generally share a form of short lines, with small double-space stanzas, and occasional indented lines, creating a repeating visual scheme for the otherwise sonically haywire poems. Melnick read these poems aloud for a time, and apparently had “correct” pronunciations for his invented words, but it’s clear that this isn’t quite a proper language of its own. Rather, PCOET reads like a hallucination of English, Latin, and Greek. Occasionally, its words seem almost recognizable —in this poem alone, we get “dignti,” which seems like “dignity,” and “artest,” which seems like “artist” or a playful superlative. Less often, the words are indeed recognizably English, but divorced from any context that would make their meaning meaningful—in this poem alone we see “lode,” “not,” “a,” and perhaps even a familiar star in “cher.” Could we describe the line “o lawe, o stareat” as poetic apostrophe? Something like the “O Solitude!” of Keats? But reading PCOET isn’t so much about decoding these hints of meaning; it’s rather about the experience of sensing these hints of meaning, and letting them pass in favor of unreadability. Each nonsense word of PCOET, not despite but precisely because of its unreadability, inscribes an entire world of ethics, politics, desire, and, even, fun. Take for example how Colin Herd, in his essay “‘qquerl: Electracy and Homographesis in David Melnick’s PCOET,” riffs on one of the words of PCOET (“qquerl,” which begins poem 26) to call the book “qquerl-ous.” In his introduction to Nice, Noah Ross asks, “[w]as it that his work points to a kind of unspeakability of these very ‘qquerl’ feelings? I am left wondering what kinds of queer feelings we can represent in queer (il)legibilities.”

Melnick’s third book, Men in Aïda, is an astonishing answer to that question. Its first volume was published by Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press in 1983, but its second and third volumes first appeared in 2002 (uploaded to the Eclipse archive by Craig Dworkin) and 2014 (in a full bilingual edition from Uitgeverij Press), respectively. A homophonic translation of Books 1-3 of The Iliad—that is to say, a transposition of the original Ancient Greek to words with similar sound in English—Men in Aïda is a raucous tour-de-force of glossolalia. Taking more than a few liberties with the uncertain pronunciation of Ancient Greek, and playing with punctuation, Melnick transforms the lines of The Iliad into a kind of prosaic bathhouse comedy: 

Men in Aïda, they appeal, eh? A day, O Achilles!
Allow men in, emery Achaians. All gay ethic, eh?
Paul asked if tea mousse suck, as Aïda, pro, yaps in.
Here on a Tuesday. ‘Hello,’ Rhea to cake Eunice in. 
Hojo’ noisy tap as hideous debt to lay at a bully.
Ex you, day. Tap wrote a ‘D,’ a stay. Tenor is Sunday.
Atreides stain axe and Ron and ideas ‘ll kill you.

As its title implies, Melnick’s homophonic translation takes every opportunity to find homoeroticism and “gay ethic” in the Ancient Greek, turning the long history of gay neoclassicism into an epic babble. As the editors of Nice put it, here “homophonic translation admits sex.” You may have noticed in the excerpt above the placement of the Illiad’s characters beside the new, less-epic character, “Ron” (possibly Silliman?), and later in the work we encounter “Rae” (Armantrout?) and “Aaron” (Shurin?). Men in Aïda takes the language of epic warfare and uses its sound as a portal to a sex comedy populated by friends and nonsense. 

Surrounding these experiments in orality and readability are two short and beautifully opaque works, Eclogs (1972) and A Pin’s Fee (1987). In Melnick’s own, self-deprecating words on Eclogs, these are “impossibly oblique yet turn up clues to the movements of the soul of the poet[..].” Nice’s editors call Eclogs “pastoral” and A Pin’s Fee “necropastoral,” and this description feels apt for thinking about how what is shared stylistically between the works has been transformed in the latter by the emergency of the AIDS crisis. Eclogs is characterized by many of the themes that define Melnick’s later works, such as myth, obfuscation, the pleasure of babble, and fairytale, but the book shows a poet still growing into his toolset. However, A Pin’s Fee, Melnick’s shortest work, is his most affecting. In response to the conditions of the crisis and the failing health of his romantic partner, Melnick’s style is pessimistic, pained, and coursing with gaps in language: “unpronounceable! Only a              could say it. / to think it ‘really’ would intend horrible crimes.” If PCOET is unreadable in the sense that it refuses meaning, and Men in Aïda is unreadable in that it transforms an ancient tongue, then A Pin’s Fee is unreadable because the political and personal landscape it encounters destroys the possibility of its ever coming to meaning. A Pin’s Fee’s adopts some of the pastoral and fairy-tale quality of Eclogs but watches as this quality breaks under the enormous pressure of the book’s emergency. Its last poem is almost concretist, a page populated by the single word “DEATH,” repeated again and again. 

Perhaps one thing we see in this oeuvre is how a gay poet’s joy in unreadable orality is crushed by the AIDS crisis until it becomes total poetic silence. Melnick’s twist of “gay ethic” in poetic language makes for a brief but unforgettable oeuvre. Nice: Collected Poems proves that David Melnick is an exemplary figure of unreadability in American poetics, one who continues to teach us of unreadability’s pleasures, politics, and pains.