Ireland
Bouequet
University of New South Wales
Amy Ireland
Bouequet, or a joke about the language of flowers
Abstract:
This submission for a creative presentation proposes a performative decipherment of
the three short object-poems that currently make up the experimental work-inprogress, Bouequet. Each poem has been generated through a process of encryption
devised to guide language back to matter, beginning as a written text penned in
1996
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Alien Phenomenology or What it’s Like to Be a
Thing (Bogost, 2012), respectively, and designed to cycle around a central
homophonic ambiguity particular to each one. These three original texts have then
been transposed phonetically, effectively transforming them into sonic events and
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the same time the latent potential of the trans-word homophony integral to two of the
three poems. Each phoneme has then been paired with a three-dimensional shape
designed to express its sonic and connotative properties and then modeled in three
dimensions using CAD software. The shapes are strung together in an order that
correlates with the phonic representation of each text in an infinite line along the
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materially rendered phonemes inwards so that the assemblage is almost solid and the
resulting object is printed in three dimensions in synthetic polyamide, informed by
the scale and dimensions of a flower.
When a cipher is provided for the phoneme-to-shape abstraction, it is possible to
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backwards from the phonic instantiation to the original, written text. However, if the
original text is suppressed, a poem that passes through this system can never be
wholly decrypted or laid to rest in a definitive form: a persistent cryptographer will
find it impossible to go deeper than homophonic equivocation. Instead, the poems are
condemned to flicker eternally between potential readings, setting in motion an
infinite permutation of internal tensions that - in the case of the three poems presented
here - vacillate between the universal and the particular, the sacred and the profane,
and the affirmation and negation of being, the latter citing the poetic form itself.
Biographical Note:
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Ireland
Bouequet
Amy Ireland is a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing with the School of the Arts and
Media at the University of New South Wales where she teaches creative writing and
co-convenes Aesthetics After Finitude, a research group dedicated to the problematics
of speculative aesthetics. Her work is focused on a reappraisal of twentieth century
poetics through the prism of new theories of philosophical realism.
Keywords:
Experimental poetics – Noise – Materiality – Code – Speculative aesthetics
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Ireland
Bouequet
Poetic line (I. II. II)
List of works cited
1996
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Visions of Excess: Selected
Writings 1927-1939, 7th edn, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 10-16.
Bogost, I 2012, Alien Phenomenology or What it’s Like to Be a Thing, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Johnson (trans), Divagations, Cambridge, Massachusetts:
The Belknap Press, 199-211.
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Ireland
Bouequet
Research Statement
Language is a method of encryption that translates its outside, however one chooses to
construe it, into a coded, symbolic inside. Both divine and logical languages,
designating as their grail a faultless correlation between these two realms, necessarily
underwrite their code systems with either divine guarantee or rational precision. It
could be said that poetry capitalises on the failure of these systems, while
simultaneously mourning their loss. This, I suggest, is the resurgent dilemma of
twentieth century poetics. The twenty-first century retains the basic form of this
dilemma yet its anxieties are intensified, for its poets are squarely faced with the
problem of what language may become in the wake of the death of both god and the
human subject as we conceive of it today.
A hypothesis, then.
If language is code, might it not run wild once the last tethers of human exigency are
cut? Language as mad, self-propagating, non-linear putrescence! A growth that
crowds out every last hope of logical correlation, dissolving the clarity of things in a
ubiquitous mesh, infinitely egged on by its own feedback.
Bouequet is an experimental work-in-progress comprising three short synaesthetic
poems responding to three texts that interrogate poetic abstraction: Stéphane
1996
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ost, 2012).
Following a model of encryption in which semantics is first defiled by homophony
then debased, in turn, by substance, these three poems gesture towards a hypothesised
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engendering a semantic noise that feeds back into the code system, driving it towards
entropy. If the original texts are suppressed, poems that pass through this system can
never be decrypted back to a definitive form. A persistent cryptographer will find it
impossible to go deeper than homophonic equivocation. Instead, the texts are
condemned to flicker eternally between potential readings, setting in motion an
infinite permutation of internal tensions that - in the case of the three poems presented
here - vacillate between the universal and the particular, the sacred and the profane,
and the affirmation and negation of being, the latter citing the poetic form itself.
Bouequet proffers a Language of Flowers for the linguistic apocalypse in which
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what by, remains to be seen.
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