In the final pages of Alisoun Sings, the new book by poet and sound artist Caroline Bergvall, a chant emerges—almost a slogan for Bergvall’s poetics:
Like hey say: Pump up the V
Don’t believe the tag!
Mind’s opulent compost poesy
Big up! Hystoricise! (113)
For Bergvall’s dedicated readers, the oddities of this refrain—for instance, its alternation between medieval and modern spellings—will seem unremarkable. Bergvall has been working with medieval texts and spellings for more than ten years, a period in which she has cultivated an expansive personal style through her engagements with the past. Familiarity should not distract us from the polemic force of its deployment here. With its ebullient exclamation marks, “Big up! Hystoricise!” indexes the ambitions that Bergvall has sustained across her engagement with medieval sources—a poetic program engaged, simultaneously, in the politics of sexuality, migration, and language and in scholarly quarrels about historical method. Indeed, her command to “Hystoricise!” echoes Fredric Jameson’s famous insistence that literary critics must “Always historicize!”—but with a Derridean différance. Bergvall’s Middle English spelling of this paradigmatically modern word sounds the same as Jameson’s “historicize.” However, the inaudible shift from i to y announces a commensurate shift in historical practice: a refusal of historicism in favor of an anachronistic, queer, and anti-disciplinary engagement with the past. The shift in spelling also activates dormant semantic associations that haunt the standard spelling. Hystoricise calls to mind, for instance, hysteria, that 19th century disease of patriarchy—implying that historicism itself is a patriarchal discipline, an expression of a controlling heterotemporality.
Bergvall’s hystoricism is not entirely unprecedented. Bergvall is a fellow traveler with a loose group of queer scholars like Carolyn Dinshaw (2012) or Carla Freccero (2005), fellow critics of historicism as a regime of literary and sexual discipline. Further, Bergvall’s experiments with the dense materialities of Middle English spelling sit alongside similar projects by Julian Talamantez Brolaski (2011, 2017) and Jos Charles (2018)—poets who also use the semantic slippage and sonic richness of medieval English for queer purposes. This work is perhaps too dispersed to be called a movement: its practitioners have a range of scholarly, poetic, and political commitments. Yet the quiet, but persistent, flowering of these queer medievalisms constitutes a significant—and undersung—development in contemporary poetry.
Bergvall has done much to inspire and sustain this scholarly and poetic possibility. Alisoun Sings is the third and final volume in Bergvall’s project, which spans her two previous books, Meddle English (2011) and Drift (2014). Meddle English, composed in the late 2000s, takes as its occasion a series of Chaucerian tales—especially shorter, less canonical tales, like “The Host’s Tale.” Bergvall presents her own “meddled” English—a mixture of Chaucerian puns and internet slang. The intervention is particularly pointed in the context of contemporary medieval studies, a discipline which has seen, almost simultaneously, a flowering of queer approaches, a new attention to race, and a renewal of white supremacist fantasies about the past. In opposition to these reactionary tendencies, Bergvall’s historically multiple language creates a space where all that is transgressive, opaque, and mobile from the medieval and the contemporary meet. Drift, the second book in the trilogy, works with some of the oldest extant texts in the language. Bergvall hears an echo of present-day migrant crises in the alienation, precarity, and loneliness of Old English outcast songs like “The Seafarer.” Drift creates a circuit linking the suffering of present migrants and exiles to those of the past. They speak with and through each other: the pain of the past amplifies and sharpens readers’ sensitivity to the pain of the present and vice versa.
In Alisoun Sings, Bergvall returns to Chaucer. The first version of the text was published in 2008 as a chapbook by the feminist publishing collective Belladonna, around the same time as Meddle English. Unlike Meddle English, Alisoun Sings engages one of the most well-known figures in the Chaucerian canon, Alisoun, better known as the prolix, proto-feminist Wife of Bath. Chaucer thus becomes both start and endpoint of Bergvall’s archive, her tradition. However, Bergvall does not allow her readers to sink into a comfortably choreographed relationship between then and now. Bergvall has studiously resisted the temptation to construct a chronological arc: her trilogy moves backward and forward through history, cutting a U-shaped, hystoricist trajectory.
The series as a whole refuses chronology; so too Alisoun Sings moves in lateral trajectories. It ranges back and forth as if weaving, gradually building its textual fabric from an accumulation of small, oblique motions. Reading Alisoun Sings feels like reading The Canterbury Tales itself, a text which is similarly accretive in its narrative structure and lateral in its movements. And, like Chaucer’s Alisoun, Bergvall’s character is refreshingly unpretentious. She opens her monologue with a disarming apostrophe: “Hi you all, I’m Alisoun.” This easygoing introduction doesn’t quite prepare the reader for the vast and expansive performance that follows. Alisoun quotes disco songs and Audre Lorde, she discusses the experience of orgasm and Carolingian miniscule, she extemporizes on the medieval craze for buttons and the 2017 Women’s March. The flood of reference and topical engagement can be overwhelming at times, though often pleasantly so: one luxuriates in Alisoun’s logorrhea. Elsewhere, the book is focused and controlled: again and again, Alisoun returns to the misogyny, homophobia, and gender-based violence that links our moment to hers. As she notes in her opening monologue:
Sbeen a long time, some & six hundred times have circled round the solar sun, everything were different yet pretty much the same, sunsets were reddier, godabuv ruled all & the franks the rest. Womenfolk were owned trafeckt regulated petted tightlye impossible to run ones own afferes let alone ones mynd nat publicly nat privately, & so were most workfolk enserfed, owned never free, working working day ’n niht. Sunsets redder, legs a little shorter. (1)
These opening lines present a bitter prospect: surveying the past six hundred years, Alisoun finds little cause for rejoicing and little improvement in the condition of women. Yet Alisoun articulates an alternate vision, one in which the institutions of patriarchal life and the genders it constructs to enforce those institutions are changeable and changing:
…I like to think I move with the times. As agenders change and the oceans rise and the citees sprawl, mariage needs be large! accountable! not reserved for the benefits of one, needs revise its views on ownership & burghery.
“Burghery” is an especially sharp pun: one hears in it both “burgher” and “buggery” (the latter a euphemism for sodomy). Alisoun at once critiques marriage as a bourgeois institution and, within the linguistic space of that institution, celebrates queer practices and pleasures. In articulating this utopian queer vision of a “large! accountable!” marriage, of course, Alisoun is speaking with, not against, Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. The Wife of Bath likewise complains in her Prologue of the “wo that is in marriage” (3); she also argues for its (numerical) expansion: “he syde myn housbonde / Shoulde lete fader and mooder, and take me. / But of no number mencioun made he, / Of bigamye, or of octogamye” (30-33). Bergvall’s celebration of queer pleasure is also not so distant from the fecund, flowering world of Chaucer’s Aprille: “And showers soote suffuse all our veins, mineral vegetal animal fairies cyborgs aliking…” (12).
Alisoun is thus both a critic and a utopian; she names, precisely and without flinching, the wounds of patriarchal life, yet she also imagines the “domestic bliss” that might still open in a world less limited:
Let folke of alle gendres creeds coloures and sexes, esp. thouse what know best what it feels like to be owned and belittled by isolated servitude or preachers rules letem meet & mete in strengthened unions. And create new transactions. (17)
Such equivocal utopianism is present in Alisoun Sings from its title page. The name Alisoun contains a typically rich Bergvallian pun: she is not a “son” but a “soun”—a “soon.” She is askew, out of joint from the typical progress of patrilineal descent. She is soonness itself—a prospect, a future. If the book begins with a pun, it thus also begins with a paradox: the future, Bergvall suggests, resides in the past. After the anguished meditations of Drift, turning to the future comes as a breath of lightness and possibility. Alisoun Sings allows for the pleasures of the utopian imagination—albeit a complicated utopianism, both enriched and freighted with the history with which Bergvall continues to engage.
For Bergvall, engaging with Alisoun is not an uncomplicated act. Bergvall does not imagine unmediated access to the past. The relationship between Alisoun and Bergvall is fraught; summoning up this medieval specter is exhausting for the postmodern poet. Hystoricism has its costs. The transfer between past and present is not frictionless and not without its losses and distortions. Entering the text herself, as a speaker she calls “Caroline,” she admits:
Tbh I’ve always felt we were a bit ill-matched. Looking for relevant ways to reinvest your iconic figure’s speaking habits as the impressively loudmouthed past-future era maximalist female that you are has been a pretty taxing task for the troubled foibled complicated 21st centry writer fighta that I be. (49)
The passage slips in and out of Alisoun’s medieval spellings, as if to dramatize the burden of investing language with so much fraught material intensity. Large sections of the text abandon the medieval altogether and offer a detailed and moving autobiographical account of Bergvall’s own struggles with gender, sexuality, and love:
The question arose about how to reintegrate a sense of myself. Not to give in to what one has lived through…How to find back to the ways of the heart. How to use trauma and sorrow… All this opened up my life again, filled with air and fluidity. (59)
Bergvall’s writing has always been autobiographical, full of personal detail and feeling. That persistent connection to her own life is part of what makes her medieval trilogy so affecting. But she does not write so openly of her own life elsewhere in her medieval trilogy—she has never been so direct about the role that poetry, with its capacity to hystoricize, has played in calling her back to joy, pleasure, and possibility. “Alisoun,” she writes:
[you] are bringing me back to my own time, slowly more grounded and available, full of a fighting spirit, more open and alive than before to surges of polymorphous intuitions and processes of collective retribution, a necessary traumatised transition that rekindles reconnections, as much as tough, persistent cooperation. (58)
Indeed, “tough, persistent cooperation” might describe Bergvall and Alisoun’s own collaboration: at times trying, even exhausting, yet liberating. If Bergvall speaks of and through the personal here, it is in part because Alisoun herself has made it possible to do so: the past, she argues, brings us, renewed, to the present.
The book builds toward the present—or, at any rate, the recent past. It culminates with an account of the 2017 Women’s March, which Bergvall presents as a moment of utopian hopefulness, framed by the gathering darkness of newly arrived Trumpism: “Ah let’s bang some pan! offget the desolation ybefallen this tale. For a few pages forward, let’s go to the 21 January 2017, a day that instigated the long cold silence about to be endlessly resisted…” Alisoun announces, introducing a long poem inspired by the Women’s March (104). Alisoun describes the march as a moment of “multidimensional interfloating”—a permissive, collective space in which “this magnificent crowdmass clusters and masses” (105–106). This vision does not entirely align with the reality of the march, which has been justifiably critiqued for falling into a complacent white feminism at precisely the moment when a more capacious political imagination was called for. Bergvall does not engage with these critiques, at least not explicitly. But her account of the Women’s March is less concerned with the disappointing realities of the occasion and more with its potential. She transforms it into a vision—equal parts dream and invocation—of what a truly collective and intersectional feminism might look, feel, and sound like. The vision she presents is distinctly Chaucerian, not so much a protest as a pilgrimage:
Large bands of peoples take to the streets in a sea of flags & banners, placards & slogans, blow trombones, shout megafones, take boombooms to the parks, pilgrims be chained to gates or downsail the commons carrying an out rage of demanding… (94)
In these final moments of her trilogy, then, Bergvall provides her readers with a hopeful and restorative vision—a salve for the isolation and violence of Drift. The trilogy ends with a vision of a defiant community assembled to protect its most vulnerable members. “Let’s celebrate congregate upbring the fever and collected energy, all the passionate, angered, urgent, demands of our crowded multifarious lives,” Alisoun insists (95). It is worth pausing to acknowledge the satisfying strangeness of her presence, her participation, in the political struggles of the present. Across her trilogy, Bergvall’s hystoricism has made it possible to imagine and occupy such strangeness—to move in a poetics and politics where “the fever and collected energy” of popular protest extends deep into the past, involves its fighters, fast-talkers, and wanderers.