Creative stuttering is what makes language grow from the middle, like grass; it
is what makes language a rhizome instead of a tree, what puts language in a
state of perpetual disequilibrium [Ö] It is no longer the formal or superficial
syntax that presides over the equilibrium of language, but a syntax in the
process of becoming, a veritable creation of a syntax that gives birth to a
foreign language and a grammar of disequilibrium.^50This is a poetic language that gasps rather than grasps, and both male
and female speakers stutter. Unlike the cartographer who attempts to
chart a delimited territory, poetic stutterers disturb meaning, throwing
the lines out of stride in a ëprocess of becomingí. Rather than forging
a fixed grammar they give ëbirth to a foreign languageí or speak ë‡
líÈtrangerí, they make strange and create a disequilibrium that would
throw the bubble of Heaneyís spirit level off centre.
Poems in Berkeleyís Facts About Water are comparable with
Seamus Heaneyís deterritorialization. She writes a number of poems
about flight that are reminiscent of Sweeney Astray (1983) and Station
Island (1984). Her poem ëMan in Flightí could be a direct writing
back to Heaney or the Sweeney myth: ëSometimes he was like/ a
powerful bird/ His climb into airí (p.59). As Heaney borrows from
Robert Frostís notion of writing on the brim, this connects with
Berkeleyís exploration of limits in terms of fluidity. Berkeleyís poem
ëThe Swingí from Home Movie Nights (1989) (p.49) is also com-
parable with Heaneyís poem ëThe Swingí from The Spirit Level,
(1996), which begs the question of how far the two writers are in
communion or communication with one another.^51 Whatever is the
case, both a male Northern writer and a female Southern writer draw
on nomadic metaphors, imagery of flight and loss at sea in their
poetry.
50 Gilles Deleuze, ‘He Stuttered’, Gilles Deleuze and the Theatre of Philosophy,
eds., Constantin V. Boundas & Dorothea Olkowski (London: Routledge, 1994),
p.27. Cf. Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, A Thousand
Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Vol.2 (London: Athlone, 1988), pp.3–
26 or ‘The Rhizome’, On the Line, (New York: Semiotext(e), 1985), pp.1–69.
51 Heaney, ‘The Swing’, The Spirit Level (London: Faber, 1996), p.48.