On October 18th, 2020, Lara Trump, Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law and campaign advisor, did a CNN interview in which she was asked to defend an instance from earlier in the campaign where she seemed to be mocking Joe Biden’s stutter. She denied the accusation and stated that she, along with many Americans, is simply concerned for his “cognitive decline”—an unfounded claim rooted, still, in nothing other than Biden’s occasional stuttered speech (“Tapper pushes Lara Trump on unfounded accusation”). The ableist association between stuttered speech and feeble mindedness has been circulated and normalized in national news outlets, and in American public discourse more broadly, in extremely disconcerting ways and remains a harmful narrative requiring collective ongoing resistance. In 2016, ABC platformed a viral video, aired by a string of conservative media outlets, that edited a speech by former president Barrack Obama to play only moments of hesitation or dysfluency in his speech, supposedly occurring when speaking of Trump (ABC15 Arizona). The video clearly tries to counter the common perception of Obama as a fluent and articulate (and therefore direct and honest) speaker, latching on to these moments of dysfluency to support a conservative narrative that depicts Obama as weak and deceitful compared to Trump. The ideological intent of the video reeks of toxic masculinity on top of the underlying ableism that treats all departures from uninterrupted communication as suspect—as Mel Baggs argued in their article “There is Ableism Somewhere at the Heart of Your Oppression,” ableism is often, if not always, embedded in all forms of oppression, and it is, therefore, crucial to understand the logic of these widespread prejudices to dismantle them.

More than widespread, these prejudices run deep through the tendrils of intellectual and cultural history. Benson Bobrick’s Knotted Tongues traces the long and winding history of ultimately futile attempts to understand and cure the stutter, outlining along the way the common privileging of fluent speech to emphasize the severity of this disability. Adam’s “first and quintessential human act” is the act of speech, more specifically the utterance that directly corresponds to exterior reality; speech is the “conversation of the soul,” according to much of early Greek philosophy, the “foundation of a civilized society,” according to Cicero; “in the beginning was the Word,” the incomparably powerful and redeeming logos in the Gospel of John (23-4). In short, the deck is profoundly stacked against efforts to untether fluent speech from intellectual prowess or from a basic human given—to show that speech and “language is wielded” within “shifting barometers of exclusion,” that it is “not a neutral utility” (Migone, 129). Highlighting the complexity of speech and the stutter, Bobrick describes the nearly countless theories and methods for curing one’s stutter, from Demosthenes’ heavy physical labor while declaiming with pebbles in his mouth, to an American tribe’s repetitive ritual intended to expel the devil from the stutterer’s throat via recitation and spitting (19), each of which turns its attention to the physicality of the mouth. The labor and repetition of these therapeutic methods acknowledge the complex musculature involved in speaking and its various obstacles, but the lack of one-size-fits-all cures reflects the condition’s particularity. I was surprised to have previously overlooked Shakespeare’s reference to different kinds of stammering in As You Like It: in frustration with Cecilia’s meandering questions and responses to Rosalind’s simple question, Rosalind exclaims, “I would thou couldst stammer, that thou might’st pour this concealed man out of thy mouth as wine comes out of a narrow-mouthed bottle—either too much at once, or none at all” (3.2.202-06). The line is meant to be comical in its ironic invocation of stammering as a means to meet Rosalind’s demand for quick and direct communication. It speaks further to the stutterer’s narrower passage between thought and utterance, how it can be met with either complete blockage or rushed, excessive articulation. The width of this passage, however, does not reflect the scope of what is on either side. Indeed, it is this juxtaposition and collapse of blockage and excess that this paper finds the work of poet Jordan Scott particularly relevant and important today, as well as in relation to the logocentric history of language and speech and the marginalization of the stutter. Scott’s blert in particular serves as a full-on assault on this ableist ideological regime of fluency.

Scott is a conceptual poet from Canada whose works investigate the ways in which the material, embodied, and social realities of stuttered speech can expose and resist the normative structures of language and fluency that work to erase or conceal the body in the semantic order. Published in 2008, blert is a powerfully disorienting yet sonically precise confrontation with these structures of “normative fluency.” Borrowing some background here from an essay by Craig Dworkin titled “Stutter of Form,” Scott’s work fits within “the family of post-language-poetry lyrics published since the 1990s,” and his publication and reception history “associates it with poetry from the Calgary small press community (Ryan Fitzpatrick, Derek Beaulieu, Christian Bök) and other Canadian writers using lyric disjunction as a primary compositional mode” (Dworkin). As Dworkin and other reviewers have noted, blert is not simply “about” Scott’s experience of stuttering metaphorically or thematically, nor does it strive to be only a “mimetic representation” of the stutter, but rather it articulates a poetics of dysfluency that understands stuttering as “an effect of language,” (Dworkin). It is a “rewrite of language as disfluency” (Fitzpatrick), and as such, a subversively anticipatory poetic experience that attunes one to the dynamic materiality of language.

This paper aims to remain sensitive to the impulse to generalize or philosophize about the internal logic of Scott’s work, to read the formal aspects of his poems in such a way as to extract linguistic philosophical import, or to make them relatable to one’s own experience of speech, language, and/or embodiment. These readings do not intend to smooth over differences or give the sense that I have gained access to Scott’s particular experience with stuttering. As he writes in the afterword to blert, “While all individuals are dysfluent to some extent, what differentiates stutterers from non-stutterers is the frequency and severity of their dysfluency and, most importantly, that those hiccups regarded as ‘stutters’ are accompanied by an acute awareness of a loss of control” (65). Thus, without downplaying the severity of his experience, I want to ask: how does blert engage with this “acute awareness” of bodily limitation and persistent difficulty? To pursue this question, I argue, through the lens of Caroline Bergvall’s notion of “friction” and Christof Migone’s “disarticulation,” Scott’s work reimagines the physicality of the stutter as ripe for creating a generative, empowering, and resistant poetics, as opposed to an innate disadvantage or something to be pitied. Focusing primarily on the piece titled “Valsalvas,” this paper explores how this title evokes the embodied resistance of the stutter as well as notions of the therapeutic. The three sections of the poem construct a poetics of stutter that interrogate the assumptions of dysfluency and “the utterance” through linguistically, terminologically, and syntactically complex and disjointed passages that force the reader into the realm of the stutterer where the boundaries of anthropocentric articulation are blown open, reversing ideological prejudices to render “the utterance” or “normative fluency” feeble and unsophisticated.

Scott writes that those who stutter are perpetually “suspended between the thought and its utterance” (65), anticipating every moment of communication, repeatedly forced to return to the “fact of [the] mouth” (7). It is by dwelling on this complex intermediate space that he amplifies the material realities that mediate forms of speech and disrupts and denaturalizes ableist discourse that uniformly equates thought with its utterance. We have moved crucially beyond Adriana Cavarero’s “vocal phenomenology of uniqueness” (7) to one of struggle, anticipation and difference, despite both authors in some sense “resist[ing] against the regime of signs” that has disembodied speech and thought (Cavarero, 22). To achieve this, however, Scott’s works align more with Caroline Bergvall by focusing its attention to the myriad instances of “friction” in speech that exceed the semantic. Bergvall writes,

Friction brings awareness of connection and of obstruction, of physicality and of language twitches. Preparing oneself to speak is part of speaking. Breathing, coughing, spitting become part and parcel of the linguistic situation. It shows the sounds of language as explicitly composed of the body’s mechanics. It is at the root of Sound Poetry’s revolutionary and internationalist poetics, its profound revolt against semantic dominance. (“Cat in the Throat”)

Scott’s poetics of the stutter foregrounds and intensifies these linguistic frictions to revolt against not just the “regime of signs” or “semantic dominance,” but more poignantly the implicit “regime of fluency”—as he puts it in the “State of Talk”—that regulates and marginalizes bodies, regards non-fluency, as Christof Migone puts it, “as a hindrance to full participation in a society where functionality is measured by degree of communicability” (Migone, 129). Thus, within the regime of fluency, disruption is an aberration; difficulty is traitorous, effort superfluous. In revolt, Blert seizes on the intense bodily efforts persistently involved in the frictions and fragmentations of the stutter to embrace the stutter as what Migone calls a “surfeit of articulation, a disarticulation which divides infinitely, which divides the indivisibility of letters”—and there he’s referring to Aristotle’s formulation that “a letter is an indivisible sound […] for even brutes utter indivisible sounds” (122). It is, thus, by forcefully amplifying linguistic friction and the excess multiplicity of divided, or fragmented, sounds that Scott constructs a poetics of stutter that reimagines dysfluency as an empowered disruption of fluency and semantic erasures of the body. Indeed, Scott’s work even resists the category of experimental sound poetry when we consider the association of “sound” to coherence. Rather, blert agrees more with Migone’s theorizing of the “unsound,” the conceptual richness of silence and noise, of formlessness itself, that extends beyond and exceeds normative borders of sound and soundness.

In the poem “Valsalvas,” Scott interrogates “the utterance” with three bursts of disjointed grammar and esoteric vocabulary to construct a poetics of stutter that draws our attention to the complex physical exertions involved in spaces of anticipation and hesitation. The title of the poem “Valsalvas” refers to the Valsalva Maneuver, named after Italian anatomist Antonio Maria Valsalva, which “designates the action, described by Valsalva, in which an attempt is made to exhale air while the nostrils and mouth, or the glottis, are closed, so as to increase pressure in the middle ear and the chest” (OED, “Valsalva”). Valsalva, as a 17th century expert on the ear before antibiotics, would actually use this method to expel pus from one’s ears. Today, the method can be used to return one’s heart rate back to a regular rhythm, but I also found online something called Valsalva Stuttering Therapy: a process that claims to “address the neurological and physiological core of stuttering blocks – the brain’s substitution of motor programs for effort instead of phonation of vowel sounds, in response to anxiety or the anticipation of difficulty in speaking” (Parry). Part of this therapy entails “Treating words as a continuous flow of movement and phonation, rather than as physical objects” (Parry). However, as discussed, blert is not interested in ignoring or transcending difficulty or reinstating language and speech as an immaterial, continuous phenomenon.[1] No, here the stutter appears on its own terms as a material poetics that resists oversimplified readings of rehabilitation. Forceful breath, effort, and bodily limitation are foregrounded at the outset to prepare us for an eruption of anticipatory poetics. Pluralizing “Valsalva” implies the many forced blockages that punctuate stuttered speech. Perhaps, instead, Scott’s interrogation of the utterance seeks to expel the ideological pus from our ears so that we may be more attuned to the material frictions of speech and the discontinuous ecosystem of sound that fragments the regime of fluency.

The poem begins with three italicized phrases “Some will not when by themselves / Some will not when speaking to children or animals / Some will not when they sing” (11). Scott uses italics to summon and directly confront the voice of the ostensibly fluent speaker. Here, fluency refuses to explicitly name the stutterer whilst relegating dysfluency to isolated, undeveloped, and pre-semantic realms. Each of these lines describing supposedly less sophisticated speech correlates with an explosive response to the question “What is the utterance?” Upon first reading each response, Scott’s investment in difficulty and fragmentation is immediately palpable: the frenzy of fricatives, parade of plosives and strange syntactical arrangements task the reader with intensely focusing on each syllable—it is utterly defamiliarizing. Grammatical markings bear little relevance amidst the myriad extra pauses the reader must take to stumble through the barrage of alliteration and unfamiliar juxtapositions.[2] The technical terminology takes one away from “every-day speech” into contexts of communication that estrange the reader in their own lexical landscapes. We are confronted with how poorly equipped we are to navigate realms of speech apart from our own. References to hidden anatomical phenomena suggest a parallel to the often hidden or silenced bodily negotiations between thought and utterance. The muted mastication of “an osteoclast,” the inaudible slight pitch shifts of a “Chirped electrode,” and the “soft hum” of the subtle oral and ecological frictions: here these silences are all amplified and multiplied with a dense vocabulary and alliterative phonic structure that is both unfamiliar and difficult to say in smooth succession. They force the reader to notice the oral gymnastics, the “labial turbulence,” in performing Scott’s poems. It’s an experience of language, Canadian poet Dennis Lee writes, “where every vowel and consonant must be traversed, claimed, made audible by non-stop bodily effort.”

The first response dwells on dividing the indivisible utterance and multiplying the individual stutterer. “When by themsel[f],” the stutterer is presented here in the company of a diverse ecosystem with “flounders,” “molluscs,” “kelp,” and “puffins”. The interior struggles, the phonemic “flounder[ing]” or “tussles,” of the in between space of dysfluent speech blends with non-anthropocentric modes of expression. The stutter’s “neurological misfire,” Migone writes, “creates the space in between,” a “space which is and isn’t. […] a doubling which blurs exterior and interior distinctions” (122-23, my emphasis). It is by articulating the disarticulation of dysfluency that the interior and exterior, the individual and the multiplying plural, collapse into each other, and thus, expand, overflow, and collide against the semantic “hardwood floors” that feebly attempt to smooth over an acoustic environment of difference.

The section taps into and rebels against a historically verified experience, as well as deeply rooted conception, of the stutterer as often isolated from the external world. Speech pathologist Karl Ludwig Merkel, who also stuttered, spoke of the stutterer’s proclivity toward “a certain reserve, absorption, inclination to solitude and to contemplation” (Bobrick, 23). In an 1856 article on stammering, Charles Dickens writes, “Stammering [in children] rises as a barrier by which the sufferer feels that the world without is separated from the world within” (14) Because the space between interior (thought) and exterior (expression) often entails a physical labyrinth, or total barrier, in the mouth, those who stutter are often forced to feel as if they do not have access to the external world. For Scott, however, this labyrinth of sound and effort is precisely what gives him such detailed access to the granularity of his environment, anatomizing it and analogizing (or “tether[ing]”) it to the most private workings of his body and mind. As a child, Scott’s father once compared his speech to the undulating tide against the shore, and from then on he has always imagined mouth mimicking the movements and sounds of his environment. In this way, Scott asks us to reimagine the speech of the stutterer as always already in the company of a profoundly diverse sonic environment beyond that of the anthropocentric, and it is this idea that Scott expands upon in the next response.

The second response reverses the notion of pre-fluent speech to construe fluency as the disruption in a vast landscape of sound. “When speaking to children or animals,” the stutterer resonates with the fleshy excess (the “dewlap”) of every disarticulated syllable. The physical frictions of non-semantic sounds reverberate into a vast, radically different—virtually unknowable—sonic and temporal landscape, the “Mesozoic.” However, the “scaffolded throats” suggest a fluency under construction, one at this stage still acutely aware of the bodily mechanisms that constitute the operations of the utterance. The poem questions what the real disruption is here. The “antelope roll” of the stutter, the “rolling gait of words within words,” as Scott puts elsewhere, is burdened and camouflaged by the stagnant, residual billabong’s “slow freight,” by the “palate” understood as a faculty of discrimination. Fluency, as a specific construction of the throat, seeks to restrict and regulate the unfamiliar landscape of sound to which the stutter is attuned, to repress the desires of the child who seeks to “revamp the alphabet” (65).

Despite this section being the shortest response of the three, Scott’s invocations of such vastly unknowable sonic landscapes asks the most from the reader. There is no way of knowing what species from the Mesozoic era would have sounded like, which perhaps constitutes the “blotches” on our “lobule curves” in this section, why the sounds of the Mesozoic do not resonate with our cochlea, but instead rapidly “ricochets” off it and remains impenetrable and out of reach. The temporal lobes, those closest to our ears and responsible mostly for retaining memory, takes on more meaning in this invocation of transtemporal acoustic environments, those beyond present day human and non-human animal kingdoms. The poem exceeds the collapse of a speaker and their environment and extends this already challenging reimagination through history, before the existence of anthropocentric modes of speaking and listening. The “scaffolded throat” suggests a modernizing construction of speech and fluency, one that restricts and fixes speech within certain standards and expectations that we hold today. However, the “dewlap syllables” of the “Mesozoic” hang loosely off the locus of vocalization, supple and malleable (as opposed to fixed), contrasting and overwhelming our profoundly limited notions of communication and sound. Once the reader has struggled with these grandiose reimaginations of unknowable noise, Scott seeks to harmonize these overwhelming landscapes of sound.

The third response realizes the stutter as a disarticulated symphony of generative frictions—in Migone’s words, “a polyphony of the oral register,” or in Scott’s words, “an inchoate moan edging toward song” (65). This is the longest response and features several instances of repetition. These repeated phrases emerge from the initial “panic,” or anxiety and anticipation, of a mouth that swallows and regurgitates language, registering an affective as well as physical struggle that is personal and particular (“My”). Wedged in this process, Scott conjures the music of mastication from the ornithological epidermis hidden beneath (“pteryla”) and between (“apterium”) the feathers. There are no references to mellifluous songbirds, only flesh and struggle colliding to evoke the disarticulated song of the stutter. Anatomizing the ornithological subverts norms within the genre of poetry itself by stripping the prototypical songbird away from its metaphorical association with poetry and materializing it within a fragmented and disorienting staccato of language. The chewing and chomping of this section recall the chomping osteoclast in the first response—this is a crucial concept for Scott’s poetics of stutter. The osteoclast, from the Greek “osteo” (bone) and “clastos” (broken), breaks and regenerates one’s skeletal structure, much like mastication breaks down resources for nutrients. It also alludes to the idiomatic expression of “chewing on” a thought to understand it fully. To break down, fragment, and divide language and fluency as the stutter does is actually to have a stronger grasp of language, to have access to the raw materials ripe for a linguistically subversive poetics. In Scott’s own words once again, “[blert] is written as if my own gibbering mouth chomped upon the language system, then regurgitated the cud of difference. My symptoms are the agents of composition” (65). Lewis Carrol, who also had a stutter, writes in the preface to “The Hunting of the Snark” of the unsettled, yet perfectly balanced mind capable of uttering the neologism “frumious” when split between saying “fuming” and “furious,” which I think, for Scott, illustrates the poetic and intellectual richness in dwelling on struggles involved in speech. However, it is also the case for Scott that “each furious millisecond of personal struggle” that “collid[es] with language” (65) erupts in song, in an arhythmic polyphonic ensemble of dysfluency. For the stutterer, to “open your mouth and speak” is to seize upon the frictions of hesitancy and orchestrate new semantic constructions and, therefore, new—perhaps, emancipatory—ways of knowing.

 

By the end of the piece, the utterance, the notion of a fluid, coherent unit of speech, is rendered weak and frail, crawling from the fatigue induced by the turbulent oral exertions preceding its formation—pitifully singular in comparison to the expansive, musical multiplicity of the stutter’s disarticulation. Structuring the poem as an interrogation, however, reflects his keen awareness of and unwillingness to fully depart from the material reality of power relations that marginalize stuttered speech. It gestures toward his investigation of the stutter’s relation to interrogative spaces where any departures from fluency are suspect (Kelly Writer’s House). It does this work by forcing us into unfamiliar semantic and linguistic realms where we have no choice but to acknowledge the various ways that forms of speech are mediated and how language demarcates taxonomies of sound and species. Along with this acknowledgement of the oftentimes brutal reality of stuttering, however, Scott remains hopeful about what a poetics of stutter conceptually can do to resist systems of power, how its mysteriousness, and that of poetry itself, slips through the cracks of these harmful ideological narratives and exposes how weak and fragile they really are.[3] Part of the spirit of this work, I feel, resonates with how Bobrick ends Knotted Tongues recalling the narrative of how Moses gets his stutter in the Bible: an angel diverts his hand away from jewels (saving his life) and toward the hot coals, which he then puts in his mouth. No one would deny how incredibly painful this would be, nor does Scott deny how difficult living with a stutter can be, but Moses’ story is one of emancipation. Thus, “perhaps,” Bobrick writes, “it may also be surmised from the angel’s intercession that even stuttering in life’s labyrinthine journey can sometimes prove to be a blessing in disguise” (186), a blessing of a “narrow-mouthed bottle” with emancipatory potential within a systematically oppressive regime of narrow minded conceptions of communication.

Notes

[1] “Two and a half million Americans—fifty-five million people worldwide—stutter; and though their baffling malady has been subjected to confident analysis for over twenty-five hundred years, most endure it without hope of a cure. In the United States and elsewhere, no unified program of experimental therapy yet exists, presenting a bizarre diversity of options—most of them ineffectual—to those in need” (Bobrick, 19).

[2] Jordan Scott on ways to construct a poetics of dysfluency for the page: “I think it’s in interrogating grammar because I think that grammar sets sort of rules for the mouth: a pause, a hyphen, a period […] strictly personally, those have always been irrelevant for me, like they can either be there or they cannot, right? Similarly with the fragment or enjambment in poetry” (Kelly’s Writer House, 39:54 – 41:54).

[3] When aggressively interrogated about his work on ambience and redaction in Guantanamo by military personnel, Scott stumbles upon the threat of poetry as “a tool for investigation or witnessing” systems of power, as means for confusing the “permissible and the impermissible,” a persistent “mystery in the face of violence” (SFU Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, 1:09:40-1:11:27).

Works Cited

ABC15 Arizona. “VIRAL: Obama Stutter NOT Necessarily Over Trump – Re: Obama Turns Into Stuttering Mess About Trump,” YouTube Video, 0:52, 6 July 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iuxlHKQa9FA.

Bergvall, Caroline. “A Cat in the Throat: On Bilingual Occupants,” Jacket 2, http://jacketmagazine.com/37/bergvall-cat-throat.shtml, 2009.

Bobrick, Benson. Knotted Tongues, Simon & Schuster, 1994.

Cavarero, Adriana. For More than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression, Stanford University Press, 2005.

Dickens, Charles, “Psellism: The Act of Stammering,” Household Words. London, 1856.

Dworkin, Craig. “blert Review,” Couch House Books, https://chbooks.com/Books/B/Blert, Accessed 3 November 2020.

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Hunter, Caroline. “Slow down, you’re going too fast: SVT and The Modified Valsalva Maneuver,” CPR Seattle, 29 July 2019, https://www.cprseattle.com/blog/slow-down-youre-going-too-fast-svt-and-the-modified-valsalva-maneuver.

Kelly Writer’s House. “Presentation by Jordan Scott at North of Invention (Day Two),” YouTube Video, 49:59, 29 Septemeber 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qs1h2HdLT4g.

Migone, Christof. Sonic Somatic: Performances of the Unsound Body, New York: Errant Bodies Press, 2012.

Parry, William D. “Valsalva Stuttering Therapy: A Brief Introduction,” StutteringTherapist, http://www.stutteringtherapist.com/vstintro.htm, 2016.

Scott, Jordan. Blert, Couch House Books, Toronto: 2008.

SFU Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. “Jordan Scott, SFU Writer in Residence on Guantanamo Bay Detention Center,” YouTube Video, 1:32:04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MK_XRcA28_E.

Shakespeare, William. As You Like It. Barbara Mowat, Paul Werstine, Michael Poston, and Rebecca Niles, eds. Folger Shakespeare Library. Accessed on December 7, 2020. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. https://shakespeare.folger.edu/shakespeares-works/as-you-like-it/.

“Tapper pushes Lara Trump on unfounded accusation.” CNN, 18 October 2020, Accessed 2 December 2020, https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/10/18/sotu-tapper-presses-lara-trump.cnn.

“Valsalva, n.”. OED Online. September 2020. Oxford University Press. https://oed-com.proxy.uchicago.edu/view/Entry/221241?redirectedFrom=Valsalvas (accessed November 09, 2020).