Origin of the Mimeo

What do guns when they are not in use?
In the dead of night they double and divide,
naming new owners, finding a new ruse.

Carry a gun on stage, it must be fired.
Deterrent only lasts until undone.
Better they are counted out of mind.

List the ways to frame a decommission,
a car-park graveyard covered with cement.
Which stay on stasis is sufficient?

Marking each as put beyond use.
Keeping their provenance as you would art.
Rocking the replicas back to their false start.
It’s got to be efficient.

A suggestive metaphor from thermal imaging technology provides the title of Siobhán Campbell’s new collection, Heat Signature, and sustains its resonance in this week’s poem.

The invention of the mimeograph, an early copying machine, dates back to the 19th century. It was supplanted by the photocopier some time ago. But the reader doesn’t need to remember the mimeograph to get the reference, since imitation (as in mime) is spelled out in the word itself, and emphasised in its implied cohabitation with “original”. The double summoning of the past, including the recent past, is surely apt.

Campbell’s larger focus is the contemporary “matter of Ireland”. Unusually, there’s little sense of a north-south border, or at least one that can’t be freely trampled. The Dublin-born Campbell seems comfortable with the uncomfortable, a native not of the south or north but of the problematic, including the peace process and its vicissitudes. This poem challenges assumptions about the value of de-commissioning. Replication undermines the pledge to put a weapon “beyond use” (line 10 quotes the formula) and mocks the burial: the dead weapon in its “car-park graveyard” proliferates. These guns are not only undead: they “double and divide”.

Terseness predominates in Campbell’s syntax as the phrasing of the opening questions signals. Not: “What do guns do when they’re not in use?” but “What do guns when they’re not in use?” This usage heightens the notion of the guns’ sparky animation. The weapon has a sinister life of its own, and can find its own combatants and reasons for use. The rhyming of “use” and “ruse” is eloquent.

The second stanza introduces Chekhov’s famous dictum about theatrical guns and broadens the poem’s frame of reference. Campbell herself, in her thesis “From There to Here”: writing out of a time of violence, reads Origin of the Mimeo as a poem about poetry. Chekhov’s rule highlights the contract of author and auditor, and could apply to any significant object, and to other literary genres than drama. The rule might be extended to embarrass the concept of the weapon as a deterrent: if it exists, it will be used. But Campbell is interested in the question at the level of this specific poem: having introduced the gun on to the stage of the poem, is she obliged to fire it?

Campbell’s lines are mostly in trochaic pentameter; they have a terse orderliness but are never leisurely. Her single-sentence, single-line statements are perhaps meant to be verbal gunshots. Or perhaps it’s the curtailed last line that fires the gun.

In stanza two, the moral clincher of the third line plays on the verb in apposition, “counted out” and its transformation into “counted out of mind”. Previously, the italics of deterrent remind us of a word claiming too much for itself.

In the third stanza the idea of the list is raised and mocked by the image of “ a car-park graveyard covered with cement”. There are too many ways to “frame a decommission”, beginning with the interpretation of “frame”, no doubt. The phrase has an odd echo of Elizabeth Barratt Browning counting the ways of love, possibly hinting at Campbell’s resistance to lyric sentimentality.

Lyrical grace may be suspect, the terza rima casually plaited, but there’s an energy in the language, buried metaphors, gleams of wordplay that are more than mere lace (“stay on stasis”, “rocking the replicas back to their false start”). The latter is particularly interesting. Campbell points out the Yeats connection with “rocking” in her thesis: presumably it’s primarily The Second Coming which is invoked.

Only the decommissioning of the mind will put the gun beyond use. Meanwhile, the very word gun is potent, a disturbing image in three coiled letters. Perhaps the poem itself is mimetic, a small, loaded object with underground connections, its own forms of subterfuge and escape.

The thought is often complex. To keep a gun’s provenance “as you would art” suggests the placing of a high value on the original. This may of course be an allusion to historical responsibility. In “rocking the replicas back to their false start”, it’s the term “false start” that suggests the possibility of beginning afresh.

The throwaway last line can be read in several ways. It looks back to the earlier lines of the quatrain, that powerful triad of gerunds, which answered the command to “list the ways to frame a decommission”: “Marking each as put beyond use. / Keeping their provenance as you would art. / Rocking the replicas back to their false start.”) And, grammatically, the pronoun “it’s” refers to the “stay on stasis”. There’s a complicating idiomatic twist in the line. “It’s got to be efficient” can mean “it’s sure to be efficient” or “it will need to be efficient”. Then there’s the (attractive) potential for irony – “none of this is at all efficient”.

The poem decommissions neither optimism nor pessimism. It’s a finely balanced piece.