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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael
Peverett |
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF WESTERN CULTURE
by Michael Peverett
Denise Riley
(first published
in Intercapillary Space)
[The three poems I write about are all available on the internet
- check out the links.]
Some
of these endlessly exhilarating poems flow around a foreign ingredient. More
accurately I ought to say that all poems are made out foreign ingredients, but
the ones I'm talking about are marked up for attention (in the title or
epigraph or whatever). Everyone knows about "A misremembered lyric" [http://uk.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=5702&x=1],
which interthreads pop song lyrics including "Something's gotten hold of
my heart" -
A misremembered lyric: a soft catch of its song
whirrs in my throat. 'Something's gotta hold of my heart
tearing my' soul and my conscience apart, long after
presence is clean gone
The
poem misremembers it just the same way a lot of other people in the
"A
Nueva York" [http://jacketmagazine.com/20/pbs.html#sdr] is another of
these. The epigraph comes from Alphaville
(1965), to which the title also alludes ("Nueva York" is where
Natacha Von Braun is said to have been born). The epigraph: 'In order to create
life, it is merely necessary to advance in a straight line towards all that we
love' - this was the cry of a man excuted by the pool beauties, itself nearly a
quotation from a poem in Paul Eluard's "Le Phénix" (1951) - (later,
one of Natacha's own speeches is also loosely based on Eluard's poem). But
anyway, it's specifically the English subtitle that is Riley's founding ingredient.
Within the poem it pokes its head up at various points, swimming strongly, as
the
private affections
the statement of the need to merely
head directly;
go straight
ahead
In
fact the poem's set-up poses as a tranquil discussion of Eluard's dictum
(tranquillity unrippled by some unheard cries, dispensing with them as
"individual wilfulness"...); this occupies about the first half; then
it kind of explodes into kinetic and mesmerizing display, like this:
No era
changes palaces, old burr of swallows
lavender that prime spring I broke
through the abyss. Master I spoke
directly an arrow through me, ice?
questions come in fits a small pony
a name dragged across the sun eel-like
to me poor thing you think to be at the
centre skin of the royal worm, egg,...
It's
the apparent simplicity of the Godard/Eluard advice that Riley plays off
against an intuition of the ultimate obscurity of directness - by going there
so directly you find yourself with a haziness about how you arrived, which is
what we're left with at the end of the poem, when it subsides from its own
fireworks:
Fear is
marvellous and simultaneity,
this morning
the tombs swollen the mouth's rock.
Between us we came down to the clear world
and went out together to observe the stars.
"Between"
is a slight correction to the drift of the quote - no single person advances
actively towards a passive assembly of loved objects; instead the movements are
communal, there is always simultaneity. The sequence Alphaville,
Having
got this far, you can go back to the poem and see that its opening passage
develops the "slight correction" to Eluard just described: the
"private affections" is the way it pours cold water on Eluard's
"all that we love". But is the relation between the poem and its
foreign element now a matter that is cleared up? Not at all: the emphasis on
simultaneity, which picks up the idea of a seasonal change in the poem's
opening, is really undermined by the blithe flow of "this morning Paris
this morning Saigon" - they are not simultaneous times of day, nor is
morning a good time for looking at the stars.
And this new opposition reminds us of something evasive in that strident
opening line
I would do it for you but not here
-
This "I" is beautifully enunciating a reason for personally doing
nothing at all; in fact, has more than a little in common with the
problematically hubristic "man of dry vision" who later advises his
disciples to "go straight ahead to where I'll find you". The poem can
be read endlessly, and its movement through that kinetic storm is endlessly
thrilling, but the lyric temptation to mark itself as morally normative is
choked off.
"'Outside
from the Start'" [http://uk.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=5707&x=1]
develops from its title in quotation marks, not quite a quotation as it turns
out. Merleau-Ponty's sentence is supplied in the endnote: "Nothing
determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but on the
contrary because I am from the start outside myself and open to the
world." This is from The
Phenomenology of Perception (1945), a book that must have influenced
Riley's own thinking about identity. (Sample it here: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8xOAkQwIOsIC&printsec=frontcover&dq=denise+riley+selves&sig=KPuqEbyW9Gbr7LUJlGbd3YhpOdI#PPP1,M1
) - Riley refers again to Merleau-Ponty's remark on p. 44.
This
is to suggest that the relationship of the foreign ingredient with the rest of
the poem is, comparatively, non-adversarial. But neither are cool judges, both
are already conflicted.
I
The
first section has one unforgettable, mobile image:
- something unskinned me, so
now it bites into me - it has skinned me alive,
I get dried from dark red to dark windspun
withered jerky....
It's
snatched away from you so fast that the transformation from peeled damson to
skinned human flesh to dried twirling rasher leaves only a trace of horror; the
timing is comically breathtaking, as is the way the word "red" gets
put to bed in "withered".
II
The
second section stands under a lime tree, casting a glance upwards through "hot
leaves, veined with the sun" - it's difficult to do this without
constantly being blinded by gobs of sun, so the acid green that is the way one
has learnt how to describe lime leaves is mainly an importation -
"draining the watcher's look of all colour". But
"importation" would suggest that there is a core individual
experience, something more authentic - just what the title of the poem calls
into question.
III
The
section begins with a tongue in the ear, "as brown and flexible as a young
giraffe's", another mobile and comic image, so rapid is the subliminal
shuttle through violation and eroticism contained within this mildly
exasperated admiration.
So
far the poem's connection with its epigraph is really quite straightforward and
satisfying, as if executed from a recipe: take an idea and strike brilliant
pictures out of it. But no Riley poem is ever that comfortable. When the third
section begins to elongate, the trouble, which is the poem, really begins. Similes
become too obtrusive, natural description becomes trifling - oystercatchers are beautifully, but somehow
mechanically, poeticized as "coral beaks dab at froth", and a certain
frustration turns from the admitted seductions of "blank pennywort
charm" (the coin-shaped leaf has no economic device stamped on it); the
effort of this elongation turns into air-shots - "punch of now that rips
the tireless air".
IV
Still,
the poem carries on trying to pursue the line it took at first. From the
clopping "heart on legs" of the first section to the upright stalking
of the third to this:
lumping across sterile air it counts itself
lonely and brave. At once it festers.
Finally
it gets to shaping an apotheosis which affects us as strong even when the sense
of the words is the utter illusoriness of the supposed struggle in which the
lyric is imagined to be strong.
High on itself, it sings of its own end, rejoicing
that this cannot come about. Because I am alive here.
V
The
poem decides to become fatuously rhymed and to make the shapes of political
gesture: nature is now recast in the Victor Hugo manner: "The muscled
waves reared up"; it rises (with help from the movement of Housman's
"blue remembered hills") to the noble strains of
no setback for the partners of democracy
who portioned barnyards out to each volost
while florid in the twilight, Nation stood
alight above the low dismembered good.
"Partners
of democracy" means, I suppose, financial partners: sometimes it does look
like democracy can be owned, we uneasily concur. On the other hand,
"dismembered" looks like a way of burying the good news of "shared".
Patently, it isn't a political lyric to espouse; considering the massacre of
lyric pretensions that's preceded it, this shouldn't be a surprise, but it is.
VI
This
is only one disenchanting path though the poem. (There is no sixth section, but
you scratch around looking at the note about Merleau-Ponty, and wondering what
happened to the thrill of liberation it seemed to promise.)
You
look back over the poem, noticing how "alight" picks up "the
piney trees their green afire" in the third section. "Piney
trees" - "rooky wood" - "rainy marching in the painful
field"... 'Outside from the Start' is
full of canonical clutter. You wonder why in the trombone pomposity of this ending
the low-key "alight" displaces, for instance, an energetic
"flaming", and then you see how the officialese meaning of
"alight" ("passengers are asked to take care when
alighting...") spangles the line with a kind of genteel reluctance to
dirty one's feet (or hands) with suffering. I say "you" but I mean
"I" - or rather, I think the Merleau-Ponty implications for identity
rather affect the reader's poetic as well as the poet's.
"Like
many others, I imagine, I can only leave
a poem alone once it no longer resembles any product of mine..." (The Words of Selves, p. 62). But this writer's game requires, ideally, a
reader who is as reluctant to discover what the writer has eliminated. If 'Outside from the Start' takes the shape
of a fall from grace, you can go round again and find that this redeems the
lyric, and go round again and find that the redemption sullies it. And when
this recession is seen to be endless, then the thrill of liberation seems
tangible again, and the poem walks, though awkwardly, as in one of those
clopping or lumping images mentioned earlier. The playfulness of the language
is out in the sun again, to cause more trouble.
Note:
In Conductors of Chaos (ed. Iain
Sinclair, 1996), the first of the five parts of "Outside from the Start"
was presented as if it was the entire poem. I can't be the only reader who
experienced a mild sense of bafflement at why such a broad trajectory seemed to
drop off so abruptly.
(2008)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael
Peverett |
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