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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
John Wilkinson
(first
published in Intercapillary
Space)
Mercator
or, "Merry co-star" as JW plays
around with the letters of the title. The poem (and the book) begins:
A lovers' shadow, thumbed
from waxy & ambitious
skins
Typical Wilkinson
over-determined image: the thumb shucking out the quarters of a grapefruit, the
pith revealed and overcast with the hand's shadow; squeezing a spheroid into a
2D projection, shape of two lovers curled up in one bed, and one of them is
ambitious. Everything here is meant, including the apostrophe and the
ampersand, which might be a logo of the poem's image. From that ambition springs
the anticipated political vector, aggressive
possession of the earth and all that is on it.
Dateline
I don't make much
of this - always a possibility because of Wilkinson's way of constructing
poems, but I'll remember the ending:
special effects
run the mill. Internal
motivation gallops in sealed units.
It's easy to
extract such memorably disenchanted nuggets about the way the world is going,
or perhaps has already gone; this one reminds me in a lonely way of that
novelty mouse-pointer that is a tiny horse galloping emptily. Lonely as
Wilkinson's world of people at work and play is, I think this poem is more
about international timezones than dating agencies. In W-world people
communicate rather than converse. The communication tends to be aggressive.
Abacus
The whole poem is
an exploded image similar to the one discussed earlier, this time based on the
abacus, of course with economic implication. One of the things that gets whirled into this mix is raindrops compared with beads
on a wire. Unfortunately that line of thinking tends to lead us off theologically
towards a First Mover who storms at us and who controls the only account there
is, and who shifts around the helpless victim-people-beads, themselves fattened
by pickings of His economy. But this monolithic theology tends to ignore the
specificity of human economies as cultural constructs.
Squared Off
The q in the final word,
"sequestered", trimly completes the last quarter. Quarters, old
rooms, are what this poem itemizes and doesn't return to.
either upon this stele, or
bellywise.
is how Wilkinson uses rhymes and textures. All
these opening poems have a disarmingly stiff four-square stanzaic appearance on
the page. As you read the poems what happens exposes a gaping tension between
that appearance of constraint and the wild pitching of the poem's directions.
Which is partly what this poem's about.
A Reasonable Settlement
"Those
poltergeists .... their clumsy, abstract
title-deeds...." This is a kind of expression that Wilkinson deploys a
great deal: what in abstract terms you might define as "demonstrative
adjective followed by fleering description".
Here's a few
more:
"this moon-/face" (Cité Sportif)
"these sowers of disorderliness" (Spiegeleisen)
"these ageing / heads of the town" (Marram Mat)
"these package deal finickers" (Shoal of the Ditto Ship)
Who is pointing
at what, is nearly always unasserted. It would be silly to interpret in the
gross. Still, it's an interesting question: what distinguishes a high-minded
critique of global capitalism from the barrage of street insults that are emitted
by capitalist processes in daily operation? Does anything? Who's really on the
moral high ground here: the mealy-mouthed critic, or the critic who tries to
come down to street level, or the street itelf, honest and spontaneous loathers
actuated by no critique at all?
Cité Sportif (four poems)
This is the first
of the major groups of poems (or is it one poem in four bits) that jut out like
dense challenges from the rest of
• Oxygen of suppression
• Suck-out from the dug-in
• The tell-tale account switch
wrist-flashing lane IDs
neon-clocked down the strip totally
what stamped
intelligence docket couldn't, can you
stomach, you
have no stomach which must be
superscription
documents sent ahead, to add up to
a fateful boy
dubbed incorrigible had from
birth or by neglect
traded for
time in blocks,
the flat
soles cushioned,
the Uzi clips
were shucked –
Cité Sportif rages wildly and is plainly and bitterly and often
brilliantly satiric. You can't ever pin down a JW poem to a single political
background, but the title reference is to the massacres in 1982 in the old
Camille Chamoun Sports Stadium in
Elevation to Rear Yard
"Pathways
frost the green field...." ah, a pastoral poem. But later, "pings
confirm paths", and perhaps the green field is a spectroscope or a radar. Either way the poem is bothered with the
pressure-drops of movement, skittering and frittering, "drumheads being
damped".
Trellis
Reviewing Andrew
Duncan's Conservatism book in Quid
12 (March 2004 - http://www.barquepress.com/quid12.pdf), Wilkinson briefly
turns aside to sketch contrasted formulations of two poetic avant-gardes: the
US "language poetry" group and the British "Cambridge"
group (the latter of course including Wilkinson himself) : "These
avant-gardes could be characterized broadly and in turn as a practice where the
text demands a work of 'completion' by the reader, specifically as a metatext
which identifies the theoretical debate in which the poem intervenes, assessing
its 'strategy' in that context; and a practice of over-completion, wrapping up
a counterfactual universe whose principles of organization the reader must
discern in some measure so as to enter and participate in its restructurings of
consciousness through language. ... an even bolder
sketch might distinguish between works having no inside and works having no
outside. More theoretically, folllowing Niklas Luhmann one might say that
'language poetry' is concerned with coding and therefore requires the reader to
supply its reference, while 'Cambridge poetry' is concerned with reference
(occurring only within a system of self-referentiality and autopoesis) and
exacts an observer's evaluation..."
Square Dance
premorse = ending abruptly, as if bitten off.
First Count
This is a desert
poem, waterholes overwhelmed by the distances between them. So
much for reference. A teasing feature of the contextual uncertainty is
the verbal repetitions: "pauses", "long pause"; or "Operant
/ crowds about that well thirst / licenses and bounty thirsting to be crushed
out". A certain obviousness in what the poem
seems to be about is combined with a certain obviousness in the choice of vocabulary:
a pause is a pause, what more is there to say? Thirst is thirst, what outré
poeticism is wanted? It's teasing because the poem also has a contradictory
bent towards such recondite words as "operant" and
"reversionary". You tend to think: this can't be as plain as it seems, and then it isn't; it stops
being about the desert, and becomes really about the desert. What I'm saying here applies mutatis mutandis to all this group of
short poems, from "Elevation" through to "Writ".
Trajectory
We're at work
again, on a "dry cough mission" - it's really remarkable how in
W-world no-one is ever at home. The trajectory is a fairly long timescale,
formation to death of stars. Then the star is conceded an inappropriate
causality: "Clamp our latest contrail" - a typical JW tactic that you
might link to the word "counterfactual" in that quotation.
Protractor
I break & then dream, re-
gearing, then breaks off.
Typical
concatenated sentence (dream is a verb in the first proto-sentence, the active
subject of the second). "Re-gearing" is that brief moment when the
pedal slips before encountering the new reassuring resistance. What really
clinches the ontological leap is the second "then", which is not
superfluous because we're now on a different plane with its own temporal
sequence.
Writ
"profligately", a word also found in
"Trellis".
Multistorey (seven poems)
This is the
second of those major groups, seven poems themselves subdivided into up to five
parts; to put it another way, 26 pages, each one as formidable as, say,
"Protractor". Opinions differ on what (if anything) can be said to be
unifying subject-matter: Jeremy Noel-Tod (Guardian review - http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/poetry/0,,1933427,00.html) suggested "civilisation and the
construction of living space". Quid
13 (IRAQuid 13), which I haven't seen,
apparently included "Multistorey" or some section of it among its
"poems in response to the atrocities at Abu Ghraib", but don't expect
grainy details of those horrible events. Another attempt to negotiate the
sequence could begin from the reiterated "brothers" and
"blue" in the final poem, or the pervasive birds, birdlime, gulls
etc. - living-space on a cliff, perhaps.
But
"Multistorey" also intermittently evokes one of those cavernous
car-parks, e.g. "strip system laid over
diesel-spotted dirt". Incidentally another
characteristic Wilkinson device, the ill-chosen metaphor. "Strip
system" might very aptly suggest the visual effect of ranks of vehicles in
different colours, but
because it also connotes ground, it is not sufficiently distinct from the dirt
itself. The reader's realization is deliberately troubled, the expression
deliberately impure.
Visitors
Wilkinson's
occasional use of a two-line stanza is unstable (see also
"Spiegeleisen", "Elementary Film") and these poems always
break up in due course.
Architecture
"Sometimes I
am unfeeling, / sometime love to folly" instantiates the uproarious
Wardour St parodies that crop up without apparent motive through the book,
contributing to the mixed signals about sociolinguistic context. Whether
"the fly-by-night / communicate on love's leash" should also be taken
as spoken without commitment, i.e. not as an epigram but as an ostentatiously
glib epigram, is less easy to decide. Can one solve this recurrent problem by
regarding everything in every poem as individually uncommitted, and only the
poems as a whole as expressions that the writer in some sense stands by? It's
not that easy, of course, e.g. try this, from "Multistorey":
their stuck-up integrity
plundering the biosphere,
rolls the thin mantle to a
lump sum.
Surely this
revels in the brilliant expression of an invective that it thoroughly commits
to?
Scamp
Ridge cucumbers:
outdoor varieties so-named because traditionally (though now rarely) grown in
raised beds known as ridges.
Stumble
"net the starry / dome of flight-paths" - see also
"Trajectory", etc.
Claim (tlc)
Talking of
which... A child's guide to Lake Shore
Drive might well kick off with this and with "Organize, Move and Back
Up", both of them generously vivid poems on definably political ground.
The use of technical vocab like "oedematous" can't really be called difficult now
that looking it up is a click away in Google; what's important is that the use
made of the word is immediately illuminating.
Electrolysis
A favourite
passage:
its tympanum, the
solidifying
lights clumps & bulks,
tapioca
gobs in cherryade, a syllabub
thinks up cloud, thinks
interference
lightning-lit
Andrew Duncan's
general complaint, c. 1995, that Wilkinson's recent poetry had become
unprofitably opaque, really doesn't seem usefully applicable to this latest
volume. Nevertheless it's well worth reading (http://www.pinko.org/17.html),
along with JW's indirect response (see earlier under "Trellis").
Step by Step
The grey escalator breaks, breaks,
lifts
grey teeth biting through
their comb shoe.
... And even
this, compressed evocation at a high level of virtuosity, with a superbly
relevant Tennysonian allusion in tow; the "traditional" craft of
poetry, the blur of a new speediness only just discernible.
Leda
Leda was
Iphigenia's grandmother. Briefly, it appears that Yeats was Wilkinson's
grandfather.
Iphigenia (eight poems)
This is the third
of the major groups. In our present times - in most times - allusions to
Iphigenia tend to evoke Euripidean pacifism. And certainly there's an invasion
going on in this poem: it's loud with helicopter-swooshes and is thrilling to
read. The expansive flow of the opening paragraph promises a continuity of
musical development and though it isn't long before jagged fractures and
general pauses disturb us the initial promise is never entirely flouted.
(You'll see what I mean if you read it back-to-back with
"Multistorey"). Not coincidentally, "Iphigenia" holds out
strange offers of simplicities ("small wonder", "simply
put"); of educated dramatic speech of the Penguin Classics variety
("Get on board now, get in, help up your father"); of archaic
ejaculations ("Queen of ships, chopper queen / Benign reaper"); of
statically hymnal chorusses replete with ritualistic repetitions. The
simplicity is only relative; for example, large sections pass outside the
military zone into consumerism and the food industry. Somewhere a little
outside these, too, stand ranks of the resourceless, the illegals and the dead.
The Shoal of the Ditto Ship
"One day
he'll wake with wings", says the epigraph, and these twelve frantic pages
are in incessant overdrive.
Slurping at dab nectar, woozy
comforters fall, denied access
by these fibrous bunches
spongiform at base – hey,
you trying to stick your
nose –
Know what's coming to you? –
Say you pass the horseradish
clockwise while at home?
Insolent to waiters? Get lost!
Ouch! Ouch! An apt little hound
rounds up misdeeds in flocks,
water thickens with tadpole-
dense performances, frogs
.....
"Ouch! Ouch!"
is from the Fall's "Cash'n'Carry" and that's
where I've heard this compulsive groove before, a heavyweight namesplattered
sort of light verse and quite irresistible.
Thelonius
You see, I was
right to mention music. The furious momentum is still carrying on from previous
poems and it gets into "Advanced Driving", too. Here it isn't too
long before summer insects cohere into the "crash apposition" and
"fly major minor" of a jazz-giant tribute, then disperses fondly into
buddleia cornets.
Advanced Driving
"Colonial
mahogany". As usual a poem that seems to be in one kind
of country soon seems to be in another; W-world has a supreme indifference to
such comfy mental compartments and routinely attacks them.
Organize, Move and Back Up
Somewhere down
the bottom of the poem's layers is a real lament for rain-forest commoditisations,
destructions and extinctions. At the same time the poem is aware of the
compromised nature of the western voice evoking the alient culture that is
unsayable, secret, and disappears on exposure. This text too, jumbled with film
titles, DVDs to be returned, and the ultimate floormix, is compromised. To be
impure is better than to let it pass? The poem isn't sure; finds its uneasy resting-place
instead in the dissipation of the alien slit of "slit gong, eye slit, slit of the vulva" into "list" and finally
"silt".
Holidays in the Sun
"SUVs, APVs
dropping their children off": Sport Utility Vehicles, Armoured Patrol
Vehicles.
Spiegeleisen
(ferromanganese alloy).
View from the Air
"Syllabled
elegance makes a goose of itself / on purpose..." the poem begins, as if
meaning to set about traditionalist versifiers for good and all. If it's they
who leak into the diction of the poem then "traditionalist" is barely
adequate to describe such ancient plaintiveness as "must implementation
lie subordinate so / to fateful bands" or such pulpit austerity as
"their ductwork / stretches unto the first supplier". But perhaps the
real target of the poem is not so much poets as, that equally suspicious group,
poetry readers - a string of terms: "evidence", "delicate
fragments", "attention", "shows", "reveals",
"second-guessing", "encompass".
Taking Flight
In this fable of
the bees it's suggested that even the drones might, in a Mandevillian spirit,
happen to "reinstate / a corporate earth, shocked-still waters". As
the last image hints, this outcome isn't entirely happy, since at some point
the helplessly humane flow gets thoroughly screwed.
Steam Cuisine
"xenomorphic": referring to the film Aliens, as also later when a nail scores
a microwaveable pack and an exotic "births itself in steam".
"Slot children" needs further elucidation: it's a term connected with
Chinese-American immigration but the Journal
of Immigrant Health (where Google found this) isn't available online:
readers please advise in comments and I'll update this
note.
In Camera
Blues-style
repetitions of opening lines has surprising effects; one of them, to resolve the poem
(that is, the way it's read) instantly into lyric.
Elementary Film
... an effect that carries over into this one. "After Abbas
Kiarostami", says the subtitle - the Iranian film-maker and poet. Maybe you
could read this as a Kiarostami-style narrative with long takes, occlusions,
wrenched point of view, a calm rhythm of repetitions, etc.
Road Kill
A list of
concepts that crop up in Lake Shore Drive
with sufficient frequency to be statistically arresting: sheaves (and other
agrarian words), birds (of various kinds), stars, flights, bulk, paperwork (such
as dockets, letterheads), cables/wires/trunking, lemurs.
Karelian Birches
The
sentimental-poetaster title is intentional, a nostalgia later re-aroused by
"a Karelian snuff-box" (made of birch). And as it turns out, expectations
of a descriptive holiday poem are not utterly dispelled by circular saws,
leaden sky, or even "cantilevered blocks of blood". Yet Karelia is a
weighted choice: the imaginative locus of Finnish Romantic-Nationalist "Karelianism"
in Sibelius and others is no longer part of Finland and does not now contain a
Karelian culture, its pre-War Karelian population dispersed through the rest of
Finland or Russified or compulsorily transferred to other Soviet republics to
the extent that a "return" no longer makes a simple kind of sense; it
is a Russian-speaking area.
Marram xxxx (ten poems)
The
last of the major sequences. The "xxxx" is a placeholder for various words, e.g.
"Marram Clutch", "Marram Mat", etc. Of "Marram
Grass" Joyelle McSweeney says: "The model of the leveling verge,
dump, marsh, or margin might be the most optimal in this book, a superior
alternative to the gruesome urban visions related elsewhere" (read the
whole review at http://www.zolandpoetry.com/reviews/wilkinson.htm) - a comment
that might have influenced my ideas about the resting-place in "Organize,
Move and Back Up". There is a calming
beauty in the abrasions and water-worn siftings of debris. Yet
"optimal" isn't a good term. It should apply to a programme for
change, not to a therapeutic vision that the eye interprets symbolically. Anyway,
these poems are not simply, though they are to a pleasing extent, descriptions
of the littoral in its natural aspect: "Marram Mat", for example, is
more concerned with the built environment of poolside; "Marram
Clutch" is a mock-Keatsian effusion that ends drunkenly; "Marram
Nursery" a
John Wilkinson's
(2007)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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