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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
Lisa Samuels
The Invention of Culture (2008) NEW
(previously published in Stride Magazine)
Lisa Samuels’ Paradise for Everyone contains 43 poems and they are in 43 different forms. This isn’t the only thing that distantly recalls Browning’s Men and Women, another triumph of universalist optimism. As with that great collection, you can spend days revelling in the fullness and variety of Samuels’ offerings, and you can also spend a few darker moments working on the nagging sense of limitation.
Cataloguing Samuels’ forms requires a somewhat different vocabulary from Browning’s; instead of trochee and triple-rhyme, we need to talk about parentheses, non-stanzaic spacing (of lines or words), justification, page dimensions, particles, French words, nonce-words and the letter U.
Oh, and iambics – occasionally. Sweep referentiality out of the door, and an unemployed music creeps in at the window. There’s some plainer examples in the book (one is quoted a little later), but I’m not talking here about ruthless regularity of the sort that the New Formalists have always been content with, nor about the brazen clodhopping that Ashbery has sometimes enjoyed. I really mean this:
or taking
the moment
further than
measurement
we could
call it
soporific sunshine
–
equivalent your
eyes
getting dimmer
by the
year folding
into dromedary
lashes –
[from ‘Something for you’]
That placing of the word “dromedary”, so you can hear all its humorous somnolence, is a piece of virtuosity that can only be called prosodic.
These highly worked forms, every one so
distinct, are no small part of my pleasure in
fearsome
predator of the leaving air
spent waking and spent experience
dangling
from the courses
and clearly
meant
________________
I’ve hardly taken to any
life at all
that is a penchant
for falling, a syllable
wreathed reckless on the
air
that I don’t mean, or
measuring
has habited us to
complicated beds
where we do or do not
say the things
we are. I’ve taken
to adjusting from afar
You might surmise that my revel with Samuels’ forms is me marooned on a mudflat with nothing but a broken TV, and starting to enjoy tracing the circuitry. Transmission is actually fairly full-on, but unlike the melodies it doesn’t stay penned within a single page. Even so tiny and contained a poem as this:
Upwind
animal pause
the sally paths
unquiet lope
we all should have
a soothing urge
a dining win
the hands taut
round the shape
we’re in
carries only a modest charge without awareness of the rest of the sequence, its interest in the mammalian rhythms of breathing, air and speech, its more specific awareness of how – unlike us – ants don’t have the ‘divisible expenditure’ of lungs (‘The host of questions’), or how – unlike us – trees live mainly in their outer cambium, which is essential to the line ‘beseeching trees to strip their bark and hide’ in ‘Riddle poem’.
Even in the brief excerpts from the two poems above, it’s apparent how, despite the radical change in character as we move from one to the other, there are continuities of interest and feeling, or in this case falling.
The book’s title announces preoccupations with the antediluvian myths of Genesis that are pervasive. Rather obviously we are involved in lapsarian material in ‘The operator in question’ and ‘A suitable expression’; more pervasively with movements that involve falling, collapse and rupture. Less obviously the poems address volition (‘Connubial bliss’, ‘The rack of consent’), nakedness and dressing, not to mention eating the fruits (the whole sequence ends with the delicious and deadly ‘Fruits of conviction’).
But still, I have a sense as I’m writing this that these extracted themes are far from central to what the poems are. Analysis itself, the poems repeatedly assert, is not at all what it claims to be:
rationality
is after-the-fact
to
make something that doesn’t matter against the desire
for
matter
requires
you to be as empty as the tools....
there
is no through to get through
[from ‘Nun walking naked..’]
Besides, through many readings I’ve become awkwardly aware that visiting the same poem at different times can induce extremely contrary ideas of its feeling and direction, and I believe that’s an important aspect of Samuels’ art. A poem such as ‘The Doctrine of Equivalents’ has a full hand of pronouns (one, her, their, we, you, I’m, you) but the pronouns don’t seem to be stable references to persons, so on one reading it might seem to speak of a community and the next time of a movement within a single mind. By the same token a poem that seems to be serenely contemplative might next time seem impacted by violent passions. And curiously, it doesn’t matter which; ‘The rack of consent’, for example, remains steadily incandescent. This is how it begins:
The world in all
magnificence surrounded by rope –
It protrudes in animundo,
flaccid and succulent like tongues
your lying articles
have reached me and the moment
here, unbraced, as
if for turpitude, innuendo
what she said and
what was said by her lies
quivering on the floor
quite meshed, unseemly
or then
forest-bound – like trees
taken to the side and
opportuned
for speaking in a
language I no longer understand
It was – like that – toast,
a word for toast
and what we ate
crumbling each other
it wasn’t meant to
reach the same confusion we caused
infructuous,
cohabiting like pears wrecked on a plate
The whole poem, which develops wildly from this opening, I take to be Samuels at her very best (I already mentioned the letter U, didn’t I?). As physical as it is philosophical, it typifies the kind of place where our best poets are beginning to exert pressure and it’s beginning to give, with startling results. It gets me every time – that trick of infiltrating the baffling darkness of “opportuned” so the ear accepts it as “importuned”. This is anti-personification of a high order.
(2005)
The Invention of
Culture (2008)
(first published in Intercapillary Space.)
Alightened
in arriviste trances
these moving theme projectiles
thistle wind shoots past the barbaric
posterior arrangements, enhanced difficulties
These are the opening lines of "Maze: a play in the round", and from the very first word, indeed the very first syllable, we're adrift in a medium that in honour of the author I'll call "Lisa English" (LE), in contrast with Standard English (SE), the language in which we write reports, read reviews, that kind of stuff. I'm aware that this monolithic idea of a standard vehicle is wrong, but I think I can use it in this context, the same kind of way that you can still use Newtonian mechanics so long as you don't take too long over it. Also wrong is the suggestion that LE is an entirely individual invention, quite the contrary, it is just one variant of an immense communal creation - for example, that particular use of "these" in line 3 happens (for me) to recall John Wilkinson - and someone with total knowledge of modern poetry would perhaps be able to write family trees for most of LE's techniques.
Part of the fascination of LE is trying to connect it with source materials in SE, sort of playing the alienation backwards and de-alienating it. Thus:
LE: Alightened
SE: Enlightened crossed with alight, the a- prefix as in "Corinna's going a-Maying", etc.
LE: moving theme
SE: movie theme
LE: posterior arrangements
SE: prior arrangements
"Maze: A Play in the Round". As often, the title is learned buffoonery, with a characteristic slight dissonance, i.e. between the occlusion of a maze and the open-air vistas suggested by a play in the round. Reading the poem, one forgets the title. You cannot easily say what any of these poems is about: LE chimes with meaning, but it does not mean things in the way that SE does. There's a lot here about arrivals and departures, and a continuous play with eyes and shooting (SE: shooting a glance at someone). You can see those motifs getting under way in the lines quoted above. At any rate the poem betrays conflicted situations - in which shots, of course, play a large part - and enacts various attempts to put the lid on them: eyes are sealed, mouths bound, bandages interact with "the finest interwoven cloth" (of a poem in a book). The poem ends up here:
all the polished antitheticals
are pent and spilled and rued
on the path of eyeishness, the lines intrude
(In my review of Samuels' Paradise for Everyone (2005) I said a lot about the formal resourcefulness of the poems, so I'm leaving that aspect on one side
here.) What I do want to notice is how the polish of these closing lines as it were concentrates, anyway does not succeed in battening down, the feeling in the poem. When you first read delightedly through the 45 poems in this book, you can maybe think - I did - that Samuels' virtuosic command of her instrument, her philosophical sophistication, must be superior to the
passions of mortals. But it isn't so. In "Maze", the uncomfortable "Witness", and above all the immense hostile weather-systems of "Fire skin with the cell-phone execution on" the untidy, splattered pages tell a story. But sometimes this is less obvious:
Everyone agrees and you have culture
The elect,
morphemically engrossed
is
beautiful, his haunch par terre
like the
horsey appended to a carousel
whose
figures of motion self-deceive.
'Safari,'
he's telling me about it, one exquisite
fortitude
after another. We purr on land
in
grasses, on highways made of carpet
the pinks
of funerary curiosity
Not that
economy isn't the central basis of
blood
terror, but the woman in the cake
knew how
to get out of there fast
(he did
it, he stayed right there in his doubt!)
They all
smiled enormously their boundaries
lightened.
After that, one might hope to be thinking.
Hyperions
of crème brûlée, cities
one would
heretofore have no reason to spell.
The rage in this poem is quite contained, so perhaps you wonder,
immediately after reading it, if it was really there. But there's at any rate
no doubt about the sarcastic judgment in "exquisite" and
"beautiful". For our speaker, the single quoted word safari is sufficient to act as a
sociolinguistic marker - his subject, the non-western material made into
dominated leisure material and wondered at for its exotic spellings. And of
course, there is no doubt about the satire directed at that sycophantic
audience who suppose admiringly that "After that, one might hope to be thinking." That too sufficiently
denotes a sociolinguistic, class-marked register - but satire also implies an
inwardness with the satirized, you cannot really be wickedly funny about
something unless you know it from within. So the poem's onslaught is to a
certain extent directed against itself - it too is undeniably beautiful and
exquisite: how about those "Hyperions of crème brûlée"? Samuels, some
readers may feel, is troublingly at home in the Jamesian/Whartonian tea-party
of this poem, works the registers of nineteenth-century gentility almost too
expertly. Perhaps Samuels' enjoyment of such literary vacuities is her
equivalent to the long-running post-modern obsession with kitsch (e.g. Ashbery,
Koons), which continues to re-emerge transformed into the grotesque cutesiness
of the gurlesque, the sublime baseness of flarf, and so on.
But I've quoted this poem for another reason, also. It's time
to get back to LE and another of its basic methodologies, the consistent
adoption of words that strike us as approximate, hazy, blurred, not quite on
the money.
They all
smiled enormously their boundaries
lightened.
The SE equivalent is something like "their (mental)
horizons illuminated". But Samuels' way of putting it intrudes another SE
expression, "their burdens lightened". The implication, you may
think, is obvious in this case: the mental stimulation offered by the lecturer
is not what the consensual audience like to imagine. Boundaries have not been
pushed, new ground has not been broken: it's simply that mental limits have
been made to feel more comfortably bearable.
This is submitting the processes of LE to explanation, which
is not what I'm really interested in. More often the perversity of expression
has a different effect:
like the
horsey appended to a carousel
When you say the words "horse" (or horsey) and
"carousel", you don't really even need a word to explain how they are
joined together. Everyone knows that the horse is on the carousel. In the most common arrangement the horse moves up
and down on a vertical rod that plumbs in and out of a socket. No-one could
claim that "appended to" is a particularly good way of describing
this connection; on the other hand, what other word in SE would be a particularly good way? The wrong word for spatial
relationships is a characteristic device of Samuels' texts. It opens out for
us, if we let it, a peculiarly powerful means of proposing (without delimitedly
setting down) narrative. Try this (from the unpromisingly-titled "The Meal
of Your Choice"):
I found
your trapping coterie
fields, rowing
forward in a
claustrophobic sea
you reached roundabout
that dark
angled, and the new one
rising board by
board
feather
talk arranged, admonishing
the back which holds you
to a rare
and bracketed smile
woven
outward, that's a waiting
taking all the fire
breathing in
Go with the story, and it's thrilling. What pricks us into
discovering (or rather, creating) depth and background is the wrong
compositions: fields and rowing don't go together, sea is not claustrophobic, you
cannot reach roundabout darkness, boards are normally horizontal, weaving means
going inward not outward, etc. To each of these remarks you may append: Well, not normally, you can try to save
the appearances (e.g. a choppy sea is claustrophobic in a rowing boat, the
boards rise when the boat pitches...), and in these demurrals the poem's work
is done. There's quite a bit of this kind of "narrative" hidden away
in The Invention of Culture, if you
are determined to find it: "Lost and Found" convalesces within
earshot of a surf-torn tropical coast, and "Increment (A Family
Romance)" has you leafing through a multi-generational saga. But the
appearance of "narrative" can't be taken for granted: "The Five
Enslavements: A Novel in Four Parts" is much more tricksy, a play of
shadows masked by comically flailing attempts at literary phrase-making.
A very curious feature of LE is its predilection for certain
words - some extremely common, some less so - that (as you get acclimatized to
it) gradually draw attention to themselves by coming into use just a shade more
often than you can easily explain. Some of these, such as the recurrent
"hands", "eyes" and "air" are indeed hard to
miss: others, such as "back" and "admonish" (e.g. see the
extract above) emerge only after more sustained immersion. Others that I've
noticed: "skin", "saturate", "broken",
"paper", "figurine", "billow", "posh",
"sides", "beach", "arms", "head",
"bird", "dirt", "grasses", "trees",
"sullen", "mode", "ruse", "scarified",
"soft".
The Invention of Culture (title) hides
an ambiguity: is culture something we privately invent (as perhaps on beaches
or islands or tracing paths in the air), or are we ourselves "the
invention of culture"; as these endlessly intricate poems come into
existence, "invented" by the building blocks of LE that I listed
above? For after all culture is only invented in such unrespectable historical
theories as the Atlantean one about travelling Egyptians seeding culture in the
far corners of the globe, a theory that becomes momentarily prominent here in
"Egyptology" and "Young and Beautiful". And the islands
themselves turn out to conceal a debt to the acculturated: "The aisle is
full of noisy disregard" begins a poem seamed with Shakespeare's The Tempest.
Samuels' book hangs there in the ambiguity: both sides of the coin coexist
already within a cultural framework in which the ambiguity becomes disputable,
namely western individualism. And can that be uninvented? What you think about that probably dictates how you
react to the last poem in the book:
Anacoluthon
that's
that island there and I am not the day recedes
the man
standing in a memory of the man standing
if I had a
temple to relax in, it would be almond trees
those
abeyed above our heads with mild bitterness
leaves
tired having sprung in the spell
the news
is over before it can be called -
it's a way
of paying attention, that's the ticket
I have
governed for someone's sake though has it been -
and lovely
are the grasses, lovely the spell, the limbs cast upward
tellingly,
his little hands climb the air, purposeful
(the
youthful self he once was, lovely and externalized all nerves
and now
embedded, imbued, re-tigered)
underneath
the lemon tree all is forgiven
we suck
until our voices ring like bells
The bells that end the book are also doubly in the book's
first poem, and that "lemon" is also in the book's second poem. As
for islands, grass, trees, hands, limbs, heads, they are recurrent. Does
"the day recedes" recall Yeats' "the unpurged images of day
recede"? "mild bitterness" - bitter almonds, bitter lemon? This
poem is lazy in the irrealis:
"if I had a temple to relax in" - but is this what temples are meant
for? When I said irrealis I was also
thinking of another title - "Beneath the valley of the present indicative"
- the chiming milieu in which I'm wanderiing is distinctly subjunctive:
(2009)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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