|
A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
|||||
A BRIEF HISTORY OF WESTERN CULTURE
by Michael Peverett
Section 9. 2004-Now
Contents
(Note: entries marked with a * are separate HTML
files. Click on the link to get to them. You can't get to them just by
scrolling further down this page!)
ahadada reader 1 (2004) Alan Halsey, John
Byrum, Geraldine Monk
Charity-shop
chuckouts (2005) notices at the last
June (2005) hairy
tare and general silveriness
Lisa Samuels: Paradise /
Invention (2005, 2008)*
NEW
Rosanna Warren:
Departure (2005) inches of topsoil
Mark Ford
and Rosmarie Waldrop (2005) two poet-critics
in action
Arielle Greenberg: My Kafka Century (2005) string of milk-teeth
Elizabeth Willis: The Great Egg of Night (2005) parataxis in pieces
Thomas Kinsella: Marginal Economy (February 2006) residue pamphlet
Four poets: Lew, Peterson, Rakusa, Sutherland (2006) stacks of unread plays
John Wilkinson, Lake Shore
Drive (2006)* notes on all the
poems
Catherine Daly (b. 1967)* a literature
rob mclennan: aubade (2006) facing unit
Leevi Lehto: Lake Onega and Other Poems (2006) NEW
Jessica Smith: Organic Furniture Cellar (2006) memory-grid and
islands
Richard Makin: St Leonards (2006-) after seven chapters...
Alice Notley: In the Pines (2007) being stifled
My haul (hours in a library) (2008) Brigid Brophy, Sir Geo Etherege, Hroswitha,
etc
Alan Halsey, John Byrum, Geraldine Monk
[First published as a book review in Stride Magazine, 2005.]
ahadada reader 1 by Alan Halsey, John Byrum, Geraldine Monk,
85pp, Ahadada Books (2004), Meikai University, 8 Akemi, Urayasu-shi, Chiba-ken,
Japan 279-8550
This isn’t a ‘Reader’ in the sense of being a kind of best-and-most-accessible selection for students, like the venerable James Joyce Reader, for example. In fact you could argue it’s not for reading at all, at least so far as John Byrum’s concerned. His work doesn’t really fit into book format, which might be one way of making sense out of the wan grisaille of ‘Approximations’.
I can’t quote from ‘Approximations’. No, I’m not being lazy, I mean this literally. I could tell you some of the words I found in it, but it isn’t a text. It’s visual poetry, and you can’t detach the verbal element from the graphics. It triumphantly fails the ‘Blake test’ proposed by Ron Silliman, who claims that the words of a poem should always be able to do their business when taken away from their original context. That seems a pretty good definition of what visual poetry isn’t. It isn’t illustrated poems, or poems used as calligraphy exercises.
So what are we going to talk about? We could talk about Byrum’s ideas, which are basically about merging and dispersing the category of art into well, human activity itself. That seems a logical destination for visual poets. You can see their work being exciting on the website of Byrum’s Generator Press; much more exciting visually than the monochrome of ‘Approximations’.
In principle, a visual poet needn’t be skillful with the linear disposition of words that we call ‘writing’ at all. ‘Approximations’ could have been designed to test that principle. Byrum chooses the most lifeless kind of intertextual theorising about art as the material for his pages; the sort of text so gnarled and over-familiar that it looks like some forgotten essay that you wrote yourself when you were really worried sick about something else.
This, for example, is the text of one double page, big white letters inside two identical grey oblongs:
|
cyclica ltropes
reveali ngconc ealing |
oneth ingint ermso fanot her |
No question but that you can read this off as ‘cyclical tropes revealing concealing one thing in terms of another’ – Oh, please! But the presentation brings submerged sounds out of their prisons. ‘ngconc’ begins with a liquid (though indefinable) vowel and ends with a hard k-sound. ‘reveali ermso’ wriggles across the middle of the page. More to the point, this has occupied two whole precious pages of the Reader’s modest 85 – and the next five are on the same gigantic scale. Never mind, Byrum makes up for it later with three pages of text so small and cramped that I accepted the invitation not to read it, merely to enjoy the interference patterns. In ‘Approximations’, neither text nor space has an inherent value. But in your mind it does. The pages I’ve, well, ‘quoted’, look opulent, a half-naked penthouse. The cramped later pages are slum tenements.
*
You would think that the instantly visceral power of graphics might lead to an art full of passion. That isn’t how it turns out, not here anyway. In the middle of the word ‘approximations’ is the word ‘proxy’ (as Byrum’s text flat-footedly points out), a defining image of modern poetry. Whatever real things there might be out there, the modern poet doesn’t feel anything about them because they’ve all been endlessly spun in the discredited virtuality of the media. Consider these phrases from Alan Halsey’s section of the Reader:
Terra In-
Cognita known &
anticipated only as an Under-
Song by sub
Tler suppressed initials
unified by natural
Contingency....
So even Terra Incognita is already qualified by hordes of past participles.
severall wayes of flying
I have now forgott
A little tease. You’d like to know about that, wouldn’t you?
‘There was a time when
people forgot
their responsibilities.’ At
Harken Energy
phantoms priced the bad news
in without a negative spot-
light. ‘Everything,’ the ex-director said, ‘seemed easy.’
So the bad news doesn’t seem bad, and even the lively words “harken energy” are smeared by being a trade name.
Certain mendacious
emendations
such as asterisks
for airstrikes.
Are you supposed to feel indignant and horrified about airstrikes? No, just notice a clever pun.
Or here, finally, are some shorter phrases: ‘hoovered goodwill’, ‘sugared safeguards’, ‘a library garbled’, ‘For ‘faculty’ read ‘faulty’’, ‘a sign saying DANGER or DANCER’**. Every noun comes ready-wrapped in cynicism.
It seems fairly appropriate to quote Halsey out of context. You’re never too sure how many of the words are his anyway, and he often builds page after page out of decontextualized quotes of other people.
The few attempts I’ve seen at dealing with his work seem to throw their hands up and just regard him as a force of nature. I think I can agree with that. His writings are the dark side of the moon, and reading them from the front isn’t very profitable. They have a recognizable cast of mind, of course. They are basically belittling. Every promise is a false promise, every word and action discredited. It produces an oddly liberating kind of equality.
Halsey’s favourite ornament is the pun. At one point he says:
A pun’s a written-out’s
blast or boast weapon in or upon class or crass struggle.
A sentence that, typically, manages to trash itself. Occasionally I find Halseyan word-play bracing – for example, ‘Wall to wall coverage on Cogito Live’, or ‘the cutting-room ceiling’. For every mind-expanding goodie like that there’s a mass of ‘uniform as cuneiform’ and ‘literal or littoral’ where the pun is manifest only in its negative aspect, as a way of reducing significance, not adding to it. The pun drains away the potential strength of the unpunned word.
But to see Halsey’s writing more fully one needs to be constantly thinking about what it doesn’t openly express. At one point he talks illuminatingly about an ‘emblem firewall’ and I follow the suggestion that, though the writing on the page consists of belittling emblems, these are a very screened version of what lies beyond that firewall.
Consider, for example, the ongoing composition that is extracted here, ‘Lives of the Poets’. This consists of a series of short sections headed by the names of British poets – generally, what were once called “silver poets” – of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. I think none of the words are Halsey’s own – they are all either the poet’s or contemporary with the poet’s life. For example:
GABRIEL HARVEY
no bones to take the wall of
what good liking Maister
Dyer had of youre Satyricall Verses
happiest Inuentor of the
English Hexameter
ink-squittering Howliglasse
in Newgate
Piers Penniless the
Pamfletter says borrows my name
I recognize some of the sources here (Spenser, Nashe), but it’s probably best not to. At least I hope not, because nearly all the other ‘Lives’ are outside my range. Anyway, vividly collaged as this is, it clearly denies the satisfaction that one might have hoped for from that hallowed title ‘Lives of the Poets’. What did we really want? A narrative in which the subject poet goes about doing things? – But, a narrative told by whom? Or perhaps an interpretation of the poet’s significance, whatever that might mean? Halsey’s ‘Lives’ aren’t biographies, and they even avoid the commentary of punctuation. They are, however, lives; or at least bits of them. So why all jumbled, then? Because that’s the way it was, perhaps – in their lives, which are not their works.
Here Halsey’s procedures are turning a spotlight on the integrity of the various things that we mean by authors and their lives. And it’s surprising what comes out of this self-denying and humane project. Gabriel Harvey’s heaviness and suspicion are perhaps encoded in the lines above; at least, they seem so to me. But conceptions of a unified character or personality are themselves under review here – the poets themselves, from such different eras, wouldn’t have had anything like the same conceptions as me, or each other.
*
The challenge of John Byrum’s and Alan Halsey’s work is, in some sense, to avoid reading it as poetry – at any rate, not as poetry the way we have known it. The difficulties of Geraldine Monk’s poems are somewhat different – perhaps, to take them seriously enough. Her voice is playful, populist, impatient with pretension and highly resistant to being told how to speak. That must be what Andrew Duncan meant when he said ‘Perhaps it's significant that she has a command of oral skills, to go with her acute lack of academic skills’. ‘Manufractured Moon’, the first piece in her selection, is pretty much in ‘Dear Diary’ format, and it reads like she took about as much time over it as someone dashing off evening emails, which is unnerving as well as pleasing.
(Subject: Falling Outs)
The blind even quivered at
the iddy girl tungsten thin and burning bright fell out with all gods in a big
way such as only youngage can with starry id. They conjured miniature animals
for warfare but they readily scorched and rebelled.
The lambs a-lit
Its face turned a shiny
teaspoon to the
west beam
that was.
Always always,
Getha.
When, towards the end of ‘Manufractured Moon’, there’s a complex and marvellous three columns of listening out of the open car window to voices in the street, you’ll be convinced that this is a much more worked piece than it might appear in extract. But though there’s many games to play here I’m not satisfied overall. Recurring images of an apostle who might be a sashaying female*, or an annoying stranger under the streetlight outside, or a Freudian nursery rhyme about crossing a golden river to bring our father’s dinner, are woven together and produce an insomniac, sensually hungry fabric. But my appreciation is, too much, at the level of picking out and admiring shiny teaspoons.
‘Latitudes’ undersells itself too, with weary ha-ha subtitles like ‘Eulogy written in an unmarked Northern city pub’, but this strikes me as an altogether more pointed sequence, omitting everything but strictly functional words (which, with enviable sophistication, manage to look completely casual). It’s the same kind of approach that Monk takes to using the space on the page.
Consider this highly ambiguated northern meditation on southern countryside, and its eloquent line-breaks:
Alchemical minds turn
cold boreal winters to
molten
gold and
all
roads flanked with
hedgerows and horses – swish
and
rush and
giddy curves of thatch.
Dumbswept. Vibrant. Earth-hug.
Or the ending of a not-at-all grave meditation in a summer graveyard, which keeps flying upwards, and keeps getting more serious:
Growth gang. Ging and.
Blue chipped. Marble.
Date to date. A hands span. A spirit cheer. Clinks.
Let’s fly.
Lark.
Rich one. Poor one.
Beggar both. The
opposition to life is
massive and sustained.
Innings and out.
Clock.
Tock.
Cuckoo.
The graveyard sections are paired with pub sections. So now read this:
It is still night. It is still day. It is moving. Timeless.
The traffic.
The cues.
The ebb and flow and chink
of glasses.
The spills.
The queues.
Lay the two passages thus alongside (e.g. ‘cheer. Clinks’ next to ‘chink of glasses’) and you’ll register the echo effects that someone who listens to every sound and rhythm can deploy to create an intently focussed exploration of society out of bird-song doodles.
Monk’s selection ends with three poems that
are, a little more directly than the others, about the worsening international
situation and the
stuckup on thorn hedge
hemmed in
broderie anglaise
capped
pearlies kink the may day
blossom floss
a fly pass is
buzzing her maj
at enormous expense
the sky streaks red white
blue
on blue
It takes more than lateral thinking – lateral feeling, maybe – to connect dental flossing with the Red Arrows. So, yes, I conclude that someone who insists on saying ‘her maj’ and talking about ‘pearlies’ is nevertheless someone I do take seriously. Whether you do or not, you ought to keep a watchful eye on a poet who falls out with so many gods.
* Note: The female apostle in ‘Manufractured Moon’.
I didn’t know when I wrote this, because I hadn’t read schlockbusters like The Da Vinci Code and Holy Blood, Holy Grail, but they’ve aroused much popular interest in the highly effeminate St John of Leonardo’s Last Supper. It took a TV program to bring me up to speed. The books place Leonardo in the legendary Priory of Sion, keepers of the secret of the holy bloodline, and they identify the figure not as John but as Mary Magdalene, Jesus’ wife and the mother of his daughter Sarah. The relevance of this popular conspiracy theory background to Monk’s poem, if there is any, isn’t clear to me – and “leaning too willowy to Christ” is not the posture in Leonardo’s wall-painting – just the opposite, the two figures lean away. Perhaps Monk’s playful meditation on cake (“Was Sara Lee a gypsy?”) might make some reference to the “bloodline”. The conspiracy theory isn’t just a joke, after all – for example, it releases the potential for a feminist critique (and revision) of Christianity. But though any specific relevance to ‘Manufractured Moon’ escapes me I’m quite sure that this connection illustrates Monk’s hotline into popular culture, one of the things that interests me most about her writing, and a major source of its strength. What I also like about Monk’s work is that it’s never ironic. It makes fun of things, loves and detests and dismisses them, but it doesn’t manifest any security in its judgment, any superior class-consciousness. Most British poetry does (as it always has), and not even very subtly.
** cf. Charles Tomlinson, ‘Autumn Piece’: “and at a curve was a red /
board said ‘Danger’: / I thought it said dancer.”
(2005)
This is not about then, but about now. I’m clearing out, the way you want to sometimes, things that can go to Barnardos. Books, tapes and bric-a-brac.
Let’s start with the books. The first one
is a Ladybird book with a smiling old lady on the front-cover. The lady is
wearing a triple rope of pearls and she has pearl ear-rings to match; a floral
dress. The eyes are kind, the smile perky, posed, and with a touch of
authority, as if the photographer ought to feel lucky to get it. It is H M
Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, and the author is Ian A Morrison MA Ph D.
In sepia at the age of seven, looking out winsomely from a cosy wrap, she was
Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. Robert the Bruce and Owen Glendwr were ancestors,
the family had owned
were eleven and six years
old before their father and mother were unexpectedly made King and Queen.
Instead of taking Court life as their model, their parents looked on family
life as a sanctuary in which people could develop despite the pressures on them
in the outside world. The happiness of her own early days seems to have guided
the way she and her husband decided to bring up their own family. This is
important, because the pattern of family life that she set with Albert then...
has been continued through to her grandchildren’s generation. Many people feel
that this feeling of the Royal Family being a real family has contributed a lot
their continuing popularity in the last part of the 20th century.
As more recent commentators have pointed out, this investment in the idea of a nuclear family has in the end risen up to bite her successors. If you want to maintain that vision it’s best to lose your husband early and become famous for your madeira at Clarence House.
Next book: Beer and Skittles by Richard Boston (1976). This is a document in the early days of campaigns for “real” beer. I suppose it was bound to start with alcohol; subsequently the same powerful feelings, of nostalgia for what has been lost and suspicion of profiteering technology that seems outside our control, has extended to food. Draught beer was rescued for CAMRA, the nurturers of heritage, and all the other complainers, mostly old or educated; while the youthful mass were easily diverted into valuing lagers and other well-advertised concoctions. The same pattern seems likely to keep organic food afloat as a minority option, harmlessly absorbing the shock of dissent, though in the latter case it is about much more than “the spreading curse of blandness”.
Famous Reporter 24 (December 2001) – an Australian “literary biannual”. I’m in this one. The editor, Ralph Wessman, used to trawl the emails of the BritPo forum looking for likely candidates. But the best outcome of that sensible approach is the presence of Geraldine Monk’s defence of the author as individual, which I’ve read many times. “Once you do commit yourself to the public arena (small as it may be in our case) then you cannot seriously be striving for anonymity or an ego-less state.... Seems to me that the ultimate ego-less state is death which probably lasts a long time (hopefully) so why on earth anyone on earth should want to achieve it while on earth has always puzzled me – it seems a bit anti-life and definitely against the individual.” Go Geraldine!
The History Man (1975) and To the Hermitage (2000) by Malcolm Bradbury. Summary of the The History Man could easily make it seem a straightforward conservative satire; summary of To the Hermitage could easily make it seem a nostalgic adieu to the life of academic talk. Both conceptions do less than justice to an author whose comic vim insinuates a broad and complex vision, almost effortlessly making us feel that we haven’t done any thinking while we read. In fact, I admit it, I meant to write properly about these books but I’ve given up – it would just take too much thinking. Bradbury’s garrulous society is something I don’t feel up to adding to. Many others have read these books, and everyone seems to think well of them. The health goes deeper than being healthy diversions.
Discover
Haynes Manual – Citroën 2CV, Ami & Dyane. I owned two 2CVs, and I did read about how to reverse the windscreen-wipers which are set up for left-hand drive, but I never got round to it, an expression which I am discovering could be the motto for most of the cultural residue that passes through households like this. The text is beguiling if you don’t understand it: “Lubricate the shaft splines.... Chock the axle arm to support it and drive the hub from the pivot to separate. Use a wooden block or soft drift.” Depressing, too. I want to “live” but do the same as yesterday – the less I accept it, the bigger the barriers seem.
Now for the tapes. After selling the last 2CV I finally had a car whose engine was quiet enough for it to be worth putting in a music system, and I chose a tape player, which turned out be naive because I had not realized that tapes had just been phased out and you couldn’t buy new ones. This was about three years ago. My only source of tapes was charity shops, and tapes have proved less resilient than vinyl or CDs to the passing of time; lots of the ones that circulate and re-circulate were budget productions and don’t really work properly.
Beethoven, Symphony No. 9 in D Minor, Op. 125 (LSO, Wyn Morris) is a case in point. Besides, the flying-saucer theme in the first movement is inaudible over a car-engine, which spoils the drama. It was composed 1822-23, a fair while after the other eight. I’ve long wished to say that I don’t rate it compared to those other symphonies, but this isn’t true. I even like the choral finale (which I wished to say was just not symphonic). It’s an enormously brilliant work; every time new vistas open. The first movement, for example, passes way beyond the cavernous ice and hammer-blows with which it begins; much of it is, if not exactly friendly, certainly full and chequered like a river teeming with fish. All Beethoven’s scherzi are terrific, but the second movement here is like a gigantic, burly sort of gift, bearing its sumptuous trio with soft hands. And then there’s the slow, slow movement, the Beethoven we all like best. To finish, we begin as it were all over again, with a vast celebration.
Liszt, Symphonic Poems. I have plenty of cheap taste when I want it, and I think these are great, but the recording level is desperately low. Les Preludes is possibly the best of them. Tasso is like a Scott romance in music, but better, and I know every note of it by heart. This poem is subtitled Lamento e Trionfo which is rather misleading. It begins with a fight, and then with an uneasy, melancholy series of scenes around the castle, including a nocturnal passage where a young girl is alone with her thoughts in a high turret. This music is briefly interrupted by some sort of royal fanfare, then there is a morning busyness including the preparations of musicians for a dance. These preparations gather momentum but suddenly fighting breaks out again. It’s good fighting, but much less cruel and bloody than the gladiators in Respighi’s Feste Romane. Up to this point the drama is enitrely gripping and convincing, but now there’s a slightly awkward, too-sudden transition to the triumphant celebrations and triumphant blaze of brass at the end; Liszt gets the pacing wrong. It sounds as if the complexities of the earlier narrative have been merely cancelled. The whole piece is built with surprising consistency around Liszt’s method of “theme transformation”. In this case even a non-musician can hear that the motif of an ornamentally descending grace-note.
Saint-Saëns, Piano Concertos 1-3 (Ciccolini). This, on the other hand, has never done it for me: garish, tasteless and supremely lacking in melodic invention. That ought to be a recipe for interest, and I’ve sometimes thought I found it by focussing on the dynamics, but I felt from the effort I was just working this up artificially. Probably this is a case where having the concertos one after another (inevitably playing the whole tape through) does a disservice to the music. I would feel quite excited about hearing one of them at a concert.
Joni Mitchell, For the Roses (1972) and The Hissing of Summer Lawns (1975). And I’d have chucked Court and Spark, too, if I could have found it. But I’m keeping the earlier albums, Clouds and Blue. In those earlier records you can hear what I really care for, her voice and her expression of a generation’s feelings. These later albums strive to be brilliant, detached and critical, and I don’t think even she with all her talent can do any of that within the parameters of rock. You end up admiring her desire to make an adult music, at the same time that you feel her incapacity to realize the issues at a musical level.
Mahler, Symphony No. 1 in D. I do like this, principally the first and last movements, but I’m a mere visitor to Mahler’s oeuvre and his preoccupations; and since I’m 46 already, I perhaps always will be. It’s time to put it aside and wait for another space; if there is one, so much the better, but I hardly expect it.
Brahms, Sonatas for Cello and Piano. These are not Brahms’ most persuasive works, especially the first of them; its first movement has too much of the same expansive melody. It seems to think it’s very fine. The second is better, the first movement heroic and the finale one of those Brahmsian constructions that is faceted; it seems too short and you never want it to end. But here Brahms seems to have solved his problem of balance rather drastically, by reducing the cello-part to a source of bold pizzicati and zooshing sound-effects; he seems to have written it right through on the piano and doesn’t want to leave any space. I’ve heard these sonatas a hundred times, always one after another in this murky, greyish recording.
Sibelius, Symphony No 2 in D. My least favourite Sibelius symphony, though I have come to admire that gigantic second movement more with the passing of time, and not (as I’d once expected) less. The finale is admittedly his worst, the kitchen-sink failing to disguise the lack of crucial ideas.
Sterne, A Sentimental Journey – abridgment read by Donald Sinden. This was mildly entertaining, once, and less so, twice. I haven’t read the book, but it seems to be the same joke over and over. Very disappointing, remembering the vast wonderments of Tristram Shandy.
The bric-a-brac: a two-level lunch box that splits apart when you don’t want it to, with the Chino-English motto, “food is suel of human body”. A vase for a single stem (this should be called a solitaire) that could conceivably be just the thing, but somehow never is. A shower-radio, still in its packaging because I’ve already got one. I must admit that it’s become an indispensable part of the routine of waking up. In this fragile part of the day I am briefly immersed in Moyles, Comedy Dave, Rachel, Dominic and Carrie. I am as uncritical and ego-less as an animal, except I also laugh.
Some of these things I’m sorry to part with, especially the vase. But it seems important to get rid of at least one thing that I think I’ll miss. What lies behind this is the feeling, as Gösta Ågren puts it, that “your life slowly becomes more important than you”. As he also probably says, to possess something is no longer to have it. Only now, while writing these two pages, have I briefly had my things again.
(2005)
When spring turns into summer at the beginning of June there is a change in the landscape that is a kind of silveriness. The main constituent of this is the grasses which all at once, as it seems to us, grow tall and throw up glistening grassheads; above all, the ubiquitous false oat-grass (Arrhenatherum elatius) with its pearly strings of spikelets.
Spring is the time of year when even people
who have no special interest in wild flowers are compelled to notice them;
snowdrops, crocusses, daffodils, primroses, cow parsley, bluebells, buttercups.
Now the variety of flowers is greater,
but as individuals they are not so starkly apparent. The silveriness of the
lowlands creates a shimmer, a hazy, greyish mirror that denies the human eye
the directness of its delight in the flowers and shoots of spring. Its real
function is to cool the ground and protect the plants from hot sunshine by
reflecting it back into the atmosphere.
Hairy tare (Vicia hirsuta) is a plant that no-one but an enthusiast notices, though it’s common as a mass of filigree on hedges and roadsides. It’s a small annual vetch; small in the sense that the leaflets and whitish flowers are small, but it can easily scramble to a meter or more through a hedge. The plan is to rise above the fast-growing summer growth and to flourish in full sun; no energy needs to be wasted on structural strength, since it merely floats on the massed herbage. Compound tendrils cling around other plants and, in particular, around themselves, so the plant pulls together and develops a kind of sprawling latticework, the natural equivalent of knitting.
I have no idea what kind of insects, if any, are enticed into visiting the small flowers – I have never seen any insects showing an interest, and I suspect all the flowers self-pollenate. Under a good lens the flowers are seen to be perfectly formed small pea-flowers, white finely streaked with violet. Their larger relatives are perfectly designed for bees, but what kind of bee would be small enough to manage these flowers I can’t imagine. The plant goes to seed quickly and bakes brown; every pod has two fruits, and all the nutrients for these pods can be produced from the shrivelling up of the rest of the plant.
Scramblers and climbers have highly evolved mobility. This is obvious in the tendrils and no less so in the leaflets, which open or close along a central axis and will bend in different directions to provide a precise control of light, wind-resistance and moisture-loss.
The plant’s common name presumably indicates that it was once a nuisance to farmers, though the biblical tare must have been something different (possibly darnel, Lolium temulentum).
The elderflowers appear in creamy saucers; they are harvested up in Gloucestershire. The harvest begins in the farm’s own orchards, but is permitted to spread out to the lanes nearby.
The common grasses of lanesides are false
oat-grass (Arrhenatherum elatius),
I went up to Cley Hill, a detached chalk
capstone perched on the greensand ridge separating the young limestone of
Wiltshire from the old limestone of
Elsewhere the most noticeable drifts of colour come from the eerily tilted masses of moon daisies (aka ox-eye daisies), the horse-fields full of meadow buttercup and on waste ground the dazzling dandelion-like flowers of beaked hawksbeard.
When it rains in June the days are particularly grey, and all the abundant growth of flowers and grasses is knocked flat and looks as if it is seriously damaged. But new growth is so fast that it recovers in two days. When the sky clears it is suddenly really hot – sunburn, damp clothes, open windows, ice-cream.
(June 2005)
Rosanna
Warren: Departure (2005)
(previously published in Stride Magazine)
Rosanna Warren is a late-comer in the Lowellian tradition. There are lines in Departure that you would swear are half-remembered quotations from For the Union Dead. It’s raining, and
therefore
the ex-Presbyterian fieldstone church
on the corner of
announces “The Boston
School of Modern Languages”
in an eddy of street
torrents and regurgitating storm drains
and foists its mute
megaphone clamped to a chimney pot
against the gargled
sky.
[from ‘5 P.M.’]
Or, in a plane,
Unbolted, my heart
is a missile
heading, in every
sense, in the wrong direction.
[from ‘Travel’]
But I can half-imagine
To speak in a tradition is not to stand still or cease to exist as an individual, though if any poet would accept that fate you think it might be Warren, who loads her book so heavily with the work of other artists that she is sometimes almost a hostess whose greatest happiness is to ‘bring someone out’. At least that’s how I think of ‘Mud’, whose stanzas add hardly anything to the exhibition catalogue of John Walker’s paintings (though some of the lines can hardly be understood without it – the inexplicable ‘duchess’ is Goya’s Duchess of Alba); while ‘Departure’, though it ventures to weave in a few words of Guido Guinizelli, seems to sacrifice its own modest claims completely by inviting you to experience for yourself the terror of Max Beckmann’s triptych. Inevitably, the painting just blows the poem away.
But though I don’t admire either of these poems I’m interested in the process by which, thoroughly accepting the moves of an all-too-familiar tradition, they end up taking them to a kind of extreme and, in the end, giving birth to something different. Here’s a stanza from ‘Mud’:
the clay grew tall?”)
across canvas: he can’t
bury fathers, uncles,
sons, they keep
sprouting, worms their
words (“Men went
to Catraeth as day
dawned”): Our words, his
This is, in part,
‘Postscript’ is a better poem that evinces
the same kind of pressures. It arrives in the middle of a group of poems about
the death of
toothbrush and dentures
a still life on the
faux-marble washbasin;
her washcloth slowly
stiffening on the towel rack;
Yet its assumption of lyrical forms is short-breathed; one after another they founder, and we become conscious of an impatience, both in the mother:
how to ease things a little—if
anything can—
Time to break this
off—
and in the daughter-narrator:
So she floated in the
red
armchair, so her tongue couldn’t find
its lair in her mouth:
so her ankles swelled, so
each breath snared and hauled
up a groan from its burrow
of dark:
Warren over-emphasises the structure of narrative, its logical colons and its “so” and “and”, until we become aware that the speech-act is ready to snap because of the huge weight of its inner desire to stop, its awareness that loss is really empty.
We are Greek figures
in a bas
relief, two women leaning
But only in the poem’s narrative, which creates the bas relief. Outside the poem these two figures are not there, one of them in particular. And though the poem is so intimately close to those seared moments in the hospice, it never aspires to using the second person.
Without narrative, what conclusion? The poem ends:
So have whole tribes
passed from the memory
of earth.
The missing article is significant. There
is indeed a memory of earth, though it’s a short one, little more than a
surface.
the little well hidden through tall grass
at Kazničov,
springing up through
the roots of three lime trees, “Helisov’s Well,”
and in ‘What Leaves’
the fountain acknowledges the epic of water
and keeps spurting,
from its aorta, its own small line.
The capability of these surfaces is everything we have, but it is limited to now, or rather to a sequence of nows:
since now is a
proposition
molded over and over
in water, loam, and stone.
[from ‘Portrait: Marriage’]
I am only slightly committed to Departure
as a collection, and these are all the poems (with the addition of ‘North’)
that I like. But in them one can begin to fasten on the source of its vague
sense of subversiveness within tradition; it is humility.
How absolved,
if the heart keeps sloshing more
pleas forth from its
dim
pump?
As the poem continues we see that its answer is neither ablution nor absolution but dissolution.
(2005)
Mark Ford and
Rosmarie Waldrop (2005)
[This review first appeared in PN Review, April 2006]
MARK FORD, A Driftwood Altar: Essays and Reviews (Waywiser)
£10.95
ROSMARIE WALDROP, Dissonance (if you are interested) (
If you turn to A Driftwood Altar seeking a fix on the distant excitement of Mark Ford’s poems, it eventually supplies one: “Like too many of my poems, this one ends up being about empires, their rise and fall...” Ford perhaps was making the same discovery as Rosmarie Waldrop did when her collage-poems still ended up being about her mother. She comments:
Tristan Tzara has a famous
recipe for making a Dada poem by cutting words out of a newspaper and tossing
them in a hat. He ends with: “The poem will resemble you.”
Besides this, the character of the
connection between Ford’s own poems and (especially) Raymond Roussel is surely
a tacit sub-theme of his major essay “
Elsewhere Ford is sympathetically concerned with his subjects and keeps himself out of the picture; his imperial obsessions perhaps manifesting themselves only in an odd phrase such as “the French” and in his relish for the kind of journalistic challenge presented by reviewing Weldon Kees for the LRB: addressing, as it were, an audience whose wide interests and high intelligence will most probably not involve a personal investment in the poetry world, who perhaps have never heard of Weldon Kees and are content to suck his marrow from a lively article. It’s what few poets would dare or have the skills to dare or wish to dare.
On July 18th 1955, the
Californian Highway Patrol reported two abandoned cars in the sightseers’
parking lot at the north end of the
You can see I hope how instantly we get interested in the case of Weldon Kees. Ford sees the dramatic moment, organizes beautifully, and is preparing from the outset for the quiet drop goal of that title, Nonverbal Communication. And he’s also trailing another question that he knows full well arises from Kees’ obscurity: why is this essay about Kees at all, and not about Joseph R. Eppler, to whom (as we don’t doubt) Ford’s sympathy could win us no less completely?
This is splendid writing, but when it comes to Kees’ poems rather than his case, Ford calls them “successful” and even “addictive”, yet somehow he hasn’t addicted me to Kees; nor for that matter to Mina Loy nor Ginsberg nor even Roussel himself. What criticism of their work requires, perhaps, is not sympathy but methodological concessions unknown to the society portrait. It’s curious to see what is basically the art of Strachey or Philip Guedalla applied to writers who themselves have broken away so utterly from the values of belles lettres; there’s a dissonance that isn’t always fertile. But sometimes it is. Aside from Bishop and Ashbery, the writers for whom Ford most compels my interest (rather against the run of my own tastes, and possibly rather against his) are Auden, F.T. Prince, Marinetti and André Breton. I am a little ungrateful; Ford is hugely informative, and much of his information I’ve absorbed so effortlessly that I’ll soon have no memory of how I came to know it.
That was a kind of dissonance that lies wholly outside the ambit of Rosmarie Waldrop’s book (Consonance might have been a better title). This is a ragbag of a book, and sometimes it even starts to merge with Waldrop’s poetry (chiefly around the time of Reluctant Gravities), which I consider a most valuable bonus. Waldrop’s pieces are guileless, autobiographical, and almost totally uncritical; of the books that she herself lives by, I mean to say. These are generously sampled so that what emerges is the picture of a community at work: Waldrop is trying to write her poem, and as she does so is continuously refining a statement of poetics that seeks to illuminate not only her own work but that of her contemporaries. The casual and repetitive nature of the pieces only emphasises the formidable clarity of her direction.
“SHALL WE ESCAPE ANALOGY”
(CLAUDE ROYET-JOURNOUD); OR, COMPOSITION AS PROCESS
Nothing is given. Everything
remains to be constructed.
I do not know beforehand what the poem is
going to say, where the poem is going to take me. The poem is not “expression,”
but a cognitive process that, to some extent, changes me. Cage: “Poetry is
having nothing to say and saying it: we possess nothing.”
As I begin working, far from having an “epiphany”
to express, I have only a vague nucleus of energy running to words. As soon as
I start listening to the words, they reveal their own vectors and affinities,
they pull the poem into their own field of force, often in unforeseen
directions, away from the semantic charge of the original impulse.
Valéry: “When the poets enter the forest of
language it is with the express purpose of getting lost.”
Jabès: “The pages of the book are doors.
Words go through them, driven by their impatience to regroup . . . Light is in
these lovers’ strength of desire.”
The book contains several variants of this passage, and of course that operates as an invitation to get stuck in: to read across, to worry at fault-lines, to make your own connections: I think it functions best as a manual for a working poet.
This is not to asperse the breadth of material in Dissonance. Waldrop has close connections with poetries in Germany and France as well as the USA: it’s illuminating when you suddenly see names in apposition that you think of as in different worlds (in my case it was Inger Christensen brought up against Ron Silliman); and of course it’s yet more illuminating to be gifted some kind of engagement, however much they are abraded into bon mots, with poets I didn’t know of at all and immediately want to pretend I do (Royet-Journoud, Albiach, Heissenbüttel). I feel the loss of nuance in passing those wise pebbles back and forth, I admit; but that’s literary. Here conversation asserts itself as the central process of language.
In this world the poems themselves are not privileged: they begin to seem like illustrations to a larger discourse and the larger discourse is what really constitutes a poetry. You might suppose then that reading is highlighted in its pilfering aspect rather than its receptive aspect, but that turns out to be not quite right: Waldrop’s reading of Olson is close, indeed absorbed. But that isn’t primarily what Dissonance is about. Its friendliness shouldn’t perhaps make you like the writings it talks about (that would be uncritical of course); what it certainly has to offer is a view of why they’re being written.
(2006)
Arielle Greenberg: My Kafka Century (2005)
First published in Intercapillary
Space.
This has to be read, I think, as a collection – not exactly a sequence, but a collection. I mean, not as individual poems. Images and themes swim across these constructions: which individually are loose, zany shoulder-shrugs; glossy and hollow, perfect for reading-groups. Let’s take a tour.
my draped
milk-white pearls
which I have pulled out on their silk strand
from the blood-hole, one by one, sobbing on the string
is from the violent sexuality of “Private, I”. In “Red Rover” (children’s game where you try and break through a line formed by the opposing team), this clot of imagery shows up again:
How are you, friend, across the milky highway?
This blood-moat, a fairy tale made of lost teeth?
The expression “milk-teeth” never actually gets used. But children, like dogs, and other disturbingly cutesy domestic, innocent things, get snarled up in these discourses. “The Missing, The Maybe” begins with a real tooth extraction. Greenberg is still preoccupied with that silk strand, the nerve of the tooth or whatever it is:
This is the central text:
middle of the book with its white silk thread
cut through like a tooth.
The collection does, sometimes, take on aspects of a sequence. At the end of this same poem, she’s talking about a pet dog:
I keep an animal with me like an
for protection. From God. From history. From the
spells.
Me and her, we speak with the same black tongue.
In the poem that comes next (“Hotel”), there’s more about this black tongue:
Death is a very close door in the hall –
see how our foot slips in?
(The sweet taste of shit.)
See how everything, history, is a chute?
See how our tongue, this close door,
is also that black, that sweet?
And in the next poem (“
A Jew tried to bleach his tongue…
the towering desperation of the Jew to be clean;
our spirits, the language of a dog.
Perhaps this poem is, as it purports to be, about Dr Zamenhoff and Esperanto, which “never worked”. But is it also about Hebrew, effectively a dead language in the mid-nineteenth century, now the first language of millions of people (and thus an inspiration to the makers of auxiliary languages)?
Anyway, let’s go back to the dog and its language. In “Shirley Temple, Black”, Greenberg is trying to get outside the shutter of human reason:
Go through the window and you become an animal,
and are so happy to lie in your little round bed…
I mean that madness is a ship to back where our thumbs
did not oppose.
I mean that this is where we relax back into our
cracker shapes…
I think I am most a home inside the ear of a dog,
sweet portal to lunacy, where no day is Jesus, and a
kickboard
keeps me from bursting into yet another child star.
But maybe it’s not such an exciting experiment for the dog, kidnapped like all dogs from its mother and responding with dumb loyalty to the kidnapper:
She adores me, goes off leash
impeccably, is my own pretty Patty
Hearst. (“A little ditty I like to call ‘Stockholm Syndrome’”)
Greenberg, whispering repetitious endearments to her little pet, likes the euphony in that and varies it:
She’s my own Patty Duke… She’s my own Patsy Cline…
She’s Tom Verlaine to my Patti Smith Rimbaud.
For most
Substantial threads in my own Greenberg glossary (that is, all the things I knew I didn’t really understand and had to look up) included: US pop culture icons (Patty Duke, Chuck Yeager, Katie Smith, Nancy Drew); US cultural commonplaces (carpetbaggers, John Henry, President Howard Taft the trust-buster, soda fountains, dry jack, the Superball craze of 1965, the Bicentennial of 1976, Crisco cooking oil); US vocabulary (back to smarts, drink along, kickboard, stink-grass, lugnut, foamcore and various baseball terms); Jewish expressions and concepts (Dybbuk, menorah, mitzvah, Hallel, mama-loshen, chalilah); Biblical allusions (two references to rubies refer mainly to Proverbs 31:10, “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.”); and fabrics (organza, damask, cotton duck, gingham, luxe). You also need to know that Peter Lorre played a child-killer in Fritz Lang’s M, how an ocularium is used, and who Robert Wilson is.
And Kafka. Besides A Country Doctor, The Hunter
Gracchus, Letter to His Father
(all named explicitly), there are stray references to In the Penal Colony, The
Castle,
As they say, born old.
Winter brings its white rape,
its endless wormy prostrators, each sudden,
expected as a guest –
that’s the belief, anyway.
We (who?) sing the Hallel, a grace after rape,
the tuneless of the hills dancing their demise,
and woe of fever.
Another chosen pervert – save you, save they –
hushly drops enchanted sodomy onto its favored child.
The horses, in their glittering rape bells,
stir like Russian moons.
(“The mountains skipped like rams, and the little hills like lambs” Psalm 114:4, part of the Hallel group of Psalms sung on days of thanksgiving. Prostrator: [religious] in general, a worshipper, supplicant, or penitent; more specific meanings in the Buddhist, early Christian and Islamic traditions; [political, pejorative] an uncritical follower, an abject apologist; in Zionist circles, a pro-Palestinian Jew.)
The moral discomfort, the feeling of getting embroiled in unacceptable positions, was already a large element of Kafka’s fable. Greenberg develops this element further; here and elsewhere in the best parts of My Kafka Century, you’re left feeling queasy about where your imagination is made to go, the incompatible things it has to negotiate.
I seem to have come to rest on a poem
that’s highly concentrated, where even the small lines (“that’s the belief,
anyway”, “and woe of fever”) do disruptive work. At the opposite extreme the
poems can get too conversational to generate enough of that friction: “City of
Greenberg’s own reflections, so far as they went in April 2003, can be studied in her essay On the Gurlesque, an attractively modest and lucid account of a new feminist wave of poetry whose own attractions are neither modest nor lucid.
(2007)
Elizabeth Willis: The Great Egg of Night (2005)
Fist
published in Intercapillary
Space.
Most of
the reviews I’ve read of Elizabeth Willis' poetry are unstintingly
enthusiastic; though sometimes the enthusiasm seems to be for floral wallpaper.
John Latta (http://isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2006/08/preen.html
) indeed
registers a doubt, but it isn’t a doubt about how marvellously Willis has
written, more a “But what of it?” kind of doubt - and to grasp the charge more
accurately you need to read the whole piece. In other words, it's an external
criticism of the kind of thing that’s achieved, not an internal question about
whether she has achieved it. And this too is praise of sorts, because mediocre
writing never raises that kind of big metaphysical issue; the evidence on the
page is too shot to make it worth thinking about.
These
reviews, I should explain, are of the full-length volume Meteoric Flowers (Wesleyan University Press, 2006). The Great Egg of Night is an Equipage pamphlet
of 2005 containing 16 poems, all of which (with the exception of "Female
Figs Supposed to be Monsters") are also in the larger volume, so you can
read this as a mini-review of Meteoric Flowers as well, if you prefer.
Both books are records of a project: the titles of the poems (and occasionally
sentences within them) are taken from Erasmus Darwin's The Botanic Garden (1791).
This is
one of my favourites:
GRATEFUL AS ASPARAGUS
The house of mirth is
casting its shadows. My bureau, my agency, a wall of sliding glass. Without its
leaky reverie, the face is a shield. Who wouldn't love the sycamore in spite of
its skin? For a minute the fountain was an indoor labyrinth, a garden gone wild
into perfect order. See the bleeding ankle? The meat of the body left alone to
run the house. In the company of A or B, in the company of M or W, unfixed by
science, a leaning spectacle. The delicate column, the poppied hill.
The
structure of Willis' prose poems is not, as that term can so easily mislead us
into assuming, the same as typical prose; it is just as formally exclusive as
any stanza in verse. Adam Fieled (http://adamfieled.blogspot.com/2006/12/elizabeth-willis-meteoric-flowers.html)
has described the poems as "hard-core paratactic", and this is true
grammatically as well as semantically; in the whole of The Great Egg of Night the word and appears only twice, that
once and which not at all.
Commas are nearly always used paratactically, and when I read the poems
discursively - or intone them lyrically - there's a steady thud of full stops
caused by shortish sentences whose shortness is exacerbated by the lack of
obvious connection, which offers no bridge of passion between the sentences,
and thus no way of keeping the voice animated. Which monotony tells me that
this isn't a great way of setting about reading them.
It might
be better to think of other highly paratactic forms and how we read them, for
example the mise en scène at the beginning of a play:
Left
and right back, high up, two small windows, curtains drawn. Front right, a
door. Hanging near door, its face to wall, a picture. Front left, touching each
other, covered with an old sheet, two ashbins. Centre, in an armchair on
castors, covered with an old sheet,
Or
perhaps, (in deference to Erasmus Darwin and his master Linnaeus), a standard
botanical description:
Stems
erect, to 1.5(2)m; cladodes on main lateral branches (5)10-20(25)mm, flexible,
usually green; pedicels 6-10(15)mm; seeds usually 5-6; grown as vegetable, very
well naturalized in dry sandy soils among sparse grass...
(slightly adapted from the entry for Asparagus officinalis in Clive Stace, New Flora of the British Isles, 2nd edn.
1997)
For such
passages of parataxis one adopts a particular kind of reading behaviour. One is
trying to assemble a comprehensive picture from the materials given; one reads
so slowly and with such long pauses for assimilation that all sense of
underlying rhythm is sacrificed; one flicks back and forth to check on things
(it not seeming important to maintain the sequence of the phrases in the
reading); or one dwells for one's particular purposes on a single phrase to the
exclusion of the rest. In short, one studies
them.
That is
at any rate analogous to the kind of tempo and reading-strategies that I've
gradually found myself dropping into, reading this pamphlet. One of the things
I've omitted to say before in praise of pamphlets is that they are a good format for sneakily infiltrating poetry into
the workplace, because a pamphlet looks like promotional or training material
and therefore attracts no interest,
whereas a book connotes putting your feet up as flagrantly as a glass of
beer. Most of the reading, and some of the writing, of this review took place
in the office. And this is about the best pamphlet for the purpose I've ever
tried, since its sixteen poems, if studied
sufficiently in the empty sounding-chamber of work, yield material for
sixteen novels.
Indeed
even a single sentence, such as this one -
I see the face in flower
and want to draw it, I chop the tree without thinking, a book or a subtle
lean-to.
(from "Sympathetic Inks")
- it makes so many changes of direction that
it's hard to hold all the elements in the mind, never mind review them. I've
found myself wondering, as an interesting exercise, if any substitution of the
nouns and verbs in this sentence could make its syntax acceptable. (This is not
such a trifling consideration as it may seem since there are times in these
poems when a noun-substitution is insistently suggested: e.g.
the springing scent of
consensual facts
briefly
hinting at consensual acts - and then
focussing us back with redoubled emphasis on consensual facts.) Or I've wondered about how such mental reverie as is
expressed in the first part of that sentence could be combined with such sharp
if unpondered action as is claimed in the second - the best idea I could come
up with was when driving a tractor. As it happens a scene of business-pastoral
(a rapidly changing scene, of course -
of mixed farming, horse-breeding, fishing and forest clearance), lies back of
this poem. That distinctive juxtaposition of tranquillity with violence is
insistent too. Perhaps it is a characteristic experience of a machine-driven
age, in which vigorous action is effected without breaking the flow of thought. Or perhaps it reflects that familiar moment
of belated global awareness in which we discover that the habit of innocently
going about our own business has ruined ecosystems, weather systems, and other
people's lives.
"Sympathetic
Inks" isn't the only poem to have, in one corner of its eye, a piece of
political grit. "The Great Egg of Night" likewise proceeds mistily at
first, with the vaguely disconcerting feeling that plural subjects are acting in
singular ways, and vice versa -
Palmed and tendered in
subaltern shade, I could not shake the memory of a train that whitely striped
the hills. The surrendering pike pours out in uniform. Butter-gloved epiphanies
slide past us in their muscle car.
A little
later the political relevance of language's capacity to personify and aggregate
becomes manifest:
What form do women take? Or
is she taken like a path to frosty metaphor, a seed easier crushed than opened?
The poem
doesn't end there, though. Its end is a conspicuously rigged self-betrayal of
language's capacity for huddling together a fake conclusion:
Rigging our descent to
decent landings, mistaking angle for angel, piloting home.
But what
then of "Grateful as Asparagus", the poem I quoted in full? It isn't
only sentences with difficult syntax that are worth fixing on. What could be
simpler than
See the bleeding ankle?
But what
does it imply about its context? Surely that the person addressed is, whoever
else, not the owner of the ankle; the owner being considered insensible to what
is being said: whether comatose, dead, absent, unable to understand English, or
unable to participate in professional talk. "Ankle" at least tends to
suggest a human owner, but an owner as it were dehumanized. The speaker is, we
suppose, an investigator, which chimes with "My bureau, my agency",
and also with the dirt-digging notes of "In the company of A or B, in the
company of M or W". The poem's title, Darwinian as it may be, is also
Chandleresque. Dehumanization brings us to the sentence that follows, the one
about "the meat of the body". It may be that the asparagus, that
"delicate column", is also a dehumanization.
The
quietly elegant appearance of these poems (I am thinking of Latta again) is not
to be gainsaid. Still, it may be that this very elegance is an accident of
efficiency: that (to take the final poem,"Ferns, Mosses, Flags", as
an example) the aestheticallly-pleasing words "weathers",
"haystack", "brook", "skin", "eyebrows",
"chalk" etc, occur because they are also the most useful words for
Willis, her chisel words. In this case it's the idea of a nation that gets
cracked open.
*
Two notes on "Grateful as asparagus": The house of mirth: Edith Wharton was
quoting Ecclesiastes 7:4, "the
heart of fools is in the house of mirth". The tree called sycamore in the
(2007)
Thomas Kinsella: Marginal
Economy (February 2006)
First published in Intercapillary
Space.
Reviewer beware! Here is Kinsella noticing an old adversary at a funeral and listing their past clashes:
Recently, and sharpening
our exchange across the
grave,
his finding the occasion
in the press of public
affairs
– debating his fixed
viewpoints
in a three-piece colonial
accent –
for a murderous review :
a flow of acid
colloquialisms
dismissing a main thesis
based on a misreading
of the images off the cover.
. .
The review may have been murderous, but it can’t have been more deadly than this. Copying it out, I count the strikes on my fingers, savouring that bit about the mock “debate”, performed solo by the possessor of those fixed viewpoints. This is from “The Affair”, one of the best of the dozen or so poems in this pamphlet; from the middle part of that poem, when it’s in full flow. But very soon afterwards the poem breaks out of its rage and subsides:
– his thick back moving off
familiar among the others.
Under a shadow, forming
and descending, unfamiliar.
“Familiar” is an important word for Kinsella, but here it’s the word “descending” that catches the ear. Here’s the ending of another poem:
The soul confined,
her face pressed against the lattice.
Looking out at the day and
the bright details
descending everywhere, selecting themselves
and settling in their own light.
It begins to be clear that there’s a common pattern in these poems, a pointed abbreviation that puts a distance between the poem and the kind of writing (confiding, oracular, lyrical, or whatever) that it seemed to consist of.
So “First Night” leads us round and about,
building up to an encounter with a famous bar-room narrator, like the frame of
a short story. But when, finally, the encounter is made and the narrator starts
talking, the poem ends without us hearing a single word. This is abrupt, and of
course a good way of making you read the poem over to try and guess what’s
missing. But then the fact of it being missing is important too. There’s no
local colour in the pamphlet, not a single Irish name or turn of phrase,
Still, you couldn’t mistake this for the poetry Kinsella wrote in his formative years. Long gone are the terza rima and the blank verse, their refined spirit a potent residue in broken prose and intensely worked space.
This I think is meant for the reader:
Nightwomen,
picking the works of my days
apart,
will you find what you need
in the waste still to come?
Waste takes centre-stage elsewhere, too. The ecological accent in this shit-stirring and in the slash-and-burn title poem has pulled the preoccupation with liberalism into some different shapes.
For the past thirty years Kinsella has committed himself, admirably and presciently, to the pamphlet form. The burning desire to publish a “full-length” collection – ultimately this is a publisher’s conception, not a poet’s – used to be fuelled by the belief that books broke into market-places where pamphlets didn’t, but that doesn’t make any sense now. Unless you live in a very privileged spot indeed, it’s not possible to buy interesting books of new poetry from a shop. The pamphlet is therefore no less available than the book and is as often as not the more credible artefact; what I mean is, we more easily believe that it has a purposeful shape, a topicality, an intention. And besides, it marries better with the wave of online publishing that is giving us everyday access to large samples of what current poets are doing, which will certainly lead to a generation of better-informed purchasers who aren’t at all moved by the publisher’s implication that “this is a real book, therefore the author must be worth reading”.
In Marginal Economy the economy is also assured technique: things are said once. Thus the brief final poem, “Rhetoric of Natural Beauty”, describes a marine sunset, and nothing grows from the minutely troubling resonance of that title, until in its last words the affirmation that’s forming becomes (so swiftly you can miss it) an ironic glitter and another baulking descent.
(2006)
Four poets: Lew,
Peterson, Rakusa, Sutherland (2006)
(First published in Stride Magazine)
ANYTHING THE LANDLORD TOUCHES by Emma Lew, 80pp, £8.95,
Shearsman Books,
THIS ONE TREE by Katie Peterson, 98pp, $14.00, New Issues,
Western Michigan University, 1903 W. Michigan Ave., Kalamazoo, MI 49008-5331.
A FAREWELL TO EVERYTHING by Ilma Rakusa, trans. Andrew Shields and
Andrew Winnard, 101pp, £9.95, Shearsman Books.
BURNING THE HEARTWOOD by Janet Sutherland, 86pp, £8.95, Shearsman
Books.
The weather moves fast in Emma Lew’s Anything the Landlord Touches. The moon appears fourteen times, usually memorably, usually changing as it passes overhead. Suns rise and set, it’s midnight again, clouds form and dissolve in an instant.
Not wholly distinct from the changing skies are the changing characters, like this pair for example:
her lies
were her own to tell,
and everyone who knew him
knew that one of the great
events of his life had
occurred at the Place de
Pyramides, when, like clouds
worn down by a summer,
their paths crossed. Charm
went with a sympathy for
ruin, meaning a woman
who lisps slightly, gifts
snatched up, impulsively
taking the wheel of the car.
[from ‘Fugue of the deal’]
The cast of characters, enormous and transitory, are all in motion, riding somewhere, perhaps buffeted by their own violence. And perhaps like clouds they sometimes bleed into each other, so that when in another poem we’re standing beside a revolutionary agitator, suddenly there’s the lisp again:
All our lives we have hated
white moonlight.
All our lives we have been
hating, as we learn
to hate here, tonight, on
the ramparts, where
the sentries, the snipers,
crave a strong moon.
We have gone through the
streets, lisping
our words, hearts full of
vicious light,
and always the stars above
us that way,
and small children bearing
the sonorous names.
[from ‘Pocket Constellations’]
All of these characters are busy, but the stories don’t completely come into focus. What we get is a vast mutter of passion, like stacks of unread plays by M. Hugo. You can almost hear him:
There’s parish in the
spittle of an angry man
[from ‘Flourish’]
That would be ‘
the children
particularly remonstrating
with
hunger, and words fell
blindly
out of mouths onto bare
earth.
The sun set like a
guillotine,
bricking up the cellar
windows,
and the moon grew grave,
artillery horses clattering
up its
steep ascents.
Who else do we have? Slaves, seducers, tycoons, penitents, entomologists, people who limp, riders across the desert, ghosts, businessmen, philosophers, fathers, concubines, camp-followers. No-one is just someone, everyone’s in trouble, and a word often used to describe them is ‘fast’. The poems are surcharged with the detritus of narrative, the only person who seems to be completely absent is Emma Lew herself.
There’s so much narrative material that I think the book would amply repay reading just for its adventures; say, on a blowy winter night beside the fire; you would then enjoy the way that some themes (the open air, war-time, hotel assignations) seep in from nearby poems and create the effect of a group of chapters. But I’m sure that the narratives are not really the point; they are veils blowing across the sky but these poems have another kind of interest which is more abstract and delighted, perhaps exemplified by the gleams cast by some of the oblique titles, e.g. ‘Rice’ and ‘Plantain’. Or consider ‘Fugue of the deal’, and how the shadowy lovers make a pattern of echoes; in fact, they animate the form of the poem. This quote continues from the earlier one:
She was all she had to be
by being, and the voice
in which he called out to
her
was her own, calling himself
back in the same frantic
phrases of estrangement,
the same tones of
entrapment,
as smoke.
I think this is at least as much about fugue as about the deal. Or if you want to get analytical, something like this: the waves of action and psyche that underlie music and passion. But it’s better not to be analytical.
The book also contains three pantoums. Not a form that I’ve ever felt like attending to before (not even Ashbery’s), but Lew’s poems develop a curious feature of the form: that you can also read it from the bottom up and if you do you get a sort of echo-poem, a cousin of the top-down version. I could swear that Lew first composed these poems the other way around and then reversed the line order. Anyhow, they are very fascinating constructions, like those toy snakes made out of wood and ribbon that turn inside out as you play with them. As with the other poems, one begins to understand that the action and the account that can be made of it are inseparable, slithering out together from the same egg.
*
This One Tree is Katie Peterson’s first collection. It has pleased an impressive range of other poets (Donald Revell, Fanny Howe, Dan Chiasson...); more than enough, in fact, to make me feel suspicious. The fruits of this suspicion are that I no longer think the collection half so imposing as it first seemed that it was going to be; on the other hand, the things I do like, now doubly put to the question, I like more positively.
The poems look deceptively plain, their vocabulary spare and simple, their pictures empty of detail. Three times out of four, when I’ve picked up the book, nothing’s really happened; and in some of the longer pieces that emerge in the book’s later sections, I don’t think there’s much that’s ever going to happen.
But after all, those arid readings of good poetry are hardly an unusual event for me. It’s only the fourth time that matters; it requires, perhaps, an off-guard state of receptivity, perhaps a willingness to completely discount the subject or to drop my other expectations of what you should look for. This is difficult to illustrate without quoting a whole poem, so I hope the publishers will forgive me:
Job
Sound of a rake,
many-pronged, dozened
across the crisp dark.
Go towards it now.
Ask the old man
(true he might laugh)
what you can do,
here, what accomplish?
He might refuse you.
This world comes alone,
take it that way.
Piles to make.
That’s not your job.
Light them on fire.
Light the whole hillside.
What of the rake?
So soundly steeped,
ear in this darkness
wherever it moves,
to empty trees:
rake in the branches.
All of the poems in the first section are like this, in dimeters. The first three lines might appeal to an older sensibility as ‘capturing’ the sound of the rake; one could dwell on the hidden criss-cross in the third line, but the point, I take it, is the inadequacy of this attempt; no sound of the mouth really sounds like a rake, it lacks the sense of outsideness; you need the feel of open space around you first, and how will an onomatopoeia give you what even a good hi-fi can’t give you? This poem is full of prickles and frustration; for a moment the rake is not a sound coming to the ear, but a rake across the ear (ouch); finally it clangs inappropriately in leafless branches. The prickles show like beads of blood in the weird syntax of ‘Light them on fire’, or the archaism of ‘here, what accomplish?’; this is not about establishing the patina of a voice. Darkness, we think, ought to attune the ear and make it more open to sounds, but Peterson’s images, of drowning (‘steeped’) and of a moving and therefore muffling darkness, suggest an ear being dulled out and rejected (‘That’s not your job’). While the poem’s lyrical engine is a thirst for communication, its method of via negativa responds with a different draught to the expected one; necessarily oblique, electrical, conceptually distinct from the false promise of onomatopoeia.
That’s one reading, but it’s understandable that Peterson has managed to engage such a broad range of supporters because she’s reluctant to give things up. This is the end of another poem:
Backtrack of experience against
the grain of philosophy,
loving the world and leaving
it alone––
[from ‘Backtrack’]
Those are lines that will be greeted with relief by some for seeming to tap the pretensions of ‘philosophy’ on the nose with a rapturous assertion of humble (but really philosophically superior) ‘experience’. And I don’t think this reading is wrong, I think the poem does propose to keep it floating there. But I also think that the contrary position is proposed, for example by the italics and the broken ending. This image of backtracking against the grain, as in a kind of woodwork that is difficult and ungrateful and sometimes correct, compels the poem’s experience of weather and body to reside in conceptual dubiety and this is simultaneously great and actually not good.
At its best this reluctance to give things up produces poems that intrigue by paradoxical effects. Thus the poem beginning ‘Church bells at the same time as sirens’ (its title is ‘The Tree’, but lots of the poems have this title) is organized about its centre, a sad little childhood narrative about a tree house, but a quite different kind of poetry is active at the peripheries which kicks off other sorts of trouble and play until you can’t even hold them apart.
A good many of the poems develop this kind of dynamism, indeed most of them in the first three sections, and they read very well (even best of all) as places where you can discover fragments. For example, this evening I found in one of them this, which I felt free to take off and enjoy on its own:
There was no tree where we
came from.
There were only the hillside
grasses (these
never needed names), the
faint
cry of the towhee, the
comforts of science fiction.
The formal, close but uncrowded arrangement of the fricatives and parentheses is itself an essay about the comforts and empty comforts of the grass.
If you want to find out more about Katie Peterson’s poems, then Simon de Deo has a good account of one of them on his blog (http://rhubarbissusan.blogspot.com/2005/05/katie-peterson-adam-and-eve-in-morning.html).
*
Ilma Rakusa is a noted translator, cultural commentator and academic. She is of Hungarian/Slovenian parentage but her poems are in German. A Farewell to Everything is a translation by Andrew Shields and Andrew Winnard of the 1997 collection Ein Strich durch alles. I think this literally means ‘A stroke through everything’ – the pen-stroke of a dissatisfied author. But in English the word stroke has too many other meanings so the obvious translation didn’t work out. Translating poetry is a frustrating business. I’m inclined to think that quite a lot of the work’s original impact must have gone the same way as the title because I felt quite disappointed with it.
It’s a sequence of 90 nine-line poems that look like unpunctuated notebook jottings and express, in large part, a straightforward heartache, her lover departed for the other side of the world. It’s good to hear someone prepared to say what they’re feeling:
and he is alone
she alone not a pair
nightmare for all time
or to say (of children swimming in the moor pond)
the others brown and
arms held high
and bubbles in the water
sunbeaten joy like
the uphill paths heading
back
but (in English at least) too many of the poems don’t seem to do enough with their passion and collapse into trifling observation:
In the train just dozing off
when the horizon tips inward
this sandhill yellow and
huge
African it towers up
behind the tracks of a
provincial station vastly
different
Where am I? and deep red a
bulldozer enters the picture
to take down the illusion
Sometimes the observation turns elliptical and the words begin to do more work, and these are the poems that interested me most:
If the oak is an ash it
returns
home turns the slim
wand – sound wand – in wind
and shadow falls into the
bath
the ornamental forms swim
on the grass tin zinc
subsides and in the boughs
the fifths flow both brass
and bamboo druidically
The contradictions in an oak being an ash or in bamboo being druidic make the poem swirl restlessly, we begin to experience the bathtub as a sonar space, both resonance and vacuum like the interval of the fifth.
There are perhaps a dozen poems like this but not enough to build momentum and though the sequence is easy to read through it’s in a deeper sense wearying. But passion always burns. It gives poems an energy of intention and it may be that this is a book that will jump out at me when it’s hung around on the shelves for a few years.
*
No such reservation applies to Janet Sutherland’s Burning the Heartwood. Nothing here is likely to spring out at a later date; what Sutherland has to give, she gives immediately. This is ‘Hearth’, the first poem in the book:
The hiss of flame before
earth
Sometimes the ear listens
without thought
Unbuttoning the heart
we hear rain
from a wet coat
leaping and cracking
on stone
It’s a lovely poem, and you just take it to your heart and memory: exegesis is unnecessary, it could never go deep enough anyway.
Only a handful of the poems that follow match up to that opener, and they are all nearly as short (‘In my father’s store room’, ‘Crumble’). This is really not a satisfying book at all and the rest, the bulk of it, is made up of poems that didn’t need to be written called things like ‘The Reckless Sleeper (René Magritte)’ and ‘In the House of the Terracotta Warriors’ with an explanatory note at the end; or naive writing like
ascending the cliff steps we
talk of other days
your calm voice strengthens
in a time of need
solid you rest me in a pool
of words
and save me drowning
[from ‘The road to the beach’]
that it’s disconcerting to see in a book.
I’m not sure I understand where the audience for this book live, but I suspect they would be a lot less interested in Poetry than you and me and a lot more interested in ‘trees like ragged lace / along the horizon’ and ‘unclothed / creamy downs’ and ‘tussocks of strong grass’. But if the whole book was like that I think I would be enthusiastic too.
(2006)
First published in Intercapillary
Space.
aubade, a sequence of
twelve sequences, themselves mostly comprising what are putatively shorter
poems, has some beautiful pages. The page rather than the poem is how I see
this; which perhaps is surprising - you might not consider the visual aspect of
rob mclennan's poems as especially noteworthy on the face of it - but that's
how it is. What I would really like to "quote" for you here is a
complete double-page, for my impression is that the facing pages do a lot of
work in partnership, but I haven't found out how I can do this on a blog, so
you'll have to be content with a single page - a long quote nevertheless, but
this is more telling than lots of little ones that would miss the most
important thing. This page comes from somewhere in the middle of poem for a
sad november, which unlike most of the sequences is not further broken up
into poemlets each with its own title, but is all the clearer in its effect
(the last word on the preceding page, I ought to explain, is
"requiem"):
for sour
grapes / to justify
five
spaces left
*
corona
down the macrolevel of a
novel
spent overwritten on the trees / crack
ice or air
she culls it, glass, en français,
glace / not wrong but one language
overlay
the other
beautiful
& binary, irregular & dangerous
*
this
lyrical twoness--breaks apart
distinction of the heart & beauty myth,
binary /
yang/ying that completes the
hidden
circle / i miss you
like
so wet
& cold & damp
sung deep
in the bones
*
presents a
reasoning for this cold november
more than
seasonal heat & lack thereof
prevents a
making of
stone cold
soup / hydraulic sage
&
microwave blaze / old
radiation-king
/ & roommate
argues with her boyfriend, screams
thru the
wall a desire that has not been spent
What we notice first, most simply and not least importantly,
is a lyrical energy driven by the preoccupations (impossible to disguise) of a
male poet under thirty-five - mclennan was born in 1970 but most of aubade was written in 2000-2001.
This lyric pulse is the way in to the poem, or inverting the
metaphor perhaps it's the engine-room, but anyway it isn't the poem. And as is patent the "lyric" is
also a topic within the poem - mclennan is a very literary poet - I mean, a
poet who inhabits a literary world and writes through that.
The word "spent" appears twice here; a word whose
meanings waver around financial, sexual, seasonal, extinguished; the sun comes
in and out of this sap-sunk time of year: "corona", "seasonal
heat", "radiation-king".
But here's what I mean by taking pages as units: there's a
way of looking down into the poem and seeing other things. So in the section
beginning "corona" you can take in at one glance, just as clearly as
you can hear it, the sound-sequence that goes corona ... macrolevel ... novel ... overwritten ... overlaid. Going
along beside this are the icicle evocations of culls and glass. Most
visual of all, the solidi and the ampersands make, respectively, disjunctive
splits and conjunctive knots.
(And yet, in talking this way about the page I'm also aware
of a feeling that this is just a snapshot; I've stopped the poem in its tracks.
Though it's taken me personally a lot of attempts before I've grown accustomed
to the movement, it's eventually possible to read poem for a sad november straight through and to experience the
poem's transformations as a thrilling adventure, its final pages for example
obviously a bit slower in tempo and with different melodies, yet feeling like
some substance deposited out in the course of the chemical reaction, and not
very like a coda.)
*
It's clear from his very name that rob mclennan takes the
minutiae of orthography, layout and punctuation quite seriously ("to
justify / five spaces left"). At first glance you might suppose that aubade evinces a consistent group of
presentational choices, and to a certain extent it does: no capital letters, no
apostrophes, and abbreviated particles such as thru, w/, abt, yr,
&, tho. Part of the point, no doubt, is to create the right kind of
casual, liberated landscape in which the poetry can develop; besides, – mclennan's work being constantly in
dialogue with literary community – past participles like wrappt, calld, etc
instantiate the Robert Duncan spelling-choices so widely used as
identification-markers by poets in non-SoQ traditions; thot (for "thought") is also a Duncan spelling, though
perhaps the more relevant invocation in this case is bpNichol.
But what I find interesting and inventive in aubade are the subtle ways in which
orthography, punctuation, and syntax interact with more narrowly poetic formal
choices to make varieties in this overall landscape. poem for a sad november,
for instance, has a distinctively different feel from some of the other
sequences. If it flourishes its deviant use of the solidus (creating an
impression that the lines of verse are making hay with lines of verse from some
other text), it makes only minor use of the aforementioned abbreviations - the
phrases are long (if often incomplete), not here suggestive of slangy notes but
of discursive amplitude. In its ten pages there is only one non-standard past
participle: turnd - it emerges that
"turn" is an important verb in this poem, so we then find turns, turn, and (decisively) turned.
Or consider the use of full stops. In some of the sequences,
like the opening aubade, there are none. In poem for a sad november there
are none, except for a sudden eruption of three in successive lines:
the only
significant pause. oh, there
little
aesthetic shocks. gets between
the
blanket & her warm thighs.
Then, in a later episode, they make a sort of transformed
return with spaces to either side, falsely implying metrical marks:
inevitable
. a sequence
of
diminishing numbers . & days
the roof
falls in on . dogs
bark at
trees . squirrels
The adventures of the full stop, like the adventures of the
word "turn", are secret narratives interlaced into the larger action
of the poem.
Try another one. This is the first poem of exile:
south keys (he who became lost
this is a
poem w/ neither light. time of day
evaporates.
by the
teeth of the river, they slept. the tip,
the
tongue.
expands
across the water. lets lost balls
float
slowly past.
the taste
of anything this morning. the snow here,
does as
snow does.
a candle
burns brightest. the box it came in,
even more.
a
telephone is not a detection system. beats
the myths
of early warning.
tristan
took the wrong south bus, & never saw
isolde
again. wandered crescents
for hours.
who then
became.
the loss
becomes him. that is,
turned
into.
Most of these sentences are incomplete. (Despite this, the
lyric is very nearly in focus, as many of the lyrics in aubade are.) This poem exploits one feature of dispensing with
capital letters; there's no formal distinction between what seem to be the
beginnings of sentences ("this is a poem w/ neither light", "a
candle burns brightest") and what seem to be the ends of sentences
("the taste of anything this morning", "lets lost balls float slowly
past") - not to mention the middle part ("who then became"). The
poem and its firmly-positioned full stops maintain an unstable poise between
the derangement of loss (time of day evaporates) and the apparent sprightliness
of its solid things (a river, a candle, this morning).
For a final variation in this survey of the full stop take a
look at this poem, which comes from a translation: stones & ice, a
sequence where everything, even the titles of the poems, is conspicuously
over-punctuated.
adverse to shifts in other states.
appears
like smoke but isnt, merely
had the
vapours. reverts, from stories
told thru
motel phones. a long distance
prairie.
the miracle of technology, &
close
reminder, of what is no longer
there. the
front desk emits, & says,
ask me
nicely. reroute this. ask.
The typical line is hindered by one, two or three stops. Only
a couple of lines in the whole sequence are allowed to take in more air and
those lines are important for the sudden long breeze and long view. You realize
then how the rest of the sequence is stifled, jumbled together, still in its
boxes. Block ice and soil packed with boulders.
Reading across, the poems keep striking out the same things:
stones, ice, translation, words, skin, sex, motel phones, rooms you stay in for
one night only. I imagine an ingenious reader could find each of those things
in each of the poems - try it with the one above if you like. "Emits"
and "contains" are the two important and not quite oppositional
verbs.
*
I tried a similar approach to voice-over 3: bloodletting
when I finally happened to make a connection between a handful of references to
blood or (as I persuaded myself) to implicit blood. But it's no use pretending
this gives a very secure foothold in the sequence, which plays off its
title-quotes in pursuit of sheer width of reference. That way the slender texts
remain upright and become interesting more as a kind of architecture, shaped
spaces to negotiate, than for what they "contain". The poetic
experience lies as it were between the poems, so this is bringing me back to
what I said earlier about pages. Here is one of the 11 poems, just to give you
an idea, but I think the best way of reading is to flick between them all as
rapidly as possible:
'Paradox is to poetics as coffin is to corpse: how'
–Pete Smith
harkens
the world, goes out to
pitter-patter.
ambient
noise across the amphitheatre--
heartbeat,
breathing.
i hear the
sound of,
sound
judgment.
there is
an opening. i stuff it
full of
leaves.
letter drop, or songs from a room is perhaps an even more
baffling sequence. But it does give me an opportunity to highlight another in
mclennan's arsenal of techniques, the curious recurrence of phrases that cuts
across the structural division of aubade
into sequences. Examples:
sing a song of sixpence (from "old standards,
2" (aubade)).
sings a song of (from "and
comforted", (letter drop, or songs from a room)).
just call me angel, trilogy (from
"undercurrents" (underwater)).
just call me angel, trilogy ("'How you transform
the wet / late-winter snow' - Jan Zwicky" (from voice-over 3:
bloodletting)).
the / minds deluge (from "hair" (aubade)).
the minds deluge (from "poem for my mother" (winterlong)).
letter drop, or songs from a room (sequence
title)
letter drop (from "hair" (aubade)).
film & letter drop / break (from section 4 of poem
for a sad november).
What do these recurrences mean? Contrasting with the
immediacy of the lyric pulse, the implication is construction from pre-existent
materials. Consider too the nature of the recurrent phrases listed above: they
are more than a little enigmatic. What is the significance of "just call
me angel, trilogy"? - a Google search picks up "just call me
angel" in the chorus of that much-covered Chip Taylor standard "Angel
of the Morning", but it doesn't record any instances of this phrase being
linked with "trilogy". The phrase "letter drop" could refer
to a rather dull word-game, or to the "dead letter drop" beloved of
spies and revolutionaries, or to an Oulipian poetic form, as in the 1999 collection
Letter Drop by the
It may be that a reader from
*
Much of what I've just said about these more overtly
difficult sequences applies also to the final sequence, death & trauma:
a deliberate play of births and endings.
The end-note informs us that it's "a very loose
translation of fragments from an essay by Robert Kroetsch, 'For Play and
Entrance: The Contemporary Canadian Long Poem' ..., while over-writing the
story of the Frank Slide,
the essential difference between
of wallace stevens,
the poem
of the mind in the act of dealing
what will
entice. it was never so hard
to mind.
the lean was set; it retorted what
was
already built.
then the features changed
to
claiming else. its currency was unclear.
NOTES
1. "In the early morning hours of April 29, 1903,
2. aubade is dedicated to Diana Brebner,
Anya Brebner, and John Newlove. The
(2008)
Leevi Lehto:
First published in Intercapillary Space.
Leevi
Lehto is a totally net-enabled poet, so one can begin anywhere. For example, in
his corner of Anny Ballardini's Poet's Corner (http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=Content&pa=list_pages_categories&cid=166),
where everyone has a corner. Here are
four of the sonnets from
Also in
this corner are a couple of translations of classical Finnish poets, Eino Leino
and Aaro Hellaakoski. The classical era in Finnish poetry is not much further
back than the start of the twentieth century - before that, Finnish was not
often a written language. So Eino Leino is a patriarch poet, though roughly
contemporary with Yeats. When Leino comes into English the results tend to be
barbaric, no more so in Lehto than in Cid Erik Tallqvist (Voices from Finland, 1947):
Said his say thus the
Earth-Spirit:
»Three-lock Kouta art by
name called.»
Gloomily smiled Gloomy
Kouta;
»What man can know, I know
also,
What the gods can, that can
I, too;
But not bind the blue
flame's burning,
Nor bring back by black art
bygones.»
And here
by Lehto:
My heart is a
harp-of-the-wind, of-the-wind,
its strings are a seat for
a ceaseless song,
when in night, and in day,
alone, alone,
it sounds to the air,
ever-shivering.
Here on earth so cursedly
familiar
are the yards of the
clouds, the huts of the winds.
No brothers nor sisters I
ever can have:
As strange is my self, just
tingles and rings!
But
Lehto's barbaric English is adopted more methodically. This is from Aaro
Hellaakoski's most famous poem "Hauen laulu" (the Pike's Song):
From his hole so wet and
drenching
a pike rose up to tree to
sing
when through the greyish
net of clouds
first gleam of day was seen
and at the lake the lapping
waves
woke up with joyous mean
the pike rose to the
spruce's crone
to take a bite at reddish
cone
[Kosteasta kodostaan
nous hauki puuhun laulamaan
kun puhki pilvien harmajain
jo himersi päivän kajo
ja järvelle heräsi
nauravain
lainehitten ajo
nous hauki kuusen
latvukseen
punaista käpyä purrakseen]
Or take
the later lines:
opening
his
mouth so bony
sidewise moving
the jawbone phony
Nothing
in the original really excuses the word "phony", it is there for the
felicitous sound like "crone" and "mean". Lehto says, in the introduction to this book,
a bit plaintively: "There may be an element of Second Language English in
at least some of [the self-translations] - if so, the reader is asked not to
see it as altogether inadvertent." As that sentence itself shows, Lehto's
English is as near fluent as dammit - and why would it not be, since he has
lived and taught in the
I've at times thought of myself as an American poet only writing in
Finnish, at others as a Finnish one, yet whose medium is more or less
"barbaric" English. ("Finland Between Coercive Swedish and Barbaric Danish" -
Interview with Annelie Axén in Kritiker 5
(June 2007) - http://leevilehto.net/?page_id=77).
I'd like to speak about language-fugal
sublime here.
("Plurifying the Languages of the Trite" -
http://leevilehto.net/?page_id=44) - and see Note 5 of the same essay.
I have proposed a concept of literature of "Barbaric English"
- the English spoken as a second language.. This has now developed into an
interest of all kind of barbarized versions of all the languages involved (I
just finished a longish poem in Norwegian, a language I don't know enough even
to know what I have said in the piece.) These development will evidently pose
new challenges for American poets, many of whose, if truth be told, are only
too complacent with only disfiguring their own dear English. ("In the Un-American Tree;
The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetries and Their Aftermath, with a Special Reference to
Charles Bernstein Translated" - http://leevilehto.net/?page_id=78. The
Norwegian poem is here: http://leevilehto.net/?page_id=14)
..about "Nations Being Enemies of Literature". I've used this
slogan to describe a special mission of ntamo [Lehto's internet publishing
house] to chart a new (public) space beyond and between nations, a
transnational literary scene.... ("Nothing That Is Initially Interesting To More Than Seven People
Can Ever Change The Consciousness Of The Masses" -
http://leevilehto.net/?page_id=79)
But the
best arguments for Lehto's barbaric English are 1. His inspiring reading of one
of the sonnets, "Exactly. Absolutely" (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lehto.php)
with its authoritatively deviant pronunciations, and 2. The national
self-crippling defence-mechanism of identifying and bonding over the
extraordinary quaintness of foreignisms, as evinced not only by lovers of true
poetry and standards in Hampstead but by motorists complaining about offshore
call-centres and by almost-daily comic routines on the Chris Moyles show.
Paradoxically,
to fully appreciate the contrariness of Lehto's slogan about nations being
enemies of literature, you have to see it against a Finnish background, i.e.
the devout Herderian nationalism that gave such enormous impetus to the birth
of written literature in Finnish, in e.g. Eino Leino.
*
So, on
to the book in question. Salt, whose translation series has never really got
off the ground, have presented it as a translation (a self-translation, mainly)
from the Finnish, and have put the inevitable iconically unspoiled lake on the
jacket so we appreciate that we're abroad and that this represents an added
attraction. To a certain extent this is wrong. Some of the poetry was written
in English from the start, and some of the rest has been not so much translated
from Finnish as composed anew in its new language. So is Lake Onega and Other Poems really an exemplary work in a new mode, the
true transnational literature that Lehto envisages in his essays, the first
sample of this new World Poetry, as he names it in "Plurifying the Langues
of the Trite"? Well no, I think it is premature to characterize it in that
way: more accurately, I should call it a dream
of a new world poetry, or perhaps (to further misquote one of Lehto's favourite
quotations) the "pursuit of transnational poetry by other means".
For a
start, there is that traditional-looking title, which deserves to be considered
in two halves. I suppose some non-Finnish readers might assume that
Maigret and His Lady
Friend. Widow of Yours,
Hostess of Mine. Fumbling
Poems. The Sin.
Manners of the Youth. Wine
for the Wise.
its Plants, & Fish,
& Flow, & Waters.
Eugene Onegin. A
Conversation. Sister.
The Horse's Sex-Life, Short
Stories.
Tax-Index of the
Lake Onega (here as elsewhere referring specifically to
the sonnet sequence of that name, not the whole book) therefore blankly refuses to invoke nationalism and history, it
absolutely insists on its internationalism, its word-games, its messy open
space into which almost any subject may stream, but from which nothing like a
subject emerges. "Not written
against a horizon of meaning", as Lehto somewhere felicitously puts it.
Yet at the same time for a Finnish poet to name a sonnet sequence Lake Onega is somewhat akin to a US poet
writing a non-referential book and calling it Bay of Pigs, or maybe like when Swell Maps put out a single about
"sucking city boys today" in 1978 called "Dresden Style".
(Don't press these analogies, history fans...)
And now
for the second half of the title, and
Other Poems. The book proposes
itself as a kind of selection of Lehto's later work, arranged chronologically
so that we can read a story of metamorphosis from (in the early 1990s) lyrics
in the manner of Finnish modernism to (in more recent times) "more
procedurally oriented work" - for example, the Google-based poem "Of
the Help Her Art" from around 2003. So while the materials are distinctly
innovative in form, the book itself is quite an old-fashioned kind of artistic
narrative, a reader for the uncommittedly curious. Lehto is no doubt a
realistic enough operator to know that getting a poetry book published outside
your native land, except by the most miniscule of book presses, is difficult
enough on any terms; some such compromise as a putative "Selected" is
probably inevitable. But anyway, how should this narrative be read? Should we
say of the earlier poems in the book (though they are by no means early ones in
terms of Lehto's entire career) that they are there to be seen as outmoded,
merely to introduce and set off the more radical work that follows? Or should
we see this later work as accepted by the publishers only on the proviso that
there ought to be some "real" poetry as well? I don't know, but the
resulting mixed impression is certainly absorbing, even if we don't perhaps
know the code - maybe because we
don't. And I'm willing to believe that it's considerably more absorbing than
e.g. Lehto's hardcore Päivä (Day) of
2004, a response to Kenneth Goldsmith's Day
that easily disproves Goldsmith's claim to be the most boring writer who
ever lived (it consists of Finnish newsfeed from Aug 20, 2003, but with the
sentences rearranged in alphabetical order) - though even this produces
unputdownable reading compared to Craig Dworkin's austere Parse or Emma Kay's numbing Worldview
(read about all of them here: http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/goldsmith/Goldsmith_ConceptualWriting.pdf).
As it
stands, you will spend a lot more time reading the exquisite
"Snowfall" (1994) or, of
course, Lake Onega (1997) than
"Of the Help Her Art". The relation that this last poem bears to e.g.
"Snowfall" is like the protective translucent tissue page to the
relief-coloured aquatint in an old book, i.e. you are affected by the tissue
page, you may even appreciate its purity and lack of datedness compared to the
aquatint, but you don't spend much time staring at it. But as Goldsmith has
often remarked, it is not necessarily the point of writings in the
conceptualist zone actually to be read, or readable.
However,
the contrast is not quite so stark as all that. Unexpectedly, there are
continuities in Lehto's work that pass across these quite radical formal
boundaries, for example a musical witnessing of urban business, as here:
80
timely too all, the buried ones
included
And without forgetting the
dead ones, he specified
81
as an
across-this-world's-swarming-and-whirling-large-
flat-floor-walking,
specifying shadow
82
as a snowy rain
a-flooding with butterfly-
and certain kind of bread-formed
words
83
with cities, objects with
their aftermarket, pots, flowers
on window sills, with
carpets shelves light-spots measure-
sticks houses
concepts
(from
"Snowfall")
and
here:
containing partly acoustic
music, partly that from the turn
of the century,
reflected at the surface of
the wall using a computer and a
video-gun,
and during the intermission
to the holy ceremony,
refreshments. I really was taken over
by horror
when I saw burned that good
man form Biscay, who as
godfather had married the godmother
reflected at the surface of
the wall using a computer and a
video-gun:
XXL size lush big-breasted
shaven offers relief to men of
all sizes and descr in Yliviesk evenings
nights.
When I saw burned that good
man form Biscay, who as
godfather had married the godmother,
I'm excited by him having
sex with another man:
(from
"Ananke: A Pantoum", in which, Lehto tells us, "The bulk of the
poem is based on direct quotations from online and newspaper dating
services".) A Lehtoic sound and manner emerges clearly from both these
poems, the first of them perceptibly late-Finnish-modernist and the second
broadly procedural. In that respect Lake
Onega and Other Poems reads very well as a unified book, not merely a
historico-biographical record of experimentation.
And, in
every way central to the book, I keep drifting back to
Ear's yelling question's
killing seismograph,
in linkup one, two thousand
chilling mall
virtually uniting all the
drunkards
to really vouch it all, for
rotting vitamins,
vigils whereat? Men may
take it all,
consigning even. Or reeling
moonward.
This is
the sestet of "Negative Capability", - "Half-homophonical on the
Finnish original which, again, is half-homophinical on John Keat's 'Bright
Star' sonnet". Whose sestet goes:
No---yet still stedfast,
still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever---or else swoon in death.
It's
surprising what survives this double mash-up through the sieves of language -
the play of double-L sounds, the resumption of the repeated absolute
"ever" in the repeated absolute "all", and the
near-rehabilitation of "ever---or" in the last line. But Keats'
vision of swooning inactivity is thoroughly translated away from its tender
context of a loved one's embrace; socialized, it turns into reeling drunkards
in a mall and also into human technological progress, e.g. travelling to the
moon. Both "stedfast" and both mindless, exactly as per Keats'
recipe, and sarcastically offering a new interpretation to the phrase
"negative capability".
Perhaps
sarcasm isn't quite the right word. Though mordant judgment, or potentially
mordant judgment, characteristically surrounds such comic episodes as the admin
department in "Back Office", or the cod-opera trimmings of
"Jagellonicae", one thinks rather of the stance of
The
Language of Flow (I think)
Asking the Water, I ask
where I swim:
what gets
"in-read" in you, being a "dream";
that and no more? not consciousness?
deep as a major, strong as
a minor, as
a traitorous hunch, a
wizard so white, as
a parish or garish, a gang,
parasite - and a kite
(in my view), and perhaps a swaying
of
night - and the steeple I broke myself
against, a shipwreck (not transposing to earth).
A luscious being, in view of the uncles.
A blossoming flight. A translative. Full
as vacuum, though full of you,
encircled, departed, in
view of the strand
and all the bundles there,
if you please.
*
NOTE 1:
As readers of English poetry we naturally tend to associate Lehto with his
American connections e.g. Bernstein and Goldsmith. The Finnish connections are
doubtless as important: Jyrki Pellinen, Arto Kytöhonka, Matti Tiisala,
Jukka-Pekka Kervinen, Jukka Mallinen, Aki Salmela, Janne Nummela, Cia Rinne,
Tuukka Terho, Jukka Tervo, Markku Aalto,
and many other writers - mere names to me - on ntamo (http://ntamo.blogspot.com/).
NOTE 2:
It's time to take issue with Lehto about something, and it's this: "It
wouldn't surprise me to see the next step in this process to be a certain
return to creativity - this time not based on a vision of authentic language
but on the authentic experience of the strangeness of all languages instead: in
the spirit in which I have proposed Finnish to be seen as one of the real world
languages - i.e. marginal to the point of being able to stand for all the
others' marginality..." (from "Nothing That Is Initially Interesting
To More Than Seven People Can Ever Change The Consciousness Of the Masses"
http://leevilehto.net/?page_id=79). Applauding the
general concept, I feel like pointing out immediately that Finnish and the
other Nordic languages are in some ways very exceptional - consider just for
instance its remarkably high standing, the high regard in which the Nordic zone
is held within e.g. the rather xenophobic English-speaking zone - popularly
perceived as (not only white and first-world and affluent but) more culturally
advanced, better at design and technology and politics and education and
politeness, than even we are... an uninspected esteem that e.g. this essay
contributes uneasily towards cementing. Or consider the unique relationship of
(2009)
Jessica Smith:
Organic Furniture
Cellar: Works on Paper 2002 – 2004
(first published in Intercapillary
Space.)
There’s reviews I’ve found more difficult than this one – in fact, they’re all difficult – but I don’t recall ever starting to write a review so many times. Because Organic Furniture Cellar is a book that can lead you off in a lot of directions beyond textuality.
But I’ve decided that I’m not going to
write about how I bought it, though I think that the way that poets like Jessica Smith and Anne Boyer have taken up
Etsy ateliers – Etsy is a sort of handicraft version of eBay – is fascinating,
and surely one of the more unanticipated impacts of the Internet on poetry. I’m
not going to write about the continuity between OFC and Smith’s other
handicraft works (Sommarhuset is an object-poem consisting of sand,
dried bilberries, and stolen items), nor about the persistent blurring of
public and private art that runs through her work; I’m not going to write about
the alarming openness of her LookTouchBlog
and her recently published Discourse
Networks; I’m not going to write about modern self-publishing, though OFC
is a formidable argument for it, nor about the many talking-points in
Smith’s introductory poetic (“The Plasticity of Poetry”), nor about the uproar
over Ron
Silliman’s enthusiasm, nor about that range-finding shell from Joyelle McSweeney.
Most reluctantly of all, I’m going to junk my effusions about where the book
was put together (the
Organic Furniture Cellar is subtitled Works on Paper 2002 – 2004. Jessica
Smith uses the whole of the paper, and the quotations here are frankly adapted to make them easier for me to quote. (For example, I can’t replicate the half-line drops that she often uses to make a top-down left-to-right reading impossible.)
And can we do better then start at the beginning, with the top part of “Passage”?
red mtn.
still hums with
irreconcilable distance
74 distances hum like traffic
400
during the day and like
crickets at night
14 15
picking white flowers
distances are
magnetized, they
push us away, they
615 us
repel 101 that click click of watches
sunny and
rainy kisses, 108 degrees in the shade
raspberry fingers
durcchscheinende road-cut
sunsets
trans lucidity
dandelions’ of memory the
first
dead white everything
In these poems Smith is riding an unstable equilibrium between something that can be more or less read (though not necessarily top-down, left-to-right), and something that is looked at in the more apparently simultaneous way that we receive a visual; something we can then examine, but our examination doesn’t have a particular start or finish to it.
It’s the difficult cusp. (By contrast, a poem such as Herbert’s “Easter Wings” is fairly stably in the reading zone despite its obvious visual aspect; a poem like Peter Finch’s “Instantaneous Magnetism”, where the word magnetism appears about thirty times in a column down the middle of the page, is fairly stably in the visual zone, though you might read the odd word while you’re looking it over.)
To keep us – at least for a while – where she wants us, Smith has a problem of balance. “Passage” is an example of where she gets it about right, and here’s the top part of “90” where I think she gets it wrong:
7 hours
a winter drive
blue sky
tangled white feathers
shedding
that
tpke
winter phase
24
hawks mass
Sometimes readers are their own worst enemies. We really want something interesting to happen, but if we start off (as we rather tend to) at the top-left corner and immediately see what the poem seems to be about, then hey, we stick with that, no further questions. And since winter drives are, to our lazy minds, pretty familiar fare, the page just dies on us.
I’m not saying this to nitpick, but because one of the ways to appreciate what’s happening here is to see how new kinds of problem loom into view.
“
There’s an analogous problem in the time-dimension. The exploration needs to go to work on the memory-forming process and Smith understandably uses her own memories. Memories themselves are keyed to – though not of course unmodifed from – what she really thought or felt at the time. And this means no dressing up.
Think of a poem like Wordsworth’s Prelude that is built around memories already formed. We are satisfied that it’s based on real experiences but in fact we are allowed very limited access to them because the text has completely absorbed the memories and their origins into the composed discourse of the poet; as here, of the philosophical walks with Beaupuy during the “Residence in France”:
And sometimes –
When to a convent in a
meadow green,
By a brook-side, we came, a
roofless pile,
And not by reverential touch
of Time
Dismantled, but by violence
abrupt –
In spite of those
heart-bracing colloquies,
In spite of real fervour,
and of that
Less genuine and wrought up
within myself –
I could not but bewail a
wrong so harsh,
And for the Matin-bell to
sound no more
Grieved, and the twilight
taper, and the cross
High on the topmost
pinnacle, a sign
(How welcome to the weary
traveller’s eyes!)
Of hospitality and peaceful rest.
How far we are from a direct transcription of the thoughts and experiences of the nineteen-year-old William (a fairly rough diamond, it would seem) can be gauged from the biographers’ profound uncertainty and wide latitude for speculation about this part of the poet’s life. The Prelude isn’t a narrative about the growth of a poet’s mind in a psychological sense – though it’s almost impossible for us to avoid that anachronism, so much has our concept of personal identity changed – it’s a narrative about the development of his opinions.
The technical problem in OFC is that the rawness of those first thoughts is to be represented, and rawness is perilous: “your hand squeezes mine”, “your rosy cheeks, salt-stained”, “quiet Swedish ögruppen” (groups of islands),
“crossing streets with tree names”, “deep blue flatness”, “the roar of the sea”, “languages and places switching places”... It would be unreasonable to object to the private thoughts considered merely as thoughts – would yours read any better? – but we’re so habituated to picking out this kind of phrase as a damning sign of insufficiently-realized poetry that, seeing these words in a poem, a knee-jerk condemnation is hard to suppress. Yet Smith needs the raw thoughts as material to explore memory-formation.
So it creates, once again, a delicate issue
of balance. “Common Blues”, “January”, “February”, “
And because of other poems here I do have an idea of what the ones I don’t begin to read might be supposed to do. Here’s the top-most and bottom-most parts of “first leaves”:
a
d s
red
w c i
fire
explosion
k
tt
l
d
yellow
burnt
e
bursts of
***
orange
little specks of brown
a
smell of
wet leaves
like bananas
ll
trees like fireworks
brown
eaves some trees
turn utterly yellow
more quickly than others
(I’ve missed out the middle third, approximately, of the poem.) To call this only a poem about autumn leaves misses the dynamism of the arrangement. As the eye moves from top to bottom of the page, it passes through several gradations. Topologically, we’re passing from tree-tops to the ground. We’re also moving outwards, from the first thing you see (hence the title), the focussed dramatic flare of red in the crown that makes you think: oh, right, the leaves are changing colour, to a transformed perception of the whole scene; for example, to noticing the leaves under your feet, the smell of wet leaves. But there’s a chronological motion as well as a topological one: from looking ahead (on the lookout) then to inspection and consideration (looking down). The “mnemo-topology” mimics the movement of leaf-fall; for the mind is seasonally-suggestible and makes the rhythms of seasons. You could also recognize in the gradation of the poem a movement from October to November. And like the leaves themselves the mind finally dries out, retaining nothing in words but the flat, analytical, noteworthy observation that “some trees turn utterly yellow more quickly than others”. Thus reason hopes to prolong the brief flush of apprehension!
Probably the most impressive extended
stretch in the book is the poems grouped as Exile. A poem like “first
leaves” works with the simplest of apprehensions and in natural forms and
rhythms, but Exile is concerned with negotiating a complex built
environment, the city of Berlin, and with structures inherited from a built
monolith in our culture, Joyce’s Ulysses (the city wanderings are of
course à propos): the poems become grid-like and criss-crossed, except –
naturally – in the trapped domesticity of Calypso and the sentimental
eroticism of Nausikaa. Lestrygonians fragments a cynical
conversation about the Berlin Wall and the Gaza Strip; Cyclops settles
into the numbed “myopia / my opiate” of train travel.
“Hör du ente klocka?” (Don’t you hear the clock?) says one of the fragments in Archipelago, the last part of OFC, which idyllically tries to stop the clock in the High Coast, where the land is still rising nearly a centimeter a year, and former bays like Ulvön are cut off from the sea. (It’s a shame that the Swedish glossary, promised in the introduction, is nowhere to be seen.) The urgency of memory, as a means of clock-stopping, is figured in the inconsequentially beautiful map-poems, and sends sad tremors through the final poem, “After The Hours / Riddarfjärden”. Wherever Smith gets to from here, it can’t be back.
runs again
and remember
street lights this life runs
out
night
m stops running
you see
you
point
finally
even in alleyways thoughts command
when
remember this
e
(2006)
Richard Makin: St
Leonards (2006-)
[First published in Intercapillary Space.The
online version of St Leonards begins here: http://www.greatworks.org.uk/poems/Makin/stl1.html.]
We're not
going to forget it, the opening screen: poultry, jack or tin and paper case,
ditto section. You have to move in close to read all this, using negatives,
saying what is not—torn in a seacup, eye full of clipse. First the green line.
One thing I am certain about: the language filched from passers by. Immaculate
simplicity of narrative. It's a method known to stop anything in its tracks.
She
is born with her head wrapped around a name, a big chunk of it.
(Opening moves of St
Leonards, Chapter 6)
For the last few years
Richard Makin (the "A" seems to be optional) has been publishing in
monthly instalments on the Great Works
site run by Peter Philpott. Work in
Process began publication in 2004. It was supposed to run for a year, but
in the event it carried on for more than two, so the complete text runs to 30
parts, separated by photographic images. St
Leonards followed immediately and is, as I write, on its seventh
instalment: not too late to get with it and to enjoy - if that is the right
word - the curiously compulsive exercise of waiting for the next episode and
its surprising turns (which are always a surprise) and its revelations (which
never materialize). Right now this is one of my favourite books.
The two works are not
entirely discrete, so that for example "a rust chute emptying into the
sea" in SL2 repeats an image
that first showed up as far back as WiP2;
"the great arterial trunk that carries blood from the pump" varies a
definition of aorta first seen in WiP29; longstanding motifs such as the descent and the hexagon continue
to outcrop; the "young man with an ashplant" of WiP30 returns fragmentarily in SL3,
part of a narrow thread of references to the Telemachia of Ulysses
that still makes a remote rumble in SL7
when "She loses her implant".
Serial publication posits
an active relationship with a public; it recalls, perhaps, the popular frenzy
whipped up by Dickens' early novels, the anguished letters and the tearful crowds
waiting for news of Little Nell. Or the ill-fated serialization of Ulysses in Pound's Little Review, which finally foundered on the Nausicaa episode.
Makin's serialization bears only an ironic or parodic relation to those
analogues ("What she misses is that he has silenced the crowd"): what
invisible audience there may be is subjected to a continuous mockery of its
expectations and motives: "I am so grateful to listen in on all sorts of
people thinking aloud" (SL2).
Still, there are
certain analogies that bear investigation. Reading a serial work as it comes
out, we know that the book is still being written; we are involved in a narrative
about the author's progress - something that Makin self-referentially feeds
into the text. We receive the text in a series of timed releases, each
advancing and not advancing our conception of the book that does not yet exist,
resembling and not resembling the parts that came before. When the book is
published complete, if it ever seems complete, this particular aspect of its
generation of radical indecipherability will disappear, only to be replaced,
however, by the ironic suggestion of indecipherability proposed by book-spines
along a shelf.
We also know that the book
title has been made up in advance of composition;
we tend to assume that it provides an insecure and provisional marker (like the
material on which this note bases itself) to how the book will actually pan
out. St Leonards refers casually to where
the author now lives, but the book is not about the place in a simple way (it
is not a simple place, except in Thomas Campbell's poem). Very occasionally,
almost with a joke-like effect, a local reference crackles into view:
"castle nowhere near camber, swift running flame" (SL6).
And finally, Makin's
serial works, like The Old Curiosity Shop,
are illustrated. Illustrations for St
Leonards have yet to emerge; this one is from early in Work in Process and has the caption "RX12+?".
What relation the
images bear to the text is a question. Perhaps a few of the recurring motifs,
the pyramid and the rust chute for example, owe their origin to the images.
What the text tends to emphasize about the images is how much you can't
understand about them; a radical indecipherability of our surroundings, not at
all diminished by me supposing this to be Dungeness and knowing that RX12
specifies a boat registered in the
Serial publication is
an invitation to read; Makin's work is an experimental prose that connects, at its extremes, with both the
novel and the installation - I would call it, in our present state of
incompetence, partially readable. In
some of his earlier work that meant reading a few words here and there. The
work I'm writing about here accommodates - yes, invites, - a reading-through
somewhat as a book of reflective essays or even a novel, but it does not
resolve into characters, action or locale, and in fact it's impossible to hold
the non-sequential material sufficiently in the mind to perform the mental
exercise that we normally think of as reading.
What kind of a serial
is this?
I have heard Makin's
work described as "non-generic prose" and I like that description,
which emphasizes the freedom of the reader, the potential for pioneering into
land that neither author nor reader may recognize. But I know it's not so easy
as all that to be truly non-generic. Makin knows it too. Programmatically
self-referential, the text constantly implies descriptions of itself, as an
essay ("Let's start with some basics"), lecture ("whether you
might be persuaded to say a few words"), novel ("no story although a
great many things happen"), automatic writing ("This is an
underthread"), travelogue ("we're heading off to the opening
sea"), anthology ("A selection is given"), residue
("charred leaves go up the flume"), apology ("He's reduced to
justification"). Those are all in
the first section of St Leonards. In
the second, there's others; a trunk in the attic ("This is where I put
things I reject but wish to keep"), and a crime fiction ("They
believe his motive was revenge..."). That last one keeps nagging at us: coroner's
reports and post mortems, archaeological pathology, provide a sinister
undercurrent. Without fixed characters or locations it's going to be a tough
case to crack.
Where the
"non-generic" tag really falls down is that it doesn't suggest the
definite character of the writing, which I suppose is in this case the thing
that makes anticipation (and therefore serialization) possible.
This, for contrast, is
a stretch of one of Makin's earlier works:
the list of loss ashen graille sunk low in
the minute past participles of braun sand. pin umbrella tube epic horrorscope
pictures worlds for collapse in monte de pietá of wergild. an equivalence of
chunnel hoping. kufa kef impulse alienated from the bable televisionary progrom
twighlights of the idle of the tribe the den the cave the forum the theatre the
fumes from music rising verdigris.
(from Forword)
This is fantastically
inventive, but it's a bombardment. The tempo of the serial works is less
frantic. Space, silence and nervous tension have crept out to the surface of
the text.
Animals are box office. The first
impression is recovered. Box of fire. Box of ash. Words stuck to the concrete
redeem the evening —
ground and delivered, with screed pull to deep background square, collided.
What if one of us expires on route. The ghoulest thing is the image of her face
at the fourth floor window. He is conscious of, but cannot apprehend, its
wayfare and flickerbook existence.
Tell them the general needs you, he allows
you to breathe in the sea tonight. I break away. First train back. He goes to
search in his pack. Now you must away too. Carry with you this common place
book. Utilize primary methods of sensation, the quality of being limited by a
condition, like rising earth each side of a furrow, the ineluctable etcetera. I
don't have time for this now.
(from SL3)
Perhaps the right
question to ask is not about the meaning but about how the text was made. Some
is arrived at by direct transmutation: "Box of fire" a typo variant
of "box office", for example. Some responds to a particular groove
within the chapter: in this case, a recurrent sequence of transformed
cricketing terms ("pull to deep background square").
Then there are unmarked
quotations and allusions: "breathe in the sea tonight" inevitably
induces a spectral hint of that pained Phil Collins ballad In the Air Tonight. "The ineluctable etcetera" alludes to
the start of the Proteus section of Ulysses.
Other sentences look like that could be quotations but are possibly invented ("Carry with you this common
place book"), like those epigraphs in the Waverley novels that are
attributed to Old Play. No reader is
going to know them all: the text's materials are unlimitedly various (it was by
the merest accident that on second or third reading of a sentence elsewhere, "the
madness in my area", I remotely recalled a Fall B-Side from 1979).
Almost as tricky, if
you like difficult games, is the use of dictionary defnitions that are detached
from their headwords; as here, "the quality of being limited by a
condition", which I am still trying to work out. Sometimes the headword
may show up in due course, as happens elsewhere with distal and bearings.
Often the definition is mutated, like "the part of a cartel that receives
pollen" (SL7) - which would have
defined stigma, when the fifth word was "carpel".
Perhaps most crucially,
the text develops from its own foundations. Take the penultimate sentence from
the passage above; this, three chapters later, is what sprouts from it:
She stands in
a timely passage: the inenarrable modality of the invisible. There is a
clerical boundary, the quality of being limited by a condition (law). In the
middle of the compass a kidnap, a net: feldspar whose tissues are not at the
right angles—all that bite, any mixture of them—oblique fractures, crosswise of
mouth like sharks and rays, crosswise returning with transverse slit on
underside of head. Vouchsafe, the walk is round the back of myself. Climb the ascent
and back on to the road. Use any of the primary methods. His tendons are
crushed. Classify the sensations as to whether true, false, necessary, possible
or impossible (log).
It's a method of
progressing that makes one persistently aware of vague recognition; it suggests
the illusory idea that if you could only hold the whole text in your mind at
once, you'd learn something. At least, I think it's an illusory idea, but maybe
it's only impractical.
If that long-distance
grasp of the material seems difficult for readers with the vital thread of
fixed text to work with, it seems nothing short of astounding in the writer. A
method there must be, or it would be impossible to bring this book together,
page after implacable page. Though one category of favoured words witnesses to
where Makin begins from in British writing (revenant,
simulacra, mephitic....), yet he
utterly transcends that point of origin through the vast scope of his
content/allusions, his multi-threaded scenae, eye-opening wordplay, most audibly
perhaps through such casually skilled sentences as these (all drawn from the
same page):
He touches his cheek. It's dry, but still
the sting of cold spray, the taste of salt.
Glister on beaded rubble, a collapse of
boulders.
His knuckles knock against the uneven
surface of the table like dice.
Erosion and sand-drift, the itinerant
pebble.
One flies towards him with a live coal and
purifies his lips.
Bringing these excerpts
together (they are not adjacent in the text) reveals them as more or less
closely connected; they ignite each other. The elegance too is not there for
its own sake, but is part of the procedure.
(2007)
Alice Notley, "In Forgetting" (from In the Pines, 2007)
[First published in Intercapillary Space as
part of Constellation:
Alice Notley, a collaboration between Birkbeck Centre for Poetics, Openned,
and IS...]
Why should
I respect, or convince, or even interest you?
In the Pines (2007) is a
stifling book. Apart from its unrelenting animosity towards the reader - this
was the book's first line, the final poem is called "Beneath You" -
it exists entirely in a death chamber. If the title poem is, as the back cover
proposes, a lament, then the word lament does not include elegy. Do not look
here for poetry's starry recreation of past, for conferring immortality on the
good times, for
thou in this shalt find thy
monument,
When
tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent.
But here: "I remember no-one's fine eyes; I remember
no-one's large heart"; "the story is false. Why is the story
generated? For beauty's sake?"; "I'm almost telling this story but
I'm not going to. The old kinds of details aren't right any more";
"but if they say what you did, that isn't what you did".
Here the dead are the dead, unless they are still dying, it
is death that is remembered, its negativity that is upheld, The book is about
no-one, nothing, denying that things exist. This negativity, well it's cheap of
me but it seems reasonable to say "this negative theology", I like in
"In Forgetting":
I see bodies in the snow, as
I walk out, but I'm dead myself. The entire north knows this. He took the
manitou on his knee and I succumbed. So why read the murder book? The only real
murder is mine.
As I fly above the white
north. Wonder who's dead and if their souls will appear.
Everyone in this land is a frozen eyeless
heartless forgetting.
One might recognize the form
of someone you knew; you won't know if this one recognizes you. You may not
know exactly what recognition is, if they have killed you.
Well someone has. Do you
care who kiled you?
There is a walrus-like man,
a silkie, in the night exchange coming towards me. He walks upright and would
like to say something, but the counter-exchange is formless; my words are lost.
Notley doesn't talk about a cloud of forgetting, she
doesn't like clouds or food (it sounds too positive), the forgetting is just
called forgetting, and it is formless. How does one bring formlessness into a
poem? By misdescribing the form (lament, noir fiction), or by tattered,
defective forms. In the Pines, quite
as much as Kenny Goldsmith, is indifferent to the writing of good poems, though
what does get written dispenses also with the acceptable surfaces of the game
or the forecast. I think it's a committed private endeavour, a search for
contact "in those rooms where we can no longer touch our lovers, because
their skin hurts, or touch them with words they can answer", a shamanistic
search for a soul. If it's in any way directed towards the world of the living,
it's not about aesthetics, it's an instruction.
To catch the full force of the book's hostility to
being "read", it helps to be a male reader, but any reader is going
to examplify the "he structure"
("something is of interest if
the he structure says so"). As
we stand, all culture is corrupt, the reader is an institution of the culture
and so is everything else; there is no nature in In the Pines, or rather, it is just as acculturated as everything
else: "if I'm the earth or ocean, you have ruined me".
This poem begins: "Because he took that strange
girl on his knee." Which is a perfect image of betrayal, abuse or love, or
all three together, or who is to judge which? Is there love which is not
abusive and a betrayal? In this false culture? How deep will this radical
negativity cut?
It's
interesting her eyes are torn places.
The weight of denunciation in "interesting"
is clear enough. In "Beneath You" that sarcasm smoulders on:
In my
crushed-out eyes I
beautifully
.........
working
for you my-
self.
which took lives
in this
crushed-out room where
all times
come, between the
spokes of
my broken irises
there's no
one who can sing like me.
In the Pines comes up to
breathe only twice, once in part 14 of the title poem, the already celebrated
section about the world tree that had also appeared in Grave of Light (2006), and which Notley reads memorably in a
soundclip on Third Factory (http://www.thirdfactory.net/lipstick.php?id=P119). The second time is on
the book's last page, but here I'm not sure if the gulp of air we take isn't
mostly to do with the white space that signals that this bruising encounter is
finally ending. The real work of the book is elsewhere, not in these stray
concessions.
Make nothing of this; to be
this negative is an action with no known flower yet, but I prize it, I said.
(2008)
My haul (hours
in a library) (2008)
PART 1...
Comfortably secured from anything like real poverty, the
extreme parsimony of one who has merely over-extended himself is more of a
luxury than a constraint. While my friend at work treated himself to a shotgun,
ninety quid's worth of cartridges, an iPod Nano G3 and a KFC Variety Bucket, we
window-shopped for a bar of chocolate.
So there was a book sale in the reference library near where
I work. There is something pleasing about the mere act of taking books away
from a reference library, but in my present state of indigence I did not
indulge myself very much. I bought, for 20p, a book about Henri Michaux which
abundantly conveyed (or rather, reiterated) the author's enthusiasm for
Michaux, and there matters stayed. It seemed that the book sale was not a great
success. These, of course, are the books that no-one wants to read any more,
but that doesn't bother me much, a lot of my lifelong tastes (e.g. for Scott)
have been determined by what I could pick up for almost nothing. A few weeks
went by, and then appeared an offer that I really couldn't refuse. For the last
few days of the sale, we were encouraged to fill an ample plastic bag to the
brim and to pay only a pound for the whole lot.
So vast an influx of literature could not, of course, be
entirely read through, and perhaps I scarcely intended it. What follows
therefore is in the spirit of Pierre Bayard, the result as much of surveying as
of reading.
The
Shelley's Literary and
Philosophical Criticism ed. John Shawcross, 1909. The editor had no excessive
admiration for Shelley's prose, but felt compelled to issue a selection that
expurgated his political and atheistic work - the mature Shelley was not even
very interested in politics, Shawcross claims. Here's something I just read in
Saarikoski's Edge of Europe (a
fantastic book, which I'll review as soon as I can get it together): "I
went to Helsinki, spent three days there and met a lot of people, but none of
them said anything memorable because all the people I met were intellectuals,
and intellectuals always say what they mean without meaning what they say, and
this makes it hard to have conversations with them." Shelley in his prose,
the poems I'm not sure about, but what appeals in the prose is a willingness to
stand by what he says. You think of Shelley as idealistic, but he's more
dangerous than that. He says of Jesus Christ and of Rousseau (this is the Essay on Christianity) that they didn't
really mean that one should literally give away all one's possessions or return
to nature: "Nothing is more obviously false than that the remedy for the
inequality among men consists in their return to the condition of savages and
beasts". Most poets of a radical type would be tempted to assert the
doctrines in their literal form - it would come over a lot sexier. But Shelley
was political in his very bones; he was interested in the implementation of justice. So of the idealistic early church in the
first generation after Jesus, "It was a circumstance of no moment that the
first adherents of the system of Jesus Christ cast their property into a common
stock. The same degree of community of property could have subsisted without
this formality, which served only to extend a temptation of dishonesty to the
treasurers..." This formality -
that's where I hear the Shelley that takes my breath away. This could be
misconstrued perhaps as timidly prudential or self-serving - not at all.
Shelley believes in a distinct path to equality: the spread of knowledge brings
individuals to moral maturity and results in a just society which results in
equality. The final sentence of the Defence
of Poetry is there not for the glory of poetry but to concentrate attention
on effecting material change.
Zbigniew Herbert and Tadeusz Różewicz - two volumes of
selected poems in English translation. I've only glanced at the introductions -
these two poets who came of age during the German occupation and who drew from
it such different ideas for their art. This reminds me that Enright wrote
scornfully of the dire influence of all such translations of foreign poetry
into English, with the sole exception of
Cavafy. I like translationese. Reading it certainly breaks you out of that sad
conception of "verse". It probably doesn't even matter much whether
the poetry being translated is "good" or not. Venturi and all those
currently fashionable protestations about allowing the foreignness to come
through are just continuations of Enright. As if you could possibly prevent it!
As if you are even in a position to know what is foreign!
Phaedrus - like the
The Rise of the Greek Epic, by Gilbert
Murray. This irresistible book would have helped with that. (This was the one
book in my haul that I immediately read from cover to cover.) It was mostly
written around 1906, and gives the most comprehensive explanation I've ever
seen of what "Homer" is (and by the way of the conditions of Athenian
Tragedy). The subsequent history of these theories I do not know - to what
extent later scholars have rejected or accepted them. What's enthralling is the
quality of the searching questions that are addressed here - Murray begins with
the uniqueness of the Homeric poems as a datum and as something that demands
explanation; he ends up with a detailed image of the "ancient book"
as a collaborative evolution that is even more unique than we supposed - it was
fascinating to read this back to back with
Teach Yourself
Postmodernism, by Glenn Ward (1997). I suppose a lot of people get their
postmodernism from primers rather than primary sources; I certainly do, and
even so these contacts are fleeting, I remain quite ignorant. It seems that my
conception of Baudrillard's hyperreality (drawn as I recall from another
primer) was largely mistaken, if this one is to be believed. Now I have two
conceptions, both with explanatory potential, and I'm not really bothered about
resolving them. It's sobering to find that a lot of what I imagined to be my
more original ideas are in fact just part of the zeitgeist, the kind of things
that everyone is thinking these days.
Romeo and Juliet,
Two hundred poems from the
Greek Anthology, trans. Robin Skelton (1971). This selection mainly
represents (in spicy tetrameters) the gentlemen-authors among the whores and
boys, giving vent to every fantasy in prospect and every cynicism in retrospect.
I wish I were a nodding rose
for you to watch me bud and blow,
and pluck me with that slender hand
and press me to your breasts of snow.
Balzac's Comédie Humaine, by Herbert J.
Hunt, 1959. Balzac's work is so vast that being a Balzacian scholar is
necessarily a way of life - Hunt has absorbed certain qualities of Balzac's
aesthetic into his prose style, where they do more harm than good; it's rough
going, (tougher still if your French isn't perfect, books on French Lit were at
this time language-mosaics; it was then assumed that the reader of literature
knew a basic toolkit of four or five
languages), - and Hunt doesn't
seem to want to think very much about what he is reading (contrast Gilbert
Murray, above) - "Grandmother Tonsard is one of Balzac's most colourful
old hags..." etc. Clearly the book
contains a vast quantity of information, but it strikes me the only way to know
what this information means is to read the whole of the Comédie humaine first. Balzac is one of my very favourite writers,
but the idea of ever doing that is monstrous, it would be suicide.
Sir Walter Scott on
novelists and fiction, ed. Ioan Williams, 1968. And here's another favourite
author, but I would rather die than read through these 500-odd pages;
obviously, this compilation was intended solely for ease of scholarly
reference. Scott's review of his own Old
Mortality (published anonymously) is an uncomfortable performance; and
getting chunks of the Prefaces without the accompanying novels leaves me
feeling horribly cheated. Still, I suppose I'll withhold it from the charity
shop for a while. It could just possibly be that one evening I'll like to
immerse in one of Scott's long reviews of, say, Richard Cumberland or The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan.
The Plays of Roswitha, trans.
Christopher St. John (1923). More commonly known as Hroswitha, she was a
tenth-century nun in the convent of Gandersheim in
This takes me to nearly the bottom of my first shopping-bag.
Oh, didn't I mention? - on the last day of the sale I went and filled up
another one. More to follow when the feast of gloating has finally calmed down.
*
PART 2...
OK, let's get on with it.
The Literature of the
Highlands, by Magnus Maclean (new and extended edn, 1925). "After
receiving a fair classical education, and
while yet a student,
this wayward fondling of the Muse fell in love with a Glen Etive damsel, Jane
Macdonald of Dalness, or Sine bheag nam
brogan buidhe (Little Jean with the yellow shoes), as she was locally
called, and this winsome maid he married..." (this is about Alexander
Macdonald). Not much of whatever may be interesting in the subject (Scots
Gaelic poetry, 18th-19th century) is still interesting when it's been
translated into sweet Victorian parlour-lyric. Besides, there's a filtering
process at work so we hear nothing of what would shock us in Alexander
Macdonald's "Praise of Morag" ("His amorous language, indeed,
needs frequent asterisks at the hands of publishers and translators"), nor
of his 1735 pamphlet with the promising title "An Essay upon Improving and
Adding to the Strength of Great Britain and Ireland by Fornication". The
terms of critical language create their own story, in this case entirely
distinct from the story I think I want to hear. "'William Ross,' says
Pattison, 'is a graceful poet, perhaps the most polished of any of the Highland
minstrels; although he is certainly inferior to more than one of them in point
of strength and energy. He is tender and easy and plaintive.' He delighted in
pastoral poetry, of which he seized the true and genuine spirit, and in his
descriptions of nature is very sweet and pretty. His 'Praise of the Highland
Maid' is a masterpiece of its kind..."
Tres pasos en falso, by E. Jarnés
Bergua (1970) - detective novel for students of Basic Spanish; very
fascinating. I spent about half my time speculating about the intended
audience, apparently good enough at Spanish to negotiate the astoundingly
ingenious reasoning of the investigator, yet sufficiently unacquainted with
Spanish life to benefit from laborious explanations of eg. cigarettes, nerves,
facts, saying goodbye, and even smiling (to laugh without noise). It was only
just now that the penny dropped, that the book being designed for readers from
any country cannot translate any of its unknown words but only indicate the meaning
by using Basic Spanish itself. The other half of my time was spent admiring the
darkly intricate story and the bizarre perspectives of the illustrations - e.g.
of falling masonry as seen from overhead. Reading a story in another language
massively intensifies its effect; what would be beneath notice in English
disturbed my dreams for several nights with an impression of desolate
sadness.
The Works of Sir George
Etherege, vol. 1 - containing a lively account of the author's
scandalous life (most of it comes after his brief dalliance with the theatre),
and also The Comical Revenge, or Love in
a Tub (1664), - the first real Restoration Comedy, though still partly
intermixed with heroick love in couplets. It's difficult to read it without
thinking of the brilliant new genre that would solidify immediately afterwards
and as a direct result of this play (but from which such transitional vestiges
as e.g. a dejected lover falling on his sword would be utterly sloughed
off).
Land in Bloom, by V. Safonov.
This won the Stalin Prize in 1949. Pentti Saarikoski (I am still reading
Saarikoski in the midst of all this), struggling with Le breton sans peine, reflected: "Lenin's method of language
study was brutal: he read his way through a dictionary and a grammar book, then
proceeded to construct sentences. He was equally impatient in his construction
of the Soviet state. Never would he have put up with this idea of proceeding in
daily twenty-minute increments. Everything had to be done now, not on the
fifteenth." Safonov's Lysenko is also like this. "Perhaps it was only
his perseverance, his extraordinary thirst for knowledge and his undeviating
pursuit of the road he had chosen that distinguished him from the rest. And one
other very characteristic feature: for him, knowledge was something that was
immediately put into practice... The fact that, having arrived in Ganja in the
autumn, he did not wait until the spring to commence work on his legumes,
already revealed the 'Lysenko style'." The result was a demolition of the
fallacious "laws" of the spluttering Morganist Mendelists,
representatives of the science of the West in its terminal decline. For, as
Michurin said: "We cannot wait for favours from Nature: we must wrest them
from her." Johann Eichfeld, interviewed by Safonov, explained: "One
must not mark time in science. Not on anything, not on any theory - like the
theory of intraspecific struggle. Ossification means death for the
researcher." He held a book in his hand, "one that he, evidently, was
constantly consulting, for its margins were heavily annotated and numerous
passages were underscored... He put on his spectacles and read the following:
'Content is impossible without form, but the point is that a given form, since
it lags behind its content, never fully corresponds to this content; and so the
new content is obliged to clothe itself for a time in the old form, and this
causes a conflict between them.' These words, the utterance of a genius, sum up
the dialectics of the development of the science that casts aside the old, that
seeks the new, and pushes ever forward. They are the words of Stalin..."
(Robert M. Young shared my fascination .... )
http://marx.org/subject/science/essays/young.htm.
Soil Biotechnology, by J. M. Lynch
(1983). This does not, for the most part, mean genetic engineering (then a
technology in its infancy) - it means, more generally, "manipulation of
soil micro-organisms and their metabolic processes to optimize plant
productivity". In that sense cultivation, straw mulching and burning,
fertilizers and pesticides are also biotechnology. The two irritants of the
proponents of a "sound scientific basis" are snake-oil salesmen
selling miracle preparations and emotive, inaccurate, environmentalists. But
the author is reasonably fair: "it is interesting that organic farmers
using composts as a basis for their system seldom encounter major pathogen
problems... Organic systems include the
composting of plants and animal wastes, the science of which is generally
poorly understood." More generally an adequate grasp of the entire ecology
of what one is manipulating seems not to have been attained: the science has
tended to be funded where significant money is at stake, i.e. to treat specific
problems of current conventional methods, a kind of patching-up. Facts thus
drift in a void, but some of the facts in the book catch my eye, e.g.:
"Most plants form non-pathogenic associations between their roots and
fungi (mycorrhiza): the sedges, crucifers, some chenopodiaceae (e.g.
sugar-beet) and certain aquatics are the exceptions".
Rubens, by Kristin
Lohse Belkin (Phaidon, 1998), who writes persuasively of the linked themes of
peace and women in his later allegories. But basically, this is the kind of art
book you get for the illustrations; a large and excellent selection, though of
course there's no shortage of material - it doesn't show e.g. the National
Gallery Judgement of Paris [http://www.geocities.com/mpeverett/rubens.htm].
When I want to read about Rubens - or Van Eyck, Rembrandt, or Cuyp, - I'll
always drift back to Eugène Fromentin, but it's even better to read him with
this book open at e.g. the
Diplomat, by Gunnar
Hagglof. Memoirs of distinguished service as a Swedish Envoy, including during
the second World War. This golden era of diplomacy depended on an upper-class
cultivation of non-specialist hunches, in turn on the conception of national
types - "I have never found it rewarding to try to define the 'character'
of a nation," Hagglof remarks, but his zeitgeist was too strong for him,
so he spent the next couple of pages doing exactly that about Germany. The book
slips down easily - Hagglof, of course, knew "everyone" - the usual
anecdotes of Goering, Roosevelt, Gide, Eliot... the raison d'être of memoirs is
to lay bare what was confidential at the time, but something makes this less
than arresting - a feeling that the author's temperament remains innately
diplomatic...
Our Lady of the Sewers: And
other Adventures in Deep
PART 3...
Brigid Brophy, Black
Ship to Hell (1962). The urgency of Brophy's writing springs essentially
from this: she accepts Freud's account of the death wish as a fundamental truth
about human nature, at any rate in modern times; then combines that fact with
the existence of weapons of mass destruction: we all basically want to destroy
everything, and now we can, so we will. This leads to (among other things) a
violent assault on religion - based not so much on its claims being untrue
(that's merely a given) as on denying that belief can be sincere or morally
unreprehensible - these are formidable, in-your-face polemics and I'm shaken
and impressed. And yet it isn't difficult to see why her books aren't in print
any more. Brophy's passionate admiration for Freud leads to many pages of
unparticularized generalities like this, sampled in mid-torrent: "She [the
prostitute] has, in fact, improved on the tragic conception of fate by adding
to it the numerical idea of chance. The male sex is a lottery, in which the
prostitute has bought the highest possible number of tickets. Any one in her
holding may be the winning number, the father she is seeking; but since no one
knows which is he, it is the series as a whole which becomes the object of her
sexual and aggressive desires. For the prostitute, every professional act of
intercourse is an act of incest and, at the same time, an attack on her father.
In exercising her profession, she gratifies her incestuous wish (and its
murderous companion), yet the fact that it is a game of hazard allows her to
plead not guilty to incest. Just so, if one member, no one knows which, of the
firing squad has drawn a blank cartridge, all may feel innocent of the killing
but the execution none the less gets done. The same psychology is manifest in
the very usage of modern European languages, where the plural you, vous,
sie is a politer way of addressing
one person than the singular thou, tu, du.
... " This jostle of ideas is dazzling, but I feel like it was even more
dazzling to write than to read. So much seems to be being asserted, (and yet,
in some sort of mode that suggests that it isn't really being asserted), and
it's so heavily bolstered by impatient logical expressions like "just
as", "of course", "in fact", that I keep wanting to
say - Hold on there! Just let me get it straight, what (or who) actually are we
talking about right now? Are you claiming that every prostitute... ? In what useful sense is this an account of prostitution (or warfare, or
education, or artists, or elections..)? This was a fashionable style of its era
- displaced at some time in the 1980s by tthe style of theory (revulsion from
the post-Freudian style when I was at university led to me wrongly supposing
that this was also how Freud himself must have written, thus putting off
discovery of my own passionate admiration for Freud for a further twenty
years). The passing of time reveals violently hostile contemporaries to share
as much as they disputed - Brophy often reminds me - at any rate, so far as her
language strategies are concerned - of C.S. Lewis in his populist defences of
Christianity (another blatant misuser of "in fact", "of
course", etc). Both made, in passing, exactly the same unanswerable
protests about the practice of vivisection - protests that were complete
failures and now excite surprise - in our time intellectuals are conspicuously
silent about this, it is only the emotive masses who think there is something
not quite right about what's euphemistically known as animal testing. (More
generally, Brophy also reminds me a lot of Germaine Greer - the same enormous
learning and the same admirable assurance of being able to cut through it to
what other learned people don't see at all.)
Alarcón, El sombrero
de tres picos (1874). I read this in
English a long time ago but can't remember anything about it, and my reading of
the Spanish is so painfully slow that nothing has yet happened. But this caught
my eye in the introduction: "Surprising to say, the Eco de Occidente [magazine started by the young author and a
hometown friend] fared far better than most little magazines. In a short time
Alarcón found himself with sufficient funds to be able to start out to seek his
fortune without any help from home.." This unlikely success, I am sure, is
not unconnected with how Alarcón's literary career afterwards went so wrong,
declining into persecuted conservatism. It just isn't right that a little
magazine should actually make a profit.
A selection from Modern
Swedish Poetry translated in the original metres by C.D. Locock (1929). The
poets in question are not what we would call modern: the young Karin Boye just
sneaks in at the end, but this basically covers the period of her predecessors,
Oscar Levertin, Verner von Heidenstam, Anders Österling, and E. A. Karlfeldt,
gaily sad, rather portly Prufrocks for the most part, who mildly rebel, or
dreamily escape, from the oppressive uprightness of Swedish society.
Our
Off bubbles Winter through the sluices brimming,
And Easter brings - alive! - in Persian shawl
Ghosts of quite unexpected little women! (Österling, from "Spring comes to
Vainly now in grey October pryest thou mid rocks and
islands:
No new Venus, bridal-vested, craves thine escort o'er
the sea:
Thou art God of the dumb fishes - through thy realms of
gloomy silence
No sea Flora passes scattering sunny blue anemones.
Goodly storehouses thou ownest, halls beneath the deep
waves sunken,
Gorging priceless roe and draining many a shipwrecked
flask of rum;
And that figurehead thou bearest, ruddy, shaggy-haired
and drunken,
Smiles contented thro' thy dreams of pleasures past -
and yet to come?
(Karlfeldt, from "Ode to the Autumnal
Richard Borshay Lee, The
!Kung San: men, women and work in a
foraging society (1979).
This is a detailed study of the last days of one of the last
groups of hunter-gatherers, - nearly detailed enough to use as a survival
manual - and I think the reference
library is impoverished for not still having it on its shelves. In truth, I
don't think many people use the reference library for books unless they are on
local subjects. It seems to be mainly visited for its computers - (by the way,
the South West Grid for Learning bars access to all sites ending in
"blogspot.com", thus preventing public library users from
encountering many of the most best sites about modern poetry, among much else.
Probably the users couldn't care less about that, but it seems wrong). Anyway,
back to the !Kung San. One abiding impression of Lee's book is that the
hunter-gatherers are very like us; they are about as superstitious as we are,
no more. Because his study covered several stays that were years apart, it
usefully points up how life changed quite dynamically, and at roughly our kind
of pace: for example, plants that were widely eaten in one season were never
seen to be eaten again - most earlier anthropological studies were too short to
generalize safely from, they just recorded a snapshot. I liked this exchange -
the !Kung preferred boiled meat to roasted meat, so Lee asked: '"How did
you !Kung live long ago before you got the iron cooking pots from the white
man?" /Twi!gum regarded me with a
twinkle in his eye amd replied, "It is well-known that people can't live
without iron cooking pots, so we must have died!"' (Those apparently
diacritical marks refer to various kinds of click produced with an ingressive
air stream - there are four, / is a
dental click, ! is alveopalatal - try it... )
Lope de Vega, El
Castigo sin Venganza (1631)
Curious that in Spanish stage directions salir means to come onto the stage, not to leave it. But then (I've
never thought about this before), why do we say e.g. "Enter Macbeth"
and not "Enters Macbeth"? As you might gather, I haven't got very far
with this one yet...
The Poem of the Cid, trans. W.S.
Merwin, 1959.
According to Ron Silliman the best translation is Paul
Blackburn's, but Merwin's pleased me. As for The Cid itself, I'm not so sure. The image of the poem is laid
before us in the first cantar, and everything then is fascinating, the war-lord
in enemy country, the fierceness, the bare narrative with its sudden ellipses;
but I didn't think much of the story about the heirs of Carrión marrying and
disgracing the Cid's daughters - it seemed only on about the level of an
episode in a Robin Hood ballad. I suppose I was expecting something with a bit
more epic stature, and perhaps this was wrong. Nevertheless, the poem intrigues
at the micro-level. Here is the Cid in
Delight has come to me
from the
lands beyond the sea,
I shall arm myself
I cannot evade it,
my wife and my daughters
will see me in
battle,
they will see in these foreign lands
how it
is that houses are made,
and how we earn our bread
their eyes
will be filled with the sight.
Misjudging my own response I tried to find some decent
criticism on the poem, but it's a curiosity of how Google works that the
better-known a literary work is, the harder it is to track down any detailed
writing about it; you are completely swamped by encyclopaedia summaries written
for the very ignorant and school essays written by the very ignorant,
interspersed with the usual tantalizing hints of stuff in Jstor and Project
Muse that we're not allowed to read and that probably aren't half as exciting
as they look when you can only see a few broken phrases.
(2008)
|
A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
|||||