"Intercapillary Space"

The island might be that moment between two events. Like the body of a bird between wing beats. Or it might be the point at which, standing straight up to take your medicine, all defenses are down and the knock out punch gets through.

The knockout catches the mind between its tiniest islands, in a moment when the instant has not quite entered memory to be filled with form. (p60)

- from Ian Davidson's An Island that is all the World – an unfinished conversation

To take only one island, Douglas Oliver has an interesting idea: the K.O. moment. Covering a European title fight he transcribed the action into his notebook: "Afterwards, I would find that my handwriting had become stuck in continuity of either vowel or consonant too: 'Moo lands a goooooood onnne', an entry would read. 'Faaaa(s)t hooooook frrom Viito'. The intervening punches would be missing." (Three variations on the theme of harm, p70) The fight is a clear, harmful event for Oliver, each punch almost pure: "On its own, each punch creates no language, just a daze of amazement, an almost-empty instant of cruelty." (p71) The punch is "the moment of change", it is "direct transparency of will".

The boxer imposes 100 per cent will
punching harm into harm in sadistic rhythms. (p72)

Maximum force from the flow of fighting. "Nowadays, grandly, I like to imagine a 'philosophy of the knockout', according to which a punch can impose on the victim an experience of an instant without content." (p60) What follows from the quote that Ian has picked out (above) is this: "If you've ever been knocked out, you know that the K.O. strikes either to our sheer surprise or when we are too weary or addled to have an 'I' in consciousness to defend."

The self which bears the will and "loyalty" falls, but there is another "apparently plenary self" (p62) which retains control of the falling body. The fallen self is defenceless on the floor. In The Harmless Building boxing is referred to as the most "capitalist of sports". You never did see it coming; you saw it coming and you couldn't do anything about it. In the long virtual poem or poem of virtual worlds, 'The Video House of Fame' (in Arrondissements), there are constant duels, visor and computer, chosen character then chosen enemy:

Reflection places plenitude
into a void: it teaches me
what to do with this
Narcissus. Blast
him out. From the
shattered mirror
slowly fall the prince's
knife blades

Punching at yourself; wrestling with an angel and the responsibility of care: Oliver ends 'The boy knocked out' -

Caught still in my earthly fight,
masochism
to empty the instant of responsibility.

– an unfinished conversation over a number of incomplete rounds. I finish, as always, on the ropes and gasping for breath, casting glances at my corner and wondering if I'll ever reach it.

Ian Davidson



. . . pages become bright islands floating in darkness . . . (p53)

The island might be Brightlingsea, a town down a road like the neck of a womb that ends in sea and swamp.

The islands are almost still places in memory . . . (p53)

The island might be the Yachtsman's pub in Brightlingsea. Oliver smoked small cigars and played pool with the unhurried calm of the snooker player. So maybe he was the island.

The island centre is a darkness through which all islands are linked together. (p53)

The island might be Oliver's seminar series in the University of Essex. It's where I first read Creeley. As I sd to my friend John I sd. Or maybe the Creeley poem was the island.

The island might be Oliver, sitting in his front room in New Street or Sydney Street, working at a typewriter while I walked past on my way to another pub.

Sometimes I return to the sea scenes of childhood to seek the origins of whatever stabilises myself in space and time. (p46)

The island might be my room overlooking the Colne from a poor terraced house.

The island might be surrounded by a sea of whisky, or it might be my car, it's floor littered with empty cigarette packets.

None of these islands were all the world to me.

I never hear rich calm voices in my imagination. I hate them. But I'm interested in people who do.

. . . once we touch more profoundly natural unconscious sides of ourselves all the cultural rubbish falls away and we recognise a deep kinship, an international kinship . . . (p92)

I don't think culture is inessential, or more or less than an unconscious, or that there is a 'spirit' in a poem. But when I say that I don't think I don't quite believe it, or that I'm right, and I'm interested in people who do think that and try to argue it.

The island might be Oliver in my imagination writing in a room in Paris.

When I lived in my literal home island, at each moment the outer British world became part of the deep self creation: my family life, my village, the near town, distant friends . . . (p81)

The island might be Oliver's Englishness which he took everywhere with him as he traveled the world; like a character from Graham Greene who never could quite grasp how slippery everything is. Or maybe he did but chose not to.

Though as a foreign observer I was safe . . . (p95)

The island might be Oliver's place of attack against the choppy waters of literary theory.

The island might be Oliver's archive in the library at the University of Essex.

The island might be Oliver performing his poetry.

It was verray intense . . . (p92)

I don't really believe in stopped time or the instant. My life is more fluid, or liquid. One moment flowing into the next. But then again one time in a pub in St Albans in 1980, and honestly I hadn't been drinking, the whole scene slowed down and the voices went slurred and the faces slipped like a Francis Bacon painting.

If a past memory comes into the present and simultaneously the present is vivid, then the past shares in the immediacy; for a second or two I sense a potential to bring all the intervening life into the immediate as well. (p105)

I come from a bilingual culture; hybridity is my 'natural' state. It is for most people in the world. Others seem to think it affectation or fancy – a kind of willful construct. They believe in the possibility of a stable or essential relationship between language, culture and geography. The popularization of linguistic and literary theory in the 1970s and 80s validated my life experience rather than challenged it. Kind of sad when you think about it.

Unity of form disappears into ambiguous dark whenever we examine it analytically, but its heart is always like the beating heart of a poem: it is the precious origin of our lives' form, or of a true politics. (p107)

The island might be a place of nostalgia, of longing for a certainty that, for some, is only ever a promise.

It could be any moment in any adult life when a past island is left behind; a new one not yet reached. Unfortunately for them, poets often get their work out of such tenseness; they're washing about in a mid-sea . . . (p78)

The island might be a raft made out of the debris that is left after global capitalism has swept through, and the poet a Crusoe figure trying to construct a meaning from the bits and pieces long after capitalism has constructed a number of other possible futures and turns to point and laugh with many empty voices.

And an island might be a place for the avant-garde to hang out mulling over what things might mean while the rest of the world goes scudding past. A kind of post-garde with poor fashion sense, bad haircuts and ethical concerns and endless bickering over definitions and readings in places not designed for readings and picking over the debris of capitalism while capitalism consumes and discards.

In a poem each stress is held in memory and perceived as a unity of sound, meaning and special poetic emotion . . . The stress centres a tiny island in memory. The centre of the island is occluded; it is the moment when we believe the stress actually happened. (p57)

I have never been at home anywhere. Most people haven't. Or if they have they rarely need to bother to write anything down so you won't have heard of them. It's all around them, written in the material of their lives.

Separating from England almost cleaved my unconscious identity in half, an irreparable harm I'd done. (p91)

I live on an island and have done most of my life. The island might be Ynys Mon, or Holyhead Island. As I read I might be constructing an island as a reflection of my own island rather than inhabiting his.

I might be doing him an injustice. This reading might be a misreading.

The island might be a boxing ring. It might be a place of peace or a place of conflict. The boxing ring might be middle class family life in the South of England.

In poems
each beat
fills my mind with melody
half there from the past
half there from the future;
but if the boxer's punch
can catch an opponent
mid-mind
before the self has thought
to fill itself with the self
. . .
any moderately hard punch
at that moment
will K.O. (p62)

The island might be that moment between two events. Like the body of a bird between wing beats. Or it might be the point at which, standing straight up to take your medicine, all defenses are down and the knock out punch gets through.

The knockout catches the mind between its tiniest islands, in a moment when the instant has not quite entered memory to be filled with form. (p60)

The island might be the:

. . . deep whole healthy self that is constructed of all unconscious vividness built into it . . . (p103)

If he has a deep whole self how does he know it's healthy? Is there no doubt? Maybe in the end we're rotten inside, or some of us are, and all we do is for the wrong reasons. However hard I try to be selfless I end up being selfish. Or is that simply the result of my being ambidextrous, of the left hand never knowing what the right hand is doing. Or classic Gemini tendencies. I think, see, that all the interesting stuff takes place at the edges, just out of sight, stuff I catch out of the corner of my eye. Glances. Glancing blows that keep me rocking. Inside is full to bursting with organs. So the idea of the rays of the object brought to a focus, is replaced by constant blurred movement. No still center. No perfect rest. No possibility of sustaining a position, or an opposition, and a metaphysics of attention is replaced by movement. Movement between countries, on the flickering screen, from lover to lover, from job to job and from poem to poem. Never sitting still and thinking about anything. How to count the loss of that.

I hate authoritative voices. They make me want to spit. Or otherwise misbehave. I don't like the idea of an island but I've chosen to live on one. And it's an island attached to another island. So maybe I like the idea of an island so long as it's in relationship to a lot of other islands. And Oliver almost says that when he says that 'all the islands of ourself expand out to the larger self and the larger self takes place in the great unconscious universe . . .' and my heart goes pitter patter and I reach for the word intertextual or rhizomatic to pin it down and then I read the next bit 'always as itself' and how 'its heart is the precious origin of our lives form'. Islands are the temporarily visible high points of consciousness, arising out of the unity of the unconscious. In the same way that underwater all physical islands are linked by the unity of the world, all 'memory' islands are linked via the unconscious. Each island has its own bordered unity and each person has their own bordered unconscious. It's a tempting visual analogy. It gives a sense of security, and a sense of endless possibility within that security, where all islands are possible in their recombination. But if there are borders to the unconscious, and each conscious island, how can we recognise those borders without consciously crossing them? To recognise the border is to acknowledge the other side and challenge any notion of unity. What is on the other side? Will acknowledging that cause disunity?

An island might be like those islands where strange animals still live cut off from the rest of the world and missed out on mainstream evolution and where words still mean what they say. Why did Oliver go on so much about the similarities and differences of avant-garde and mainstream poetry? Is it because he thought somewhere, through all that, there was an island where he could write the pure poem?

There is no island that is all the world. There isn't. Show me, go on, show me.




-------------
Page references are to 'An Island that is all the World' from the Paladin selection Three Variations on the Theme of Harm.

I feel very grateful for this assiduousness. I wonder what difference Ralph thinks the later adventures of the Diagram Poems made? Around 1980 Doug did a lot of readings, almost on tour sometimes, taking with him the diagrams on a huge pad of paper, which he would drape over a chair and flip back the pages from one diagram to the next as he read the poems, with interpolated explanations and comments, mostly on the diagrams -- the poems were read straight. Although much of this was after the Ferry Press publication of 1979 the work was obviously still in process of development, in detail anyway. He says in the Author's Note in Kind (1987) (p.8) "...when performing these in public I have often reverted to my original notion of the text" and that the diagrams have returned to their "more primitive states" before David Chaloner' tidied them.

But in the version in Kind, and more so in Selected Poems (1996) there is a lot more text, a lot more labelling in the diagrams, in fact the amount of labelling increases steadily through the Ochre + 1979 + 1987 + 1996 versions. I take this also to be a result of his performances before an audience, and a wish to reduce the enigmatic, puzzling or inexplicable elements in the diagrams and relate them more evidently to the poems, to reduce the difficulties. For Douglas did believe in clarity as a poetical virtue, clarity of sense and clarity of image, though he often had a struggle to achieve it because of various and conflicting notions of the functioning of poetry which he wanted to assimilate. The diagrams having been meditational sources for elements of the text remain there as indicators of this process, but I don't think Doug wanted them to become visual "works of art" whose semantic inarticulateness spread unnecessary doubts and problems into the ensemble. He may also have been worried about a too meccano-like way of creating poems by taking material from the diagrams into text. The cancelled poem "Do not now always revolve..." (A Meeting for Douglas Oliver p.52) is much more closely related to the diagram than "Fire" which replaced it.

In about 1980 I put on a reading for Doug in a bookshop in Cromford, Derbyshire, at which he did the Diagram Poems. His impromptu comments there went way beyond the occasion. I recorded him on a little cassette-recorder and he later later transcribed this and extended it until it became "The Three Lilies" (1982). In the discussion I suggested to him that The Diagram Poems first really "come alive" in the fourth poem, "Central", when Tom's voice appears, interrupting the news broadcasting and creating a newly dramatic construct. Doug agreed with this, and said he thought it was a structural fault in the book.

Seems to me that Tom also interrupts the diagrams, interrupts the diagrammatic construction of the text and interrupts everything with what Doug in 3 Lilies called vivid emotion. "...vivid emotion conducts us into the gliding instant and a succession of such gliding instants slow down time for us... Poems... give us a presentiment of the gliding and of the visions." So at the point where the book 'comes alive' the movement of the spirit is in the other direction, from text (speech) towards the visual as an arrest of the linear flux. The poem makes its own diagram. I can't help wondering whether that particular diagram (to "Central"), particularly the lower part of it, isn't derived from the poem rather than preceding it.

This slowing or sequential arrest of time in the achieved poem is a weapon against what Doug called "swift harm".

Peter Riley

I imagine Douglas Oliver standing behind me and to the right. Where he in turn imagines the deer standing, and who stands behind the deer? And whenever anyone turns to look it all blinks and disappears. Since my first proper encounter with this singular and compelling man's poetry I've felt myself haunted by his example. Bob Dylan said of Johnny Cash "You could steer your ship by him." I'm in no kind of a boat, Oliver is no constellation, no Orion wheeling across skies of myth and deep time, no Olson, and there in that refusal of the star-crown, handing it always back and back, that ruthless and constant attention to the quivering valencies of justice, to the click of spittle in the human muzzle, tapping the dream barometers, there among the news and mournings and seascapes lie some of the best clues left us as to how we might live, in what world, and who are these poets, how can they help. . .

I first came across Doug Oliver doing a cameo in Iain Sinclair's novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. In an early example of Sinclair's self-ironising (his books recently have been clogged by un-navigable thickets of self-deprecation), Oliver appears, dressed in a long leather coat, to warn Sinclair against meddling with darkness, pointing out the fallaciousness of Eliphas Levi's axiom that it takes a great soul to do great evil. Oliver utters the gnomic injunction to "...fold the bridge, find the cave." The bridge being Sinclair's Suicide Bridge, the cave Oliver's The Cave of Suicession, the real cave in Derbyshire that he nominated as an oracle, crawled into and interrogated about death.

At the time (late 80's) I was a hog for marginalia, liminalia, sweating out a fever stew of post-structuralism and counter-culture occultism, affecting dread in the deep pit of the tory years. Sinclair's formulation of society's engines as malign, hot, in debt to darknesses of the past and somehow printed onto actual urbes as well as civitas, struck me as compelling. I saw Thatcher's Orcs wheeling in the fields of Orgreave, did my pilgrimage to our King Lud, Blake, in Bunhill Fields, the final deferral of whose burial site (his stone says "Near here is buried...") seemed to confirm all my undigested Derrida. Oliver looked to me like a plausible, reasonable post-hippy teacher. Not hot enough, or cool enough.

In these days of print-to-order, abebooks, Salt Publishing, where for the price of a CD you can get everything Tom Raworth ever wrote (well, almost) it's already getting difficult to recall just how tough it was to get hold of material fifteen or more years ago. As a recent graduate, I considered myself pretty au fait. All you had to do, it seemed to me, was hang around in second-hand bookshops, and the stuff you needed virtually levitated off the shelves into your hands. Of course what this actually meant was that I was subsisting almost entirely on Burroughs, Ballard, Ginsberg, what you might call the high-water-mark flotsam of the counterculture. The deeper currents, the stranger stuff, lay outside my view, and may well have done so to this day were it not for the late lamented Compendium Books of Camden. There, like a great confluence of leys, all the hidden tracks broke ground together. The place hummed and crackled with information. I'd gone there on a tip-off looking for Anna Kavan's "Ice" I think (possibly in a leather coat, possibly in sunglasses, shudder...), and was astounded to find that I was in the Library at Alexandria. It was all here. So I bought, and bought. I moved to Islington (when such a thing was still possible for a public sector employee) and spent hours and hours there. And slowly, I began to understand the history that I suspected (paranoia being very much de rigeur) had been actively hidden from me. The first thing to really hit me was Tim Longville and Andrew Crozier's A Various Art anthology. I bought it because I recognised Sinclair's name. And as I sat in the George at the top of Essex Road pissing away my weekday afternoons I became fascinated. Prynne and Peter Riley were my favourites. I don't think I quite got Oliver at that point. The excerpts from "The Diagram Poems" seemed weirdly unbalanced, and the intrusion of the sentimental (to my eye) biographical detail seemed out of kilter with what I took to be the rules of the game. I'd read somewhere that Eric Mottram had described autobiography as 'unsanitary'. I liked this phrase and began to say it a lot, not realising that I was using it as a way of avoiding talking about real people, their histories and actions.

I think I bought Three Variations on the Theme of Harm around then, also from Compendium, and was knocked sideways by two different things. Firstly by "The Infant and the Pearl" which made all my occult political attitudinising seem childishly weak. I stopped it (best I could - still occasional lapses) and tried to follow Oliver's thought through the long poem. Or rather his thinking, its enactment. There was a lot of fuss in later years about Penniless Politics and how it supposedly made possible a new kind of political poetry, but it's all there in Infant. It wittingly placed itself in a tradition of long-form didactic-visionary poetry back through Shelley and Langland to the Pearl poet, but rather than calling on this tradition to underwrite his poem, he makes it earn its keep, forces the alliterative, iterative structure of Pearl to enact the slow, accretive structure of his argument for Socialism. The structure provides a loose and flexible sort of music, but is still sturdy enough to allow this to be readable:

"...the Second World War for a moment had taught
my nation to know that Conservative negligence
of poverty weakened the purpose fought
for..."

In isolation it looks like the kind of All-Bran for the mind that did pass muster in some quarters in the late eighties, but it's half-hidden alliterations and approximate four-stress line give it a feeling of something underneath the level of utterance that links it as a type of knowledge to this:

In an interval of fulgurous light, in an
instant when the baby gurgled, all the glass
scythed sideways. I had glimpses of spun
barley-sugar passages studded with sapphires

Almost always that first person, declarative tone, full of strong active verb clauses. Very little of the complex and occasionally vague second person plural that so marked a generation of Prynne imitators. Things are busily happening in these poems, and happening to, in and around the poet.

Oliver was an outsider, a mature student, an asker of tough questions at the party. Conscious always of his singularity, his biography seems to strain towards exile - he ventriloquises the Tupamaro guerillas, maps the psychogeography of his Paris arrondissement according to the willed presences of Heine and Celan, leaves England for Paris for England for New York for Paris. That combination of political poetry and outsider power struck a chord with me. I could see that there was a way of making poetry do a real job here. That meaning might, after all, be got from this odd lot.

The second thing that struck me in a slomo combination punch that still rings in my ears was For Kind. This short poem, in metaphysical 'what-is-abstract-quality-x' style has stayed partially digested in my gullet for years. I've never been able properly to parse its deceptively complex structure. Like Beddoes' 'Dream Pedlary' it has the power to stay in the throat and never dissolve. It takes as its perimeter a set of special definitions (kind, kindness, harm, naturalness) whose complex relations cannot be resolved. Its components hang in the air, each vector of referral pointing a Chagall loop round and under - never quite providing enough information to balance the equation, but small enough that you can swallow it whole like an astronaut gulping a zero-g jello-shot. It's what you always knew was the truth about poetry, and an absolute refutation of the new-criticism I'd grown up with, but also a challenge to the crossword-puzzle dessications of some experimental poetry.

So I became a fan. I went back over all the stuff I could find, hummed and hawed over an overpriced (ten pounds!) copy of Oppo Hectic in a bookshop in Greenwich, and tried to find (still haven't) his linguistics / prosody work. I don't say it has been all roses - there's lots we'd disagree about I'm sure. I find his formulation of 'spirit' risky, and there's a little bit of goading of materialists (he breaks cover and does this overtly in Whisper 'Louise') in his resolute insistence on the empirical supernatural. No amount of vague appeals to quantum theory can ameliorate a belief in ghosts, or in phantasms of the living (which belief sunk and brought to suicide the 19th century philosopher and spiritualist Edmund Gurney - no space here to go into this; google it). But every step of the way I knew I was accompanying a real poet. One whose thought was brought right up and out to here through a maze of concentrated attention, of jewel-bright and wax-soft gentleness and strength of moral purpose - that purpose being one of tracking through the maze of wax and mica and forcing speech to make its map and what is that?

Where does the wing beat begin? Mark the sheer beauty of his conception of the beat, the clairvoyant hinge in the growl and peep of speech, a conception built out of a clear-eyed vision of Sonny Liston peeling time apart in parts of seconds and acting between them, left, left, of the syllabic harmless hum of the all-sanctifying filthy jain, of the heron, grey wing turning time over and over, and the equally beautiful fact of his following this up in the actual laboratory - microphones and charts and all - this alone is a considerable achievement, and a thing of use.

Useful to consider, but difficult to talk about, because Oliver imports all difficulties into his handling of it, feints again and again at the impossible no at the centre, is Tom, Oliver's son, born with Down's Syndrome, and who died horribly young. The death of a child is traditionally the end of the parent. It could certainly do for you as an artist. Think of Samuel Palmer, whose son's death reduces him to vacantly painting again and again the stars in their configuration at the time of death, needle jumping in the trauma groove. (But then think of Mallarme, of Tomb for Anatole.) Is Oliver's conception of his son as a kind of dumb saint (with Kerouackian connotations of holy fool) a little sentimental, dubious in its surrogate piety, a little too close to the special case of private grief to be poetry? But then what would a poetry with no place for a father's grief be worth? And why is the dread trouble of death a special case? Another transmissible insight afforded by these poems is this: an understanding that death needs to be found, that it hides in our lives these days, and the truth about it might be the missing term, and a reminder of what I still find tough to follow: his conviction that ceremony isn't gauche, or anti-materialist, rather it's a kind of physical mnemonic of death.

Oliver pours wine into glasses for dead poets as a fearless rite, makes the challenge to us, and what do we do? Do we pour the wine into an extra glass for Doug Oliver? And do we drink it down? Or pour it on the slabs in the garden and half look away for the deer to come and sniff, touch it with a little pink tongue? Or do we only write it down and never do it? Because when he says, in a heart-freezing moment in the Diagram poems, speaking of bloody revolution and its danger to the defenceless,

"...but my Tom's in a frightener cell..."

I still feel my throat close around the indigestible little stone of the poem, grit in the oyster, and know that the place Oliver made there for me to look out from is extremely valuable to me. I use it a lot.


Alan Hay, July 2006

1 Ethics

In a letter to Iain Sinclair concerning Sinclair's Suicide Bridge (1979), Douglas Oliver fears that Sinclair's obsession with the Krays, amongst others, is 'yielding creativity into bad vortices', and is tainted with prurience, or sensationalism. (Iain Sinclair: White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings: 159-60) Unlike the earlier Lud Heat (1975), where the patterns of ordinary life counterpoint the grand theories he engages, the constructed mythologies of Suicide Bridge, such as Slade's chilling prophecy, promise nothing but further evil as an inescapable presence within ordinary life. Oliver poses the problem in neo-Blakean terms: 'Can the poetry effect the resolution of good and evil into the coincidence of contraries?' (WCST 160) But the contraries are not ethically neutral, cannot simply balance; Oliver pitches for the 'sovereignty of good', a term of Iris Murdoch's. (WCST 162) Whereas Oliver says that Sinclair's 'phantasms' attempt to prove that 'great evil demands as great a soul as does great good', - a near-quotation from Pascal - Oliver believes evil 'to be small-minded and furious like an atom-power release, and . . . good to expand "in love"'. (WCST 161) Sinclair, writing of the Kray funeral in 1995, in Lights Out for the Territory, recognizes this smallness when he quotes one of the Twins on the murders of George Cornell and Jack the Hat McVitie: 'It's because of them that we got put away,' and comments: 'A nice piece of sophistry – to blame your victims for making you kill them.' (LOT 71) Yet this is the predatory attitude that underlines the universe of Suicide Bridge; it has no room to consider the notion that 'love/moves the sun' as its contrary, Lud Heat, contends (in words which are themselves echoes of Dante's ecstatic incomprehension before the beneficent cosmic order revealed at the end of the Divine Comedy). The doubt for Sinclair, as he observed of JG Ballard's work as late as 1999, is whether, in exposing evil, the writer does not bring about that which he most fears. Oliver also alludes to what the philosopher Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. One of Sinclair's villain's noted dread of yellow socks hints at the utter lack of sensationalism in real criminal life, but there are few acknowledgements of this in Sinclair's mythic apparatus. Contrast this with the autobiographical account of Tony Lambrianou, scooping Kray victim McVitie's guts up from Blonde Carol's stained carpet to throw them on the fire with a 'little shovel', and one recognizes the banality inherent in that precise detail.
        That Oliver's pertinent criticism of Suicide Bridge was published as part of Sinclair's next work, White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, testifies to Sinclair's generous openness to criticism, and to his prophetic sense that the letter's 'time would come…. The nerve-ends that Doug's letter touched are still twitching'. (WCST 165) And a quarter of century later they still are.


2 Poetics

6th January 2006:

I read Doug Oliver's Whisper 'Louise'. . . He positions his own art as non-mainstream and non 'innovative'. He talks, though, of needing a further dichotomy, that of the extremes of 'clarity' and 'obscurity' - not for his work to be located in the middle (a third way poetics), which is where mediocrity lies, but to inhabit both 'extremes' at once. (He imagines this geopoetically on a map of Paris, Heine and Celan the 'extremes'.) I'm not suggesting for one moment that there is a contradiction here, at all, but that the two go together, at least in Doug's mind.
         The work neither belongs to the avant-garde nor to the mainstream; it
        belongs to both the extremes of 'positive . . . ballad-like poetry' and
                                to 'negative opaque and complex' poetry (WL 340)
        'both poles . . . are necessary'
                        the positive is also 'bravery in withstanding vicissitudes';
                        but is there no 'also' for the negative, no bravery there?
                so why that polarity at all?
        In any case, a sense here of an individual positioning himself.
        The book is also trying to posit the positivities of Poetry: 'A poem taps into poetry, a primordial form of knowing emanating from the "one life" that we share with animals . . . Poetry is a fundamental aspect of mind.' (WL 162). Indeed, more specifically, 'a poem's music models human experience of the passage of time'. (WL 41) (He says also that plot in narrative is the equivalent of music in poetry.) And, less explicitly, but more complexly, poetry is related to an eidetic consciousness, surrounded by the 'humming', the background 'radiation' of the universe. So that:
        'In life . . . the healthiest agents of a story's collapse are love, justice, mercy and hope. It takes love to understand' death. (WL 423)
        Kind. Kindness. It all ends up as a series of abstract nouns, like Stefan Themerson's 'decency of means' (and indeed both are trying to avoid the fanatic's monomania. . . Philip Roth's I Married a Communist is arguing something similar. Like Oliver, he sees personal heroisms amid both personal and public stupidities (on both sides), the McCarthyite witch hunts not too different a historical mess from the Paris Commune in Oliver's reading.). Yet neither of these is a 'slogan'.
        What impresses me is the long-term/large-scale working out of these things. But with the openness to know that he hasn't the answers to some of the things he posits, whether his residual materialist scepticism about 'eidetic consciousness' (which sounds like TM to me), or about the 58 items on his list of 'potentially disastrous pathways' for humanity.
        What is interesting is the sense of measuring all this against one's death…. out of some ethic for the only life, the 'one life', the only earth. I think of The Three Ecologies of Guattari – but I remember that he is called a 'bigot' by Oliver in one of the few bigoted moments of the book. . .




This text combines an adapted passage from my monograph Iain Sinclair (Writers and their Work, forthcoming), and a private journal entry.



assembled June 2006

The Cover

The back cover of A Salvo for Africa promises something extraordinary from Douglas Oliver:

"Fusing political with personal and covering many African countries, his tenth book of poetry invites readers to expose, as he does himself, European viewpoints to a learning process."

Can we expect a journey of personal development and insight? Will I learn something about the way in which Africa is 'seen' or 'comprehended' or 'taken in' from the 'outside'? Is it possible to glimpse the processes by which the Other and the exotic are created in society and psyche?

The way in which I approach this book is shaped by this promise. My assumption is that every page will reflect the complex inequalities in the relationship between Africa and Europe. I also assume that Oliver's poetry will give me a different, more subtle perspective than academic or journalistic writing can achieve. My hope is that the imagination will offer an understanding of the multiple layers of experience lived in relation Africa. Perceptions are formed, through the gaze of film, media, literature, tourism, academia, the internet, museum curators, importers of music and objects, charity organisations and Live Aid/8, long before most Europeans actually set foot on the continent.

Before I open the book, Marcel Mauss whispers the reminder that my concepts of personhood are products of a particular time and space. The notion that I can 'develop' as a person through reading a book seems suddenly ludicrous. Delving into the mind to 'excavate' its concealed patterns and layers, in poor imitation of Freud, seems a symptom of a ridiculous therapy obsessed culture. My own fascination with myself is perverse, especially in relation to Africa. On one level, we are all individuals in culturally shaped boxes rubbing up against each other awkwardly, or shooting each other down across vast divides.


The Poems

It is clear from the first poem that the advantage of this form for describing complex social and political issues is that so much can be condensed and hinted at in a very small space, asking the reader to develop ideas and make connections across time and continents. In Our Family Is Full of Problems Oliver takes the reader on a walk through Coventry and Dar es Salam, explaining the play of history and market forces that has created similar areas of social deprivation in the two cities. However, Oliver is clear that there are differences of scale:

And I read a Daily Mail economist forecasting great wealth
for all free market countries. 'Of course, there will be basket cases,
such as Africa'. And I grab you by the arm.
'Did you hear that? Africa! Not a Coventry suburb, a whole continent
written off in our free trade fanaticism." As if
holding your arm I face towards Africa and write these poems
a representative of a failed British imagination.

Here Oliver defines himself as complicit in the systems of inequality that determine Africa's poverty; the poems are conscious of their limitations and inability to offer solutions to the issues they raise. Oliver's talent is to re-present the histories of colonialism and after in a way that reflects the lens backwards onto Europe, reminding us always that we are responsible.

In The Cold Hotel Oliver writes:

myself a travelling poet-representative
for a people that won't take a dip
in their incomes, no not any
possible good imaginable,
not for the benefit of the future's poor,
not even for their own grandchildren

Again, he does not separate himself from the rest of us who enjoy a lifestyle sustained by the poverty of others. This drive for luxury and convenience in denial of environmental impact is raised in Soot and the inequality of ownership maintained by the trademark laws is highlighted in Few possessions in Togo. Other poems remind us that European greed in the face of African poverty is an historical 'habit': The King's Garden describes the legal trick that enabled the British colonials to appropriate Bulawayo from King Lobengula's people; A Salvo for Malawi traces the treaties that stole Nyasaland, enslaved its people and then demanded that they fight in World War I for a cause that had nothing to do with their history.


Through the Lens

A Woman in Ethiopia and The Infibulation Ceremony are poems written through the device of a lens. The lens acts as a reminder that the western male gaze always objectifies women and in the framing of African women there is a greater removal and increased risk of constructing fantasy. A Woman in Ethiopia is a title we are all familiar with, having watched reels of film of starved women and children in aid camps over the last 25 years. Oliver's poem attempts to show the closeness of a community joined in celebration despite their hunger. He is unable to share their joy because all he can see is starvation and all he feels is shame. The poem is making us conscious of the one dimensional view that poverty and malnutrition is the whole of the Ethiopian experience. Oliver makes us aware that the complexity of social relationships, religion and culture continues even on the edge of survival, which is something that newsreels and aid organisations have little interest in representing. Although bleak images of famine victims may encourage the intervention of western governments and donations to charity organisations, something of our similarities and shared humanity is lost.

The Infibulation Ceremony is a powerful poem, not just for the subject matter, but for the questions it asks about film and who the hell the films are made for and the reasons they are made. Female circumcision is so often used by feminists as an example of the institutionalised violence that women face daily but Oliver's poem is conscious of the fact that this takes place in an environment it cannot hope to understand. However, neither does the poem shirk from the agony of the mutilation:

They dance in a hurt, stiff motion,
sick-legged as if avoiding stones
blood gleaming on brown thighs
tears in expressionless eyes.

The lens of the camera zooms in and out, making a film for western consumption. Oliver asks who it is that films and representations of this kind are intended to benefit:

We know these illiterates will never see our film;
so will the children make their children dance
that queer dance in this cinema-wilderness?

I read into this poem all my discomfort of western feminists using female genital mutilation for their own political expediency. Although Spivak argues that the symbolic and violent suppression of female desire could be the issue that unites all women, the subtlety of her argument is lost in the noise of international campaigns that constantly single out this disturbing cultural practice for condemnation. We find it much easier to turn the camera outwards on the pitiful image of a girl

with a sewn vagina, stripped of pleasure,
crossed with thorns, as if the surgeons
had sutured the mouth of a healthy baby
leaving the palette uselessly cleft.

than to consider our complicity in the misogyny of our own cultures.


Memory and Imagination

The question I formulated in reading the cover of A Salvo for Africa was whether poetry could give an alternative perspective to illustrate complexities of Europe's relationship with Africa. There are poems in this book that stretch my imagination and ask me to challenge what I know. One of these is The Borrowed Bow, which sketches an elderly colonial official with a collection of African artefacts who is living out his time in an English coastal town after World War II. A sense of time and place are built with a bakelite wireless and a pier that has been blown up to prevent German invasion. The poem communicates the narrator's boyish fascination with an African bow and the old Wireless, the two objects becoming entwined together in Oliver's memory. Both objects feed the boy's imagination, both are magical and both have the potential to shoot:

in a village of valves, which cracked like gunfire,
a tracer arc streaked across dusty connections,
as if before the snap of it, the coil of smoke,
a tiny bow had shot a brilliant arrow.

This electric shock is a moment of inspiration where time and continents are drawn back, like the bow, and we are held in the moment of the poem to reflect on war, colonialism, collecting, time, childhood, old age, memory and media. The poem reminds us that the most marked cultural differences can be between the generations, particularly the ones who have experienced war and the ones that have not. This poem is full of triggers, shots and gunfire which reflect the life experience of the old colonial, the recent history of England and the culturally sanctioned games of little boys.

The presence of the wireless is a suggestion of the world shrinking through media communication; there is a sense that the signal being picked up is from the home of the bow. I find myself wanting to know when I first heard of Africa. Was it Idi Amin on John Craven's Newsround? Was it Elephants on Blue Peter? I remember Zulu and gun fire. I remember Roots and slavery. Later it was the images of starving children culminating in Live Aid. I remember presenting Evans Pritchard's The Nuer in my first week at University in 1989. I remember my visits to the Pitt Rivers museum in the early 1990's and spending hours pulling out drawer upon drawer of artefacts collected by the early anthropologists in an attempt to 'catalogue' cultures under threat. I remember flying into Malawi in 1999 and being shocked to see only one road cutting across the country, just before my experience of Africa became more than imaginary. Now, when I mention working in Malawi, older people ask what the country used to be called. "Ah, of course, Nyasaland. Hastings Banda," is their response, immediately creating images in my mind of childhoods spent staring at maps of colonial Africa before it crumbled away into the hands of men like Banda. The experience of our different histories holds us apart.

The Borrowed Bow encourages me to both deconstruct my own memory and want to know about how other people understand their experience. It draws a link between all human experience in the forcing together of diverse lives and objects in the space of three stanzas. The title itself can be expanded into a discourse about removing objects from alien cultures and creating exotic fantasies around them which we may then mistake for reality in our construction of the Other. Other poems that work on the same level of memory and imagination are The Childhood Map, Big Game and The Mixed Marriage, which bring together HIV, tourism, Mau Mau, environmental issues, financial markets and international relations into imaginative realms of paper aeroplanes, computer games and displaced objects. For me, these poems are among the most interesting in the book because they demand the complete engagement of the reader. They remind us that Africa has never been a distant place but always present in the next news flash or documentary.


A brief nod at the prose

The poems in A Salvo for Africa are punctuated by prose. Oliver uses this space to cover historical details, introduce his poems or expand on the ideas that they contain. Towards the end of the book he explains his project as an attempt to respond to the complex layers of experience present in real life, criticising the "British poetic culture which sniffs at too much literary ambition" (p 106). A curse of the western way of life is that most of us expect to divorce ourselves from parts of our experience, to the extent that our lives become a practice in specialisation. Oliver reminds us that leaving politics to 'the specialists' is a denial of our individual responsibilities to the world that we have constructed as our Other.

Throughout the book Oliver points with admiration to the African writers who are able to avoid the condescending tone of the West. A Salvo for Africa does not intend to imitate Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Denis Brutus, Frank Chipasula or any other writer who has the experience of growing up on the continent. Oliver's purpose is to make his own culture conscious of itself and allow it to uncover what it already knows about its relationship with Africa. Oliver does not offer answers to these global issues but is constantly pointing in the direction that they could be found. This book refuses to accept that there is nothing we can do and demands that we all face our responsibilities to the present and future populations of the planet.


References

Mauss, M (1985) 'A category of the human mind: the notion of "person"; the notion of "self"', in du Gay, Evans and Redman (eds) Identity: a reader Chapter 26 (2000). Sage.

Spivak, G (1981) 'French Feminism in an International Frame.' In Mary Eagleton, ed., Feminist Literary Criticism, pp. 83-109. Longman Critical Readers. (1991) London & New York: Longman.

(click on the diagrams below to view an image which can be enlarged)

Douglas Oliver published Diagram - poems in Ochre Magazine #4 in the late 70's. There are eight poems and eight diagrams - one has to omit the word matching - for matching is the problematic task for both reader and writer. There is also a brief introductory piece carrying the title of the whole. It is this set of poems I wish to write about and not the later The Diagram Poems published in 1979 by The Ferry Press.

Before the commencement of the Diagram - poems, the diagrams on the left, the poems on the right of the page, there is a brief explanatory introduction. Immediately from this we are in confusion, The diagrams describe and transform movements of, but they don't, the words describe or enact or grow from or elaborate a content from the diagrammatic. There are levels of composition and temporality to these poems which define, influence and make their final shape, both visual and textural. Before the diagrammatic there were real events; a series of raids carried out by the Marxist Tupamaro urban guerrillas of Uruguay on key sites in a single town unwitnessed by Oliver, but witnessed as a journalist from afar in Paris. Next, it seems, the poet made a series of maps of these raids. These maps were then turned into a series of diagrammatic cartoon-like drawings. The text then grew from an interaction with the diagrams.

These poems contain the comic and the deadly serious. The diagrams themselves are comic simply because they are so badly and innocently contrived. And in this Ochre version drawn in the poet's hand (the 1979 versions are drawn by David Chaloner), Douglas Oliver also makes them comic through graphic acts of legerdemain. This pictorial conjuring is part of the Diagrams process. My favourites being the magician's poodle made from balloons in P.C., the simplistic yet universal pinman of Arrest, and the explosive pending parturition of Central.

These poems are about key sites but these sites aren't tangible, they are not the buildings the guerrillas want to command, the town they wanted to control, the real estates of money and communication. The key sites for Douglas Oliver are emotive fields, consequences of human actions, decisions and commitments and the way in which we react, confront or negotiate with these fields. Our positive resistance to that which is negative, bad or evil is the revelation of some inner strength or goodness, more likely to be defined in Oliver's work as kindness.

The nature of the initial confusion is of course deliberate; simply events are not what they seem. These poems and diagrams do not record the news events to which they refer in a conventional way simply because in one sense, as Oliver has written, the "theme is the untrustworthiness of what we take to be factual information." In an earlier version in Chicago of 1974 there is an explanatory piece entitled Importantly which states, "Whatever the factual basis for these events, I want to disavow any direct relationship between them and the poem which, in any case, distorts the facts." These events are used to explore the emotive fields brought about by such actions and further explored by the poet's relationship to these happenings and the happenings of the twofold unfolding of the poems and, importantly, his own historiography and experience.

The first poem Team Leader conjures words from two fluid shapes, reminiscent to me of randomly looping string or a complex of knitting patterns.


                                                                    Chicago European Edition 1974


                                                                    Ochre Magazine #4

Strikingly the words unfold an illustrative landscape from the diagram. Thus within the diagram one can see the articles and accoutrements of the written text. Oliver enumerates a catalogue of holes, spheres and circles - gloves, spectacles, measles, wheels, sleeves, gloves and ring plus a series of words which describe the dynamic of the drawing/s, hurries, looped, slither. In this way we can move easily from the drawing to the text or vice versa - if we wish to. There are also a number of other words in this initial poem which act as thematic indicators on a number of levels. They reverberate not only in the setting, the immediate raid details, but also in the argument Oliver is articulating, an argument his work constantly tries to articulate, from The Harmless Building to his work on the Paris Commune, Whisper 'Louise'. The words are, blood, unlooking, cemetery, arrival, eyes and losses. We can pair up or make oppositions from these words. Emotive movement, prosodic movement and diagrammatic movement become interlinked.

Our access to the complementary and the oppositional meanings of the words is provided through the free flow of interpretation of these doodle diagrams. In this way we can find details in the doodles which are not written about in the text. Strikingly the writing is full of puns and alliterations and what I can only describe as compressed polysemic images. The diagrams likewise are also full of visual puns and visual polysemy. In P.C. the parabolas of flight become a dog. The written word EJECTION on the diagram is the aviator / ejecting from arrowed lines in the poem. EJECTION in the diagram becomes the unwritten but diagrammatic injection of the written vaccinated dog. The word Germs appears around a newly realized drawn nose, a black blob metamorphosing throughout the diagram. The poem like the air is full of sniffs and pointers.



The diagrammatic emphasis of these cartoons is stressed by a proliferative use of arrow indicators. Remarkably, Fire Station is arrow free. This becomes the most radically changed diagram in the 1979 version. Unflying birds squibble the page. To my untrained eye these birds must be identifiable, one chicken, one turkey but I'm not sure what they are or if they have any significance other than being diagrammatically flightless - Ill wings tide down. The word ill flying straight back to the germs and precautionary vaccination of the previous poem. Thus the Fire Station becomes a location for the opposites of health and sickness, tying into the themes of birth and death and the related occurrences in the text of entrance and exit, arrival and departure.

But if we haven't noticed it yet the Fire Station reveals one of the major preoccupations of these poems, the debate between the external ear / eye and the internal ear / eye. What we see and experience against what we think and do about what we hear and see. To Oliver this would be how we conduct the self - how to act ethically and morally and how we defend and define what is moral and / or ethical.



This poem batters away with an axe-tannoy through a text laden with metaphorical alarms. The earlier unlooking of Team Leader has become the blank of the eye, the not noticing and unaware, not only on a political level, men and women, women and men here now / but some in appalling prisons but also on a deeply personal level, relationship with and between mother and father, parents and children, announces the ignored years between us and the fire station at grand cries. Thought-acts are at large throughout in the contrast between good thoughts and bad, the arrow of a bad thought pell-mell towards torture. Thinking badly is as negative as thinking grandly; this is part of the final poem's declaration. A personal unlocking is directed towards ourselves and our conduct / behaviour and on a larger scale of how we look at the world of others.

It is apposite to note the worked oppositions in this poem and their further thematic uncovering / discovering and recovering in the what has been and the what is to come. Again past (birth / death) and future (death / birth) are at the threshold of each moment. They ring our lives. They are the tunnels through which the poem moves.

Fire Station, through the tannoy, assaults our listening and seeing with the words, speaks, chimes, clarion, the blank of the eye, eye, rung, bell, ring, clucking, clapper, screeching, scratchy, announces, cries.

There is also the juxtaposition of ear through story, a different story than the one we're in / an old story, and eye, through picture, Not yet in the picture. As we discover with the Diagram-poems the content of the picture tells a different story to that of the content of the writing. Both contents plus their interactions tie together the imagined and the real. Hearing is both literal and figurative, but true hearing is somehow locked within us and yet can be made accessible. Its accessibility is thus on the edge of being.

If we return to Team Leader we discover the first indicators of a notion of internality which runs throughout this work, a depth to which Oliver is in the process of coming to terms with. They are the word internal itself (the final words of the poems are in us) primarily connecting to the texts and the written emotive fields and Starting from a ring of arrival which interlinks the (diagrammatic) visual with the written through a variety of symbols. Starting from a ring of arrival is itself an example of a compressed polysemy, tying into the themes of birth and death and the movements and journeys of the fabricated and real.

Within the borders of feeling lies a deeper knowledge, a process of hearing feeling, that I am my children, / in me their voice breaks with ear knowledge. Understanding feeling, and feeling's part of my work, is part of this work's archaeological exploration, identifying the inarticulate figurative from which good can emerge. Hidden away in the parenthesis of the final diagram is P.C., agent, journalists, help to save some suffering.

One course of action for Oliver is to address the subject of suffering through his work - and likewise to alleviate and understand 'suffering' in one's daily life. Suffering on the larger scale is difficult to address or resolve on a personal level because of a disconnection in aggregates of power, political and economic agendas which are not ours. Here we are powerless. But it is possible to help, care, provide on an immediate level through the daily conduct of being. As Oliver writes in Central - I'd like to have friends on these streets, friends / who'd look for me in creations of total emergency / in or out of dreams.

Looking at the drawing accompanying Central we are presented with what appear to be pulled Christmas crackers and a loud visual pop or bang. There are open scissors, a pregnant woman (twice), arrows indicating an old man (twice?), a young boy, what looks to me like an eye and a smaller explosion or wig. The small Christmas crackers are communicative, they are umbilici, they are severed links.



Central is a telephone exchange. The diagram drawings translate into a plethora of connectives. Central becomes the womb (birth) and jellyroll is itself part of joining and connection. The drawn Christmas crackers are links, to our past, to our memories, to feelings. The crackers in the text become cut cables (disconnecting), severed links, the end of the line (death), fading, cut dead. Cut becomes a link, somewhat cinematic, dreamlike. . . Cut. . . A guerrilla command tone. Cut, as command could also be caesarean, Place the pregnant / woman. The drawn open scissors are poised to cut the umbilicus. Everything seems to mean itself and something else. The multilayering and interweaving (not only of this poem but of the poems as unitary) invite us into an amalgam of word and image, the aural and visual. We are orientated through disorientation. We are trying to find our way. One last command from the poet is to, Cut other connections yourself but / obey the voices that come from long distance, obey sound and feeling. Feeling translates as care and good. The long distance is somewhere deep inside us.

Thus the poem literally cuts back to Tom. But Tom's no longer there. Tom was my son. Tom is the embodiment of memory, feeling and innocence. Tom being Oliver's child who died at an early age. The Christmas crackers have been pulled apart in the poem and they were meant to be so. Faced with the dilemmas of birth and death we try to reconnect severed links.

These natural extremes are at the centrality of our most powerful and inner feelings. Is Oliver saying we should draw on these feelings to understand (hear/see) the true loss of others? This understanding is not sympathy or empathy (but obviously without these we would have no understanding) because some of these losses involve the victims of political assault by the state and those who violently oppose the state - terrorists or guerrillas. Is Oliver saying we should address these issues through our acts or actions whatever they may or can be? That there is a good to oppose evil?

Hearing and seeing are predominant to understanding but in the poem these senses (in a sense) are not literal, they are in turns cerebral (or intellectual) and gut wrenching. They are undoubtedly inner. There are internal sounds. There is ear knowledge. Hearing, knowledge and understanding go together. But hearing and seeing are also problematic and perhaps demand understanding (knowledge). In the poems the eye therefore needs medicine and the ear needs an earpiece. Ears can see and eyes can hear.

In Arrest damage to the ear affects hearing so totally that we fail to hear sufficiently of the true loss. . . the gone sick, the suicidal deafness, and, finally / the arrest when the heart's no longer heard in the ear. The complexities of meaning in the last line tie into not only the comic activities of the robberies, kidnaps and subterfuges and the descriptive literalness of these events as they unfold their narrativities and teleologies (what will happen, textural and diagrammatic arrows pointing to the conclusive cemetery), but also to Oliver's metaphoric text and the figurative implications of deafness and blindness. That part of the poem which deals with softness, feeling, kindness and innocence. Arrest is a multivalent word.



The diagram of Arrest is interesting in the way a visual text can enact a metaphoric process. As invention, change and connection are part of the writing (and the writing itself having a relationship and inter-relationship with the visual) so too does the visual transform itself making connections as it proceeds. The diagram of Arrest is in three parts. What looks like a] an electrical circuit diagram, b] a hatted head and c] an adjustable spanner. We can find words in the text to match these, a] translates as the pun drawn in the diagram, b] could be the nominalist / who likes real heads on his coins, and / or the disguised P.C. / looks a bit like "Serving us", the many headed dog (the pinman seemingly to have circular hands to match his head) and c] the punning the span of life so inevitable and yet adjustable. But there are also common elements to the drawings. The parallel vertical lines and six small arrows of a] become a strap for the hat, the arrows perhaps lines or furrows by the eye. A semi-circular dent in a] becomes a policeman's mouth in b] and the adjustable mouth of the spanner in c] and the head of the policeman has become the head of the spanner and the frown line arrows have become the spiral which adjusts the spanner head. Besides the pinman, whose hands are always up in surrender, the arrow of Escape in a] is present in b] and c] presumably relating to the no escape of being eaten, the real heads . . . of flesh of the text and the no escape of being crushed to death by the jaws of the spanner.

On the other side of softness (innocence) is cruelty - incarceration, torture, bestiality, sadism. Within the Diagram-Poems softness is located in positive relationships, mother and child of the kidnap, Tom, and his present family of my children.



These children are the locus for the poem U which operates on many temporal levels (temporality as a feature and as a phenomenological event connected to the acts and decisions of lived experience and theoretical prosody is detailed, used and explicated within the text of the whole). The prosodic movements are dictated through emotive force, that feeling Oliver refers to as part of his work. The lines are heartfelt but they are also worked. The moments of textural composition, a present, a future and their resolution, project into the as yet not written (this is partly born from an elective narration - they are what has already happened in a different form and in a different time zone, the pre-events of the poem). For example in Central we have the present written moment of, place the pregnant / woman into temporary prison → go to the future Gold and discover prison is now new present temporary stir, adding the significance of prison and agitation. The poem Gold in turn looks forward to the poem U, to the next bank of troubles, money as magnet / diagram unlucky seven. U is the seventh poem of the sequence. And in U Capital itself comes under assault. Mao's phrase about power coming from the barrel of a gun seems fitting - waves the muzzle where all the arrows / of acquisition, law and management have come and gone.

Gold in turn carries within it a multilayering both forwards and backwards in time connecting events and themes, this arrow stuttering on as the plan itself grows. Gold as a precious metal and its associative power and liquid constituency is played with on a number of fronts, banks / money - robbery / fear, banks of dread - money as liquid (smelted gold), cordial, gilt liquid can be siphoned off, robbed / stolen - banks of dread becomes bag of troubles and then bank of troubles - the metal of money becomes magnetic attracting the robbers - the banks of dread become the fear of the policeman and gold in physic is just a cordial and gilt liquid is taken off returns to the issues of (moral health), sickness and well being.

Magnates, magnets, management and managers are melopoetically and ideologically conjoined. Finance is a force field controlled through laws and practice by the state. These manipulative hierarchies, in the situations described by the poem, result in causalities of the innocent. But the true effects of capital are more widespread and likewise hidden. Capital here is under direct acquisitive attack by an anti-capitalist group, drawing attention to the complex of motives, acts, thoughts and emotions of those caught up in such dramas; innocents, guardians and perpetrators. The poem in this way highlights the emotive structures which are usually inert in our daily lives but are hidden within us. Thus our resources of kindness seem only to expose themselves in extremis - on the border or the gap of the bridge of life and death.



The final poem The Diagonal is Diagonal bears only a slight relationship to the accompanying diagram. All the diagrams up to this last poem contain elements which are included in the text - some more than others and in the vast majority of diagrams the movements or contents can be found within the text - or can be interpreted by the text. In such a highly elaborate writing Oliver has utilized processes of chance and accident (issues again of temporality) thrown up by and through the diagrams. The police encircling lines aren't buttocks neither would they be drawn so but they are 'accidentally' so. This final diagram returns me to my initial confusion (confusion, accident and chance are part of what occurs through he actual events described). All directions (are) unsure because of the amount of diagrammatic information which is absent from the poem. Why is the diagram littered with numbers? Is the cemetery a zero? Circles can be found more or less throughout the poem. Do the numbers relate to the victims, guerrillas and police? But the numbers don't account for everyone, there are unnumbered people in Hearse + 2 cars escape with some money. Why are some of the diagrammatic elements written when they perhaps could have been easily drawn?

The final poem does come full circle. It is certainly striated; each poem-band leaking and admixing between layers. The opening Slowness of gaze brings us back to looking, slowness and fastness bring us back to temporality and movement - movement brings us back to the diagrammatic flows and the diagrammatic returns us to this poem and all the other poems for this work is nothing without the original movements, which in turn returns us to the pre-event of the poems, the activities of the Tupamaro.

The lack of text on the diagrammatic is commented on within the text, The diagram could again spring a picture / encircling looks like buttocks, / there's a cloaca. Wolves. And that more or less is the totality of the written relationship between the text and diagram of this last poem. Indeed they appear to be unrelated - the visual doesn't feed into the written and the written doesn't feed into the visual. But this again might be misleading because The Diagonal is the Diagonal is by far the longest, most complicated and challenging of all the poems. It is the outcome poem and it not only reiterates much of what has gone before but also seems to question it. Here Oliver interrogates the Diagram - poems making and content, the ways in which the whole developed, grew and progressed. The self is looked at in its multiples or parts, the Parisian journalist, the academic, the father and the poet or controlling I of the poem - the assembler. The place of reassembly in the cemetery / really is the cemetery.

The poem is then briefly reassembled in its sequential order,

                                                                                                      . . .to that other start
from which team leader became a finger pointing left
that's audience left. . .
                                        In the known risk then
an airman became a dog
firemen were pegged down as birds of fire
the baby in the womb was old
the pinman strained against the spanner
if you could only believe he'd hold that posture
an arrow filled with gold
the magnet power of money failed
as the magnet power of luck did. . .

all these started in the drawings. . .

What follows is a questioning of courage - that, I think, it should remain adulterated - in a sense unmotivated - as far as is possible. We should, as individuals address our relationships and responsibilities with death both on a personal and a political level. The final line, grace and courage arrive calmly in us is then what I interpret, unnervingly and uneasily, as the call of the poem.

The implications of this final poem and this set of poems is forever problematic for me. The deliberate disorientating nature of the central question or questions is at once vast and singular. I'm not even sure I've read the questions of life and death, and the living of one's life, correctly - but I do know from this text and the body of Oliver's work that these are thematic and obsessive issues. The movements described or enacted throughout by the separate and conjoined text and diagrams will never be complete.

Pierre Joris


   (Notes on the work of Douglas Oliver)


§ Paris, 3 July 2006 — Sitting in a Paris café, reading Douglas Oliver's work. Am in the sixth arrondissement, this specific poem set in the first, in the rue Montorgueil. A meridian we shared: that's where Gisèle Celan-Lestrange lived, a friend we shared (though never met together) and whose husband Paul Celan's work was core to our understanding of late twentieth century poetry. I am reading in a series of poems that speak to Celan and his widow, gathered in the sequence "The Shattered Crystal" in his book Arrondissements:

Shocked by unsuspected absence,
return on the straight road
past Heine's lodgings
to my fishcarter's faubourg.
Gisèle calls me from the outerworld
—once the call was real,
but this is the haunting—
and I half-hear her lovely reply
to a chance remark at dinner
on the Montorgueil. I'd told her:
"A poet's suicide may
for a moment cut the path
of the past to the future."

As I am shocked by this other absence today, Doug's, and now want to replace the word "suicide" with "death" in what he told Gisèle. For certainly the result is the same, as I read his explanation for what he said:

(because there is no bridge
across its dreadful river banks,
though the path one day reforms
after so great a life
as an Iris bridge, yet of stone too.)

Tomorrow I'll cross the river Seine, from my arrondissements to his, a zigzag through Paris, haunted by years of nomadic dérives through this city of dérives (from Baudelaire to the surrealists, from the surrealists to the Situationists, from the hippie soixante-huitards to the s.d.f.'s (sans domicile fixe = homeless) of all nations, for whom Doug had such care, a care he mapped in Arrondissements.



§ Paris, 4 July 2006 — Couldn't cross the Seine today, that will have to wait a day or so. But happy anyway not to have noticed until late in the day that I had escaped the American National Holiday. How useful not to buy the Herald Tribune!

Thinking about Oliver's work I realized that I couldn't write about it without writing, thinking, feeling through the relations of friendship with the man who wrote the works. Here the personal is prime — lit crit comes a distant second — or maybe third, as the personal is invariably crisscrossed by the poetics of the political and the politics of the poetical.



§ Paris, 5 July 2006 — Still with Doug's Celan poems. Odd how their poetics seem to develop on an opposite time-line: Celan's from early near-narrative (in a surrealist-imagist way — just think of what is ultimately a straightforward telling in the Todesfuge) to the compact, near-hermetic, "dunkel" fragments of the work from Atemwende on, gaining a reputation that still today — 36 years after his death — situates him in the avant-garde of the avant-garde. While Oliver's move is from an early avant-gardish formal complexity (linked to the poetics of the Cambridge group, and especially that of JH Prynne) to a more plain, though image-rich, narrative / expository mode. And yet, maybe these two superficially contrary moves arise from the same need, the same push born from the urgency to say what needs to be said in such a way as not to be misunderstood, i.e. the push for clarity, the need to be read exactly literally. And the nature of the need is profoundly political — in the widest meaning of that word; and in the sense of the politics of poetics as well. See Celan's rewriting of the "Todesfuge" (after its misuses in Germany) in the poem "Engführung / Stretto." Oliver retains both modes, somehow, though throughout the last years the push of the work was toward ever clearer statement — a crystal clarity, even if that Celan word has to be cracked because of "its perfection and terror", can't stay, if it is to be of use, in the fixed realm of the geological. Doug has no truck with such fixities, eternities; he believes in mutabilities, and thus the image has to be moved into the changing realms of the organic, be it plant, animal or human — become maybe, as in these poems it does, the walnut cracked open to reveal its diploid kernel. The irritation is with the ease with which misreading can happen. He qualifies the traditional critical verbiage at a Celan conference that can only speak of such work in terms of "the void, the silence, the space inside the word," as "a crock, this time, of shit," and somewhat further in the poem ("Walnut and Lily") he writes:

……….Still half-dreaming.
I'm by a lake rescuing walnuts from the flood
(just a few last cornflakes in the bowl) and am
obscurely angry. Suppose our words cracked open
to another kind of light, not "white void";
crack open Celan's hard-won "thought scarab";
crack open "animal-bloodblooming";
crack open "Net-nerved skyleaf".

And then sees a similar possibility for misreading his own words, and insists that they are not "that well-gnawed English despair," are not "a return to a middle-class Parnassus," no, "these words are angry, in a flood of lyric feeling."



§ Paris, 8 July 2006 — Couldn't find the small late-night café where Doug and I spent the late-late hours sipping calvados. It was his spot, somewhere on the north-east flank of Montmartre, and he would guide me there, so much talking while walking (this is a walking and talking city), that the several occasions that brought us there did not get accurate mappings in my brain. But this was long ago, and anyway the café may also have closed. Others did: the St-Claude on Boulevard St-Germain, the Petit Bar and the Polly Magoo on rue St-Jacques. The Café de la Mairie on Place St-Sulpice is no longer the same pleasant place I used for quiet afternoon writing and literary rendezvous' for so many years. So I sit just across from our tiny studio apartment in the Café Six on rue des Cannettes, a place Doug didn't know — but would have liked: it is affordable for a café in the sixth arrondissement, has a marvelously mixed clientele (it is here that I meet my Maghrebian writer and painter friends) and a friendly, forthcoming staff. I sit and read and write and now order two glasses of calvados, and drink the one to Doug and the other to Celan, remembering Celan's line "Ich trinke Wein aus zwei Gläsern" and Doug's marvelous poem-excursus "Trink" on that line. A poem in which there are three glasses, one for Heine (who in the same poem is cited and, prophetically, gives Doug "le droit de moribondage, the right of being mortally ill") and two for Celan. Characteristically, Doug drinks the Heine glass in admiration for the poet's ability to deal with pain, and pays homage to "Celan's integrity" by pouring his two glasses away. The poem ends:

Someone's God's tongue
licks all three glasses clean.

§ Paris, 9 July 2006 — One of the great Paris pleasure when young was to stay up all night, eating, drinking, talking and carousing, and have breakfast while watching the sun come up, before finally going to bed when everyone else was hurrying to the subway to get to work. The last time I did this — and it was no nostalgic middle-aged slumming — was with Doug one night in the middle eighties, way past nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita. We met after a long day's work in the brasserie on the Boulevard de Clichy once the site for the weekly meetings of the post-war Surrealist group, not far from where Doug lived in those days. The pleasure of planning, over an apéritif, the evening's trail. First we would go to a new Maghrebian restaurant I had tried and found excellent between Place de la République (near where I lived) and Bastille, then we would go and have a drink in Peppo's bar behind Bastille to see if maybe friend Tom Raworth had found his way over from Cambridge. After that the night would be open to drift — though we knew that we would no doubt spend time in the Calvados bar, and cross over to les Halles to soothe my cravings for 3 a.m. shellfish. And watch the sun rise on another café terrace, facing east.

Which is what happened. Our all-night pleasures mitigated by our talk on the disastrous situations of the Third World. I had at that time just finished a stint as editor for a short-lived radical Third World weekly in London, (which I left in disagreement over the ways in which exiled Palestinians were mistreated by the Arab country that financed the paper), after having spent three years teaching in Algeria. Doug, who had worked a good part of his life as a journalist, and whose close friends in Paris were foreign correspondents covering Third World events, had been to Haiti and had come back deeply moved and upset about what he had seen. Our talk would inevitably turn to our responsibility (both as privileged white northern citizens of neo-colonial countries and in terms of — in Robert Duncan's phrase — our ability-to-respond as poets). If it can, how should the issue of North-South politics enter the work? What right did we have to do this anyway, we who didn't live in Africa or Haiti, who hadn't experienced the famine, jails, diseases, repressions on our own well-nourished bodies? Was it, in fact, necessary to do so? To this last question we both emphatically answered in the affirmative. If our work as writers was to have the political dimension which intellectually and emotionally we wanted it to have, then the world that had to enter the writing needed very consciously to include that world too.

These were questions and issues that had haunted Oliver for a long time. It was finally in 1993 — i.e. after he had written his long political satire on the reign of Margaret Thatcher, and thus dealt with the politics of his home country England, and the American-focused political satirutopia Penniless Politics — that he found a satisfactory way to speak of his Third World concerns and gathered the results in the poetry and prose book A Salvo for Africa.



§ Paris, 10 July 2006 — Rereading A Salvo for Africa since yesterday. What struck me immediately was the accuracy with which Oliver chose the epigraph that opens the book. It is a long quote from Martin Buber's I and Thou, and a very lucid analysis of the poet (or here "speechmaker")'s situation in relation to the state. It begins, "Speechmaker, you speak too late." A despairing line, if you will, and one that from the start questions the possibility of the poem being efficacious in a direct way (for to speak too late is to speak after the event, the inevitable has already happened, when the words can no longer direct, or at least effect the event). But can words and events ever be in such a simple cause-and-effect relation? We always speak too late — or too early, too fast. Word and event thus always at a certain distance from, or against each other, never coinciding (except possibly as the ultimate vision of the poem as limit-event, as process of transformation of the reader, an actual event of becoming for the writer/reader — but that's going elsewhere.) And yet it is also exactly such cold knowledge that is required if we are not to lure ourselves into some romantic vision of writings (revolutionary) effectiveness. The Buber quote is worth citing here in more detail; it goes on after that initial statement:

Just a little time ago you would have been able to believe in your speech, now you no longer can. For, a moment ago, you saw as I did, that the State is no longer led; the stokers still pile in the coal, but the leaders have now only the semblance of control over the madly racing machines. And in this moment, as you speak, you can hear as I do that the levers of economics are beginning to sound in an unusual way; the masters smile at you with superior assurance, but death is in their hearts…

So whom do we address in our speaking? The masters are no longer the masters, they are but the foils put up by the economic machines (read: multinational corporations) that run the show to fool us. And you can't address the machines — they are impermeable to argument, discussion, conviction. Words do not change machines. It may be good to have come to realize that the poet can longer be (if he ever had been) the scribe by the side of the ruler who by his wise words could affect the latter's decisions. A trap Ezra Pound, malgré his enormous powers as a poet, fell into. That romantic inheritance of the poet as legislator finally laid to rest. But then who does the poet speak to, whom do the poems address with the hope of changing of not (yet) events, then at least minds? For that desire, hope remains, has to remain; as Jerome Rothenberg put it in one of his early poetic manifestos, which reads in part: "Personal Manifesto / 1) I will change your mind. 2) Any means (=methods) to that end. 3) to oppose the "devourers" = bureaucrats, system-makers, priests, etc. (W. Blake);" Oliver is straightforward on this issue, and answers the question "who am I left talking to, or on behalf of?" as follows: "Theoretically, millions of ordinary citizens in Europe and America —more than the population of Africa itself." The hope is still that in those imperfect (to say the least) democracies, the citizens, if well-informed and convinced could by voting alter the governments and thus the politics. A slim hope, given what was said above, but one it would be irresponsible to abandon. The hope resides in the fact that, unlike the byte-sized and skewed TV news, the poem, demanding a slow read and a deeper engagement may indeed change minds. His approach in these poems is thus "an emotional engagement from the only places emotions come from: our hearts, their local history, and our imperfect knowledges."



§ Paris, 11 July 2006 — From the prose-&-poems in Salvo, these extracts:

Then I take your arm again and remark, 'I have risked prose,
a walking measure, to explain why I've written these poems.

*

Through the telescope's smoking lens
I see a woman rising in her heat of limbs
from the red desert of Ethiopia;
a priest above her holds a cross
and reads from a dark book: she doesn't
think of me though I think of her intently
and watch the bitter smoke of her sweet fires
making haze round a claystack chimney lodged
in thatch on her circular house of stones.

*

You must come along. Whether you're a
Caribbean in Brixton able to instruct me,
or white middle-class in Surrey,
or an elderly person on welfare in Consett,
or a blurty-eyed young person,
whether you ever read poetry or not,
all our paradoxes meet in Chilembwe's life.

*

Where's Malawi?
The question returns me
to a modern time of writing.
In my mind this past survives
as a more-then-memory.
Not even Chilembwe's religious myths
pass away, though in my own beliefs
no man was resurrected
after any Calvary except in the strange survivals
of all this time as a haunting
of our sadly avaricious, racist British lives,
survivals as shadows outside a cosy hose
where we sit eating goats and chickens
grabbed from Africa via foreign loans,
money thrown on the ground.

*

An Africa the size of a British park
cracked like a white map,
a manageable terrain,
or coloured in with adventures
for boyhood dreams in the bush,
brown and sere, gazelles,
scouted by cheetahs on their hills,
streaming over the high plateaux
of Kenya beneath the fuselage
of a plane that lands long ago, lightly,
into history. In present time
it could only land tourists,
and it's worse than that.

*

. . .
Below under Paris moonshine a ferris wheel
comes suddenly alight by the river and starts turning,
and dot men in suits are running for their lives
in 1961 while men in battledress
slowly take those lives. I'm not seeing this;
it's seeing me though the soldiers don't look at my hill.
There flashes into mind the bloody pout of a beaten man
   je
ga
manhandled by Tschombe's soldiers;
it's Lumumba; he's passed out of history, oh-oh.

I have quoted only from the poems; these are interspersed with information and meditation-rich prose sections the combination of which turn this book into a poetic teaching event of the first order.

The heat over Paris and Europe is not African; it is of our own Northern making — the price we are beginning to pay for the reckless misuse of our environment (& the second "our" here encompasses all of the peoples on the globe — no one will escape this planetary warming.) It is "payback time" as Doug has entitled one of the last prose-sections of A Salvo. Sluggishly I open Whisper 'Louise'. More tomorrow, if the weather permits. Tonight I will go look for the Dogon restaurant near Place de la République to eat some yam dish with very hot sauce — hotter than this Parisian sun, to put the heat inside and make the outside cooler.



§ Paris, 12 July 2006 — Driving south today, all the way to the Pyrenees. Oliver's books are with me, but not sure when I'll get back to them. As Paris disappears in back of me, Doug stays with me. Again I cannot separate the man from his work, and the best way I have to speak of them is to say that core to both is a practice of ethics that with great courage, integrity and lucidity refuses all (either old-fashioned conservative humanistic or new-fangled modish hip) strategies and solutions. This means, for both the politics of his poetics and the poetics of his politics, a continual self-scrutiny and an assiduous involvement in and analysis of the world around him. As he wrote in Whisper 'Louise', "It will be seen eventually that this whole memoir, with its talk of communes and revolutions, will be about integrity, that is political, philosophical, social, poetic and spiritual integrity, for they are all intertwined, and all will have to incorporate a vivid sense of what our own death will mean to our ideals — how rich a story it makes." How rich indeed! He entitled an early novel The Harmless Building, and a Selected Poems Kind: these are core concept with which he queried his actions and the world. The aim is to remain kind despite the anger and frustration that drives one's desire to change the harmful aspects of this world. How to effect radical yet harmless change. This is not easy, for even kindness is unnatural, as Oliver meditates on the matter in the poem "For Kind:"

Kindness acts idly or unnaturally,
leads us into fear. Act in kindness.
Kindness makes you idle, worse, unnatural.
Don't be afraid of the darkness of kind;
for it's the birth darkness, vertical twist
of opening lips in the night: life that follows
belongs to you in kind.

Doug had a helping angel (terrible as all angels are) that he returns to again and again: his son Tom, with Down syndrome, who died before the age of two in a crib accident. And who comes back, or is present in his last book as a deer spirit, gentle animal, incarnation of kindness and harmlessness. From this figure emanates what in Whisper 'Louise' he calls "the tea-brown light of kindness." A halo I feel suffusing the poems and the man I knew, a light of dawn or dusk, not of the high-noon sun of Cartesian false-clarity or revolutionary absoluteness.



§ Luchon, 18 July 2006 — Bombs tear apart Beirut and the Gaza strip. Harmless civilians killed by the hundreds. Another Mid-east war in progress. As if this species was incapable of kindness, caught in an unending spiral of harm upon harm inflicted on its own kind. I feel like screaming under this harsh and scorching sun. Turning for the time being away from Douglas Oliver and his work, let me end these notes with the poem I wrote shortly after Doug's death in 2000:



A CALM VADEMECUM DOSE

           toward a poem for Douglas

finally, though it starts

                       last Calvados tear

                       cried embracing you

                       knowing, knowing

                       this was the

                       long good-bye

           tiers of Calvary

no more dawn on Pont Neuf

the new bridge now the oldest

over a river that is a scene insane

           as I run

                       as I hold

the last

glass

of Calva, poured out

           now on Paris ground,

                       sop for some imaginary big dog

& yet, Lady Lethe didn't get it all


as "dark switches on the light" title

           of the last poem, Feb 10, 2000


"snow lying like a private drift of death"


"my interest is in the form that death gives to our lives"

"a public heart" he was, in John Donne's phrase quoted by Denise Riley


and the master of a most demanding poetics: "How shall I write this?

By living it; that rule has not changed. You have children. Lose yourself in them."


even now, when

"death, our richest humour, fills with lights."


           a stress            born in time

                       stands outside

a minor, eternal present, a


                       trembling instant

partly resisting           the flow

               the line           creates it

its very great fascination.


arrived at this . at that

           bouche d'ombre

the descent beckons

                       into memory's hollows &

gulphs — metropolitan or -tain

           through it rebirth of sorts, e-

merge elsewhere, come up

for breath, even if

myth your identity not safe

           above or under-ground

the grind, the grind

           I groan in dejection

                       poor Calvados

pour calm vademecum dose

           pour Calvary

go with me

calamitous vagrant ryme

           we sat & smoked Cuba

                       sighed Africa

           sited America

vaude-willed Haiti

           wept the Maghreb

set the world neither aright nor afire nor akimbo

recrossed Pont Neuf

had coffee & croissants at Le Petit Bar

embraced at metro gate

shot up the veins of another new morning

will meet again just there

I mean here