Mark Dickinson: from 'The Speed of Clouds'
from, section i. A Cloud is Nothing Else: Supersaturate Or Cloud-burst In Dreams
1:4
Envelopments unfolding detail a vertical migration in a three-dimensional world, with lattice and a strict canopy filtering out the light to a partial… clarity. Settle of leaf plain slow to timed-out expression. Beneath in reams of sand; blue to cloud; cover as message; a winged god the name of which is perched on the tongues tip goes quivering heights. The moors exposure and the slow lay of a leaf… permeated; Field; and the view that rolls ripple, down crown: Lightening to cloud… Not rupture.
2:4
This concave of flatness draws lines to its centre, the hills set out to meet each other, a stretch from beginning. No reach but a stitch of fencing laid length ways down to the sea. No breach, only the rustle of a woven edge, each part renewed to itself, while the light shows what sites before it. These old bent pines-sparse twists under the clouds duration, a thick nested syntax sourced to eye. These lines of direction, these ways amongst, the permeated landscapes of composted matter over time. This one a greying miniature; a cumulus settled in the arc. To which the sentence over reaches like fields traced dimly in twilight.
3:4
Returning to the same ground: broken circles splinter white in the bay. There is a small nest of rock with a river and stems from a ubiquitous zero; a heron with an unearthly pause mimetic in view. The land draws shape out of the water plain rising towards - settling in eucalyptus and pine. (We cannot ignore the settlements, earthly dwellings couched in view. But can sit & stare, at a whole that appears as too much an own outside of us.) These fingers scraping into its surface; opening composts of faecal and leaf-litter laid down to a vertical exchange; stratus overhead; ploughed deep-water fields reflecting white-passage on blue.
Seeing Is Believing
--------------------------------------------------
Faber and Faber / ISBN: 9780571206674 / Published: 19 March, 2001 / Pages: 96pp / Price: £7.99
Reviewed by Laura Steele
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The age of cardboard and string is, one immediately presumes, the age of those very small cats one does see sometimes often playing with string and jumping about in boxes. So it turns out, though it is not cats but children playing in a box.
Wait! We brought you back a secret,
but we're going to tell it to the zebras first -
the black one with stripes painted white,
the white one with stripes painted black,
who sleep on the landing,
leaving just enough room to squeeze by.
Most of the poems seem to slip past glancingly. The poem-equivalent of a polite cough, or when they do raise themselves up, they suddenly back down at the end, embarrassed, happy to be slight, and sometimes lightly melancholy in a bemused way. Whatever the poem was doing, it was all over before we got to the end - where the zebras, who have not appeared before, go to sleep is of little interest, other than that they are.
The most exciting moment in the book is when the poet licks someone's nipples while they read from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." There's also a short poem about Jean Follain, and another one in which the glittering sea is described as "like the several million beating wings / of a plague of locusts heading inland." There is a whole series of poems which pick up on something amusing written by Stendhal, in order to extend it whimsically.
'The Break' plays on the idea that the break for adverts in the middle of the ITN news is actually the brief gap between life and after-life. After the canned laughter of a sitcom,
The most exciting moment in the book is when the poet licks someone's nipples while they read from "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." There's also a short poem about Jean Follain, and another one in which the glittering sea is described as "like the several million beating wings / of a plague of locusts heading inland." There is a whole series of poems which pick up on something amusing written by Stendhal, in order to extend it whimsically.
'The Break' plays on the idea that the break for adverts in the middle of the ITN news is actually the brief gap between life and after-life. After the canned laughter of a sitcom,
the doomy Big Ben toll of ITN news
came as a relief, in its way: bailiffs failing again
to evict protestors, frescos in Assissi damaged
(delivered, this, with a palpable sense
of affront) by small Italian earthquake.
The twins upstairs - the one bunched up,
the other splayed to the world, postures habitual
as signatures - slept on. A car's beams swept up
and through the room, and when I came back down
to you - that, and when We'll take a break now,
said Trevor, and after the break - the afterlife,
it seemed, could be this: this sitting around, late,
watching ads for panty liners and macho cars
and worrying what's to become
of the boys and girls in the trees tonight,
maybe wafted so high
by whatever they're on, their lives
of wind and wild berries, some poisonous, some not.
So the poem slips away, but then it slips back again with a nagging unsettled quality. Domestic peace - with its anxiety and care - as a detailed heaven? Or anguished vision that we're all dead already? What to make of the closing reflection on the "boys and girls in the trees" - and the last line, backing out with a remark on berries, daring you to read it as an ending at all.
Boyle notices a spelling mistake - "I pass by the row of horses on the north side of the square. Henry James was born in one of these..." - and he writes a poem about it; Boyle opens the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry and notices his own name in the entry for 'The Wellington Group', "The term refers to a loose association of New Zealand poets in Wellington, in the years between 1950 and 1965 . . . Certainly James K. Baxter and Louis Johnson, both Wellington residents during the period, seemed to draw a number of poets around them: Alastair Campbell, for example, and the immigrants Peter Bland and Charles Boyle." So he writes a poem about it, which seems spectrally to be making fun of Doris Lessing and similar -
Boyle notices a spelling mistake - "I pass by the row of horses on the north side of the square. Henry James was born in one of these..." - and he writes a poem about it; Boyle opens the Oxford Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry and notices his own name in the entry for 'The Wellington Group', "The term refers to a loose association of New Zealand poets in Wellington, in the years between 1950 and 1965 . . . Certainly James K. Baxter and Louis Johnson, both Wellington residents during the period, seemed to draw a number of poets around them: Alastair Campbell, for example, and the immigrants Peter Bland and Charles Boyle." So he writes a poem about it, which seems spectrally to be making fun of Doris Lessing and similar -
Remind me, Peter,
what was on the agenda - weren't we trying to prove a point
to the eggheads up in Auckland
about truth to experience, the sacredness
of where and when and who?
Since I returned to London in nineteen-whatever
to start all over, to write my bildungsroman
of a wild colonial boy
in the new Elizabethan age, I seem to have lost touch
almost with my own life: my children look at me
as if across a genetic barrier,
and did I really sleep with Miss South Island
'63, or was that something else
I made up for the c.v.? But sometimes, Peter,
after lunch with my agent
in a restaurant where not even the cloakroom attendant
pretends he knows me, I'm there again -
among the bottles and books and rhyming voices
in a draughty upstairs room
where James K. Baxter holds me on his knee.
I am four years old. I don't want to go to bed.
I think there's an enormous amount of poetry in the world which one can tolerate and enjoy reading once, and this book contains some of it.
The First Metamorphosis
The first transformation described in Ovid's Metamorphoses is not the creation of the world, it's the creation of the poem, and the poem won't settle. Ovid's Mercury-heeled hexameters set us running:
In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formasThe first line tells us the subject, bodies transformed, but what kind of poem will treat of this subject? It will sing its way from the origin of the world "brought down" to present times, yes, but the way in which time is treated is the form of the Classical poem: it will be epic - perpetuum connotes this - but again it will also be light and artless, that is deductum carmen, a playful anti-epic in the Callimachean way. This will turn out to be Ovid's Latin style throughout to write two poems at once, while also hinting at possibilities and details in other unchosen versions of each story, yet chosen still, often by synecdoche (one incongruous detail which is an aspect from an alternative telling, or even more than one beginning or end like a setting of short runs of splayed thread), set running beside and through, a movable delta.
corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas)
adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi
ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen!
In translation such a delta is immediately a problem. Arthur Golding's revered fourteen-liners begin
Of shapes transformde to bodies straunge, I purpose to entreate,whereas Dryden began
Ye gods vouchsafe (for you are they ywrought this wondrous feate)
To further this mine enterprise. And from the world begunne,
Graunt that my verse may to my time, his course directly runne
Of bodies chang'd to various forms, I sing:and between the two, Sandys:
Ye Gods, from whom these miracles did spring,
Inspire my numbers with coelestial heat;
'Till I my long laborious work compleat:
And add perpetual tenour to my rhimes,
Deduc'd from Nature's birth, to Caesar's times.
Of bodies chang'd to other shapes I sing.The only one of these to get at the ambiguity of form is Dryden's "perpetual tenour to my rhimes" where perpetual tenour" feels solemn and epic, and "rhimes" is immediately more playful, with the idea of one added to the other to produce a mixture. The add goes back to "my numbers" and the choice of "Deduc'd" is a brilliant Drydenesque piece of material rhetoric, picked up from Sandys and then morphed; Dryden can make thought transform to poetry where a physical sense of thought's movement is enacted, without recourse to the sensual, a more usual location for physicality to be looked for in a poem. Deduc'd adds to this mathematical building up, of time and the poem, a system or extrapolation from the start, but the start is the changing of forms, so it's both a sequence and a constant elicit looping.
Assist, you Gods (from you these changes spring)
And, from the Worlds first fabrick to these times,
Deduce my neuer-discontinued Rymes.
*
Ovidian changes keep happening to the text in translation, and often Ovid's wit - calling the heavenly palace of Jove, "the Palatine district" (the hill where Imperial residencies were, the Capitol Hill) - lever off further quips in English versions - Sandys takes this and says:
This glorious Roofe I would not doubt to call,Addison makes Apollo into the "Sun King" while Swift sets 'Baucis and Philemon' in a "small village down in Kent". As Kenneth Koch notes,
Had I but boldness lent me, heaven's White-Hall
Byron is great, Williams of late, and Shakespeare for the ages;
But what is life, and what is fate, without Ovidian changes?
-----------------------------
Edmund Hardy
superfluous health
The madness of superfluous health, says Pope in one of the chiding moments in the Essay on Man. There are rather too many chiding moments. The balance feels wrong. One did chide in such expository poems, Hesiod had done it, so had Lucretius, but Pope's lessons have not a sufficiently copious enthusiasm to excuse his lofty reproofs. Go, wiser thou... Go wondrous creature... Fools! (he proceeds) thou fools ... Blind to truth... Cease then... - and much more in the same vein. This is not so much about enlightening the insanely healthy questioners as about telling them to shut their noise: Whatever is, is RIGHT. His paean to Order involves too much ordering people about.
Anyway, here's the phrase back in its context, the opening lines of Epistle III:
Here then we rest: 'The universal cause
Acts to one end, but acts by various laws.'
In all the madness of superfluous health,
The trim of pride, the impudence of wealth,
Let this great truth be present night and day;
But most be present, if we preach or pray.
It's the healthy, wealthy and proud who hold all the poetic cards here. How can Pope, the great apophthegmist, try and pass off this unmeaning, uninteresting verbiage about the universal cause as a great truth? As pallid is my conception of Pope preaching, or indeed Pope praying. I think he'd rather be playing in the road with the trim and impudent.
Pope knew there was something unachieved about the Essay on Man. He self-accuses it of a certain dryness, of generality without detail; defines its method as a faute de mieux; demotes it to the status of preliminaries to a more fruitful sequel; tacitly condemns it by not delivering that sequel.
Still, the great chain is fascinating. When he says:
See dying vegetables life sustain,
See life dissolving vegetate again:
when he sees the insulated concentration of the kind:
Say, will the falcon, stooping from above,
Smit with her varying plumage, spare the dove?
when (best of all) he admires the essential motors of action and passion, and their creative patterning thus:
The rising tempest puts in act the soul,
Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole...
Passions, like elements, though born to fight,
Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite...
these are glimmerings of the processes that sustain an ecology. That image of a chain, however, is inevitably too one-dimensional; too much like a gentlemanly line, or the grades of estate staff. It has its later analogy in apex predators and the like, but it isn't helpful when thinking about the inter-relations of complex groups of plants and animals. Pope intermittently knows it too: the lioness has a hopeless sense of smell. Who claims the grain? Even the humble birds. And the enchanting hog, that ploughs not nor obeys thy call, makes his living as well as Man.
Of the chain's mechanism, no satisfactory explanation emerges.
From Nature's chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.
In Pope's own terms it's difficult to see what could justify this assertion except a pious compliment to the great maker's precision. The chain is conceived as a fragile perfection, like the one and only answer to a difficult sum. Adaptation, the continuing self-repair and adjustment to changed conditions, these ideas are not to be glimpsed. The chain, being divinely imposed and RIGHT, is apparently too static to require what, to our eyes, makes the natural world a far more impressive creation.
And still, there's sometimes a wonderful energy in Pope's intuitions roving, with a liberty that was already becoming amateurish, from Nature to Man. This of the strange comforts that make everyone unwilling to trade places with another:
The starving chemist in his golden views
Supremely blessed, the poet in his muse.
Of our toys: the child Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw carried through to the deflating grace of beads and prayer-books are the toys of age. No simplicities of RIGHT here: but a broad, amused, wonderment; the spirited delectation of a superfluous health that Pope experienced only in his verse.
------------------------------------------
Michael Peverett
Anyway, here's the phrase back in its context, the opening lines of Epistle III:
Here then we rest: 'The universal cause
Acts to one end, but acts by various laws.'
In all the madness of superfluous health,
The trim of pride, the impudence of wealth,
Let this great truth be present night and day;
But most be present, if we preach or pray.
It's the healthy, wealthy and proud who hold all the poetic cards here. How can Pope, the great apophthegmist, try and pass off this unmeaning, uninteresting verbiage about the universal cause as a great truth? As pallid is my conception of Pope preaching, or indeed Pope praying. I think he'd rather be playing in the road with the trim and impudent.
Pope knew there was something unachieved about the Essay on Man. He self-accuses it of a certain dryness, of generality without detail; defines its method as a faute de mieux; demotes it to the status of preliminaries to a more fruitful sequel; tacitly condemns it by not delivering that sequel.
Still, the great chain is fascinating. When he says:
See dying vegetables life sustain,
See life dissolving vegetate again:
when he sees the insulated concentration of the kind:
Say, will the falcon, stooping from above,
Smit with her varying plumage, spare the dove?
when (best of all) he admires the essential motors of action and passion, and their creative patterning thus:
The rising tempest puts in act the soul,
Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole...
Passions, like elements, though born to fight,
Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite...
these are glimmerings of the processes that sustain an ecology. That image of a chain, however, is inevitably too one-dimensional; too much like a gentlemanly line, or the grades of estate staff. It has its later analogy in apex predators and the like, but it isn't helpful when thinking about the inter-relations of complex groups of plants and animals. Pope intermittently knows it too: the lioness has a hopeless sense of smell. Who claims the grain? Even the humble birds. And the enchanting hog, that ploughs not nor obeys thy call, makes his living as well as Man.
Of the chain's mechanism, no satisfactory explanation emerges.
From Nature's chain whatever link you strike,
Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike.
In Pope's own terms it's difficult to see what could justify this assertion except a pious compliment to the great maker's precision. The chain is conceived as a fragile perfection, like the one and only answer to a difficult sum. Adaptation, the continuing self-repair and adjustment to changed conditions, these ideas are not to be glimpsed. The chain, being divinely imposed and RIGHT, is apparently too static to require what, to our eyes, makes the natural world a far more impressive creation.
And still, there's sometimes a wonderful energy in Pope's intuitions roving, with a liberty that was already becoming amateurish, from Nature to Man. This of the strange comforts that make everyone unwilling to trade places with another:
The starving chemist in his golden views
Supremely blessed, the poet in his muse.
Of our toys: the child Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw carried through to the deflating grace of beads and prayer-books are the toys of age. No simplicities of RIGHT here: but a broad, amused, wonderment; the spirited delectation of a superfluous health that Pope experienced only in his verse.
------------------------------------------
Michael Peverett
A Short Interview with Alexander Pope
Q: I notice you don't mention poetry blogs in An Essay On Criticism. Why not?
Pope:
The bookful blockhead, ignorantly read,
With loads of learned lumber in his head,
With his own tongue still edifies his ears,
And always listn'ing to himself appears.
Q: Really? Some are quite good. You can track a poet's development.
Pope:
Some have at first for Wits, then Poets past,
Turn'd Critics next, and proved plain fools at last.
Q: What's your take on this mocked yet irresistible battle between the Ancients and the Moderns... no, I mean innovative vs traditional, or post-avant and Quietude?
Pope: "neither Side prevails / For nothing's left in either of the Scales."
Q: Come, you're being facetious, you can't mean "nothing"?
Pope: "The good lies in", "whatever is useful or excellent", "whether ancient or modern."
Q: How much institutional education does one person need?
Pope:
What tho' we let some better sort of fool
Thrid ev'ry science, run thro' ev'ry school?
Never by tumbler thro' the hoops was shown
Such skill in passing all, and touching none.
Q: I'm very fond of the Monument, where in Days of Ease I used to meet up with friends; I think of it as a folly, a work of soft architecture which points, contra-archaeology, upwards to the fire of the past. How do you think of it?
Pope: "pointing at the skies, / Like a tall bully"
-------------------------------
By Melissa Flores-Bórquez and Edmund Hardy
Part Six
Part Six
1
a young woman in white lay dead
in diagonal evening light
that sloped down through
the towering space of the Duomo
Santa Maria del Fiore
the young bride had died at noon
the priest hurried through the business
the body was trundled to a chapel of rest
for a final night above ground
in the vertiginous candlelight
the professionals mumbled
that which is mumbled
& slopped as much wet wax
about as they decently could
to be harvested immediately
by raggamuffins & then reused
at the expense of the next
family to be mugged by grief & loss
I stood in moving shadows
at the entrance to the resting place
& was invited in by a local
with his hand held out
I followed him in to the
otherwise deserted space
where he lifted her head
with its black hair & sad smile
& intolerable beauty: È bella
he grinned while letting her head
thump back down on the table
2
the echo of the thud
seemed absolute profanity
I froze like a statue of brutality
then melted & knelt
with her dead hand against my mouth
my guide still grinning
my heart imagined a young husband
suddenly appearing & misunderstanding
this gothic tableau
perhaps he would have deserved it
where was he how could he be elsewhere
& I dreamt goodbye to her
in Italian
forgive the strange intimacy
these stranger's tears on the pale
hand of death that can't take love
or my religion the arc of art
I left for another world
3
In Milan I went to the opera
but the whole audience was eating
drinking chatting picking each other up
playing cards & facing the wrong way
so I couldn't hear a note of Donizetti
music for the Italians seems to be
yet another kind of olive oil
something nice to drizzle on your
elevenses or whatever else is due
to be licked or inserted
in the next half hour
a tickle on the cymbal
a grope on the cello
a pounding in the background
on the big bass drum
it's all too voluptuous
& Italian for we French
4
all roads lead away from Rome
one way or another & I went home
a good six months early
I moved into Harriet's old flat
only to find she'd been back
& was still in Paris
as I prepared for my concert
she was back on the Paris stage in Shakespeare
that was no longer this month's flavour
slowly sucked downwards by debt
her spirits fell then so did she
she suffered a double fracture
& married me
5
one benefit concert featured
both Liszt & Chopin yet still
the cave of debt stayed dark
she brought her list of creditors
& I my anger
& the gristly business
of concert planning & self-promotion
we were ground together like
black & white pepper
I conducted & felt
a yawning chasm behind
which echoed nothing
but my pulse knocking
6
the micro-politics of the petty minded
almost showed the road to ruin
but you tunnel forwards like a mole
till one night the hall explodes
with praise & light
& Paganini pumping your arm
insisting on a commission
a work for orchestra & viola
to be played by the master himself
7
I decided the viola
would be me walking
through Abruzzo
like the lines of Byron
treading on through
mists & frustration
hangover longing
mind diseased with
its own beauty &
jagged aspirations
& yearning to cast off
definitively still
I began to call in
notes from all over
the memory of being
borne upon that landscape
I allowed them to settle
above the magnet of
my heart let these describe
the indescribable
8
Paganini already dying
gave me a year's pay for nothing
so I could compose
for seven months I lived in
Romeo & Juliet to give back
what I could to Shakespeare
Paganini & Harriet
I hear it now
the introduction & adagio
Queen Mab
the haunted voice of Friar Laurence
'tis an ill cook that cannot
lick his own finger
if much of what you've made or done
doesn't move you deeply
it may be time to change your life
9
Spontini once told me
after hearing my Requiem
you know you are wrong
to moan about Rome
without Michaelangelo's
Last Judgement
you never could have
imagined your Requiem
actually the picture
disappointed me
I saw all the torments &
paraphernalia of hell
but nothing that could
help me see
humanity assembled
for one final bow
A note in the margin of 'Windsor-Forest'
Thy forests, Windsor! and thy green retreatsNever again would Pope address a forest or woodland. The first 290 lines were, he tells us, written when the poet was 16, in 1704, at the same time as his rather suffocating pastorals, those last English gasps of that form. Johnson considered "local poetry" to be that which describes a particular place without really lifting off from that one landscape, and he praised some poets in his Lives for their mastery of this form (including Denham, whose 'Cooper's Hill' Pope specifically invokes by name in this poem); the first 290 lines of 'Windsor-Forest' might fit Johnson's local denomination - none of Pope's other poems would. So it's a work where the reader considers a possible future development which never occurred, as she might also see a rather different possible line of writing to come in 'Eloisa to Abelard'. But Pope became a Wit, and a great success, and only these early pieces remain for the idle reader to speculate on.
At once the Monarch's and the Muse's seats
(1-2)
The rest of 'Windsor-Forest' was completed in 1712, to celebrate the "sacred peace" of the Treaty of Utrecht, and the leaves soon give stronger, clearer geopolitical shadings. In the cold December of 1712, Pope wrote in a letter, "I am endeavouring to raise up around about me a painted scene of woods and forests in verdure and beauty, trees springing, fields flowering, Nature laughing. I am wandering thro' Bowers and Grottos in conceit, and while my trembling body is cowering o'er a fire, my mind is expatiating in open sunshine."
But back to the sixteen year old's poem. The Pope family had moved out from London's Lombard Street when his father took early retirement from his linen business as anti-Catholic legislation contrived to drive papists from the capital. They settled, after Hammersmith, in Binfield, surrounded by Windsor Forest. The boy Pope was furnished with this English, green symbolic and, buffering the anti-Catholic times, securing foliage all around. The forest gave vital will:
Here hills and vales, the woodland and the plain,The last line here seems to solve the later (and some think telling) puzzle as to how Pope could change his description of Nature in the Essay on Man from a "mighty maze, and all without a plan" to a "mighty maze but not without a plan", when told his poem was too negative. He probably did believe both, but "harmoniously confus'd" put it more succinctly.
Here earth and water seem to strive again
Not Chaos-like together crush'd and bruis'd,
But, as the world, harmoniously confus'd
(11-14)
Imagination gilds the world but does not change it, Pope later asserted. 'Windsor-Forest' begins by asserting very little; at its least stylized, this heroic couplet:
Here waving groves a chequer'd scene display,To break a butterfly on a wheel: The first line presents the named thing, "waving groves", which are then styled as "chequer'd" before that conceit is broken apart by the additional clauses which literalize the thought in a drawn out second line, "part admit, and part exclude the day", which paints in 3D - unnamed, light is admitted here (bright patches) and excluded there (shade), but the reader can see both in a way in which she wouldn't if the line was reduced to a word such as "dappled". Of course, the whole of the second line may have been thought up just to pad out the first to complete the couplet, so the next couplet could bring a nymph into it. But in this tiny, one-line invention, Pope produces an effect of a kind he would always gild by at least one more layer later on, such as in this description of pine trees and Clerks nodding off to sleep in book II of the Dunciad:
And part admit, and part exclude the day;
(17-18)
Soft creeping, words on words, the sense compose,
At ev'ry line they stretch, they yawn, they doze.
As to soft gales top-heavy pines bow low
Their heads, and lift them as they cease to blow:
Thus oft they rear, and oft the head decline,
As breathe, or pause, by fits, the airs divine.
(ii 388-394)
------------------------------------------------------------
Edmund Hardy
The Lady who p---st herself
Alexander Pope:
On A LADY Who P---st at the Tragedy of Cato
Occasion'd by an Epigram on a LADY who wept at it
While maudlin Whigs deplor'd their Cato's Fate,
Still with dry Eyes the Tory Celia sate,
But while her Pride forbids her Tears to flow,
The gushing Waters find a Vent below:
Tho' secret, yet with copious Grief she mourns,
Like twenty River-Gods with all their Urns.
Let others screw their Hypocritick Face,
She shews her Grief in a sincerer Place;
There Nature reigns, and Passion void of Art,
For that Road leads directly to the Heart.
--------------------------------------------------------
I think the lifting light of this squib from Pope is in his use of the word 'Vent'. The capitalised 'V' is almost obscene, but tender; some might opine that Passion aroused in that Vent is, indeed, artless, if not always incapable of untruths.
A vent is a slit, a splitting open; the "gushing" or overly fulsome praise could simply be that which is heard to rise up after a performance of some kind, part of the audience nervously coming back to the present. Pope literalizes the gushing, we can imagine a theatre filling up with p--s and steam in the shuffling, chatty noise of people filing out.
The deathbed scene in Addison's Cato, which is the emotional off-stage on-stage subject of the poem, is also a point of splitting apart, a vent for the age. The play belongs to the "maudlin Whigs" because Addison completed it for his Whig friends (though Pope contributed a final line and the prologue); Tories gush too, for they used the play - so popular its scenes and soliloquies could be referred to in political rhetoric - as part of their opposition to Walpole. Cato was a "patriot" of defeated zeal to the latter; a paragon of emotional and sacrificial liberty to the former (and to Americans, where this republican drama also packed the theatres - Washington had it staged to cheer up the troops at Valley Forge). Johnson noted: "The Whigs applauded every line in which Liberty was mentioned, as a satire on the Tories; and the Tories echoed every clap, to shew that the satire was unfelt." Both sides ended by gushing, but it's a point of splitting because Pope senses that a political morality drawn from such a death-bed mawkishness is laying a weaker model over the Christian morality to be drawn from Christ's crucifixion. The name Cato had come to mean a passionate love of freedom, but there was something deeply uneasy about the popular religious template (arising in a rage for death-beds - given brilliant painted form in Jacques-Louis David's 'The Death of Marat'). Much later, as unease with these icons and despair of the political religions unleashed grew, Addison's play was dropped and forgotten.
The poem's last word, Heart, is also the Tory heart which suddenly beat so strong on Queen Anne's death, and did continue to beat in England, claiming the centre.
--------------------------------------------------------
Melissa Flores-Bórquez
Alexander Pope and John Arbuthnot, Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus
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ISBN: 1843910012 / Pub Date: July 2002 / Pages: 112 / Price £6.99 / Hesperus Press
Reviewed by Laura Steele
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Martin Scriblerus' best known work is perhaps his Peri bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry. The Scriblerus Club, established in 1714 by Pope and Swift, met in the rooms of John Arbuthnot, author and physician to Queen Anne; Pope and Arbuthnot together furnished Martin with his memoirs, published here by Hesperus with a short foreword by Peter Ackroyd.
As an introduction, the editor relates how he met an old, decayed, harried but venerable Scriblerus hiding around the outside of St James's, having lately been pursued across Europe by an angry Spaniard who had misinterpreted the philosopher's interest in a marking on his wife's inner right thigh.
Then the memoirs begin with the beginning of Scriblerus proper, and it seems that from the first, Martin was destined to be a very great scholar, for Mrs Scriblerus, on the night of his birth, "dreamed she was brought to bed of a huge inkhorn, out of which issued several large streams of ink, as it had been a fountain." With a precocity latterly reminiscent of the much celebrated education of John Stuart Mill, young Martin advanced speedily through the learned languages: observing his son's love of gingerbread, Cornelius Scriblerus caused it to be stamped with the letters of the Greek alphabet, "and the child the very first day ate as far as iota." The early life and numerous academic achievements of our subject are profiled in short chapters. Later, his travels are summarised (they are three of Gulliver's adventures), and his romantic tryst with conjoined twin-beauties, Lindamira and Indamora, is burlesqued.
There are also sundry other documents, such as his father's instructions to Martin's playmates, 'A dissertation upon playthings':
To speak first of the whistle, as it is the first of all playthings; I will have it exactly to correspond with the ancient fistula, and accordingly to be composed septem paribus disjuncta cicutis.
I heartily wish a diligent search may be made after the true crepitaculum or rattle of the ancients, for that (as Archytas Tarentinus was of opinion) kept the children from breaking earthenware. The china cups in these days are not at all the safer for the modern rattles; which is an evident proof how far their crepitacula exceeded ours.
With no small measure of despair, one finds that many of the intellectual pieties of the twentieth century are already parodied here, only now their study has grown to industrial proportions: Martin's fellow pupil is Conradus Crambe, who was usually "contented with the words, and when he could but form some conceit upon them, was fully satisfied."
Thus Crambe would tell his instructor that all men were not singular, that individuality could hardly be predicated of any man, for it was commonly said that a man is not the same as he was, that madmen are beside themselves, and drunken men come to themselves; which shows that few men have that most valuable logical endowment, individuality.
Cornelius told Martin that a shoulder of mutton was an individual, which Crambe denied, for he had seen it cut into commons.
This is the kind of moral spirit of contempt Wyndham Lewis poured all over the place – so irresistible, whether one is sympathetic to the attack, the target, or both. Scriblerus and Crambe are also engaged with metaphysical questions such as "whether besides the real being of actual being there be any other being necessary to cause a thing to be?"
Scriblerus is ductile, pliant, he takes up the opinion of the last thing he reads and thus never loses an argument, "from which quality he acquired the title of the invincible doctor." We know that Scriblerus' works were usually published under other names – his poetry in particular - and his work continues to be done, as with Jesus, for he communicates "not only during his stay among us, but ever since his absence." Perhaps Scriblerus is born again in every generation, whenever the inseminating wind with its animalcula blows in the right direction, as Aristotle relates. In more recent times, he probably writes online book reviews...
Scriblerus is ductile, pliant, he takes up the opinion of the last thing he reads and thus never loses an argument, "from which quality he acquired the title of the invincible doctor." We know that Scriblerus' works were usually published under other names – his poetry in particular - and his work continues to be done, as with Jesus, for he communicates "not only during his stay among us, but ever since his absence." Perhaps Scriblerus is born again in every generation, whenever the inseminating wind with its animalcula blows in the right direction, as Aristotle relates. In more recent times, he probably writes online book reviews...
Andy Brown (editor), The Allotment: new lyric poets
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£10.00 / pbk / ISBN 190502407X / Stride Books
Published October 2006
Reviewed by Laura Steele
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Andy Brown's introduction sets this anthology up as a manifesto, albeit one which protests, "This is not a manifesto; neither theirs, nor mine." He says, one reason why "I distrust the notional polarity of 'innovation' and 'tradition', is that the opposition, like many binary oppositions, is based upon false premises." Brown's neat suggestion is that we leave those premises and go out to The Allotment. The two labels Brown figures as contesting a civil case – mainstream vs avant-garde – are enlisted in support of a "hybrid" between the two where, for Brown, real innovation lies: in sincerity and "the gaps between the world as we experience it and experience as we describe it".
There are 20 "new lyric" poets chosen, presented in alphabetical order. The work here is mostly characterised by a de-energising effect as you try to be interested in ideas and forms of speech you have read over and over. The poem by Abi Curtis which gives the anthology its title is in fact a more patronising version of Les Murray's 'Broad Bean Sermon' –
– though doubtless not as patronising as the tone of this review. Curtis' second poem, 'A Power Cut', is written in the genre of poems in which a shared physical event – i.e. loading a roof-rack, making dinner, fitting a door – suddenly becomes metaphorically rich with telling details on the state of a relationship between two people. The poem endsBut look close
along your sun-dried arm,
your nails bedded with wet earth,
the flaked handle of a trowel or fork
twisting in the mulch and worms.
Find, among each sift and turn;
walk-less husks of millipedes
and unforgiving knots of weed:
this is where you'll learn.
'Abode' is about a home, and this one follows the template of "tellingly extended surreal meditation" – see Amanda Dalton's 'Torch Song' about carrying a torch for someone ("She stuffed it in her briefcase not to scare the crowds") or Katherine Pierpont's 'This Dead Relationship' ("I carry a dead relationship around everywhere with me. / It's my hobby.") Curtis begins:Shall we talk? I asked, and reached across,
mistaking your hand for the honey pot.
Avik Chanda writes a poetry which sends out spiritual signals. It verges on the aching picturesque but mostly pulls up short of that. In 'Memory-Triptych' the car windscreen on a frosty day affords a look "beyond the void". 'Malevich' finds the painter, in first person, speaking in short lines about a disillusion, presumably post-Supreme Art:I have a home that breathes
into its blue garden, asking leave.
This is Malevich voiced as a pastiche of Eliot. Curious and I was amused by it:And how shall I
make virtues of dead blocks
stolid buildings
purpled distances lined with blue
the colour of loss?
Rose Flint's poems are prayers concocted somewhere between Pauline Stainer, Ted Hughes and Peter Redgrove – saints, birds, hares, wheatfields, Raven and someone who is "Vixen". A rural landscape is over-coded with myths from different sources; the biosphere disappears into association very quickly: "Ravens are one-eyed Odin's seers, Memory and Thought / and Raven is the Trickster."Praised be the absence of shape over
there shall be no texture
there shall be no form
Iain Galbraith's work is tastefully restrained in its lyrical feeling: bands of shadow, "As if against indifference their firmer hue / Arose behind the river mouth" or this whole poem:
It's in this: "The way" this kind of poetry suggests a person who deeply feels, "As if" (sigh) in stark Romance they must shore their thoughts. Often, in this tone, the poet mentions the present which is a sort of transferable melancholy crystal: "These pages filled now turning to my left / I stare across the room and out a window" ('The Wait'). These remarks also apply to George Messo (more on him later) who also has a poem here about looking out of a room ('The Beautiful Apartments').Passing the Steading
If tups and fank are all but ghosts
the void they haunt is living earth:
The way damp worsted rubbed on stone
or shapes we work dissolve in rain.
Luke Kennard begins with a variation on "domestic experience turns hyper metaphorical": film genre stylization imbues itself with thought, though Kennard's 'Film Noir' is a rather diluted work compared to, say, Redell Olsen's 'Corrupted By Showgirls'. It does end on a flourish that the Singing Detective might note wryly:
'The Tree' is a poem about a tree defending the poet in court – the poet wrote about the tree without really caring for it. A poem tedious as it is twee:When we finally broke down her door we found
A white curtain flapping in the open window –
As if waving goodbye.
'Glass' finds the poet compressing the "day's affairs" into epigrams. The second stanza:The tree delivered a moving closing statement about time and wisdom – and the colour of rust and the light breeze in the corner of a pasture.
I like the line about "used to scratch your arms" and the un-shattered calm of the final two lines. Who is being resolutely told what their most horrible thoughts are, though? The dictatorial stance of the speaker lends a tenderly unpleasant atmosphere which suggests imminent breakage anyway. Kennard follows this with two more twee poems (one which begins with a pig falling out of the sky; the other is called 'Blue Dog') and one, 'Egalitarianism', which is a dull poem of the list genre. Then there is 'It is not static' which manages to be both twee and a sort of dull list poem (a long sentence which returns to the words 'It is not static' at the beginning of each line):I'm staring at an unlit candle,
Thinking of a lit candle –
Which is no way to light a candle,
But a fine way of saving it.
You used to scratch your arms, but now
Nothing is wrong, my dearest one:
your most horrible thoughts are just
the broken glass in an unbroken glass.
Sarah Law's poems are gaudy performances; I enjoyed them more than Tim Allen ("I can't stand it" – Terrible Work) but then there were only 11 poems to read and not a whole book. At their best ('Evolutionary') they hint at a Maya Derenesque filmic world:It is not static and of this you are certain, in spite of the Victorian clown, howling,
'IT IS NOT STATIC!' sarcastically and honking his nose horn;
It is not static – even though there is no greater power than the power of ridicule;
It is not static and lies are often easier to believe; was it not Beloc who said of the lie:
'It is not static, but profoundly comfortable?' Perhaps not. [. . .]
Aoife Mannix's poems are banal, though articulately so. 'How To Be Happy' is a long list of self-help advice of different kinds – beginning "Eat ice cream, swallow sunshine, cartwheel naked across the moon", where the twist is the final line "and never take advice." Another poem, 'What We Used To Listen To', muses "Funny how music collapses time and space." 'Prophet' begins:[...]But I'm polluted
into becoming young again, the blue pool
swirls through slits of time and punishes us.
I wish I'd said. I wish I'd said the word.
Thus a combustion, and the slur of tears.
Marbles roll out of my unpacked bag [...]
These are performance poems; perhaps Mannix's delivery brings out unmissable nuance.The man with the birds in his eyes went walking
and he drank the sky till the sea was a desert.
Sophie Mayer dramatises angst in 'Fauré's Requiem': "Damn eternal bliss. / I want it now." This quip is the high-point of her contribution: Mayer's line-breaks are nearly always strikingly clumsy, rendering the poetry inert and stilted:
The result is that the reader tends to simply over-ride the break and read the poems as pallid prose; 'Blue Love' is the exception to this. There is also a poem called 'Self-Portrait as αthene' which beginsWe began a little north, in blue Holland, and
travelled south fleeting
over frozen canals. It's a fairy tale (one worth the
telling); a legend we subscribe to like a watchman's fire.
Kenneth Koch might render vainly preposterous Grecian musing with charm; Mayer doesn't. George Messo's 'The Beautiful Apartments' is an impressionistic lyric stilted by the same kind of disastrous line-break choices as Mayer:I see myself as sculpture some
days, lost as marble
on a hillside.
As a room, this stanza is a ruin, which is possibly an artful intention. His 'Entrances' presents a worst-case scenario for the possible reader of this anthology:You wonder who
at this late hour
stirs in rooms
darkness uninhabits.
Add dull epiphanies after "imagined selves", however, as Messo continues:Bored, as you are, with constant re-description
no longer swayed by frightful sounds –
named inner lives, imagined selves
– you opt to leave the afternoon
and step, one naked foot, into the Choruh river.
Unmistakably, always, quite. Messo can, however, also write poems like this –Unmistakably it is light
fading or else failing always
into which you will emerge –
the wish to be there, suddenly real,
puts everything in its place.
– which deftly modulates through and manages to be a poem-blossom-circuit.Fruit Music
The cherry tree
and its body-buds
quote pleasure.
Quote 'body'
and it buds
the cherry pleasure.
The pleasure tree
buds and quotes
'cherry
cherry
cherry'
After two shorter poems, most of Jonathan Morley's space is given over to a longer work called 'The Winter of the Modern Media': the blunt chants and repetitious cries of the press (mostly relating here to immigration) are reproduced in blank verse interspersed with prose letters.
The bludgeon irony in this presentation makes Peter Reading's work look subtle. In one way it's nice to see a Reading derivative as it affirms the power of the original.I'm no racist, I hate Germans,
no, it's these people who are driving
us into voting BNP
Jane Routh's poetry is best when it inhabits the observed land and seascape. 'Mealista' manages to be a charming poem about a road that runs on into the sea. Routh pitches her observation to come across as "unplugged" where other poets may horribly amplify their descriptions:
This from a poem about finding a piece of coral on the beach, "Let's say the Atlantic Conveyor swept it here". Potentially this is another sermon-poem but the relaxed tone manages to avoid the anecdotal didactic.but on this dark-floored beach, feet slide off grey cobbles
that knock as if the world beneath were hollow.
There are eight other poets but they fall into the patterns already covered. The anthology ends with four poems by Scott Thurston which introduce some form of non-generic thought into the tail-end of the book. These poems might even seem to fit Brown's manifesto of "the gaps between the world as we experience it and experience as we describe it":
A Bowl of Fruit
Und wars fűr diese schon zu viel, das Aufgehn?
– Rilke, 'Die Rosenschale'
What comes of making something so
unnatural?
From the violence of an unpassed course –
a bowl of fruit.
Held heavy in blunt planes
a bunch of clustered objects in the mind.
A steady inwardness draws them in
pushes their clumsy order out
into the cosmos.
this junk
too far from space
is space itself.
Held together
it disintegrates.
Peter Hughes: Berlioz (Part 5)
1
but the border police
& over-excited immigration officers
in their new uniforms
egged on by the gutter press
had meanwhile hatched the notion
that I was sneaking back & forth
between commie France
& regal Italy
in order to foment revolution
it was time to move on
& in spite of my high-tech hardware
& green comfy software
the currents of life & art began to
dissolve the grains of hatred
lodged between my teeth
2
I can't say when my daring plan
softened to old ideas
but I know that for a magic month
I wandered in & out of Nice
through air full of its own music
I watched the sea from orange groves
& vines of sunlit hills for days
that grew inside me like leaves
alone I wrote as naturally
as a shoal turns in the tide
& I turned towards Rome
3
after enduring gang-show opera
down through the peninsula
I arrived in Rome in time
for the feast of Corpus Christi
what treats were now in store
what heavenly aesthetics
a circus trundling into town
would have breathed more spirituality
than this confectionary warehouse
wrapped in whorehouse curtains –
& the music
a capella elephants
jostling to be first back up the Alps
echoed like brays & slaps off each
soft cheek of the Virgin
4
in Rome we did what students do
make a racket & wish they were in Paris
(except the ones in Paris
who yearn for New York)
we stepped around the famous sites
ten years since John Keats died
arranged excursions to the local wines
planned longer trips to Venice & Milan
Florence Naples Palermo
Rome & the Academy left me cold
except for the shadows of the Colosseum
& the resonances of St. Peter’s
it struck a chord in me forever
& I would step into serenity
as I left the heat of the city
for the cool beauty of elsewhere
I’d unpack some Byron
squat in an accommodating confessional
& read through spacious marble silence
the daft & burning passions
of our wine-dark wine-soaked hearts
until the dying of the light
5
the best days in Italy
were those spent walking
away from myself
along the lanes & tracks
that led from the city
across the plains of Lazio
towards the hill country
moving up into Abruzzo
in an old straw hat
& my pottering shirt
I’d grab a gun or guitar
& follow my unmissable nose
my head & tongue were heavy
with Virgil & key change
the ecology of orchestration
I stirred myself to tears
singing & composing
in the footsteps of the bard
I wept for Turnus & Lavinia
& I sang glittering armour
into being in the corners of my eyes
those walks were the only
perfect compositions of my life
the significant tremor of reed
gut & skin tuned to weather
6
I listen to bits of that
tinny pimp Rossini
with my knuckles
tuned to my teeth
I would rather have rusty skewers
hammered into my hips
than listen to one of his operas
Beethoven tends to come up
through the bowels like a
good suppository
I find I have to swallow
with consideration for timing
when listening to Mozart
the better the work
the more of my body is in my ear
originality in art
tends to be the juxtaposition
of several incompatible
anachronisms
7
each track & wood was
overshadowed by the Apennines
a monastery bell from the next valley
someone shouting behind a hut
a raucous bird coughing in a dead bush
just enough variety & dissonance
to help you recognise the planet
the music of the Abruzzi
is played with enormous verve
& self-confidence with each player
in tune irrespective of the others
& playing with impeccable timing
unlike one's colleagues
the bagpipes will make you forget
your future they just go in one ear
& stay there
8
don't forget to get ripped off
on a day trip from Naples
you can go anywhere
I went to Nisida
they emptied my wallet
treated me to a dinner so big
I could have sat in it
& lifted my feet from the floor
they felt guilty afterwards
& scurried around with much
furtive shouting before
presenting me with a keepsake
the biggest onion in the world
no I have not
9
it's always worth
popping into churches
& other sites
of uneasy need
& ambition
the music of yearning
of affiliation
self-satisfaction
or stomach-clenching
loneliness
you can watch
expressions postures
reflections & arches
& hear the loss
echoing through our rooms
the bigger the building
the greater the emptiness
underlined by every
art under the sun
Alice Notley's Coming After
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5 3/8 x 8. 192 pgs. (2005) The University of Michigan Press
Cloth 978-0-472-09859-0 $57.50
Paper 978-0-472-06859-3 $19.95
Reviewed by Melissa Flores-Bórquez and Edmund Hardy
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For a poem to be lifelike is for it to be "weird, patterned, tender", Alice Notley asserts in a piece on 'Elmslie's Routine Disruption'. The patterns are intonation patterns. Notley's great faith is in poetry which lives:
Why are some poets' poems so much more alive than other poets' poems? Because the poet/person her/himself is always right there in the lines forever, at the time of the writing – there was no wall between the poet's inmost self and the poem.
This, for Notley, is the origin of all these distinctive, signature styles of writing – Wherever does a style come from? It isn't a style it's a person. A poem is a memento vivere and when/if it dies (perhaps temporarily) it has "become art" (O'Hara's 'In Memory of My Feelings').
So, right there in the lines, Notley provides close readings of each poet she discusses, interspersed with statements which take the widest (or most essential) view of the work possible. The rush from up-close eye to audacious body-of-work concision can be an exhilarating flourish, or it can fall flat, and, I found, the latter occurred only once. The later pieces in this book of essays, reviews and talks (including a talk-memoir of Steve Carey) go on to draw several close readings of different poets together to present concise statements on a particular topic.
Notley's close reading is not about explication so much as finding the way in which lines think with music – finding that way is also to try and keep the poems alive so they don't freeze, for writer and reader alike:
So, right there in the lines, Notley provides close readings of each poet she discusses, interspersed with statements which take the widest (or most essential) view of the work possible. The rush from up-close eye to audacious body-of-work concision can be an exhilarating flourish, or it can fall flat, and, I found, the latter occurred only once. The later pieces in this book of essays, reviews and talks (including a talk-memoir of Steve Carey) go on to draw several close readings of different poets together to present concise statements on a particular topic.
Notley's close reading is not about explication so much as finding the way in which lines think with music – finding that way is also to try and keep the poems alive so they don't freeze, for writer and reader alike:
When Edwin Denby says something as simple as:
New York dark in August, seaward
Creeping breeze, building to buildinghe lets the scale of vowels – o-a-u-e-i – erect a city in a seabreeze, delineating separate buildings, as he refers incidentally to Faulkner and de Kooning.
This is the kind of thing that gets me excited enough to re-read and newly read Denby again and buy an edition of his dance criticism. From the same essay, 'American Poetic Music at the Moment', Notley writes about these Leslie Scalapino lines from Defoe –
Some people slip ahead on the ground.
they're on their knees. slip ahead.
this is after.
–
Now a great deal of what I hear in the Scalapino lines is rhythmical, or metrical, something done by the phrase "slip ahead" and its repetition, and by the use of two long lines and a short line together. I also hear the liquidity of the lines, they slide (slip) out of the mouth/mind without stoppage except for the periods, an effect of choice of consonants.
What does a poet sound like? That liquidity might not be what you hear – "slip ahead" does slip, but "they're on their knees" seems to be a precarious slowness – but to read what Notley's ears are picking up is also to have one's own ears perked and primed, the better to think with.
The opening essay on Frank O'Hara considers his work as political poetry; an essay on Ron Padgett considers him as a visionary; the structural time in Anne Waldman's Iovis is considered... In the closing essay, 'The Feminine "Epic"', Notley discusses the process of coming to write The Descent of Alette – Notley's comparison with the Sumerian epic The Descent of Inanna is illuminating in that Inanna "doesn't 'act'", and this technique of mythic story is what makes Notley's epic "feminine" – "Well I don't act. I don't even believe in acting, at least not very much."
The title's "coming after" refers to the second generation of NY Sch. poets, focused on in this book (after the unfreezing of O'Hara), and also to coming after "an irrecoverable point of damage". This coming after may be beginning again, to find a poem which is a speech in that "first voice", the "first voice ever to say a human poem of this world." To find a beginning is to find a potential spring of parity:
The opening essay on Frank O'Hara considers his work as political poetry; an essay on Ron Padgett considers him as a visionary; the structural time in Anne Waldman's Iovis is considered... In the closing essay, 'The Feminine "Epic"', Notley discusses the process of coming to write The Descent of Alette – Notley's comparison with the Sumerian epic The Descent of Inanna is illuminating in that Inanna "doesn't 'act'", and this technique of mythic story is what makes Notley's epic "feminine" – "Well I don't act. I don't even believe in acting, at least not very much."
The title's "coming after" refers to the second generation of NY Sch. poets, focused on in this book (after the unfreezing of O'Hara), and also to coming after "an irrecoverable point of damage". This coming after may be beginning again, to find a poem which is a speech in that "first voice", the "first voice ever to say a human poem of this world." To find a beginning is to find a potential spring of parity:
What might be another kind of poetry? Whole other poetry springing from nowhere, as at the beginning of the world, in the hands of women? Or perhaps even more desirably, as at the beginning of the world, invented equally by women and men together. Not, as now, already made out of men. Do you follow me? I'm saying, there may be nothing of women in the way any poem looks now, in what its form is – the entire soil, all layers and most nutrients, are for all practical purposes male. What would it be like to make a female poetry? Is that possible?
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Links
[#] Reviews of Coming After at The Constant Critic by Jordan Davis and Joyelle McSweeney
[#] "Intercapillary Space" review of Alice Notley's From The Beginning.