Tim Allen: Settings etc.
by Michael Peverett
I have now finished The Voice Thrower (Shearsman, 2012). The only snag is, I didn't really start it, not at the beginning anyway. I sort of dived in somewhere in the middle and just kept going. I remember doing this with War and Peace many years ago, and even now I still haven't got around to reading the start of it. Come to think of it, I did the same last week with Fortunata and Jacinta. It's just too intimidating to be on page 13 of a 1000-page novel. Picking it up half-way through takes some of the pressure off. Then I say to myself, Never mind, I'll just read it for a bit, see if I like it..
The Voice Thrower isn't a 1000-page novel, but it is a 333-stanza poem, unrelieved by section breaks and packed with narratives, often several going on at the same time. Narratives are often interrupted, typically by words that act like switch-points on a railway line to route us to a new destination. John Hall uses the word "chiasmatic" to describe this feature. Example:
and you don't really care who
you are it's the world out there that counts 2ten while
Britannia sits on her shield ouch then rolls a penny....
(pp. 72-73)
*
The full list of Tim Allen books that I've got is:
Settings (Shearsman, 2008)
The Voice Thrower (Shearsman, 2012)
An Anabranch with Slug (Knives Forks And Spoons, 2011)
incidental harvest (21 untitled poems) (Oystercatcher, 2011)
And, in effect, my Tim Allen reading list is further enhanced by the four poems from Default Soul that recently appeared in Intercapillary Space (which I think are top stuff).
*
Then there is Andrew Duncan interviewing Tim Allen in Don't Start Me Talking. Conveniently for us internet freeloaders, the interview is in the sampler. The interview begins with a page or two of Tim's long poem Sea ExChange and is altogether the handiest novice introduction to who he is. I say that because aside from his own poetry Tim is a massive part of modern UK poetry history. I'm not really happy with putting it that way, because it isn't what I want to talk about, but it's true. The rest of this essay assumes you understand who Tim Allen is. And now I want to foreground the poetry. A lot of it is still I think unpublished and unfinalized. But there's enough of it out there to see that it matters.
Numerous questions arise vaguely in my mind - and are linked, too, to all that I know of Tim's many Terrible Work reviews and his pellucid input on the British-Poets forum. (No, I simply can't refer to him as "Allen". I've never met him - I've never met anyone - but I feel I've known him a long time. We've exchanged an email or two. So Tim it is.) It is possible to avoid those questions. The constant invention and entertainment even lull them to sleep, in a way. In that respect though not in most others Tim's work affects me like Giles Goodland's does. (I am not sure the comparison would be very welcome to either author.) There's certainly a case to be made for comparing the endless inventiveness of Goodland's gnomes with the pataphysical nuggets that are strewn across the Settings and most easily appreciated when compiled into its advert-appendix of "Setting Examples". But what I really mean is, their books are definitely classifiable as post-avant writing but there's a sort of broad appeal about them too. You could enjoy Settings without being a card-carrying post-avant and probably without even being very interested in poetry or the poetry world at all; which is pretty much what I said about Goodland's What the Things Sang (Oulipo work tends to share this characteristic.) But it's kind of odd, when you reflect that Tim himself must have read more modern poetry than anyone else alive.
Anyway, I can't get rid of the questions, so let's put them out there. There are only two, and to help navigate the chaotic structure of this essay I'll just name them now: dreams and class. In the end, they are bound up together, but you have a few paragraphs to sit through before I'll be able to get to that point. So first up, dreams.
*
Tim's read everything, but it's quite difficult - that is, I find it difficult - to say exactly what poets or what praxis he's aligned with. Continental and transatlantic influences have seeped into an imagination that is eminently local, concrete and detailed. Tim has mentioned surrealism a few times - e.g. in that interview, "an early obsession with surrealism" - but of course surrealism in a broad sense is very vast, while surrealism in a narrow sense is too distant and too long ago to give many bearings. No, it's not helpful to call him a surrealist.
But at any rate, you can't read his poetry for very long without noticing how interested it is in dreams, ghosts, apparitions and transformed realities of all sorts. But the poem is only to a certain extent in the dream, it is amphibian and only intermittently committed to dream logic. Interrupting it and sometimes entangled with it is a writing about the act of dreaming, which you can call meta-surrealism if you want to but I don't want to.
What is the meaning of these dreams, or more specifically, of these dreams here? And why the jerk-back, the very Wide-Awake-Club atmosphere of Tim's writing which always seems to have a clear-eyed morning air about it though the ontological levels keep shifting in a perpetual dream-work?
Casting around for influences in the poets Tim admires, I did find one thing he does that you can also find in Lyn Hejinian. It is an exact,surprising discrimination expressed in simple words, often involving self-scrutiny of inner irrationalities.
All rivers' left banks remind me of Paris, not to see or sit upon but to hear spoken of.
(My Life, "One begins as a student but becomes a friend of clouds")
A similar situation arises with the need to sleep while not needing sleep itself.
(Settings, Set 29)
Never been beach combing but I've combed the beach many times...
(Settings, Set 57)
Hejinian's observation is that bits of language - in this case the words "left bank" - may have associations that are not shared by (are even negated by) the things those bits of language refer to. So real riversides aren't reminiscent of Paris, but when someone talks about the left bank of a river you find yourself thinking of Paris. Part of the relevance of this topic, in My Life, is Hejinian's own experience of student activism. It is not merely a funny old observation, though in respect that we can probably all relate to it, there's comedy in the air.
I suppose the thematic relevance of the first Tim Allen quote doesn't need stressing; he is almost as interested in sleeping as in dreaming. The distinction made here (and reversed later in the same Set) is hard to get clear in the mind, a characteristic feature of pataphysics. But it sounds as if it ought to be there. Consider these analogies: Elena needs a walk, but doesn't need to go anywhere; or, Elena and Kim feel like going shopping though they don't have anything they want to buy. These analogies are commonplace, but when we turn back to the poem again our confidence fades into puzzlement. Is sleeping really an activity? And is sleep a goal that you might gain by sleeping?
The second of Tim's passing comments also turns on a disconnection between language and what it refers to. Combing the beach is one thing, self-identifying as a beachcomber is another. Perhaps a vague revulsion from the ancient Daily Express column "Beachcomber" plays a part in this (Tim's cultural memory for such things is long and deep). More generally the discrimination might register a distaste for being labelled, but I don't think this formulation quite gets to it. On the whole the sentence strikes me as reasonably and amusedly open to the possibility of one day going beach combing. But its question is, what would that mean, what would it feel like? The sensitized reader will think at once of Tim's understated resistance to, or stubborn sense of wonder at, being a poet, although he formidably writes poems (a prime theme of Set 66 among others).
And this makes me think, as a good medievalist is bound to, of how the dream in old poems is a figure (indeed an implied poetic) for poetic inspiration. A shady topic in this context, maybe: - the "height of poetic inspiration", Tim almost-sneers somewhere near the start of Set 3.
*
The basic question about society is to do with Tim Allen as a working-class writer - or at any rate, a non-university writer. Allen (oh, so it's Allen now is it?) doesn't stake out out any mythical renegade territory (as, perhaps, Bill Griffiths, Barry MacSweeney..). All his writings are replete with an authorial persona, but nothing he tells us about himself claims any tribute. Nevertheless the question emerges all the stronger, does Tim Allen's work embody a distinctively non-middle-class vision, and is that the main thing that it's about?
This isn't such a small thing. The poetry world, and to a large infected degree the poetry that comes out of it, is massively middle-class. You can argue the same thing for culture as a whole, but especially what is called high culture. The BBC, as a structure for culture, is middle-class in its bones. The middle-classness of poetry, while perhaps less overt than the middle-classness of classical music, is barely any less fundamental. Literacy itself has its roots well set in class distinction. You can more easily lay that background aside when it comes to fiction - some genre fiction especially - but poetry always carries its history around with it.
Mention of the BBC, bastion of the mainstream, may imply to some that I'm specifically connecting this middle-classness with mainstream poetry. There's a case to be made for that (as per Andrew Duncan's use of "conservatism"), but it's not my point. Middle-classness is eminently in the fibre of the post-avant wing of the poetry community too. Sometimes I think it flourishes there in a kind of pure atavistic form that couldn't possibly survive the waters of the mainstream but only here, where a nod to the Frankfurt School pardons everything. Or again, I believe that quite unusually conservative mindsets can find themselves oddly drawn towards hypermodern cells because they identify strongly with hatred of the merely modern. Advanced formal conceptions and radical politics often coexist with breathtakingly class-conscious behaviours, with the whole snooty game of segregating elites and oneupmanship and patronage and tactical silences. But this is not material for witch-hunts. I do not claim any immunity from these vices and I am talking as much about structures as we hapless individuals who inhabit them.
I feel, anyway, fairly convinced that Allen's poetry occupies a critical distance from his poetics and this critical distance has to do with a consciousness of belonging to the class that did not build the poetry world.
"The basis is the poet’s necessity to act on a language and its forms which has deteriorated through boss usages." (Eric Mottram writing about Bill Griffiths - in "‘Every New Book Hacking on Barz’ : The Poetry of Bill Griffiths" (1983), reprinted in the Salt Companion.) That formula seems about right for Tim Allen's writing, too, but not quite. Griffiths, with the Royal College of Music and UCL behind him, had a necessarily different relationship to counter-culture than Allen's, who at 16 was working in W.H. Smith's in Weymouth. (Isolated fact stolen from the aforementioned interview. I actually have no idea if the contrast in background is as clear-cut as I'm saying.) After all, there is an arrogance in feeling equipped to detect and act on deterioration - as if one possessed the culture as of right. I don't know if Griffiths had that arrogance, but I'm sure Allen does not.
[... Just in passing, though, Griffiths and Allen are both absolute masters of rendering demotic speech, and there has to be some influence there.]
A primary school teacher; an Argyle fan; a poetry fan; a music fan... and that's it. (The modesty was always there in Terrible Work days too. Tim never seemed to claim that what he was doing was at the same level of seriousness as Cambridge reviewers, he was just saying if poetry books were good or bad.) The modesty is attractive of course. Is it also limiting? The hard-copy Terrible Work of the 1990s was an incredible achievement and, I hope, seriously influential on our poetry. It ought to have been, it asked so many searching questions. People who take exception to Tim's unblushing use of the term "mainstream" probably have no idea of how much mainstream poetry he read and even published, how granular his awareness of different poetries on the ground, not just multiple varieties of innovative and mainstream but the little tribal enclaves who know of no poetry but their own and are hardly ever discussed or even noticed in bastions of poetic thinking, but can't honestly be ignored when you are forced to mingle with the small rabble of regional reading events and magazines. But was it as paradigm-shifting as it should have been? Tim always asked those big questions in a sotto voce way while seeming to be addressing some purely local issue. The messages required (but refused to demand) an attuned ear. The online version of Terrible Work never mustered momentum, and was almost ruined by clunky web design.
I can't help but reflect that Tim was uniquely placed to write accessibly about the whole gamut of British poetry from a non-mainstream perspective and there could (should?) have been a Tim Allen blog to match Silliman's in its heyday (kind of fitting, too, because Ron Silliman is one of Tim's fave poets). Maybe the problem was that the blogosphere came just too late for him - he'd already said his piece. Or maybe something else. Something to do with why so much of his own poetry is still unpublished and unpromoted. Something about his detestation of how the poetry world works. Some sure ethical instinct that whatever else you do you must never seize the moment, an aversion to power. (You could never imagine Tim on this kind of list.)
Or look at it another way. Settings and The Voice Thrower are big thorny books packed full of difficult progressions and bewildering flights of imagination, but if you think about the vocabulary you realize that what's totally absent is the kind of stolen technical or archaic terms that are wielded by a lot of the poets that you and I read. e.g "abscission" (J. H. Prynne), "fungible" (John Wilkinson), "reminated" (Allen Fisher), "anarthria" (Timothy Thornton), "ergon" (Andrea Brady). I get a quite different feeling when Tim occasionally uses a word that I have to look up like "autochthonous" or "aporia" (it turns up in the quotation below); I think he's completely internalized those words though I haven't and they just come out naturally. Maybe you won't agree with me.
My hypothesis is that Tim Allen's work looks away from the enormous word-hoard of academia because it's looking for value in a different way and finds it not in a community of the wise but in a critical view from outside the places where these terms come into use (critical in a quite different sense than Drew Milne's when he says "The critical poem alone is still open", which I take basically in Horkheimer's sense) . It is not the words, but the behaviour of the users of the words, that constantly preoccupies these writings. Much of Settings is (as Allen says in that interview) structured by pataphysics, it gains traction not by hooking into civilized discourse but by the musings of outlaw philosophy. It would be a mistake not to recognize the highly consistent critique that runs through these good-natured remarks.
This Set 49 concludes with a stark description of seeing a dog being run over that's unquestionably "moving and highly successful" (as if the words were not already ironized enough). But maybe the "poor uninspiring" approach has something to be said for it too. This is where Tim and I would part company, because he has always, so far as I can see, believed in the value of discriminating value in poetry and has not shown any interest in walking away from those tussles into a relativistic conception of artefacts. But anyway, I want to come back to the dream question and conclude, I hope, simply. One way in which working-class and other alienated writers have invaded the middle-class citadel of literature is by focussing on the integrity of the personal experience they bring with them, which asserts and presupposes an integrity of imagination within the writer. Dreams, being as personal as they are, might seem a paradigmatic instance of the kind of material that can import this fresh blood into dessicated culture. But Tim's characteristic stance of writing not the dreams but the act of dreaming is analogous to the critical position he takes up in relation to the poetry world, with the difference that the critical view is now directed at his own inner experience. What kind of integrity is there in our dreams - there certainly is some - when the dreams themselves are to some degree (but just as certainly) artefacts of a larger and already-infected culture? It's a question raised with endless energetic subtlety and endless comic ramifications in these open-ended writings. (I had to re-write that last sentence to take out the word "explored". I don't do "explored".)
*
It is possible to read Tim Allen's work when you're in a bad mood, and in not too long a time you'll forget about your bad mood and feel interested in what you're reading, as interested and soothed as when you open the window and look down at people walking in the street. (I really would have loved to spend more time here going on about the depth of Portland and Plymouth life in these poems.) But prior to that, while the bad mood still goes on, you might wonder if the big books ever really get far off the ground. Shouldn't a work on the scale of Settings more tangibly throw its weight around, attempt to pull off something bigger? Part of a much larger discussion, of course: a core aesthetic issue of the new sentence in all its forms, this resolute refusal to crystallize.
The other doubt arises from Nathan Thompson's review (blurbed on the back of The Voice Thrower), where he says that the experience of reading Allen is ("exciting... infuriating...") an alternation of being mindblown and of wanting to chuck it out of window. Probably Thompson intended both states to be taken as complimentary (cf. Joseph Dewey on Ken Edwards: "the prose at once shimmers and infuriates, engages and intimidates"), but (in a bad mood) Thompson's enthusiastic acclaim is seen to conceal a charge of chronic inconsistency.
And this does have something about it. Read Set 8, first paragraph - incalculably brilliant account of prog-rock to punk and the way artistry of youth music works (9/10). But the second para is a nothing (3/10), and the third sort of stumbles back upright in some rock god's open day at his stately home (7/10). Move on to Set 9. The first para seems pointless on hippos nine times but then suddenly comes into focus with "The serrated edge of heaven and the buttery curves of hell moved blankly like Elizabethan war" (5/10). Para 2 is more or less great and as a bonus contains one of the text's secret spaces between fi and b (see also Set 13, Set 23) (9/10). Para 3 fires off some puns, and only one of them is good (4/10), and then para 4 switches to acute diary entry (8/10). Up, down, up, down, up.
I believe there is nothing accidental about this; that it's to do with the expressed intention of rendering successive paragraphs in different modes, and perhaps it's also to do with the necessary injection of what Tim calls "lightness". It may be intrinsic to this approach that it won't appeal to any reader all the time. When I go back to the first para of Set 9 I suddenly think I see that it's about equilibrium in nature and macroeconomics in society and the equipoise of heavy weights and I instantly want to upgrade my mark.
It's true there are a few Settings that are more cohesive. At one point I had the idea of writing titles for them but I got no further than titling Set 37 "Open Prison" and Set 50 "Ireland", which is what the most casual of readers could do. These occasional concentrations are as nothing compared to the prevailing sense of a dispersed poetic scena in which themes and images recur across the poems. At another point I started to count the number of horses and stopped at seven. Not too little, but not so very many either. It's because of the large scope of the imaginative field i.e. the sheer number of interlinked themes (so that, in fact, they are not themes in a narrowing way at all) that I consider Settings the most amazing and also the most challenging of the books considered here.
You've probably noticed that I keep saying "poems" when the book is all prose. Tim has more to say about that in an Afterword, the essential gist of which is that the Sets are poems but aren't prose poems. And I agree with that completely. He refers to North American Language poetry but I think you could probably also say the same of Une saison en enfer.
*
In his ever-useful notes Tim says that The Voice Thrower might be difficult to read. Well yes it is, and as you read it you are acutely aware of the massiveness of those 333 stanzas, but I personally find it a lot easier going than Settings. When all is said, rhythm has a forward momentum, it is like a connected narrative in that respect. The Voice Thrower swings. (Point of clarification: I have read it all now. Lots of times.)
There's no good place to start a long quote, but we'll pick it up here, with my interspersed notes.
Sober despair spat forth 4x4
art crit copy but every 4th was an oath in the mouth of
a rhetorical oaf who never did get to sew his oats into
a Shreddy Old Labour old labour how lovely are your
branches? That oldtime politics over a pint of newtime religion.
World Warp 1 raps Beatles or Stones & Wapping lies
Robin Hood the redbreast freerunning along business
park roofs When the screws turned the otherway they
screwed the one with the screw loose Red Rum spook poked
cowpatter from an open-top halfdoor portrait halfway
up a grand staircase in a mansion full of aint-halfmad
prisoners running off so fast on the spot they've been
redshifted Tense not accruable when the languaged mind scan
ning timeless untruths hurls a decoy decree for a phil
ologist to digest its workmanlike nift e.g. a doggedly
calculated degree concludes: compared with a whore
a horse has a voice but hey hoe it's the hoarse throated heehaw
whore with a hobby but not a hubby painting a sunset
behind papiermâché hills The nag won't reach Vortic
ist trainingcamp by sunset or even by moonlight filter
ed blog waffle banging on about rights another narrative threat
ening to narrow a life like the poems bout mum&dad
Notes:
1. forth..4th..oath..oaf..oats - typical Voice Thrower progression by pun association.
2. Shreddies, interwoven breakfast cereal (cf. sewn oats).
3. Old Labour; originally-pejorative term for the Labour Party as it had been before Tony Blair skinned and boned it for public consumption in the mid-90s (around the time that The Voice Thrower was first being drafted). The poem has a lot to say about Old Labour and I suppose this is partly about political views in the Allen household.
4. branches, i.e. local units. These are habitual structures in Tim's regionalist thinking. Quoting the English translation of "O Tannenbaum", which has the same melody as "The Red Flag", the Labour Party song that Blair was not the first to find inconveniently socialist.
5. oldtime religion - quoting a Captain Beefheart song.
6. Beatles or Stones - another Beefheart song.
7. redbreast, Red. Leitmotiv of the entire poem.
8. Red Rum, in captivity. ( I'm feeling like the spectre of Shergar also lurks here.) Introduces a horse theme which continues through subsequent stanzas. As I mentioned earlier, there are quite a few horse references in Settings, too; and at least one of them - I can't track it down, though - is in a prison context.
9. open-top halfdoor. i.e. a stable door.
10. hobby - horse!
11. sunset, sunset. Related to the "red" leitmotiv.
12. narrow. i.e. mainstream poetry, stereotypically characterized by parental narratives.
Some may see a certain irony in The Voice Thrower being, as Tim acknowledges, about his mum Nan Allen (1919-1990, née Hannah Lawton). It's her red hair and politics that shimmers behind all those glancing references to red sunsets. But for the most part it isn't anecdotal about her; Tim's more interested in dreams than in memories. Perhaps not the best way of putting it, when there's so much autobiography in all his texts. But to express it a little better, the centre of interest is in what memories do rather than in what they are. A retained memory carries a payload just like every other object.
*
AN ANABRANCH WITH SLUG
Like The Voice Thrower, this existed in an ur-form in the 1990s.
OK, so "anabranch" IS a stolen technical term. But Tim explains it in a note, so it doesn't count as far as I'm concerned.
An Anabranch with Slug is a pantoum, i.e. lines 2 and 4 of each stanza are repeated as lines 1 and 3 of the next one. It is a more immense pantoum than might appear from a casual glance at the slim booklet (KFS have chosen to present it in the tiny print more commonly associated with cheap editions of the Collected Byron).
This information will send a shiver down the spine of anyone who detests pointless repetition as much as I do. If you are one of those people, you will already have sussed that the only tolerable way to read a pantoum is to skip every other stanza and hey presto, a poem with no repetitions. Unfortunately before the first page is out Tim has already blocked off that dodge by starting to break the pattern with imperfect repetitions, so it's time to stop whingeing and enjoy it instead. And besides, "Repetition...challenges our inclination to isolate, identify and limit the burden of meaning given to an event (the sentence or line)." (Lyn Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure", which Tim quotes here.) Hejinian says some acute things about repetition, but they are too narrow because she's doing her thinking within a literary context - i.e. quoting Gertrude Stein's words on the topic, which are a dead end. The core 20th c. art in thinking about repetition is music. Repetition in music can have a million shades of meaning, as almost any 70-minute DJ mix will tell you, and that's the kind of repetition-palette that's relevant to a poem like Anabranch where every repetition has a different effect, where repetition is a language in itself.
The poem is subtitled Robotic Pastoral in honour of Raymond Rousel. How deeply Rousel has influenced the poem's procedures I'm too ignorant to guess. It comes across at any rate as the purest of these poems, unclouded by anything resembling a meaning yet still pervasively comic and very clearly the work of its author, so to speak. I mean that nearly every line has Tim Allen's stamp on it, and that really isn't, I believe, what Lyn Hejinian was talking about.
I'm saying unclouded by meaning but that isn't really true. Slender narratives wriggle through these pages. For example the sun screams at the anabranch and then at the slug, before the heavens go through a series of transformations, so they are sometimes quite large and gentle and at other times quite small and angry. You can extract these, but the real excitement is in the wild buffeting of the lines against each other. Reading it is like turning a kaleidoscope. Here's a sample:
i share all your fears
healthy interview of church triumphant breeds laughing stock
the child mastered the difficult sequence
abandoned to an indifferent frenzy of primary rust colours
healthy interview of church triumphant breeds laughing stock
the forehead of a flatmate glows like a judge's pate
abandoned to a different frenzy of trusted rhyming colours
mewling at Christmas listless to Torus R Us to buy a toy purse
the forehead of my flat-mate grows like a judge's wig
lift span trace-flag menace freely
listless at Christmas mewling into Torus R Us to cross fox off list
displaced previous ones replace previous resumptions
lift span trace-flag menace freely
abnormal series bunched not but figured hot and wet
displaced previous ones replaced previous presumptions
effigy cold and dry
abnormal series bunched not but figured hot and wet
blew the kid's reputation right off the scale reaching streamers of rail....
*
I'm putting this one in for completeness, but I don't think I'm going to say very much about it. The 21 poems have an economy that deliberately courts the accusation of slightness. The quality of needing-to-be-seen-to-be-substantial is distinctly absent. There's a confident sense of being in no hurry. The poems are short on words, some of them are jokes (pretty good jokes about the poetry world, mostly), and the author is quite prepared to spend two thirds of a poem on build-up in order to make one line fly. This poem typifies all of that:
i felt sorry for the fish that died for art
no creature should have to die for art
a branch above water
a reflection of the branch in the water
The line that flies is the last one, of course: hopefully I don't need to spell out what happens. But I do want to propose that some of its charge comes from the opening couplet; you could not simply throw that part of the poem away. This moment of serenity comes bearing a question (with topical reference to Damien Hirst, Marco Evaristti, Cildo Meireles? -- Or Ruggero Deodato, Francis Ford Coppola?). It comes in a context where fish do die, where the haiku-ish purity of the ending is seen to be at best a product of, not merely separate from, a more troublesome world.
*
[I've been writing this for almost a year, and I'm happy to report that in the mean time a few more Tim Allen works have crept out into the shivering dawn. I thought for one mad second of reviewing them here but I realized I'd be painting the bridge forever. Anyway, the ones I know of are:
Tattered by Magnets (Knives Forks And Spoons, 2014). You can sample this and it looks very wonderful.
Copyright (Department, 2014)
The Carousing Duck (zimZalla, 2014)
Default Soul (Red Ceilings Press, 2014) ]
I have now finished The Voice Thrower (Shearsman, 2012). The only snag is, I didn't really start it, not at the beginning anyway. I sort of dived in somewhere in the middle and just kept going. I remember doing this with War and Peace many years ago, and even now I still haven't got around to reading the start of it. Come to think of it, I did the same last week with Fortunata and Jacinta. It's just too intimidating to be on page 13 of a 1000-page novel. Picking it up half-way through takes some of the pressure off. Then I say to myself, Never mind, I'll just read it for a bit, see if I like it..
The Voice Thrower isn't a 1000-page novel, but it is a 333-stanza poem, unrelieved by section breaks and packed with narratives, often several going on at the same time. Narratives are often interrupted, typically by words that act like switch-points on a railway line to route us to a new destination. John Hall uses the word "chiasmatic" to describe this feature. Example:
and you don't really care who
you are it's the world out there that counts 2ten while
Britannia sits on her shield ouch then rolls a penny....
(pp. 72-73)
*
The full list of Tim Allen books that I've got is:
Settings (Shearsman, 2008)
The Voice Thrower (Shearsman, 2012)
An Anabranch with Slug (Knives Forks And Spoons, 2011)
incidental harvest (21 untitled poems) (Oystercatcher, 2011)
And, in effect, my Tim Allen reading list is further enhanced by the four poems from Default Soul that recently appeared in Intercapillary Space (which I think are top stuff).
*
Then there is Andrew Duncan interviewing Tim Allen in Don't Start Me Talking. Conveniently for us internet freeloaders, the interview is in the sampler. The interview begins with a page or two of Tim's long poem Sea ExChange and is altogether the handiest novice introduction to who he is. I say that because aside from his own poetry Tim is a massive part of modern UK poetry history. I'm not really happy with putting it that way, because it isn't what I want to talk about, but it's true. The rest of this essay assumes you understand who Tim Allen is. And now I want to foreground the poetry. A lot of it is still I think unpublished and unfinalized. But there's enough of it out there to see that it matters.
Numerous questions arise vaguely in my mind - and are linked, too, to all that I know of Tim's many Terrible Work reviews and his pellucid input on the British-Poets forum. (No, I simply can't refer to him as "Allen". I've never met him - I've never met anyone - but I feel I've known him a long time. We've exchanged an email or two. So Tim it is.) It is possible to avoid those questions. The constant invention and entertainment even lull them to sleep, in a way. In that respect though not in most others Tim's work affects me like Giles Goodland's does. (I am not sure the comparison would be very welcome to either author.) There's certainly a case to be made for comparing the endless inventiveness of Goodland's gnomes with the pataphysical nuggets that are strewn across the Settings and most easily appreciated when compiled into its advert-appendix of "Setting Examples". But what I really mean is, their books are definitely classifiable as post-avant writing but there's a sort of broad appeal about them too. You could enjoy Settings without being a card-carrying post-avant and probably without even being very interested in poetry or the poetry world at all; which is pretty much what I said about Goodland's What the Things Sang (Oulipo work tends to share this characteristic.) But it's kind of odd, when you reflect that Tim himself must have read more modern poetry than anyone else alive.
Anyway, I can't get rid of the questions, so let's put them out there. There are only two, and to help navigate the chaotic structure of this essay I'll just name them now: dreams and class. In the end, they are bound up together, but you have a few paragraphs to sit through before I'll be able to get to that point. So first up, dreams.
*
At night the brain is an illuminated formal garden but at day it is a reformed cult through which you walk naked without feet in your boots. (Settings, Set 34)
Tim's read everything, but it's quite difficult - that is, I find it difficult - to say exactly what poets or what praxis he's aligned with. Continental and transatlantic influences have seeped into an imagination that is eminently local, concrete and detailed. Tim has mentioned surrealism a few times - e.g. in that interview, "an early obsession with surrealism" - but of course surrealism in a broad sense is very vast, while surrealism in a narrow sense is too distant and too long ago to give many bearings. No, it's not helpful to call him a surrealist.
But at any rate, you can't read his poetry for very long without noticing how interested it is in dreams, ghosts, apparitions and transformed realities of all sorts. But the poem is only to a certain extent in the dream, it is amphibian and only intermittently committed to dream logic. Interrupting it and sometimes entangled with it is a writing about the act of dreaming, which you can call meta-surrealism if you want to but I don't want to.
Your dream was of a scruffy shambles (a realism made of newspaper) (Sea ExChange)
One night way back I dreamed I was fencing I had just cultivated my first cloak-and-dagger goatee but I gave my opponent a close shave we kept on talking about the Russian novel that had to change school buses as we feigned and thrusted, My sword rusted, well it had too, it came after thrusted. I flew at him with my trust in the dream gone but fell from the extravagantly arch window of the story into the streets of Moscow... (Settings, Set 13)
It was a real sleep not one of those pretend ones it was so real I knew it was the last sleep of my life I would wake from its lake and stay awake for (an) eternity remembering its deeply impertinent dreams of second-hand oracle following their signifying chain back back into as much past as could be scooped from my imaginary lives. (Settings, Set 21)
I think I am dreaming precognitively of a cigarette packet called Diplomat but naked and alone writing a postcard in a laundromat. (Settings, Set 63)
What is the meaning of these dreams, or more specifically, of these dreams here? And why the jerk-back, the very Wide-Awake-Club atmosphere of Tim's writing which always seems to have a clear-eyed morning air about it though the ontological levels keep shifting in a perpetual dream-work?
Casting around for influences in the poets Tim admires, I did find one thing he does that you can also find in Lyn Hejinian. It is an exact,surprising discrimination expressed in simple words, often involving self-scrutiny of inner irrationalities.
All rivers' left banks remind me of Paris, not to see or sit upon but to hear spoken of.
(My Life, "One begins as a student but becomes a friend of clouds")
A similar situation arises with the need to sleep while not needing sleep itself.
(Settings, Set 29)
Never been beach combing but I've combed the beach many times...
(Settings, Set 57)
Hejinian's observation is that bits of language - in this case the words "left bank" - may have associations that are not shared by (are even negated by) the things those bits of language refer to. So real riversides aren't reminiscent of Paris, but when someone talks about the left bank of a river you find yourself thinking of Paris. Part of the relevance of this topic, in My Life, is Hejinian's own experience of student activism. It is not merely a funny old observation, though in respect that we can probably all relate to it, there's comedy in the air.
I suppose the thematic relevance of the first Tim Allen quote doesn't need stressing; he is almost as interested in sleeping as in dreaming. The distinction made here (and reversed later in the same Set) is hard to get clear in the mind, a characteristic feature of pataphysics. But it sounds as if it ought to be there. Consider these analogies: Elena needs a walk, but doesn't need to go anywhere; or, Elena and Kim feel like going shopping though they don't have anything they want to buy. These analogies are commonplace, but when we turn back to the poem again our confidence fades into puzzlement. Is sleeping really an activity? And is sleep a goal that you might gain by sleeping?
The second of Tim's passing comments also turns on a disconnection between language and what it refers to. Combing the beach is one thing, self-identifying as a beachcomber is another. Perhaps a vague revulsion from the ancient Daily Express column "Beachcomber" plays a part in this (Tim's cultural memory for such things is long and deep). More generally the discrimination might register a distaste for being labelled, but I don't think this formulation quite gets to it. On the whole the sentence strikes me as reasonably and amusedly open to the possibility of one day going beach combing. But its question is, what would that mean, what would it feel like? The sensitized reader will think at once of Tim's understated resistance to, or stubborn sense of wonder at, being a poet, although he formidably writes poems (a prime theme of Set 66 among others).
And this makes me think, as a good medievalist is bound to, of how the dream in old poems is a figure (indeed an implied poetic) for poetic inspiration. A shady topic in this context, maybe: - the "height of poetic inspiration", Tim almost-sneers somewhere near the start of Set 3.
*
The basic question about society is to do with Tim Allen as a working-class writer - or at any rate, a non-university writer. Allen (oh, so it's Allen now is it?) doesn't stake out out any mythical renegade territory (as, perhaps, Bill Griffiths, Barry MacSweeney..). All his writings are replete with an authorial persona, but nothing he tells us about himself claims any tribute. Nevertheless the question emerges all the stronger, does Tim Allen's work embody a distinctively non-middle-class vision, and is that the main thing that it's about?
This isn't such a small thing. The poetry world, and to a large infected degree the poetry that comes out of it, is massively middle-class. You can argue the same thing for culture as a whole, but especially what is called high culture. The BBC, as a structure for culture, is middle-class in its bones. The middle-classness of poetry, while perhaps less overt than the middle-classness of classical music, is barely any less fundamental. Literacy itself has its roots well set in class distinction. You can more easily lay that background aside when it comes to fiction - some genre fiction especially - but poetry always carries its history around with it.
Mention of the BBC, bastion of the mainstream, may imply to some that I'm specifically connecting this middle-classness with mainstream poetry. There's a case to be made for that (as per Andrew Duncan's use of "conservatism"), but it's not my point. Middle-classness is eminently in the fibre of the post-avant wing of the poetry community too. Sometimes I think it flourishes there in a kind of pure atavistic form that couldn't possibly survive the waters of the mainstream but only here, where a nod to the Frankfurt School pardons everything. Or again, I believe that quite unusually conservative mindsets can find themselves oddly drawn towards hypermodern cells because they identify strongly with hatred of the merely modern. Advanced formal conceptions and radical politics often coexist with breathtakingly class-conscious behaviours, with the whole snooty game of segregating elites and oneupmanship and patronage and tactical silences. But this is not material for witch-hunts. I do not claim any immunity from these vices and I am talking as much about structures as we hapless individuals who inhabit them.
I feel, anyway, fairly convinced that Allen's poetry occupies a critical distance from his poetics and this critical distance has to do with a consciousness of belonging to the class that did not build the poetry world.
"The basis is the poet’s necessity to act on a language and its forms which has deteriorated through boss usages." (Eric Mottram writing about Bill Griffiths - in "‘Every New Book Hacking on Barz’ : The Poetry of Bill Griffiths" (1983), reprinted in the Salt Companion.) That formula seems about right for Tim Allen's writing, too, but not quite. Griffiths, with the Royal College of Music and UCL behind him, had a necessarily different relationship to counter-culture than Allen's, who at 16 was working in W.H. Smith's in Weymouth. (Isolated fact stolen from the aforementioned interview. I actually have no idea if the contrast in background is as clear-cut as I'm saying.) After all, there is an arrogance in feeling equipped to detect and act on deterioration - as if one possessed the culture as of right. I don't know if Griffiths had that arrogance, but I'm sure Allen does not.
[... Just in passing, though, Griffiths and Allen are both absolute masters of rendering demotic speech, and there has to be some influence there.]
A primary school teacher; an Argyle fan; a poetry fan; a music fan... and that's it. (The modesty was always there in Terrible Work days too. Tim never seemed to claim that what he was doing was at the same level of seriousness as Cambridge reviewers, he was just saying if poetry books were good or bad.) The modesty is attractive of course. Is it also limiting? The hard-copy Terrible Work of the 1990s was an incredible achievement and, I hope, seriously influential on our poetry. It ought to have been, it asked so many searching questions. People who take exception to Tim's unblushing use of the term "mainstream" probably have no idea of how much mainstream poetry he read and even published, how granular his awareness of different poetries on the ground, not just multiple varieties of innovative and mainstream but the little tribal enclaves who know of no poetry but their own and are hardly ever discussed or even noticed in bastions of poetic thinking, but can't honestly be ignored when you are forced to mingle with the small rabble of regional reading events and magazines. But was it as paradigm-shifting as it should have been? Tim always asked those big questions in a sotto voce way while seeming to be addressing some purely local issue. The messages required (but refused to demand) an attuned ear. The online version of Terrible Work never mustered momentum, and was almost ruined by clunky web design.
I can't help but reflect that Tim was uniquely placed to write accessibly about the whole gamut of British poetry from a non-mainstream perspective and there could (should?) have been a Tim Allen blog to match Silliman's in its heyday (kind of fitting, too, because Ron Silliman is one of Tim's fave poets). Maybe the problem was that the blogosphere came just too late for him - he'd already said his piece. Or maybe something else. Something to do with why so much of his own poetry is still unpublished and unpromoted. Something about his detestation of how the poetry world works. Some sure ethical instinct that whatever else you do you must never seize the moment, an aversion to power. (You could never imagine Tim on this kind of list.)
Or look at it another way. Settings and The Voice Thrower are big thorny books packed full of difficult progressions and bewildering flights of imagination, but if you think about the vocabulary you realize that what's totally absent is the kind of stolen technical or archaic terms that are wielded by a lot of the poets that you and I read. e.g "abscission" (J. H. Prynne), "fungible" (John Wilkinson), "reminated" (Allen Fisher), "anarthria" (Timothy Thornton), "ergon" (Andrea Brady). I get a quite different feeling when Tim occasionally uses a word that I have to look up like "autochthonous" or "aporia" (it turns up in the quotation below); I think he's completely internalized those words though I haven't and they just come out naturally. Maybe you won't agree with me.
My hypothesis is that Tim Allen's work looks away from the enormous word-hoard of academia because it's looking for value in a different way and finds it not in a community of the wise but in a critical view from outside the places where these terms come into use (critical in a quite different sense than Drew Milne's when he says "The critical poem alone is still open", which I take basically in Horkheimer's sense) . It is not the words, but the behaviour of the users of the words, that constantly preoccupies these writings. Much of Settings is (as Allen says in that interview) structured by pataphysics, it gains traction not by hooking into civilized discourse but by the musings of outlaw philosophy. It would be a mistake not to recognize the highly consistent critique that runs through these good-natured remarks.
"This might not be the most pressing question for News Night but it's the one I find myself asking is there a difference or not between the quality of experience of someone who for example writes about their experience in what we call a moving and highly successful way and that of someone who writes of their experience in a poor uninspiring way? I'm not talking about literary worth itself but of the aporia between such value and the experiential reality. It could be extended to include those who do not write about their experiences except that's already implied in both options. I spent hours trying to talk about this once then the sun came up and I admitted defeat." (Set 49)The passage feints at making one of those Hejinian-style qualifications, this time to place "those who do not write about their experiences" as some kind of untroublesome side-issue, when they are really the elephant in the room. But I think the poem knows better. People who write are a small and untypical minority; it's unclear how their experience, whatever its personal merits, has relevance to the hosts of non-writing people who make up the working (or indeed non-working) world. And it seems to me here, by the way, that bringing together "highly successful" and "poor" within this sentence makes it impossible to set aside its class implications.
This Set 49 concludes with a stark description of seeing a dog being run over that's unquestionably "moving and highly successful" (as if the words were not already ironized enough). But maybe the "poor uninspiring" approach has something to be said for it too. This is where Tim and I would part company, because he has always, so far as I can see, believed in the value of discriminating value in poetry and has not shown any interest in walking away from those tussles into a relativistic conception of artefacts. But anyway, I want to come back to the dream question and conclude, I hope, simply. One way in which working-class and other alienated writers have invaded the middle-class citadel of literature is by focussing on the integrity of the personal experience they bring with them, which asserts and presupposes an integrity of imagination within the writer. Dreams, being as personal as they are, might seem a paradigmatic instance of the kind of material that can import this fresh blood into dessicated culture. But Tim's characteristic stance of writing not the dreams but the act of dreaming is analogous to the critical position he takes up in relation to the poetry world, with the difference that the critical view is now directed at his own inner experience. What kind of integrity is there in our dreams - there certainly is some - when the dreams themselves are to some degree (but just as certainly) artefacts of a larger and already-infected culture? It's a question raised with endless energetic subtlety and endless comic ramifications in these open-ended writings. (I had to re-write that last sentence to take out the word "explored". I don't do "explored".)
*
It is possible to read Tim Allen's work when you're in a bad mood, and in not too long a time you'll forget about your bad mood and feel interested in what you're reading, as interested and soothed as when you open the window and look down at people walking in the street. (I really would have loved to spend more time here going on about the depth of Portland and Plymouth life in these poems.) But prior to that, while the bad mood still goes on, you might wonder if the big books ever really get far off the ground. Shouldn't a work on the scale of Settings more tangibly throw its weight around, attempt to pull off something bigger? Part of a much larger discussion, of course: a core aesthetic issue of the new sentence in all its forms, this resolute refusal to crystallize.
The other doubt arises from Nathan Thompson's review (blurbed on the back of The Voice Thrower), where he says that the experience of reading Allen is ("exciting... infuriating...") an alternation of being mindblown and of wanting to chuck it out of window. Probably Thompson intended both states to be taken as complimentary (cf. Joseph Dewey on Ken Edwards: "the prose at once shimmers and infuriates, engages and intimidates"), but (in a bad mood) Thompson's enthusiastic acclaim is seen to conceal a charge of chronic inconsistency.
And this does have something about it. Read Set 8, first paragraph - incalculably brilliant account of prog-rock to punk and the way artistry of youth music works (9/10). But the second para is a nothing (3/10), and the third sort of stumbles back upright in some rock god's open day at his stately home (7/10). Move on to Set 9. The first para seems pointless on hippos nine times but then suddenly comes into focus with "The serrated edge of heaven and the buttery curves of hell moved blankly like Elizabethan war" (5/10). Para 2 is more or less great and as a bonus contains one of the text's secret spaces between fi and b (see also Set 13, Set 23) (9/10). Para 3 fires off some puns, and only one of them is good (4/10), and then para 4 switches to acute diary entry (8/10). Up, down, up, down, up.
I believe there is nothing accidental about this; that it's to do with the expressed intention of rendering successive paragraphs in different modes, and perhaps it's also to do with the necessary injection of what Tim calls "lightness". It may be intrinsic to this approach that it won't appeal to any reader all the time. When I go back to the first para of Set 9 I suddenly think I see that it's about equilibrium in nature and macroeconomics in society and the equipoise of heavy weights and I instantly want to upgrade my mark.
It's true there are a few Settings that are more cohesive. At one point I had the idea of writing titles for them but I got no further than titling Set 37 "Open Prison" and Set 50 "Ireland", which is what the most casual of readers could do. These occasional concentrations are as nothing compared to the prevailing sense of a dispersed poetic scena in which themes and images recur across the poems. At another point I started to count the number of horses and stopped at seven. Not too little, but not so very many either. It's because of the large scope of the imaginative field i.e. the sheer number of interlinked themes (so that, in fact, they are not themes in a narrowing way at all) that I consider Settings the most amazing and also the most challenging of the books considered here.
You've probably noticed that I keep saying "poems" when the book is all prose. Tim has more to say about that in an Afterword, the essential gist of which is that the Sets are poems but aren't prose poems. And I agree with that completely. He refers to North American Language poetry but I think you could probably also say the same of Une saison en enfer.
*
In his ever-useful notes Tim says that The Voice Thrower might be difficult to read. Well yes it is, and as you read it you are acutely aware of the massiveness of those 333 stanzas, but I personally find it a lot easier going than Settings. When all is said, rhythm has a forward momentum, it is like a connected narrative in that respect. The Voice Thrower swings. (Point of clarification: I have read it all now. Lots of times.)
There's no good place to start a long quote, but we'll pick it up here, with my interspersed notes.
Sober despair spat forth 4x4
art crit copy but every 4th was an oath in the mouth of
a rhetorical oaf who never did get to sew his oats into
a Shreddy Old Labour old labour how lovely are your
branches? That oldtime politics over a pint of newtime religion.
World Warp 1 raps Beatles or Stones & Wapping lies
Robin Hood the redbreast freerunning along business
park roofs When the screws turned the otherway they
screwed the one with the screw loose Red Rum spook poked
cowpatter from an open-top halfdoor portrait halfway
up a grand staircase in a mansion full of aint-halfmad
prisoners running off so fast on the spot they've been
redshifted Tense not accruable when the languaged mind scan
ning timeless untruths hurls a decoy decree for a phil
ologist to digest its workmanlike nift e.g. a doggedly
calculated degree concludes: compared with a whore
a horse has a voice but hey hoe it's the hoarse throated heehaw
whore with a hobby but not a hubby painting a sunset
behind papiermâché hills The nag won't reach Vortic
ist trainingcamp by sunset or even by moonlight filter
ed blog waffle banging on about rights another narrative threat
ening to narrow a life like the poems bout mum&dad
Notes:
1. forth..4th..oath..oaf..oats - typical Voice Thrower progression by pun association.
2. Shreddies, interwoven breakfast cereal (cf. sewn oats).
3. Old Labour; originally-pejorative term for the Labour Party as it had been before Tony Blair skinned and boned it for public consumption in the mid-90s (around the time that The Voice Thrower was first being drafted). The poem has a lot to say about Old Labour and I suppose this is partly about political views in the Allen household.
4. branches, i.e. local units. These are habitual structures in Tim's regionalist thinking. Quoting the English translation of "O Tannenbaum", which has the same melody as "The Red Flag", the Labour Party song that Blair was not the first to find inconveniently socialist.
5. oldtime religion - quoting a Captain Beefheart song.
6. Beatles or Stones - another Beefheart song.
7. redbreast, Red. Leitmotiv of the entire poem.
8. Red Rum, in captivity. ( I'm feeling like the spectre of Shergar also lurks here.) Introduces a horse theme which continues through subsequent stanzas. As I mentioned earlier, there are quite a few horse references in Settings, too; and at least one of them - I can't track it down, though - is in a prison context.
9. open-top halfdoor. i.e. a stable door.
10. hobby - horse!
11. sunset, sunset. Related to the "red" leitmotiv.
12. narrow. i.e. mainstream poetry, stereotypically characterized by parental narratives.
Some may see a certain irony in The Voice Thrower being, as Tim acknowledges, about his mum Nan Allen (1919-1990, née Hannah Lawton). It's her red hair and politics that shimmers behind all those glancing references to red sunsets. But for the most part it isn't anecdotal about her; Tim's more interested in dreams than in memories. Perhaps not the best way of putting it, when there's so much autobiography in all his texts. But to express it a little better, the centre of interest is in what memories do rather than in what they are. A retained memory carries a payload just like every other object.
*
AN ANABRANCH WITH SLUG
Like The Voice Thrower, this existed in an ur-form in the 1990s.
OK, so "anabranch" IS a stolen technical term. But Tim explains it in a note, so it doesn't count as far as I'm concerned.
An Anabranch with Slug is a pantoum, i.e. lines 2 and 4 of each stanza are repeated as lines 1 and 3 of the next one. It is a more immense pantoum than might appear from a casual glance at the slim booklet (KFS have chosen to present it in the tiny print more commonly associated with cheap editions of the Collected Byron).
This information will send a shiver down the spine of anyone who detests pointless repetition as much as I do. If you are one of those people, you will already have sussed that the only tolerable way to read a pantoum is to skip every other stanza and hey presto, a poem with no repetitions. Unfortunately before the first page is out Tim has already blocked off that dodge by starting to break the pattern with imperfect repetitions, so it's time to stop whingeing and enjoy it instead. And besides, "Repetition...challenges our inclination to isolate, identify and limit the burden of meaning given to an event (the sentence or line)." (Lyn Hejinian, "The Rejection of Closure", which Tim quotes here.) Hejinian says some acute things about repetition, but they are too narrow because she's doing her thinking within a literary context - i.e. quoting Gertrude Stein's words on the topic, which are a dead end. The core 20th c. art in thinking about repetition is music. Repetition in music can have a million shades of meaning, as almost any 70-minute DJ mix will tell you, and that's the kind of repetition-palette that's relevant to a poem like Anabranch where every repetition has a different effect, where repetition is a language in itself.
The poem is subtitled Robotic Pastoral in honour of Raymond Rousel. How deeply Rousel has influenced the poem's procedures I'm too ignorant to guess. It comes across at any rate as the purest of these poems, unclouded by anything resembling a meaning yet still pervasively comic and very clearly the work of its author, so to speak. I mean that nearly every line has Tim Allen's stamp on it, and that really isn't, I believe, what Lyn Hejinian was talking about.
I'm saying unclouded by meaning but that isn't really true. Slender narratives wriggle through these pages. For example the sun screams at the anabranch and then at the slug, before the heavens go through a series of transformations, so they are sometimes quite large and gentle and at other times quite small and angry. You can extract these, but the real excitement is in the wild buffeting of the lines against each other. Reading it is like turning a kaleidoscope. Here's a sample:
i share all your fears
healthy interview of church triumphant breeds laughing stock
the child mastered the difficult sequence
abandoned to an indifferent frenzy of primary rust colours
healthy interview of church triumphant breeds laughing stock
the forehead of a flatmate glows like a judge's pate
abandoned to a different frenzy of trusted rhyming colours
mewling at Christmas listless to Torus R Us to buy a toy purse
the forehead of my flat-mate grows like a judge's wig
lift span trace-flag menace freely
listless at Christmas mewling into Torus R Us to cross fox off list
displaced previous ones replace previous resumptions
lift span trace-flag menace freely
abnormal series bunched not but figured hot and wet
displaced previous ones replaced previous presumptions
effigy cold and dry
abnormal series bunched not but figured hot and wet
blew the kid's reputation right off the scale reaching streamers of rail....
*
I'm putting this one in for completeness, but I don't think I'm going to say very much about it. The 21 poems have an economy that deliberately courts the accusation of slightness. The quality of needing-to-be-seen-to-be-substantial is distinctly absent. There's a confident sense of being in no hurry. The poems are short on words, some of them are jokes (pretty good jokes about the poetry world, mostly), and the author is quite prepared to spend two thirds of a poem on build-up in order to make one line fly. This poem typifies all of that:
i felt sorry for the fish that died for art
no creature should have to die for art
a branch above water
a reflection of the branch in the water
The line that flies is the last one, of course: hopefully I don't need to spell out what happens. But I do want to propose that some of its charge comes from the opening couplet; you could not simply throw that part of the poem away. This moment of serenity comes bearing a question (with topical reference to Damien Hirst, Marco Evaristti, Cildo Meireles? -- Or Ruggero Deodato, Francis Ford Coppola?). It comes in a context where fish do die, where the haiku-ish purity of the ending is seen to be at best a product of, not merely separate from, a more troublesome world.
*
[I've been writing this for almost a year, and I'm happy to report that in the mean time a few more Tim Allen works have crept out into the shivering dawn. I thought for one mad second of reviewing them here but I realized I'd be painting the bridge forever. Anyway, the ones I know of are:
Tattered by Magnets (Knives Forks And Spoons, 2014). You can sample this and it looks very wonderful.
Copyright (Department, 2014)
The Carousing Duck (zimZalla, 2014)
Default Soul (Red Ceilings Press, 2014) ]
