"Intercapillary Space"

I've got to thank Peter Riley for belatedly bringing D. S. Marriott to stage centre in my personal theatre of UK poetry. His recent piece is here:

http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2014/06/caribbean-poets/

It's an article that's both admirable for the detail of its tussle and vulnerable to some rather obvious objections (for example, in its willingness to characterize "Caribbean" poetry, and its clumsy attempt to connect/contrast Marriott's poetry with said characterization).  But detailing these easy objections distracts from the more urgent issues that Riley exposes.

They are often most urgent when most mean, as in the paragraph that forcibly connects Marriott's poetry with John Burnside's, both of whom Riley caricatures reductively as going: Look at me, I have a special psychological condition. The exemplary obverse, of course, is Riley's own poetry: here the psychological condition of the poet, as a topic of any importance, seems to disappear from view. Riley may misunderstand Marriott (or Burnside, or both), but anyway this is a discussion worth having. Personally, I feel Riley's critique depends on a conception of normal psychological experience that ultimately isn't true and in many contexts isn't even helpful. One of those contexts, surely, is the disturbing places that Marriott's poems go to.

While fully recognizing the formidable skilfulness of  Marriott's writing (as who could not), Riley basically finds it depressing and a dead end. Well, that's my own reductive caricature of a many-layered essay, and you too might find that the encounter prompts contrary conclusions.

Riley's view of Marriott's poetry is part of a wider dispute with theorizing and any poetry that takes its propositions seriously. On the other hand,  John Wilkinson's 2013 review claims that while Marriott's poetry has close links to certain thinkers (e.g. Franz Fanon, Gillian Rose), "the extensive sweep of his poetry resists any ready purchase, and for readers raised on French Theory or post-Heideggerian thought its way of thinking may be incomprehensible".

Marriott's own cultural studies books (On Black Men, Haunted Life) are most likely the best introduction to this aspect of the poetry. For a stunning example of this side of his work, see the essay "Inventions of Existence" listed below.

This isn't, and isn't meant to be, an exhaustive bibliography of Marriott on the internet. It's structured around the big collections and his most recent chapbook, and it comprises enough poems to make even the most cautious of poetry fans decide whether it's time to shell out for a Marriott book, plus a few articles and other materials that I've found useful in thinking about his work.




Incognegro (Salt, 2006)

http://www.saltpublishing.com/shop/proddetail.php?prod=1844712613

Sampler, including "The Ghost of Averages", "Someone Killed Them", "Orange & Green", "The 'Secret' of This Form Itself":

http://www.saltpublishing.com/assets/samples/1844712613samp.pdf

Review of Incognegro (Salt, 2006) by Abena Sutherland, in Intercapillary Space

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2007/01/in-you-more-than-you-d-s-mariotts.html

Very informative review of the pamphlet Dogma (Barque, 2001) by Andrew Duncan, in Jacket 20 (Dec 2002). The poems from Dogma ended up in Incognegro.

http://jacketmagazine.com/20/dunc-r-trio.html





Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman 2008)

http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/product/4015-ds-marriott-hoodoo-voodoo


Sampler, including "On The Whiteness of the Whale", "The Ishmael Poems", "The Dream of Melby Dotson":

http://www.shearsman.com/ws-public/uploads/223_ds_marriott_hoodoo_voodoo.pdf


"The Levees" in Jacket 31 (2006):

http://jacketmagazine.com/31/marriott.html

From "Speak Low: Poem to Jonas",  in Intercapillary Space: 

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2006/08/d-s-marriott.html

["Jonas" is Stephen Jonas, US poet who died in 1970. Here's some poems by him:

http://chax.org/eoagh/issue3/issuethree/jonas.html  ]


The Bloods (Shearsman 2011)

http://www.shearsman.com/ws-shop/category/797-british-titles/product/4016-ds-marriott-the-bloods

Sampler, including "Lorem Ipsum", "The Virus Called Smith", "Black Sunlight", "Sirens", "Trueblood", "The Dog Enchanter" :

http://www.shearsman.com/ws-public/uploads/223_ds_marriott_the_bloods.pdf


"Pot Kettle Black" and "Into the Pit" in Blart 1. (But watch out, the pages are in the wrong order.)

http://blartmagazine.jimdo.com/blart-1/d-s-marriott/


"Riverflesh", in Blackbox Manifold

http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue3/DavidMarriott.html



In Neuter (Equipage 2013)

Review by John Wilkinson, in Blackbox Manifold:

http://www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk/issue11/JohnWilkinson11.html


other bits and pieces: 


Review by Cristian Castro of Marriott's Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (Rutgers, 2007).

http://hemisphericinstitute.org/hemi/en/e-misferica-71/castro



David Marriott: Inventions of Existence: Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Sociogeny,
and "the Damned" (The New Centennial Review, Volume 11, Number 3, Winter 2011,

pp. 45-89) is available online here:

www.academia.edu/5800366/Inventions_of_Existence

(You might have to join up. Just bullshit them with that Independent Researcher guff.)


Michael Thurston and Nigel Alderman, Reading Postwar British and Irish Poetry (Wiley, 2014) has a few illuminating pages on Marriott's poems. You can read them if you check out the eBook version on Google Books.

I don't have a Kindle. And so far as I can see the alt- poetry world isn't particularly interested in the paperless format, yet. At some point there may be a tipping point. Basically because Kindle editions are so cheap compared to paper. Price isn't usually thought of as an important factor in selling alt-poetry, but O Publishers, it might be more of a differentiator than you think. That's all I'm saying.

Anyhow, this is all just an excuse for a couple of recommendations if you want some light Kindle reading. (And obviously I haven't read them myself, just glanced at the samplers, which are even cheaper of course.)

1. Complicities: British Poetry 1945 - 2007 ed. Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin (Literaria Pragensia, 2007) . Kindle edition £2.02.  Essays by various hands (Sutherland, Prynne, Marriott, Dworkin, Cooke and a dozen others) on disparate modern-UK-poetry-related topics. There's something young-fogeyish about the title, hell, about the idea that a book like this embodies. (Remember the young fogeys? Oh well.)  Nevertheless it seems like a promising primer if you want to understand the kind of things people say in Sussex circles.

The sampler contains the editors' not-too-convincing introduction, plus three pieces: Robin Purves' typically excellent essay: this is about whether W.S. Graham's poetry does or does not show the influence of Heidegger's philosophy. I couldn't care less, you might reasonably respond, as I did. But that's not really the point. Every question turns out to be absorbing once someone really deep-dives into it as Purves does. His essay makes both the poet and the philosopher begin to seem significant, and above all the problematics of this whole question of "influence". Also Thomas Day on Geoffrey Hill, which I'm afraid I can't be bothered to read, and a substantial part of a Keston Sutherland essay on Prynne that is really a work of profound beauty and power.

2. Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics ed. Louis Armand (Literaria Pragensia, 2010). Kindle Edition £2.03. This is another collection of essays - an even more interesting one, in my judgment.

"Beyond a type of Luddite mentality, there is a view counter to the pervasive Google-ization of the web which invites a certain difficulty in making particular types of archival material immediately locatable. Ubu Web's self removal from the Google search engine points to a growing aversion to the market cult of accessibility and the tyranny of distribution (mediated and regulated by proprietary bodies such as Google, Amazon, et al.)."

This is from Armand's terrific Introduction and of course there is a massive irony in talking about Kindle editions in this context. This collection is in a sense Armand's follow-up to Avant-Post, a 2006 collection in the same series, but this time the focus is on "marginality" and this is a much sharper focus than "avant-garde", which is swamped by irrelevant baggage.

Anyway the sampler gives us two wonderful bits of literary history, Kyle Schlesinger on Asa Benveniste and a large chunk of Robert Sheppard on the eighties London scene and Bob Cobbing. The latter gives, I think, a better flavour of the striking intellectual/creative discussions within that scene than anything I've read elsewhere. Revelatory. Other contents include Stephanie Strickland on digital poetry, D.J. Huppatz on Flarf, plus Allen Fisher, Jena Osman, John Wilkinson....

You can see why the Kindle format makes sense for these hefty essay collections. But what actual poetry can you get in Kindle editions? Here's what I turned up in a desultory search:

Keston Sutherland. Yes, you can get the Odes to TL61P, but at £5.89 this is not much of a saving and paper is probably the best way to go. The sampler is frustrating (a dozen pages of preamble, some sort of epigraph and only one page of actual ode.)

Wesleyan University Press, including:

John Ashbery, The Tennis Court Oath (Wesleyan Poetry Classics). Kindle edition, £6.87. Wow. Just wow.
and Peter Gizzi (especially Threshold Songs- £4.42), and Jena Osman's Public Figures (2012), rather expensive at £12.35, which is a big shame.

On the other hand, BlazeVOX books. Including brilliant things like Tom Clark's At the Fair (2010) and Amy King's Slaves To Do These Things (2009) - ridiculously cheap at £0.77 each.

Major UK publishers of alt-poetry (Shearsman, Reality Street, Barque) have not taken up Kindle.

Salt have, but they hardly publish any alt-poetry any more. I know I would hugely enjoy reading Luke Kennard's The Harbour Beyond The Movie (2010), - Kindle edition £3.08 - though I probably never will.

More significant is the availability of quite a few Carcanet books on Kindle. Tom Pickard, Philip Terry, Tom Raworth, Christine Brooke-Rose, Peter Riley, Roger Langley, Thomas A. Clark, Christopher Middleton, Andrew Crozier might be variously acceptable to our hypothetical Kindler.  (Prices vary; they are not very much cheaper than the paperbacks.)

And Penguin, of course, are on Kindle, so you can get half a dozen Alice Notley books, as well as a few classics by Ginsberg, Berrigan, and Kyger. Like Carcanet, they pitch the kindle price almost as high as the paperback price.

Not forgetting!..:

James Russell, Neurotrash (Like This Press, 2013, £2.05)




MP